Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Master of Arts
Major
Philosophy
Date of Defense
4-22-2024
Graduate Advisor
Lauren Olin
Committee
Eric Wiland
Billy Dunaway
Abstract
Explanations of mental disorders come from a wide array of disciplines and epistemologies. How we conceive of and order these explanations has great importance for agency. Yet, psychiatry as a discipline has long suffered from the assumption that these explanations are multi-level. That is, some lower-level mechanism (i.e. neurobiology) constrains the information produced at a higher-level behavior. I argue that this approach is unsatisfying, and offer a new perspective: the egalitarian approach to mental disorders. The egalitarian model of mental disorders is non-hierarchical, dynamic, and cross-cultural. The paper begins by highlighting an inherent feature of psychiatry which I coin the hard-problem of psychiatry. I review ways in which multi-level approaches fail to account for this problem, and show how the egalitarian model accepts it. I conclude by addressing ways in which my model accounts for recent calls for nuance about agency in mental disorders.
Recommended Citation
Driskill, Eli, "An Egalitarian Approach to Explanations in Mental Disorders" (2024). Theses. 470.
https://irl.umsl.edu/thesis/470
