BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//132.216.98.100//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.20.4// BEGIN:VEVENT UID:20250916T183730EDT-3929TMx6Ll@132.216.98.100 DTSTAMP:20250916T223730Z DESCRIPTION:Psychiatry and the Epistemology and Ethics of Precision by Kath ryn Tabb\, PhD\, Assistant Professor\, Department of Philosophy\, Bard Col lege.\n\nZoom registration\n\nAbstract: Over the first decade of the 21st century\, the United States government’s institute for psychiatric researc h\, the National Institute of Mental Health\, broke from tradition by begi nning to actively discourage the use of the Diagnostic and Statistical Man ual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM had long been the consensus documen t not only for psychiatric clinicians but also researchers\, so this shift was dramatic. The rationale was that the DSM\, whatever its utility for p ractice\, had not been constructed with biomedical research in mind – inde ed\, most of its categories were determined on the basis of clinical obser vation long before the advent of neuroscience or behavioral genetics. The NIMH’s contention was that the categories were not designed to help isolat e causal mechanisms\, and were in fact retarding scientific progress by fo cusing researchers’ attention on heterogenous groupings of cases. In its p lace the NIMH introduced an alternative classification tool\, not for pati ents but for research targets: the Research Domain Criteria matrix\, which allows scientists to present their projects in terms of the biomechanisms they target\, rather than a specific patient population. Epistemically sp eaking RDoC constitutes an enormous shift\, wherein psychopathology no lon ger explicitly demarcates the subject-matter of psychiatric research. Afte r demonstrating how this is so\, I will turn my attention to the epistemic and ethical challenges that result. In so far as medicine has as its aim the alleviation of suffering and the maintenance of health\, medicine has become a distal\, rather than proximate\, goal for the NIMH. While it may be ethically sound to turn attention away from the traditional goals of ps ychiatry in the short run to be successful at them in the long run in this manner\, the case defending this sort of revisionist view of psychiatry’s project has not yet been made. Instead\, the shift in priorities has been implicitly justified by an assumption about psychiatric taxonomy: that th e true essences of its categories will lie at the level of the biomechanis m. This assumption is no doubt question-begging\; I conclude by considerin g whether it is also wrong.\n\nBio: Kathryn Tabb is an assistant professor of philosophy at Bard College. She completed a PhD in History and Philoso phy of Science and a MA in Bioethics and Health Law at the University of P ittsburgh\, and also holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science f rom the University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on the history and philo sophy of psychopathology\, focusing on the early modern period as well as contemporary issues in psychiatric classification and explanation. She ser ves as a steering committee member for Columbia University's Center for Ex cellence in ELSI Research and has published her work in diverse venues inc luding Philosophy of Science\, Nature Human Behavior\, Theoretical Medicin e and Bioethics\, Behavior Genetics\, and Synthese. She is currently compl eting a monograph on John Locke's account of psychopathology.\n DTSTART:20220303T180000Z DTEND:20220303T200000Z SUMMARY:Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry & the Culture\, Min d and Brain Speaker Series URL:/psychiatry/channels/event/division-social-and-tra nscultural-psychiatry-culture-mind-and-brain-speaker-series-337537 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR