Mental health without mirrorsA non-descriptivist approach to mental health and the intervention with people with delusions

Resumen

Conceptual debates in the field of mental health have typically revolved around two core issues: the problem of mind and the problem of normativity. Against the reductivist and eliminativist tendencies that characterize most therapeutic models, in this dissertation we advance a pragmatist and non-descriptivist approach to mental health -a “philosophy of mental health without mirrors”. This approach rejects the idea that folk-psychological interpretation subserves a primarily descriptive and causal-explanatory function. Rather, it highlights its evaluative and regulative dimensions, while at the same time retaining their truth-aptness. In doing so, it offers a non-reductivist, yet compatibilist approach to the mind and normativity, which affords a better conceptual framework for mental health. We then explore its consequences for the debate around the doxastic status of delusional experiences and its implications for the intervention with people with delusions. Drawing from this non-descriptivist approach, we claim that doxasticism about delusions can and must be defended not on the grounds of its scientific value, but on the grounds of its ethical and political virtues. We conclude that non-cognitivist, functional-analytic approaches to the intervention with people with delusions offer a better model than their cognitivist counterparts, and we point out several ways in which our non-descriptivist approach could help to enhance their efficacy and clinical significance.