We are living through a mental health crisis of global proportions, one whose scale and urgency the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief. Recent large-scale studies indicate that by age 75, approximately 50% of the population can expect to develop a mental disorder. The crisis is marked not only by rising rates of diagnosis, but also by persistent unmet treatment needs, even in affluent societies. Stigma and lack of awareness remain formidable barriers, while women, gender-non-conforming persons, lower-income groups, and racially marginalized populations bear a disproportionate burden.
These lectures proceed from the conviction that philosophical methods and tools have a distinctive contribution to make here, not as a direct remedy, but as a means of critical reflection on the concepts, norms, and assumptions that shape how mental health and disorder are understood, experienced, and treated. By examining these presuppositions carefully, philosophy can illuminate how mental health and mental disorders are woven into – and in turn disrupt — the fabric of everyday life. Drawing on a range of intellectual traditions, from psychoanalysis to contemporary philosophy of psychiatry, and from phenomenology to critical social theory, the course engages with questions such as: What does health mean, and how do we distinguish between healthy and unhealthy (ill, pathological, disordered) states and conditions? When, and on what grounds, does it make sense to move from such normatively charged distinctions toward the framework of "neurodiversity"? How does the mental or psychic dimension of health relate to the body? What is the relationship between (un)health and rationality, agency, and autonomy? How are we to philosophically understand key diagnostic categories, as e.g. "depression," "anxiety," "dissociation," "schizophrenia," "autism," and others? And what ethical questions arise from the practices of diagnosis, treatment, and psychiatric care, including issues of labeling, consent, and institutional power?
Central to the course is an engagement with the social, political, economic, and cultural norms and structures that shape mental life. We will examine how the contemporary organization of work, the socioeconomic imperatives of hyper-functionality and self-optimization, the loneliness epidemic, sexual and intimate abuse and violence, racism, climate change, political polarization, and war contribute to the development and entrenchment of mental illness and psychological suffering.
