Georgetown University Medical Center

Dominic Sisti

Section: Edmund D. Pellegrino Fellows

Dominic Sisti, MBe., is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Center for Bioethics and a doctoral student in philosophy at Michigan State University.

Research Proposal

With Dr. Pellegrino¹s guidance, I plan to deepen my philosophical examination of the concepts of health and disease by asking the question: How ought mental illness be (re)conceptualized?

Specifically, I will to look at the concept of dysfunction and how it has been used to demarcate instances of mental illness from healthy psychological states. I plan to explore the possibility that a robust theory of mental illness will require a bivalent concept of dysfunction that encompasses both biological and social dysfunction. To do this, I will need to first survey and explain the ways in which the notion of dysfunction has been used in competing theories about the concepts of health and disease, such as in normative, nonnormative, and hybrid accounts. My analysis will thus require an analysis of theories of biological function and teleology found in the canon of philosophy and in the philosophy of biology and medicine literature.

Once I have parsed the concepts of function and dysfunction, I hope to then argue that we can distinguish between reasonable and legitimate social dysfunctions and those that are constructed to merely enhance a power relation. The former may be considered the basis of mental illnesses, the latter serve as the basis of pseudo-illnesses. Case examples will illustrate this point.

 I wish to therefore advance the claim that legitimate social dysfunctions should be considered mental illnesses even if biologically testable correlates do not exist or will never exist because they are not biologically reducible or scientifically testable.