Here is a thought provoking lecture on YouTube which investigates psychiatry’s problematic foundations, especially in terms of the influence of culture, individual differences, and neurodiversity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsubfDIKgUw Laurence Kirmayer is an MD at McGill University, and he has a lot to say about using clinical neurophenomenology to explore some very murky but important issues in psychiatry. There really are problems that make psychiatry different from the rest of medicine, because however necessary the reductionistic-biological medical model nearly ubiquitous everywhere else may be, it is not sufficient. I’m very glad Kirmayer is bringing up Daniel Dennett and his work on heterophenomenological methods in the clinical context as well, not because it’s the end-all be-all, but because it orients what have historically been difficult and controversial debates in an accessible, easy to read, reasonably pragmatic way. He is also doing good work in looking at how psychiatry gets it’s norms, methods, and foundational orientations, prompting him to call for phenomenological investigations in psychiatry. What a timely effort! I can’t help but feel the DSM-V was panned before it was published in 2013 (and not just by angry people with Asperger’s or Scientologists) because this phase of psychiatry may be running out of steam. The mapping between biological mechanisms to the myriad ways individual people in various cultures live out their emotional pain and existential struggles isn’t good enough. The ontology or foundational ideas about a psychiatric patient must reference existential reality: the meaning of embodiment and how one’s experience brings forth a lived world, while the ontology of neuroscience is based on genes, proteins, signals, action potentials, circuits, modules, information-processing, and maybe even dynamical systems. Current psychiatry seems to me to be inadequately addressing the foundational problem of how to map these domains. All the genome-wide association studies, connectome diagrams, and brain imaging data in the world aren’t enough to create diagnostic categories that cluster the lived meaning, experiences and embodiment of similar bipolar or schizophrenic patients together, and that of dissimilar patients apart. There really is alot of applied work needing to be done on how to model the cognition of patients whose disorders manifest as disturbances of body cognition or existential crises (here’s my version, dealing with heartbeat perception). Moreover, foundational investigations into the ontology of psychiatry may very well provide a needed stimulus to get psychiatry out of it’s current funk betwixt and between medical humanism as a healing art, and bio-reductionistic techno-medicine. Overall I am convinced clinical neurophenomenology is a vital and largely new area, despite the pioneering efforts of the neuropsychiatrist Erwin Straus and the more recent work of neurologists such as Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio. The lodestar of clinical neurophenomenology seems to me to be Varela’s idea of a mutual constraining and mapping between data from lived, embodied phenomenology and theories based on cognition and neuroscience. There is a more about Kirmayer at http://www.mcgill.ca/trauma-globalhealth/people/canada/kirmayer/
Neurophenomenology 