Our lives are dominated by technology. We live with and through the achievements of technology. What is true of the rest of life is of course true of medicine. Many of us owe our existence and our continued vigour to some achievement of medical technology. And what is true in a major way of
general medicine is to a significant degree true of psychiatry. Prozac has long since arrived, and in its wake an ever-growing armamentarium of new psychotropics; beyond that, neuroscience promises ever more technological advances for the field.
However, the effect of technology on the
field of psychiatry remains highly ambiguous. On the one hand there are the achievements, both in the science and practice of psychiatry; on the other hand technology's influence on the field threatens its identity as a humanistic practice. In this ambiguity psychiatry is not unique - major thinkers
have for a long time been highly ambivalent and concerned about the technological order that now defines modern society. For the future, the danger is that the psychiatrically real becomes that which can be seen, the symptom, and especially that which can be measured. Disorders and treatments might
become reduced to what can be defined by diagnostic criteria and what can be mapped out on a scale.
This book exams how technology has come to influence and drive psychiatry forward, and considers at just what cost these developments have been made. It includes a range of stimulating and
thought-provoking chapters from a range of psychiatrists and philosophers.
James Phillips: Introduction
Part 1 - Technical Reason in Psychiatry
1. John Sadler: the instrument metaphor, hyponarrativity, and the generic physician
2. Peter Zachar & Scott Bartlett: Technoloigcal rationality in psychiatry: immanent critique, critical theory, and a
pragmatist alternative
3. Louis C Charland: Technological reason and regulation of emotion
Part 2 - Critical Approaches to TEchnology in Psychiatry
4. Miguel Uribe: Technology, aesthetic explanation, and psychoanalysis
5. Sue V Rosser: Focusing the lenses of feminist theories
to reflect on technology and psychiatry
6. Douglas Porter: The critical theory of psychopharmacology: the work of David Healy and beyond
7. Donald Mender: Towards a post-technological information theory
Part 3 - Technology and Psychiatric Disorders
8. Douglas W Heinrichs:
Technology and mental disorders: a clinical probe into the differential impact on individuals
9. Mark D Rego: Frontal fatigue: how technology may contribute to mental illness
10. Philip Sinaikin: Bored to tears? Depression and Heideggr's concepts of profound boredom: a postpsychiatry
contribution
Part 4 - Technological Instruments
11. Abraham Rudnick: Psychiatric rehabilitation and the notion of technology in psychiatry
12. Stuart Kaplan: Drugs, not hugs: antidepressant medication trials and suicidality in children - a case history in the philosophy of science
as an argument for the neeed for improved technology in psychiatry
13. Karen Iseminger & Dale Theobald: Philosophical considerations of an internet-enabled telephone and computer psychiatric symptom monitoring system: maintaining thebalance between subjectivity and objectivity in
research
14. Robert Kruger: The assessment of emotional awareness: can technology make a contribution?
Part 5 - Ethical Issues in Technology and Psychiatry
15. Jennifer Radden: Thinking about the repair manual: technique and technology in psychiatry
16. Michael A Cerullo:
Beyond repugnance: human enhancement and the President's Council on Bioethics
17. Mark P Jenkins: The reflectively anxious and depressed; psychotropics and lives worth living
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
James Phillips is in the private practice of psychiatry, with a focus on medically oriented psychotherapy, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the Yale School of Medicine. He is Secretary and member of the Executive Committee of the Association for the Advancement of
Philosophy and Psychiatry, and is editor of the AAPP Bulletin. He has written extensively in the area of philosophy and psychiatry and is on the editorial board of the journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology. He is co-editor (with James Morley) of Imagination and its Pathologies (MIT Press,
2002. Since 2004 he has been involved in developing and supporting a psychiatric clinic in Ayacucho, Peru, a rural Andean city, and he travels there regularly.
