Christian Perring

In response to recent concerns about the overmedication of children, this paper considers ethical and conceptual issues that arise in the issue of when children who are diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should be given stimulants such as the psychotropic drug Ritalin as part of their treatment. There is considerable resistance and worry about the possibility of overmedication. This is linked to the worry that the diagnosis of ADHD is overused, and the paper considers some reasons to worry about the overuse of the diagnosis itself. The paper then focuses on the resistance to the use of drugs, which is particularly strong for children in the gray area of diagnosis, where it is dubious whether the children really meet the strict diagnostic criteria. The reasons behind such resistance are often not well articulated, so part of the task of the paper is spell out what they might be. The reasons are given the following labels: side effects, unnaturalness, profit motives, thought control, competitiveness, and doctors' power. The paper ends in taking the polemical position that while there is some legitimate concern about possible short and long term side effects of children taking psychotropic drugs, the other reasons for resistance are not well‐founded.

This dissertation is a philosophical investigation of irrationality. The aim is to provide a conceptual basis for understanding various forms of irrationality, such as psychosis, neurosis, self-deception, repression, and weak-willed behavior. There are six main chapters, focusing on different phenomena, and touching on several fields of inquiry, including moral psychology, value theory, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science and psychoanalytic theory. The first two chapters are broad in scope, discussing the relation of philosophy to clinical psychology, and the very possibility of the existence of irrationality. The subsequent four chapters explore the particular topics of the disunity of self, unconscious mental states, self-deception, and weakness of will. There is no single overriding thesis being argued for here, but the general theme is that it is possible to understand irrationality in detail, and that the forms of irrationality that we are capable of understanding include extreme ones that many thinkers have deemed conceptually or logically impossible. Chapter One argues for the importance of the interrelation of philosophy and clinical psychology. Chapter Two argues against the necessity of charitable assumptions of rationality in interpreting the language or behavior of others. Chapter Three discusses the various ways in which the disunity of persons have been conceptualized, and argues that homuncularism often confuses different levels of talking about people. Chapter Four argues for a strong ontology of unconscious mental states and processes, giving them equal status to conscious mentality. Chapter Five argues against several so-called 'paradoxes of self-deception' and clears the way for the possibility of intentional self-deception. Finally, in Chapter Six a standard conception of the distinction between valuing and desiring is examined and found wanting. A new model of the nature of valuing is proposed, drawing on Gestalt psychology. On this view, most weak-willed behavior involves not a divergence between what is desired and what is valued at the time, but rather a change in the person's values. If there are occasions where what is valued differs from what is desired, they are rare and demand a special explanation

Gold & Stoljar's target article is important because it shows the limitations of neurobiological theories of the mind more powerfully than previous philosophical criticisms, especially those that focus on the subjective nature of experience and those that use considerations from philosophy of language to argue for the holism of the mental. They use less controversial assumptions and clearer arguments, the conclusions of which are applicable to the whole of neuroscience. Their conclusions can be applied to psychiatry to argue that, contrary to many researchers' assumptions, the approaches to both understanding and treating mental disorders must be interdisciplinary.

Exactly when Philosophy of Psychiatry started as a subfield of Philosophy is hard to say. There are several different estimates of how old psychiatry itself is, from one hundred to three hundred years, and of course there has been discussion and treatment of mental illness for at least a couple of thousand years. A host of issues which could count as belonging to the field have been discussed just within the last hundred years. For instance, a large literature on the philosophy of psychoanalysis dates back to the beginning of the century, and in the last thirty years there has been discussion of amnesia and multiple personality in the philosophy of mind, bioethical debate about involuntary hospitalization and the ability of the mentally ill to give informed consent to drug trials, and recent continental philosophy has shown much interest in madness, civilization, capitalism and schizophrenia. However, I suggest that Philosophy of Psychiatry reached a sense of itself as a separate field only in the 1990s. In this time, it has gained its own association, journal, and a book series with a prestigious press. I refer to the American Association for Philosophy and Psychiatry, the associated journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, and the MIT Press series, Philosophical Psychopathology: Disorders of Mind, edited by Owen Flanagan and George Graham. Jennifer Radden's Divided Minds and Successive Selves is the first book in that series

In this paper I argue that a Naturalist conception of personhood, such as the one defended by Derek Parfit, implies that there are degrees of personhood, i.e., that it makes sense to say one individual has a greater degree of personhood than another. I describe both criteria of general personhood, which distinguish between persons and non-persons, and criteria of particular personhood, which distinguish between one person and another. I examine some of the consequences for ethics, including the rights to life, self-determination, and treatment. There may be circumstances in medicine where we have to judge the value of a patient's life in order to decide what medical treatment, if any, to provide, and although it may be emotionally difficult and politically dangerous, one relevant factor is what degree of personhood that individual has

The debate in philosophy of science in the twentieth century over the theory-laden-ness of observation showed both that there are many ways in which scientific observation depends on theory, and also highlighted some ways in which it is blind to theoretical assumptions. Debates in the philosophy of medicine have shown how concepts and theories of illness are value-laden, especially in psychiatry. Kious in his helpful and stimulating target article argues that the mainstream approach to autonomy depends on assumptions about value, and this conclusion is surely correct. However, his focus on the concept of non-voluntariness is problematic, as I argue, and we are better off not seeing it as laden with.