Clinician's Guide To Mental Illness Book

This book leans more heavily towards the "Introductory Philosophy" and away from the "of Medicine." The book consists of three sections (Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics'simple enough) and each section is divided into five chapters, most of which weren't worth the time (were I to diagnose the book I would say that there is some sort of benign growth). Many of the chapters present a sub-SEP level of philosophy, with some tenuous connection to medicine.

To use as an example (or, a case study, if you will), there is the second chapter in the Metaphysics section: "Medical Causation and Realism." The chapter's first sentence typifies many of the issues with the book as a whole: "Causation and realism are two important notions that are essential for understanding any worldview, especially medical worldviews." The main clause of the sentence concerns philosophy with (a grammatically-incomplete) "especially medical worldviews" thrown on the end for good measure. The rest of the chapter devotes most of its space to either historical understandings of causation or the various positions within realism or anti-realism. The connection to medicine (ostensibly the point of the book) amounts to saying that physicians who use a biomedical approach tend towards realism whereas those who prefer a humanistic approach to medicine tend towards anti-realism.

The final problem I'll mention is that the connections to medicine invariably involve breaking physicians into two categories: those who prefer the biomedical approach on the one hand, and humanistic ones on the other. From this point, he then will comment how the biomedical approach has been useful and effective thus far, but has contributed to the quality-of-care crisis. He's almost certainly correct that the biomedical approach has contributed to the quality-of-care crisis, but this is hardly groundbreaking (or worth writing a dozen times). Thus, the book becomes reductive and formulaic'which funnily enough, is the major failing of the biomedical approach.