I meccanismi della malattia mentale: promesse e limiti

The notion of mechanism is widely used in a number of scientific fields, as well as in everyday life. Medical contexts often refer to organs’, diseases’, and drugs’ mechanisms. Philosophy of science has promoted a sort of “revival” of the mechanistic approach to explanation and causation, conceived in a probabilistic perspective, since the 1980s, and definitions of “mechanism” have been proliferating in the last couple of decades. The paper examines some intersections and possible mutual influences between such a debate and some current epistemological trends in psychiatry, and in philosophy of psychiatry. The promises and limits of a mechanistic approach in addressing mental disorders are discussed, and some tension is highlighted between some of the most recent philosophical standpoints on mechanisms and tentative uses of the notion in the mental health sciences.