Mechanistic models and modeling disorders

Abstract

Recent debate has focused on how disorders should be modeled, and on how their onset, course and final outcome should be explained. I shall here address some issues arising from modeling neuropsychiatric disorders, which are in many cases still poorly understood, subject to a very high rate of individual variations, and tackled from different disciplinary standpoints. After recalling a few core features of current views on mechanistic models, and related views on psychiatric disorders, I shall discuss some models of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The main aspects of such models are analyzed in the light of the philosophical debate on the elaboration and use of mechanistic models, stressing the distance between the two. The paper highlights the many aspects entering the dynamics of modeling disorders and discusses a few problematic issues of explanatory models elaborated in an actual medical scenario that neo-mechanist accounts can only partly capture.