Barter Street
London
What is mental health? Can we make sense of psychosis? What’s the connection between mental health and concepts including race & evolution? Explore these questions, among others, through the lens of philosophy at the 2023/4 London Lectures.
Beyond Psychiatry: Rethinking Madness Outside Medicine
Since the 1970s, psychiatry has been in the grip of a paradigm I call ‘madness-as-dysfunction’. In this view, mental disorders happen when something inside the person isn’t working as it should, or is ‘broken.’ In my historical work, I’ve identified an alternate paradigm, which I call ‘madness-as-strategy,’ which sees mental illness in terms of purpose, adaptation and function. Here I contrast these frameworks and outline their implications for research, treatment and stigma.
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About the speaker
Justin Garson is professor of philosophy at City University of New York, and author of Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (2022), with Oxford University Press. He is also the author of The Madness Pill: The Quest to Create Insanity and One Doctor’s Discovery that Transformed Psychiatry, forthcoming with St. Martin’s Press.