Trouble in Mind

Trouble in Mind is an introduction to psychiatry that provides an original perspective on mental life, explaining the normal processes that become disrupted in mental illness. Dean F. MacKinnon offers a biological focus on the mental nature of human anguish, unreason, disability, and self—destruction.Trouble in Mind offers alternatives to the orthodox view of psychiatry enshrined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Psychiatry, says MacKinnon, is not just a catalog of disorders defined by rules laid down by committees. He shows what mental illness can teach us about the mind, from molecules to memory to motivation to meaning.MacKinnon incorporates insights from philosophy, psychology, and neurobiology into a model of mental life. A psychiatrist must learn how perception is organized in the brain to understand hallucinations, learn how habits are normally developed to understand addiction, learn how the mind navigates fear and desire to understand emotional vulnerability.This model of mental life leads to a reformulation of psychiatry as a problem—solving endeavor in which a successful psychiatric encounter results in a multifaceted case formulation and a plan to negate danger, enhance function, and relieve distress.Trouble in Mind is a readable supplement to textbooks that focus on diagnosis. It employs mental illness as a way to understand the workings of the mind in the same way that other fields of medicine use illness to understand the mechanisms of the body.