Psychiatric nosology, its philosophy and science

Abstract

Psychiatric nosology is to psychiatry what the soul is to individual human beings. Like the soul, nosology also continues to remain at the existential centre of psychiatry, but all the same continues to remain as elusive and indefinable. Psychiatry promises and aspires to deal with mental disorders but has never made any serious attempt at defining or understanding what the mind is. The discipline of psychiatry is yet to come up with a universally acceptable and comprehensive definition of mental disorders. Psychiatry is an offshoot of the extension of scientific methodologies to study the mental and behavioural disorders, but paradoxically the mental dimension of man is predominantly beyond the scope and ambit of those very methodologies. Direct empirical observation of mental dimension is not possible through human faculties. The mental dimension of man, for most of us, is an ‘inferred reality’. As a natural corollary to this is the expected predicament that mental disorders cannot be defined with greater precision or definitiveness than our capacity to either understand, or define the dimension to which it refers to, that is the mind. It is imperative therefore that we first try to understand what mind is, to better understand the mental disorders and thus be able to classify them more rationally and meaningfully. All psychiatric nosologies will also have to contain a mechanism to assimilate the imperatives of socio-cultural variations.