Gene maps, brain scans, and psychiatric nosology

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 209-218

  Robert, Jason Scott ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

BRAIN; CHROMOSOME MAP; CLASSIFICATION; ETHICS; GENETICS; HUMAN; MOLECULAR BIOLOGY; NEUROSCIENCE; PHILOSOPHY; REVIEW; SCHIZOPHRENIA;

BRAIN; CHROMOSOME MAPPING; HUMANS; MOLECULAR BIOLOGY; NEUROSCIENCES; PHILOSOPHY, MEDICAL; SCHIZOPHRENIA;

EID: 33947404415     PISSN: 09631801     EISSN: 14692147     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0963180107070223     Document Type: Review

References (60)

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14. and Bearden CE, Reus VI, Freimer NB. Why genetic investigation of psychiatric disorders is so difficult. Current Opinion in Genetics and Development 2004;14:280-6.
15. Krishnan KR. Psychiatric disease in the genomic era: Rational approach. Molecular Psychiatry 2005;10:978-84. Whether it is possible to eliminate these putatively extraneous factors is entirely debatable. But whether it is desirable to do so is equally open to dispute. Increasingly, the literature seems to suggest that it is only by embracing the social and political (and cultural and ecological) embeddedness of medical conditions that clinicians will be able to grasp the complexity of illness and to offer suitable treatment regimes to their patients. Of course, the latter approach is not developed in ignorance of science, but neither is it based in an overly reductionistic approach to science: Molecular markers, brain images, and biochemical assays are indeed meaningful, but not on their own; they acquire meaning only in an appropriate bio-psycho-social context.
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25. Philosophers of science have long contended that no scientific theories are perfectly value free; this is certainly the case with biomedical theories, insofar as diagnoses of illness inherently make value judgments about the state of the patient's body as compared to a normal body. Psychiatry could perhaps be rendered less (ostensibly) subjective by appeal to biological markers - that is the point of using, for example, neurological testing as a means of determining from what sort of disorder a particular patient suffers. But insofar as biological markers are themselves normative, the hope of value freedom in psychiatric diagnosis is a false hope, in the same way that such a hope is false also in the case of other biomedical diagnoses - none of which is to say that biomedical diagnoses are subjective or otherwise unscientific.
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55. See note 36, Andreasen et al. 1999.
56. See note 36, Andreasen et al. 1999.
57. See note 40, Crespo-Facorro et al. 1999.
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