Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Mental Health and Well-Being in Philosophy

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Explaining Health Across the Sciences

Part of the book series: Healthy Ageing and Longevity ((HAL,volume 12))

  • 656 Accesses

Abstract

Mental health is philosophically understudied, especially compared to the growing interest in mental disorder among philosophers. In this chapter we survey the literature and discuss the relations between mental illness, well-being and mental health. Negative theories identify mental health with absence of disorder, whereas positive theories look to identify it with neither absence of disorder nor well-being, but something independent of either. We put the debate into context by introducing the existing literature on disease and discuss both negative and positive theories and the relation of mental health to well-being. We also discuss mental health in the light of recent externalist theories of mind.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Alexandrova A (2017) A philosophy for the science of well-being. Oxford University Press, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 5th edn. American Psychiatric press, Washington DC

    Google Scholar 

  • Barnier AJ, Priddis AC, Broekhuijse JM, Harris CB, Cox RE, Addis DR, Keil PG, Congleton AR (2014) Reaping what they sow: benefits of remembering together in intimate couples. J Appl Res Memory Cogn 3(4):261–265

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bishop M (2015) The good life: unifying the philosophy and psychology of well-being. Oxford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boorse C (1975) On the distinction between disease and illness. Philos Public Aff 5:49–68

    Google Scholar 

  • Boorse C (1976) What a theory of mental health should be. J Theor Soc Behav 6:61–84

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boorse C (1997) A rebuttal on health. In: Humber JM, Almeder RF (eds) What is disease? Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, pp 3–143

    Google Scholar 

  • Canguilhem G (1991) The normal and the pathological (trans: Fawcett CR). Zone Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Canguilhem G (2012) Writings on medicine (trans: Geroulanos S, Meyers T). Fordham University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Carel H (2007) Can I be ill and happy? Philosophia 35:95–110

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carel H (2008) Illness: the cry of the flesh. Acumen, Dublin

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark A, Chalmers DJ (1998) The extended mind. Analysis 58:7–19

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davidson L, Roe D (2007) Recovery from recovery in serious mental illness: one strategy for confusion plaguing recovery. J Ment Health 16:459–470

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doris J (2015) Talking to ourselves. OUP, Oxford

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Drayson Z, Clark A (2019) Cognitive disability and embodied, extended minds. In: Cureton A, Wasserman D (eds) The Oxford handbook of philosophy and disability

    Google Scholar 

  • Gadamer H-G (1996) The enigma of health. Stanford University Press, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Galderisi S, Heinz A, Kastrup M, Beezhold J, Sartorius N (2015) Toward a new definition of mental health. World Psychiatry 14(2):231–233

    Google Scholar 

  • Graham G (2010) The disorderd mind. Routledge

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoffman GA (2016) Out of our skulls: how the extended mind thesis can extend psychiatry. Philos Psychol 29(8):1160–1174

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Keller S (2019) What does mental health have to do with well-being? Bioethics 34(3):228–234

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lorenc T, Clayton S, Neary D, Whitehead M, Petticrew M, Thomson H, Cummins S, Sowden A, Renton A (2012) Crime, fear of crime, environment, and mental health and well-being: mapping review of theories and causal pathways. Health & Place 18(4):757–765

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Menary R (2007) Cognitive integration: mind and cognition unbounded. Palgrave McMillan

    Google Scholar 

  • Menary R (2010) The extended mind. MIT Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy D (2006) Psychiatry in the scientific image. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Rashed MA, Bingham R (2014) Can psychiatry distinguish social deviance from mental disorder. Philos Psychiatry Psychol 21:243–255

    Google Scholar 

  • Roberts G, Wolfson P (2004) The rediscovery of recovery: open to all. Adv Psychiatr Treat 10:37–49

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roberts T, Krueger J, Glackin S (2019) Psychiatry beyond the brain: externalism, mental health, and autistic spectrum disorder. Philos Psychiatr Psychol 26:E-51–E-68.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rowlands M (2003) Externalism: putting mind and world back together again. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP

    Google Scholar 

  • Sen A (1993) Capability and well-being. In: Nussbaum and Sen (eds) The Quality of Life. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp 30–53

    Google Scholar 

  • Sen A (1999) Development as freedom. Knopf, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Sneddon A (2002) Towards externalist psychopathology. Philos Psychol 15(3):297–316

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sutton J (2015) Scaffolding memory: themes, taxonomies, puzzles. In: Contextualizing human memory: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how individuals and groups remember the past. Psychology Press, pp 187–205

    Google Scholar 

  • Sutton J, Harris CB, Keil PG, Barnier AJ (2010) The psychology of memory, extended cognition, and socially distributed remembering. Phenomenol Cogn Sci 9(4):521–560

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thornton T (2017) Recovery, paternalism and narrative understanding in mental healthcare. In: Freda MF, De Luca Picione R (eds) Healthcare and Culture: Subjectivity in medical contexts. Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC

    Google Scholar 

  • Tribble EB (2005) Distributing cognition in the globe. Shakespeare Quarterly 56(2):135–155

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wakefield JC (1992) Disorder as harmful dysfunction: a conceptual critique of DSM-III-R’s definition of mental disorder. Psychol Rev 99:232–247

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Wakefield JC (1993) Limits of operationalization: a critique of Spitzer and Endicott’s (1978) proposed operational criteria for mental disorder. J Abnorm Psychol 102:160–172

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Wakefield JC (1999) Disorder as a black box essentialist concept. J Abnorm Psychol 108:465–472

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Wakefield JC (2006) Personality disorder as harmful dysfunction: DSM’s cultural deviance requirement reconsidered. J Pers Disord 20:157–169

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Washington N (2015) mental health and human minds: some theoretical criteria for clinical psychiatry. Open Access Dissertations. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/1157/

  • Wilson RA (1994) Wide computationalism. Mind 103:351–372

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wren-Lewis S, Alexandrova A (forthcoming) Mental health without wellbeing. J Med Philos

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jonathan Sholl for comments on an earlier version. Caitrin Donovan’s research is funded by the ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship project A Philosophy of Medicine for the 21st Century (FL170100160).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Dominic Murphy, Caitrin Donovan & Gemma Lucy Smart

Authors
  1. Dominic Murphy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Caitrin Donovan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Gemma Lucy Smart
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dominic Murphy .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Jonathan Sholl

  2. Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Suresh I.S. Rattan

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Murphy, D., Donovan, C., Smart, G.L. (2020). Mental Health and Well-Being in Philosophy. In: Sholl, J., Rattan, S.I. (eds) Explaining Health Across the Sciences. Healthy Ageing and Longevity, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52663-4_7

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation