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Question The standard way of thinking about 'mental disorders' goes like this: Take some phenomena and think of a name that stands for all phenomena together. So far nothing wrong. But then it happens, the given name is being crowned as cause of the phenomena... as in the expression; "depression causes low self esteem, a sense of emptiness,..." while depression is just a given name for all those phenomena. To me that seems as an insult to the laws of logic. Can someone state a logical proof that this way of thinking is against logical laws?

Accepted:
December 30, 2014

Comments

If a mental disorder referred simply to a collection of symptoms, then it could not be a cause of those symptoms. You are exactly right about this. A cause must be distinct from its effect. That is why we cannot say that my slamming the door was a cause of my shutting the door (where "slamming the door" is nothing more than shutting the door with some force).

However, it is not at all obvious that the name of a mental disorder is simply the name for a collection of symptoms. On the contrary, the mental disorder's name might refer to a certain kind of cause of those symptoms -- perhaps a cause that is not yet identified at the time that the mental disorder was named. Then when the cause is later discovered, it is understood what the name of the mental disorder was referring to all along. Thus, a mental disorder can be a cause of some phenomena because it is distinct from those phenomena.

The very same idea applies to the names of somatic (i.e., non-mental) disorders. A new illness (such as phenylketonuria) is discovered and named when a distinctive symptom (or syndrome) exhibited by a group of patients is identified (such as a certain amino acid in the urine). But the term for the disease need not be taken as referring simply to the symptom. It can be understood as referring to the distinctive cause of that symptom. So phenylketonuria was discovered to consist of a certain deficiency in a certain enzyme, which causes the symptom.