The Mind-Body Solution with Dr. Tevin Naidu

I’ve spent the vast majority of my life studying the human mind. It all began in my childhood when I first came across a book by Oliver Sacks. The book was titled “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat”. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and after reading his book, I remember having the urge to become one myself. However, as time went on, I realized that his approach to his patients was different when compared to other neurologists.

His study of patient’s subjective phenomenological experiences, his obsession with the deeper philosophical picture, and the attention to detail that he paid to perception and reality was very similar to that of the approach generally taken by psychiatrists. Sacks was more than a neurologist. He was also a doctor of the soul. His work went beyond the brain and traversed into the mind. Thanks to him, and many others, my love for studying the human experience began and eventually culminated into a career in philosophy and psychiatry.

Philosophy (love of wisdom) is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. The scope of philosophy generally consists of three overarching parts; 1) Epistemology (the theory of knowledge); 2) Ontology or Metaphysics (the theory of being or reality); and 3) Axiology (the theory of values).

To further dissect modern philosophy, it’s often helpful to split western philosophy into “Anglo-American philosophy” (or analytical philosophy) which deals with concepts such as agency, mind, person, linguistics, etc, and “Continental Philosophy” which deals with phenomenology (structure of subjective experience), existentialism (‘existence’ ahead of ‘essence’) and hermeneutics (a set of techniques for analyzing the meaning of discourse) – which all generally tend to put people first and therefore apply well to mental health – which is my other area of expertise (Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, for example, contains a thorough analysis of Freud’s ideas; Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a detailed account of psychopathology, and existentialism produced its own critique of Freud).

Both Anglo-American philosophy and Continental philosophy have a growing concern with ‘the self’ and their models should be seen as complementary when applying it to psychiatry. Therefore, the scope of philosophy within psychiatry lies within its ability to address the more conceptual problems of the field. Psychiatry (healer of the ‘soul’) is a branch of medicine focused on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of mental illness/disease/disorder, emotional disturbance and abnormal behaviours.

Three ways in which philosophy is utilized within psychiatry range from overall “Weltanschauung” (scheme of life or general philosophy/religion) to the various branches of philosophy (i.e. the ethical, epistemological, jurisprudential, phenomenological, political & metaphysical – among others), to the more detailed conceptual analytic concerns (e.g. use of Mental Healthcare Act 17 of 2002 in a South African context to define “mental illness/disorder”).

It therefore comes with no surprise that psychiatrists claim a very special expertise in the study of mind. The philosophy of mind should thus be, uniquely, their philosophy. Conversely, given the immensely diverse range of abnormal mental phenomena, philosophers of mind should be uniquely intrigued with what psychiatrists deal with on a day-to-day basis. One of philosophy of mind’s most infamous problems, “the mind-body problem”, is a major part of the mental health topic, in the form of the differences and similarities between mental illness and bodily illness. The philosophy of mind also covers a diverse range of other topics critically important in mental health that are known as ‘philosophical psychopathology’.

Philosophy of mind, moreover, overlaps with and even underpins, topics in the philosophy and ethics of mental health: e.g. ‘folk’ psychology, the unconscious, the status of psychoanalysis, rationality, and practical reasoning, and the core notions of actions and agency underpinning our very concepts of the disorder. These interactions highlight the fact that philosophy of mind is crucially important for mental health practice and research. But in all these areas, too, mental health practice and research are also crucially important to philosophy.

Together, psychiatry and philosophy form a mutually beneficial, symbiotic, relationship. As a psychiatry medical officer, currently pursuing a masters degree in the philosophy and ethics of mental health, I come into close contact with the human mind via a first-person, subjective, phenomenological perspective, as well as via third-person, objective, clinical encounters that also involves the study of neural correlates in the form of brain scans and EEGs.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that studying the pathological manifestations of the mind can provide some of the most informative explanations and deepest understandings of the mind itself. Psychiatrists and mental health practitioners work at the very interface between mind and body and show just how difficult (both theoretically and practically) the mind-body problem really is. I do not have the answer – but I do believe that by only studying minds in their “normal” states, we fail to utilize the important resource that is “madness”.

Whether you’re a dualist, monist, pluralist, functionalist, illusionist, behaviorist, physicalist, idealist (the list goes on and on), if you are not considering the various abnormal mental phenomena that the human mind is capable of experiencing, then you’ve made a tremendously uninformed conclusion. Any atypical state of mind is an absolutely valuable asset for the study of the mind.

What becomes apparent when we look at our experience of mind from a more holistic point of view, is that our mind is not solely dependent on our brains. We are embodied beings. We are also embedded into an environment that we have to continuously enact upon. We also have extended our cognition via the scientific and technological tools at our disposal. We should no longer pigeonhole our search for the mind by only looking within. We also need to look outward. Brains are fundamentally a part of our cognitive repertoire, however they are not solely responsible for our conscious experiences.

Even when we observe the brain as a statistical organ, functioning with Bayesian-like principles, it becomes abundantly clear that we are dynamic processes that function within a dynamic cosmos. Understanding how we are able to compute our own existence was never going to be an easy endeavor. When it comes to understanding consciousness and the mind, we have to involve as many branches of knowledge as possible, whether it be science, philosophy, or even religion.

The quest to conquer the mind will require a cumulative culmination of collaborative encounters. We may never figure out the mind-body problem, and that’s okay. I still enjoy the absurdness of our obsession to find the solution.

That being said, I will be launching a podcast dedicated to understanding the human mind in both its physiological and pathological form. I will be joined by numerous experts in very diverse fields (linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, sociology, psychology, etc…) as we discuss common mental health debates e.g. psychiatry vs anti-psychiatry, big pharma vs the user voice movement, evidence-based medicine vs values-based practice, etc.

We will also be covering the deeper topics in the philosophy of mind e.g. nature of reality, perception, morality, free-will, and consciousness. I hope that this in-depth philosophical probe into the nature of the mind will help us get even closer to the mind-body solution. So, please, join me on this adventure as we go on a consciousness-raising journey through the mind!

Addison

Addison is a student of the Aust Abbottabad University of Science and Technology. He started his graduation in 2016 and graduated in 2020. I’m a professional article and blog writer, has written dozens of content on different topics and worked with professionals all over the globe. Feel free to contact me for any assistance. [email protected]