Aftab on Brain Disorders
In a comment on my post this morning, the always thoughtful
pointed me to a post he wrote a while ago about a paper on a Ken Kendler paper on the brain disorder problem.
I agree with pretty much everything Awais has to say here. I will add three refinements.
I’m not sure that asking, “Are mental disorders brain disorders?” is the right way to frame the question. Even though the etiology is not well understood, I am pretty sure Tourette’s syndrome is a brain disorder. I am pretty sure that adjustment disorders are not. So the problem is, which mental disorders are brain disorders, and that leads to then really interesting question: how do we know? If we want to build a case that a particular disorder is a brain disorder, what kind of evidence do we need to accumulate?
A good corollary to the above, my bottom line for all discussions of the problem, is that any assertion that something is a brain disorder should be paired with an admission that something else is not. Otherwise it is all too tempting to give in to the materialist tautology that everything is a brain disorder, or the anti-psychiatric reaction that nothing is.
Another problem with the “Are mental disorders brain disorders?” question is that it is too dichotomous. There is a long long way in between aphasia and bankruptcy, and different disorders are going to be located at various levels in between them, according to criteria I will save for another post. Brain-Mind is a continuum, not a dichotomy.
More later.