Table of Contents

1: The current diagnostic manuals: aims, methods, and questions
2: The sciences on mental order/disorder and related concepts: normality, meaning, natural and social norms
3: Mental disorder and human nature
4: Clinical definition: distress, disability and the need to treat
5: Boundaries and terminology in flux
6: Some conclusions

Promotional Information

Highly commended in the Mental Health Category of the BMA Book Awards 2009

About the Author

Derek Bolton read philosophy at Cambridge University and completed a doctorate subsequently published as 'An Approach to Wittgenstein's Philosophy' in 1979. He subsequently trained in Clinical Psychology and has worked in the Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley Hospital in London for many years. He is the author of many papers in clinical and scientific psychiatry, and on philosophical topics in psychiatry, and co-authored with Jonathan Hill 'Mind, Meaning, and
Mental Disorder', published by Oxford University Press, 2e, 2004.

Reviews

This book provides an excellent discussion and philosophical critique of the use of the term 'mental disorder'...this book will be useful to the inquiring mind that seeks to understand mental disorder from a wider perspective.
*The Psychologist*