Meaning and Matter in Psychiatry: A Historical View and a New Approach

Abstract

In this article, I argue that a person-centered approach in psychiatry needs to pay attention to how mental illnesses are historically constituted and products of biological, social, psychological and cultural factors. Even if the ambition of the biopsychosocial model and the medical network model was to break with reductionist understandings of (mental) illness, I argue that these models risk stabilising, rather than deconstructing dichotomies between nature versus culture, brain versus mind, somatic versus mental or hard facts versus soft sciences. I rather propose to re-orient psychiatry as a form of “relational medicine” in which causes and reasons are treated as inseparable and where matter and meaning are entangled. A person-centered approach in psychiatry must start with the person including the embodied production of meaning in Society.