Description: Blog encouraging critical debate about psychiatry
Moving from an outdated physical disease model of mental illness to a more relational mental health practice
The reason this happens is because people no longer want to make a distinction between the psychological and the biological. It is said to be a false separation (see eg. another previous post ). The fear is that the mind/body split of Cartesianism is being perpetuated by seeing mental disorder as psychological, said to be implying it is not biological (see eg. yet another previous post ). Better to do away with any distinction at all, is the thought.
As I've said before (see eg. previous post ), René Descartes (1596–1650) was the first to apply a natural-scientific mechanistic approach to life Animate and inanimate matter were understood by the same mechanistic principles. Animals were, therefore, regarded as machines; and human physiology was also seen as mechanistic. Descartes stopped short, though, of including the human mind in this mechanistic framework. The soul was denied any influence in physiology. Descartes thereby avoided the materialistic