Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis

The public, mental health consumers, as well as mental health practitioners wonder about what kinds of values mental health professionals hold, and what kinds of values influence psychiatric diagnosis. Are mental disorders socio-political, practical, or scientific concepts? Is psychiatric diagnosis value-neutral? What role does the fundamental philosophical question "How should I live?" play in mental health care? In his carefully nuanced and exhaustively referenced monograph, psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry John Z. Sadler describes the manifold kinds of values and value judgements involved in psychiatric diagnosis and classification systems like the DSM. Professor Sadler takes the reader on a fascinating conceptual tour of the inner workings of psychiatric diagnosis, considering the role of science, culture, sexuality, politics, gender, technology, human nature, patienthood, and professions in building his vision of a more humane psychiatric diagnostic process.

1.1 - Background
1.2 - Why psychiatric diagnosis and classification?
1.3 - A brief personal history of nosological controversy
1.4 - Defining 'values'
1.5 - Overview of the book
2.1 - Background
2.2 - Kuhn on scientific theory change
2.3 - Values, value terms and value semantics
2.4 - Five heuristic types of values
2.5 - Unravelling the dense fabric of values
3.1 - Background - relations between medicine and science
3.2 - Basics of classification
3.3 - Science and psychiatric nosology
4.1 - Background
4.2 - Patients
4.3 - Professions
4.4 - Guild interests and classification
4.5 - Potential professional conflicts of interest in the DSMs
4.6 - Weighing patient, professional and guild interests in the DSMs
5.1 - Background
5.2 - Defining mental disorder
5.3 - World views, assumptions and ontological values
5.4 - The constraint of ontological space - the transpersonal psychiatry critique
5.5 - The constraint of ontological time - the developmentalist critique
5.6 - Space and time recast - existential-phenomenological and social constructionist critiques
5.7 - Three contrast cases for ontological values in psychiatry
6.1 - Background: the declassification of homosexuality
6.2 - "Mad" vs "bad" in the bedroom
6.3 - Mental disorder diagnosis and women: what are the issues?
6.4 - Discrimination and stigma as negative value- consequences
6.5 - Gender concepts as entailed ontological values
6.6 - Medicalization and eudaimonia
7.1 - The cultural challenge to mental disorder classification
7.2 - DSM-IV approaches to the problem of culture
7.3 - Ten weird things about Western psychiatry
7.4 - Relativism, absolutism, and cross-cultural DSMs
7.5 - Toward an ethics of cross-cultural psychiatric diagnosis
8.1 - Background
8.2 - Barest essentials of psychiatric genetics
8.3 - Psychiatric genetic nosology
8.4 - Value-structure of genetic vs clinical nosology
8.5 - Implications of a rising psychiatric genetic nosology
9.1 - Background: Heidegger, Dreyfus and technology
9.2 - Insights from the philosophy of technology
9.3 - Psychiatric classification as technological
9.4 - Poietic vs technological diagnostic practice
9.5 - Toward a balanced poietic-technological practice
10.1 - Political meanings
10.2 - "The politics-science dichotomy syndrome"
10.3 - Externalist political landscapes and classification
10.4 - Toward a political architecture for DSM-IV
10.5 - Good politics for science and classification
11.1 - What is diagnosis?
11.2 - A gardener's allegory and the point of mental disorder classification
11.3 - Grasping the whole of values in classification
11.4 - Just how did values guide action in the DSM-IV?
11.5 - Just how should values guide action in future DSMs?