Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narratives for a Humanist Science

Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narratives for Humanist Science diagnoses the fundamental problem in contemporary scientific psychiatry to be a lack of a sophisticated and nuanced engagement with the self and proposes a solution—the Multitudinous Self Model (MuSe). MuSe fulfils psychiatry’s twin commitments to patients’ flourishing and scientific objectivity. Marshalling the conceptual and empirical resources from testimonies from individuals diagnosed with mental disorders, substantive research in cognitive science, and empirically informed philosophy, MuSe provides clinicians, scientists, and patients pathways to respond to mental distresses and disorders. This framework boosts psychiatry’s relationship to science by facilitating expansive notions of expertise and objectivity in which some patients are recognized as “experience-based experts” whose contributions to psychiatric knowledge are indispensable. Serife Tekin draws the contours of a future for psychiatry that is grounded in philosophy, medical humanities, and social sciences as much as physiology and neuroscience. This book is an ideal read for professional psychiatrists and philosophers of psychiatry who are interested in the philosophy of mental health.