Today's post is by Max F. Kramer , an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Geisinger College of Health Sciences, and Clinical Ethicist at Geisinger Health System, on his recent paper Depressed, Not Disordered: Fittingness and Pathologies of Emotion, published in the Journal of Medicine & Philosophy. Max F. Kramer A once-prevalent view in philosophy – and possibly a still-prevalent view in public life – holds that reason and emotion are inherently in opposition. An extension of this view would have us characterize mental illness as some imbalance between the two; typically, a pattern of excessive emotion or deficient reason. Although this perspective is misguided in certain important ways, it serves as a point of entry into the affective dimensions of psychopathology and especially the class of psychological phenomena categorized as affective disorders: mental illnesses characterized by some defect, impairment, or aberration in the functioning of one’s emotional a...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health