Module Directory

This module brings philosophical reflections to bear on questions to do with mental health and psychiatry, exploring key existential and social issues of our time. The exact content will vary from year to year, but questions that can be the focus include:

1. What is mental health and its absence (various understood as distress or mental illness or mental disorder or as difficult experiences and troubled or troubling behaviour)? How do we best conceptualise them?


2. What is it like to experience a disordered mind – what are the key structures and features of such experiences? And what can we learn from this about the functioning of our mind when it is not disordered?


3. What is the ontology and epistemology underlying psychiatry? Have they changed over history and if so, why and how?


4. What is the social context of distress and how can we address it? Does bio-medical psychiatry obscure that context?


5. What are the ethical and political issues raised by our mental health system? Is it ever permissible to admit or treat people because of mental health issues against their will, and if so, under what conditions?


6. What is ‘mad studies’? Who and what does it study?

We will bring to bear different philosophical thinkers (such as Michel Foucault) or research traditions (such as Phenomenology) or ethical-political frameworks (like Republicanism) in exploring these and similar questions. In 2025-26, the focus will be on the crises inherent in our psychiatric present, informed by Foucault’s critical reflections about the beginning of psychiatry.

The aims of this module are:

• To introduce students to philosophical questions raised by mental health and psychiatry.


• To provide students with an understanding of the issues underlying these questions and the debates the issues give rise to.


• To enable students to develop their philosophical skills in interpreting existential and social issues and reflecting about the ethical implications raised by these issues.

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the philosophical questions raised by mental health and psychiatry.


2. Critically evaluate the different and often conflicting positions taken in the literature on the existential and social issues underlying these questions.


3. Identify and explain ways for navigating the ethical challenges raised by these issues.


4. Apply their philosophical knowledge and understanding to existential and social issues.


5. Critically scrutinise research published in academic sources or the media through a philosophical and critical lens.

In 1980, psychiatry fundamentally shifted in the way it conceptualised madness. Since then, the number of those either actually diagnosed or considered to meet diagnostic criteria has ski-rocketed – as has the number of people who get psychotropic drugs prescribed and take them. Do we face an epidemic of mental illness – a mental health crisis? At the same time, there is evidence that the outcomes produced by our mental health systems either have flatlined or declined – with more and more people having their life expectancy cut short because of the effects of the drugs they have been prescribed and taken and other evidence of harm produced by the supposed treatment (i.e. evidence of ‘iatrogenic harm’). Is our mental health system in crisis? A third crisis has been brewing in the last two decades insofar as the dominant bio-medical approach in psychiatry has come under (renewed) fire, both within the profession and by service users/survivors/experts-by-experience and carers. These three crises and their wider context raise important philosophical questions, which we will study, drawing on Foucault’s influential work on the birth of psychiatry, among other texts and ideas. Might there be some uncanny parallels between the birth of psychiatry in the 1790s and its rebirth after 1980? How should we navigate the ethical and political issues that the medicalisation of people’s distress tends to obscure? And what inspiration can we draw from the countermovements and the way their concerns have been taken up in terms of a human rights based approach to mental health?

Indicative Syllabus Information

In 2025-26, the focus will be on the crises inherent in our psychiatric present, informed by Foucault’s critical reflections about the beginning of psychiatry.

• In which sense can we speak of ‘our psychiatric present’?


• What are the three crises that characterise this present?


• What can we learn from the history of madness and psychiatry to think critically about psychiatry and society today? Specifically, what are some of the key features of Foucault’s history of the birth of psychiatry? And what does it disclose to us about to what we should pay attention regarding psychiatry and society today?


• What is the dominant approach in psychiatry today? What is the underlying epistemology and ontology? What is its conceptions of madness?


• How did this approach become to be dominant and remain dominant?


• What are the actual functions of psychiatry today? Should it have different functions – or should we even aim for a future without psychiatry?


• What are the alternatives approach to distress in use today? What advantages and disadvantages do they have compared to the dominant (bio-medical approach)?


• What is the social context of distress and how can we address it? What would a preventative approach look like?


• Is distress overmedicalised? What, if anything, is wrong with medicalisation of distress?


• Is it ever justified to treat or assess people for psychiatric conditions against their will? What notions of the subject and of freedom are best suited for us to answer this question?

This module will be delivered via:

• One 3-hour seminar per week
• There will be a reading week

Students are expected to undertake the reading before classes and be prepared to engage in discussion.