Is There Such a Category as Mental Illness?

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Mental illness is a social construct. It began in the 15 hundreds, or whatever date that was michel foucottat announced as the start of mental illness. I'm not a nominalist, buti way, thing is confusion here. The category mental illness is, daphne, a constructed category. We do live with it. Now. Em, what are you thoughts on that? Oh, ghost, it's really come that would need another hour and a half on that front. Well, all all of em have been great questions, but am em all right. So sure.

Shermer and Arikha discuss: what it means for a mind to be disrupted • dementia, senility, and Alzheimer’s disease • mental illness and the labeling problem • the social construction of mental illness • neurology and psychiatry • agency and volition • memory and amnesia • autobiographical memory • self and embodied self • brain modularity • brain as a machine • emotions and cognition: bodily changes first then the awareness of the emotion • conversion disorder/hysteria • depression • metacognition: thinking about thinking • exteroception and interoception.

Noga Arikha is a philosopher and historian of ideas. The author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, she is associate fellow of the Warburg Institute and honorary fellow of the Center for the Politics of Feelings, London, and research associate at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. She is based in Florence, Italy.