Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Science, the Humanities, and Neuroscience

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MD, PhD

Drozdstoj Stoyanov, MD, PhD

Springer Publishing

New York
2018 

Premise of the volume:

The field of academic psychiatry is in crisis, everywhere.

It is not merely a health crisis of resource scarcity or distribution, competing claims and practice models, or level of development from one country to another, but a deeper, more fundamental crisis about the very definition and the theoretical basis of psychiatry.

Is psychiatry a social science like psychology or anthropology?

Is it better understood as part of the humanities like philosophy, history and literature?

Or is the future of psychiatry best assured as a neuroscience?

From psychiatry in crisis as a medical discipline to critical psychiatry casting for a new model …

What will be the result?

The “end of psychiatry” or its renaissance as something new and different, either as a more comprehensive theory and practice of human being or as a new branch of medicine called the neurosciences?

Principal authors:

The two principal authors are both professors of psychiatry with mainstream academic training, activities and appointments in respected university departments of psychiatry. Both also share professional training and engaged activities in the philosophy of psychiatry. Both Europeans, one working in Europe, the other in North America, Professors Stoyanov and Di Nicola are active in national and international organizations and together bring varied international expertise to this study. From these informed perspectives, Di Nicola and Stoyanov pose some fundamental epistemological and ontological questions about the crisis of psychiatry, what they imply, and how to go about resolving them to renew psychiatry today.

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD

Full Professor, Dept. of Psychiatry

University of Montreal

Drozdstoj Stoyanov, MD, PhD

Professor, Dept. of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology

Medical University of Plovdiv

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Proposed Table of Contents:

Foreword (by a psychiatrist or a philosopher)

Preface/Introduction by Drozdstoj S.Stoyanov & Vincenzo Di Nicola

Part I: Psychiatry in Crisis as a Medical Discipline

Drozdstoj S. Stoyanov

1.     Methods for clinical evaluation in psychiatry: quantitatve decomposition of narratives vs. qualitative approach. Reconstruction of the methodological discrepancies based on an exemplary case: Major Depressive Disorder

2.     Psychiatric nosology revisited: at the crossroads of psychology and medicine. Categorical vs. dimensional; nomothetic vs. ideographic classification and nomenclature; post-modern perspectives

3.     Psychiatry and neuroscience: at the interface. How to incorporate scientific data from neuroscience without turning psychiatry into an applied branch of neurology

Invited commentary/commentaries

Part II: Critical Psychiatry

  Vincenzo Di Nicola

1.     The Beginning of the End of Psychiatry: A Philosophical Archaeology

Psychology: Introspection and Consciousness

Foundations of Modern Psychiatry

Schizophrenia: The Worm in Psychiatry’s Apple

Excursus: The History of Psychiatry is Not the History of Madness

2.     The End of Phenomenology

“Who Killed Ellen West?”

A Critical Review of Ludwig Binswanger’s Foundational Case of Existential Analysis

3.     The End of Psychiatry

“Psychiatry Against Itself”

A Philosophical Archaeology of Antipsychiatry

Invited commentary/commentaries

Part III: Renewal in Psychiatry

   Drozdstoj S. Stoyanov in Dialogue with Vincenzo Di Nicola

Invited commentary/commentaries

Afterword (by a psychiatrist or a philosopher)