Are "mental disorders" "brain disorders"?

Presentations by Anneli Jefferson and Awais Aftab.
Commentaries by Nicole Rust, Alexey Tolchinsky, and Eiko Fried.
Please know that a significant driving force behind this conversation is the community of individuals who are afflicted with a psychiatric condition. To those individuals, we are empathetic. We acknowledge that there are complexities around whether and when we should consider a condition as "dysfunction" as opposed to a type of neurodiversity that society has wrongly become intolerant to - cases of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression are all examples. That said, for each of these conditions, a subset of diagnosed individuals suffer in ways that can benefit from some type of treatment. For those individuals, when our existing treatments fall short, we need to find better ways to help. With this empathetic spirit, we will use the terms "dysfunction" and "disorder" to refer to the conditions of individuals who need better solutions than the ones we can offer today.

[@hjjkthn]

It's pretty enlightening.
Thank you so much.

[@mcscronson]

I think the issue is more one of ill-defined categories than a failure to find disorders in the brain. Of course we can find causes of disordered function in the brain. The problem is that the brain is a largely intractable, indivisible model of the world and itself. While mental disorders are simple models of culture that don't actually require brains. With sufficient technology and statistical modelling in centuries to come, we'll surprise ourselves with how well we can map the two. But as culture changes, so do the boundaries of our categories, and so we will learn to look for different patterns rather than discover the patterns we have been searching for

[@The-Wide-Angle]

Have you ever seen someone deeply affected by autism, dementia, schizophrenia, etc.? That doesn't come simply from our "models of culture." One doesn't need categories and sophisticated diagnoses to see that something has gone badly wrong. The fact that even in those cases a neural signature is missing should make us reflect if we are not starting from wrong assumptions, rather than asking to do more of the same.

[@josephmeyer2650]

I think there is too much variation in mental disorders to categorize all of them as either brain disorders or not brain disorders, which has implications for public policy. One of the biggest obstacles to good public policies that respect civil rights (e.g., involuntary/voluntary medical treatment, housing/homelessness, culpability/innocence of persons for behaviors while living with mental disorders) is accepting that these are complex issues that require complex policies. One approach does not fit all conditions.