engleski

The harm criterion in mental disoders

The notion of harm can be viewed as a ubiquitous concept in the discussion on mental disorders, whether it be integral to an account of mental illness (Glover 1972, Wakefield 1992, Reznek 1987, Cooper 2002), or rejected and accounted for in other ways (Amoretti & ; Lalumera, 2018). In this paper I explore harm in its application to the discussion of mental illness. Harm has usually been tied to the distress criterion as it is in the DSM III (1980), DSM IV (1994) and DSM V (2013). However, there are (at least) two senses of harm we need to differentiate: harm in the injury/impairment sense and harm in the prudential sense. (Campbell & Stramondo 2017) I argue that distress falls under the view of harm as injury/impairment but that we should also consider harm in the prudential sense – as that which negatively impacts someone' s well- being. I consider desiderata a theory of harm should adhere to by discussing Bradley (2012) who presents the following desiderata for a theory of harm – extensional adequacy, axiological neutrality, ontological neutrality, amorality, unity, prudential importance, normative importance. Inspired by Tiberius's (2018) desiderata for a theory of well-being, namely descriptive, normative and empirical adequacy, I argue that a theory of harm in the context of mental illness should, besides some of the Bradley's (2012) criteria which roughly cover descriptive and normative adequacy, also pay significant attention to the empirical adequacy.

harm, mental disorder definition, harm criterion, DSM, distress, desiderata

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