The very idea of mental illness is contested. Given its differences from physical illnesses, is it right to count it, and particular mental illnesses, as genuinely medical as opposed to moral matters? One debate concerns its value-ladenness, which has been used by anti-psychiatrists to argue that it does not exist. Recent attempts to define mental illness divide both on the presence of values and on their consequences. Philosophers and psychiatrists have explored the nature of the general kinds that mental illnesses might comprise, influenced by psychiatric taxonomies such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the International Classification of Diseases, and the rise of a rival biological 'meta-taxonomy': the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). The assumption that the concept of mental illness has a culturally invariant core has also been questioned. This Element serves as a guide to these contested debates.
Tim Thornton was born in Darlington in 1973. Despite a boarding-school education and a degree in Drama, his adulthood has largely been spent playing the drums, currently for alt-blues act Fink.
In 2006 he escaped from behind the drumkit and headed for his laptop where he attempted to do what few drummers had done before: string a written sentence together. In fact he managed around 15,000 of them, forming the backbone of his first novel, The Alternative Hero, published by Knopf in 2009.
In 2010 Tim's years of being in bands (9 unsigned, 2 signed) climaxed in a second novel, Death of an Unsigned Band, which contains a further 12,000 sentences, some of which contain verbs. It was released by Jonathan Cape in the UK, and might be available in other global destinations if you ask your bookstore very nicely.