brain disorders, mind disorders
Psychiatrists tell us that certain conditions are organic whilst others that look organic are actually psychological. Both attributions can at times catch a lot of flak - and in this sense they do rather 'get it from both sides'. Cases of depression which the psychiatrist holds to be organic are held by others to instead be rationally or psychologically intelligible life-reactions. And patients will sometimes strongly dispute psychiatric claims that certain conditions marked by fatigue, weakness, seizures, and pain are psychological rather than organic. Now of course psychiatrists are fallible beings who sometimes get things wrong. But what I've noticed in disputes about these matters is a persistent failure to reflectively characterise what it even is for a condition to be organic or instead psychological. In what follows I try to put that right. Regarding organic conditions, the main mistake I encounter is the claim that we shouldn't talk of organic pathology unless a...
