Jeffrey Poland

Mechanism and explanation in cognitive neuroscience

The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000) mechanism approach to gaining an understanding of explanation in cognitive neuroscience. We argue that although the mechanism approach can capture many aspects of explanation in cognitive neuroscience, it cannot capture everything. In particular, it cannot completely capture all aspects of the content and significance of mental representations or the evaluative features constitutive of psychopathology.

State Psychiatric Institutions and the Left‐Behinds of Mental Health Reform

S ome promising developments for people with severe and disabling mental illnesses occurred in the first decade of the 21st century. The keynote was sounded by a special national project, the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. The Commission issued a scathing indictment of American mental health services, especially those for people with the most severe illnesses, and a corollary call for massive reform. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration responded with an ambitious reform agenda featuring grants to transform state mental health service systems and projects to identify, package and disseminate proven treatment approaches. Operating one of the world’s largest systems of health care, the Veterans Administration followed suit. In the 1990s, the Institute of Medicine issued a major position paper, arguing that practitioners are not as influenced by current scientific research as they should be. By 2000, this concern had spread to the mental health scientific and professional communities. The idea of evidence-based practice (also variously termed evidence-based medicine, science-based practice, research-validated treatment, etc.) quickly became associated with broader aspects of mental health service reform. the community

DSM-5 and Research Concerning Mental Illness

It is widely agreed that the DSM-IV categorical framework (and its predecessors) have a number of problems (e.g., questionable reliability in the field, questionable validity, heterogeneity, unexplained comorbidity, an unsound concept of mental disorder) that have compromised its utility in research concerning mental illness. At the root of these problems is a substantial “lack of fit” between the DSM framework and the domain of mental illness. With the publication of DSM-5, it is appropriate to ask whether the process of revision leading from DSM-IV to DSM-5 has been sufficiently responsive to the problems with DSM-IV to justify continued use of DSM categories in either basic research concerning psychopathology or more applied clinical research. In this paper, I argue that the revision process has not been responsive to these problems and that, hence, DSM-5 categories ought not to be used in research concerning mental illness. Rather, alternative approaches should be developed, and I conclude with a discussion of three such alternatives.