Commentary to the articles of M. Stier (Normative preconditions for the assessment of mental disorder) and T. Schramme (On the autonomy of the concept of disease in psychiatry)

“Mental illness is not reducible to brain illness, even when mental phenomena have their basis in the brain” (Schramme, 2013, p. 8) and “ . . .because of the normative nature of psychiatry, mental disorder cannot be completely reduced to neuronal or molecular processes. [. . . ] A mental state as such may well be reducible to the brain, but determining whether this very state is (part of) a disorder or not, is nothing the brain sciences can do.” (Stier, 2013, p. 8).