response to Joanna Moncrieff
Joanna Moncrieff recently posted a response to chapter 1 of my book On Madness on her blog . I'm grateful to her for taking the time to read and engage with it. Here in turn is my response. As Joanna notes, I don't myself believe that the use of medical terms - like "ill health", "unwell", "illness", and the sometimes medical "disorder" - when these are prefixed with "mental" or "mentally" or "psychological" - by itself implies that there's something wrong with the person's body (including their brain). There may of course sometimes be something wrong with the person's body - e.g. with their central nervous or endocrine system - which causes the mental illness. However that's a claim about efficient causes - about what instigates some particular mental illness; it's not a claim about what mental illness is . I'd even say that properly trained psychiatrists make a distinction betw...
