FROM NAMES TO OBJECTS—PHILOSOPHICALLY ABOUT PSYCHIATRIC CLASSIFICATIONS

At each introduction of a new edition of psychiatric classifications, a vivid debate resurfaces and concerns their very validity: should classifications be based on etiology or should they be descriptive, based on observation, and not on some or other theories of etiopathogenesis? I shift the attention to the philosophical aspect of the debate. Psychiatric classifications employ (and have always employed) taxonomic methodology but in fact are not (and never were) based on biological mechanisms leading to mental disorders. Therefore I tried to catch the moment where certain observable features, recognized as symptoms, begins to be perceived as an ontologically independent entities and we start to think that nosological units must have a specific cause (e.g. a neuropathogenesis), which is simply reflected in the diagnostic picture. I tried to catch the moment, when by naming, classifying and diagnosing, we, in a sense, create objects. Then I show how from there we can slide into objectification: we can stop to see a person and start to an illness.