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The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice

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Handbook of Philosophy of Management

Part of the book series: Handbooks in Philosophy ((HP))

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Abstract

Psychiatry has long been criticized for being a pseudoscientific discipline masquerading as a genuine medical field because the meaning of its central concept, “mental disorder,” was imprecise and subject to mistaken “false positive” diagnoses of non-disordered conditions as disorders. In response, philosophers have analyzed the concept of mental disorder to establish its legitimacy and clarify the distinction between genuine disorder versus nonclinical distress or social deviance. The most cited such analysis by mental health professionals is the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA), which holds that a disorder consists of the failure of some internal mechanism to perform a function for which it was naturally selected, and this failure causes direct harm to the individual as judged by social values. The HDA reflects essentialist analyses of meaning in philosophy of language, which anchor meaning in inferred causal processes rather than observable properties, and evolutionary conceptions of biological design in philosophy of biology. The analytical strategies used by psychiatry to justify its status as a legitimate branch of medicine and understand its key concept of “mental disorder” hold lessons for the broader social sciences and for management practice. Many social science concepts, from personality and racial prejudice to broader organizational concepts such as “social enterprise,” are best understood by looking beyond superficial properties to deeper structural properties in order to distinguish genuine from nongenuine instances of the concept.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Bioethics and Silver School of Social Work, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Jerome C. Wakefield

  2. Institute of Philosophy, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Jordan A. Conrad

  3. Center for Bioethics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Jordan A. Conrad

Authors
  1. Jerome C. Wakefield
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  2. Jordan A. Conrad
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Correspondence to Jerome C. Wakefield .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Cristina Neesham

Section Editor information

  1. ESSCA School of Management, Paris, France

    Alejandro Agafonow

  2. GRANEM, Université d’Angers, Angers, France

    Alejandro Agafonow

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Wakefield, J.C., Conrad, J.A. (2021). The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice. In: Neesham, C. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_44-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_44-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48352-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48352-8

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