Introduction: Psychiatric Research and Extraordinary Science

A climate of crisis and controversy exists in contemporary mental health research and practice, stemming partially from tensions within psychiatry. On the one hand, as a branch of medicine, psychiatry aims at clinically addressing the complaints of individuals with mental disorders, including unwanted behavior and the subjective, mental, and first-person aspects of psychopathology (such as feelings of unwarranted guilt and hallucinations); yet there are serious concerns regarding overdiagnosis and overtreatment, andnd there is no consensus on which treatment methods are most effective in addressing mental health problems. On the other hand, as a branch of science, psychiatry targets the objective, embodied, and thirdperson causes and correlates of behavioral problems and mental distress (such as atypical brain mechanisms and genetic anomalies); however, there is no agreement on what kinds of scientific constructs will best help probe these phenomena, and there has been a notable lack of scientific progress. At the center of these controversies is The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the psychiatric taxonomy used in the United States and widely around the world, which has been developed to identify both the scientific and clinical targets of psychiatry, as well as to be used in the service of sociological, pedagogical, and forensic projects (American Psychiatric Association 2013, xli; American Psychiatric Association 1994, xv). It is widely agreed, however, that the DSM is seriously flawed. Common and widely acknowledged problems include problems concerning the validity and reliability of the psychiatric diagnoses, poorly understood comorbidities, heterogeneity of diagnostic groupings, and overinclusiveness of diagnostic criteria. As a consequence, the DSM is seen by many as a major source of the current crisis in mental health research and practice. The goal of the present volume is to focus directly on research-related questions in this crisis and to explore both the nature and sources of the crisis as well as whether and, if so, how, it can be responded to, or at best, overcome. There has been an increased focus on the scientific research of mental disorders, not only by scientists, but also by philosophers. However, both in areas where this research exemplifies the problems characteristic of the crisis (e.g., problems of scientific validity of DSM categories) and in areas where it constitutes a source of responses to those problems (e.g., the conviction that the more we understand the brain, the better we will address mental disorders), a thorough philosophical investigation of the current crisis is missing. Moreover, given the existing crisis, whether and, if so how, research in psychiatry can make progress is not adequately addressed in the relevant literature.