PSYCHIATRY IN CRISIS:

AT THE CROSSROADS OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, THE HUMANITIES, 

AND NEUROSCIENCE

 

by VINCENZO DI NICOLA and DROZDSTOJ STOYANOV 

(Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2021)

 

From the Foreword, "Beyond Single Message Methodologies"

 

"[I]n their remarkable book, Vincenzo Di Nicola and Drozdstoj Stoyanov bring ... a refreshingly open and innovative vision to bear on the challenges facing contemporary psychiatry. They are perhaps uniquely well placed to do this. Both are pre-eminent academics in psychiatry. Yet both draw on extensive clinical experience on the front line of care. Both furthermore have been active in the emerging interdisciplinary field of philosophy and psychiatry.

 

"Their debt to philosophy is clear. Neatly avoiding the trap of premature closure on yet another single message mythology, their thesis is presented in the form of a critical dialogue between two philosophically framed perspectives. Stoyanov casts the crisis in psychiatry in epistemological terms as a crisis of knowledge. Di Nicola by contrast casts it ontologically as a crisis of being. The counterpoint between these two perspectives makes for an inspiring and deeply illuminating read with the added bonus of the introduction of (for many Anglo-Saxon readers at least) fresh names. Di Nicola for example draws deeply on the work of the French philosopher and contemporary of the perhaps better-known Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, notably on his analysis of what it is to be a human being.

 

"In drawing in this way on philosophical sources Di Nicola and Stoyanov are themselves exemplars of an important if minority development in contemporary psychiatry. The 1990s as they describe was hailed in psychiatry as the ‘decade of the brain’, the decade in which the neurosciences were set to emerge as the dominant influence on the field under their banner ‘the mind is the brain’. But the 1990s was also the decade of the mind, the decade in which, somewhat to the surprise of many, a long-standing if minority tradition of cross-disciplinary work between philosophy and psychiatry sprang into new life. Di Nicola’s and Stoyanov’s Psychiatry in Crisis reflects many of the virtues of the ‘new’ philosophy and psychiatry. Besides its evident scholarship and originality, and an ethos of mutual respect between protagonists, it is overtly and inclusively international in perspective."

 

- KWM ((Bill) Fulford, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Philosophy; Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford, UK