Psychic health, mental clarity, self-knowledge and other virtues

Stephen Toulmin

pp. 55-70

in: Tristram Engelhardt, Stuart Spicker (eds), Mental health: philosophical perspectives, Berlin, Springer, 1978

Abstract

In recent years, discussions about the concept of mental health have been much preoccupied with the influences — for good or ill — of something called "the medical model". The ways in which we talk or think about, and deal with, people who are afflicted of mind or spirit, and who seek out professional help in coping with these afflictions, have been increasingly guided (it is said) by patterns of thought borrowed from somatic medicine. In consequence we have been tempted to carry over, both in our attitudes towards the mental sufferer, and into the procedures that we employ in treating him, presuppositions and postures that are appropriate to his condition only to the extent that there is a true analogy between physical or physiological affliction/disease/therapy/cure/health etc., on the one hand, and mental or psychological affliction/disease/therapy/cure/health and the rest, on the other.