Keep calm and carry on: Mental disorder is not more "organic" than any other medical condition

Abstract

Psychiatry as a discipline should no longer be grounded in the dualistic opposition between organic and mental disorders. This non-dualistic position refusing the partition along functional versus organic lines is in line with Jean Delay, and with Robert Spitzer who wanted to include in the definition of mental disorder discussed by the DSM-III task force the statement that "mental disorders are a subset of medical disorders". However, it is interesting to note that Spitzer and colleagues ingeniously introduced the definition of "mental disorder" in the DSM-III in the following statement: "there is no satisfactory definition that specifies precise boundaries for the concept "mental disorder" (also true for such concepts as physical disorder and mental and physical health)". Indeed, as for "mental disorders", it is as difficult to define what they are as it is to define what constitutes a "physical disorder". The problem is not the words "mental" or "organic" but the word "disorder". In this line, Wakefield has proposed a useful "harmful dysfunction" analysis of mental disorder. They raise the issue of the dualistic opposition between organic and mental disorders, and situate the debate rather between the biological/physiological and the social. The paper provides a brief analysis of this shift on the question of what is a mental disorder, and demonstrates that a mental disorder is not more "organic" than any other medical condition. While establishing a dichotomy between organic and psychiatry is no longer intellectually tenable, the solution is not to reduce psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders to the level of "organic disorders" but rather to continue to adopt both a critical and clinically pertinent approach to what constitutes a "disorder" in medicine.

Keywords: Disability evaluation; Mental disorders; Physiologie; Physiology; Signes et symptômes; Signs and symptoms; Syndrome; Troubles mentaux; Évaluation du handicap.