Getting Personal in the Philosophy of Psychiatry: Broadening Our Minds … and More (original) (raw)

This paper show that there is a need to develop a proper characterisation of persons when theorising about psychiatry. It does so by analysing three prominent proposals in the philosophy of psychiatry that fail, we contend, to reflect the way persons are understood in our everyday life and in the psychiatric practice. Against this backdrop, this paper does three things: shows that there is a need to provide an appropriate characterisation of persons that is of use to psychiatry; demonstrates that this has not yet been adequately done; and, finally, offers some correctives and clarifications to get us started on developing a satisfactory philosophy of persons.