Analyzing and Deconstructing Psychopathology

This review discusses two books. Philosophical Psychopathology is an anthology of articles by philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition who address themselves to a disparate assortment of topics—including schizophrenia, MPD, autism, blindsight, diagnostic classification and the problem of despair. In general, the articles display admirable conceptual rigor, but are often accompanied by a distant and rather abstract grasp of psychopathological phenomena. Detailed criticisms are offered of an interesting discussion, by the volume editors, of thought insertion in schizophrenia. Deconstructing Psychopathology, written by five British authors, offers a wide-ranging but somewhat predictable critique, from a politically and epistemologically radical perspective (influenced by Foucault, Derrida, etc.), of medical-model and other mainstream approaches to ‘mental illness’—a concept whose validity the authors deny and whose political effects they deplore.