Enactive Psychiatry

by Sanneke de Haan

Psychiatry is enormously complex. One of its main difficulties is to articulate the relationship between the wide assortment of factors that may cause or contribute to psychiatric disorders. Such factors range from traumatic experiences to dysfunctional neurotransmitters, existential worries, economic deprivation, social exclusion and genetic bad luck. The relevant factors and how they interact can differ not only between diagnoses but also between individuals with the same diagnosis. How should we understand and navigate such complexity? Enactive Psychiatry presents an integrative account of the many phenomena at play in the development and persistence of psychiatric disorders by drawing on insights from enactivism, a theory of embodied cognition. From the enactive perspective on the mind and its relation to both the body and the world, we can achieve a new understanding of the nature of psychiatric disorders and the causality involved in their development and treatment, thereby resolving psychiatry's integration problem.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychiatry

320 pages, Hardcover

Published March 31, 2020

Reviews

[bejo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book to introduce problems in philosophy of psychiatry and enactivism as an alternative to other models of the mind in philosophy of mind. So accessible of a book for any non-philosopher (probably de Haan’s intent) that it could be used for intro courses to issues in the philosophy of mind or psychiatry.

The arguments about causality in psychiatry being non-linear and dynamic are convincing (plus one of the biggest problems in psych to answer) and enactivism as an alternative to the “sandwich model” (from Susan Hurley) seems like the right path. One of the biggest novel contributions to the literature, in my mind, is de Haan’s chapter on existential sense-making and how it reconfigures our sense making from organism-environment to person-world. Though I am not particularly interested in value theory, this chapter serves as a nice link between philosophy of mind and value theory and how they can illuminate one another.

[Cal Davie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and profoundly insightful. It's not often one comes across an academic book which is written in such a way that is both approachable and exciting, de Haan has achieved just this. He critiques our existing understanding of psychiatric illness as riddled with false dichotomies. Even the biopsychosocial approach, he argues, makes too sharp a distinction between the three factors. He argues that we should see psychiatric disorders holistically, whilst concluding that this doesn't need to be vague. He exemplifies this in his book and is meticulous in his arguments advocating the enactive position. I think on a practical level the enactive perspective may be too complicated to teach and incorporate in practice for many. Nonetheless it is an exciting starting point for reframing how we consider psychiatric disorders and their treatment.

[Bouke Van Balen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Besides a necessary (and revolutionary?) new perspective on psychiatry, this book is a fantastic introduction and sharpening of enactivism, that comes awfully close to being a theory of everything ‘mind/life’ that successfully rejects subject/object dualism without becoming too vague/too relativistic/too experiential/too ‘naturalistic’. Even though De Haan ‘applies’ enactivism, she also expands it into the spheres of value and existentialism. The book succeeds at proving that holistic approaches do not need to be vague whilst at the same time appreciating the ambiguity of the human life form.