Mick Power: Madness Cracked

Excerpt

This book is a psychological interpretation of mental disorder proposing a theory-grounded classification system as an alternative primarily to the DSM that became atheoretical with its 3rd edition in 1980. To begin, the author distinguishes objective, subjective, and socially constructed versions of madness and continues with an interesting history of diagnostic classification in psychiatry and clinical psychology. Weaknesses of current DSM and WHO ICF approaches are identified and the author proposes his own theory-grounded alternative based on a schematic, propositional, analogical, and associative representational systems (SPAARS) model of cognitive science. The author then integrates the constructs of drives, emotions, and cognitions (DEC) by how one of these constructs defines primary disorder and the other two affect (and are affected) interactively to produce secondary features of disorder. Chapters are devoted to a description of disorders of biological and social drives with disorders of emotion and cognition in a DEC profile detailing the many ways disorder can individualize drawing on research from cognitive science, most notably Five Factor Personality Theory, Basic Emotion Theory, and Developmental Theories, particularly from the constructs of attachment and temperament. The goal of the book was to ground classification in theory, generating a more thorough understanding of “madness” that is more collectively inclusive of objective, subjective, and socially constructed viewpoints, hence, the title, Cracking Madness. …