Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry is a concise introduction to the growing field of philosophy of psychiatry. Divided into three main aspects of psychiatric clinical judgement, values, meanings and facts, it examines the key debates about mental health care, and the philosophical ideas and tools needed to assess those debates, in six chapters. In addition to outlining the state of play, Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry presents a coherent and unified approach across the different debates, characterized by a rejection of reductionism and an emphasis on the ineliminability of uncodified skilled judgement. The first part, Values, outlines the debate about whether diagnosis of mental illness is essentially value-laden and argues that the prospects for reducing illness or disease to plainly factual matters are poor. It also explains the important role of skilled contextual judgement, rather than a principles-based deduction, in ethical judgement. The second part, Meanings, examines the central role of understanding and a shared first person perspective, both against attempts to reduce meaning to basic information-processing mechanisms and to explain away the difficulties of understanding psychopathology in recent models of delusion. The third part, Facts, shows the importance of uncodified clinical judgements, both in assessing the validity of psychiatric taxonomy and in the application of Evidence Based Medicine. Despite advances in the codifaction of practice and operationalism of diagnosis, an element of judgement remains in the assessment both of what, at one level, is good evidence for diagnosis and treatment and what, at a higher level, is good evidence for the validity of classification overall.

Esssential Philosophy of Psychiatry (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry)

Politics & Social Sciences

Tim Thornton

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

By the time most people hit 30, they've managed to do one of the following things: grow up; meet one of their heroes; and move on a bit from the music they were obsessed with at the age of 17. Clive Beresford has failed to do all three. He mopes around, drinking too much, wondering why life has forgotten him, disgusted at the deletion of the bands he loves (Carter USM, The Wonder Stuff, Ned's Atomic Dustbin et al.) from the world's musical hard drive, quietly lamenting his never-was career as a music journalist.To make matters worse, his best friend has turned into a boring old fart and his bank account is so empty it's actually developed an echo. But all - or at least some - of that is about to change. One otherwise unremarkable Saturday morning Clive sees the biggest alternative-pop star of them all walking down the high street with his dry-cleaning: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies ('the biggest British band to emerge from the late-eighties indie-boom' - Rolling Stone).Determined to grab the scoop of a lifetime, Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol, although Webster - whose charmed, platinum-selling life plummeted headfirst into a rancid festival toilet before the eyes of the indie cosmos one wretched summer night in 1995 - proves to be in no mood for discussing the past. But the pair quickly realise they have things in common neither could have predicted, forcing them both to revisit a period they thought they'd left behind: the sweat, feedback, T-shirts, stage-dives, hitch-hikes, snakebites and hangovers of British alternative rock at the start of the nineties; to quote Lance Webster himself, 'before Britpop came along and fucked everything up'..."The Alternative Hero" is that rare gem - a novel about popular music in which every sentence is completely, totally right. And it's very, very funny.

The Alternative Hero

JONATHAN CAPE.

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Books by Tim Thornton

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tim Thornton. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Esssential Philosophy of Psychiatry (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry)

The Alternative Hero