Philosophy, psychiatry and avoiding 'real mischief': Review of Philosophy and Psychiatry: Problems, intersections, and new perspectives. Edited by Daniel D. Moseley and Gary J. Gala, Routledge 2015 (original) (raw)

What can philosophy offer psychiatry? What can psychiatry offer philosophy? Simply, there is nothing as harmful as a bad theory put into practice and conversely the constraints of practice and the recalcitrance of the realities of anomalous experiences offer instructive challenges to theory. We know well that the history of medicine and psychiatry have many examples of bad theory having been put into practice often with tragic consequences. Equally the extremes of armchair philosophy and far-fetched thought experiments, while keeping some philosophers busy chasing zombies or possible worlds in which minds can be uploaded into a computer harddrives, leave philosophy open to accusations of irrelevance and obfuscation. Andrew Scull, and he is not the first, calls our attention to the political, economic and social dimensions of insanity, he writes: "For the lunatic, the madman, the psychotic, the schizophrenic, call them what you will, suffer a sort of social and moral death. Their wishes and will, their very status as moral actors, as agents capable of expressing valid preferences, and exercising autonomous choice are deeply suspect in light of their presumed pathology, as the often dark history of their treatment under confinement abundantly shows." (Scull, The Insanity of Place-The Place of Insanity, 2006: 52). The stakes are thus immeasurably high and our efforts to avoid 'real mischief' demand critical appraisals of both philosophy and psychiatry, critical appraisals internal to each discipline and between these disciplines. The collection of original essays in Philosophy and Psychiatry: Problems, intersections, and new perspectives, edited by Daniel D. Moseley and Gary J. Gala brings together diverse philosophers and psychiatrists in this effort of mutual critical engagement spanning the domains of phenomenology, 2 psychoanalysis, neuroscience, neuroethics, behavioral economics,