The Virtuous Psychiatrist: Character Ethics in Psychiatric Practice (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry) - Hardcover

RADDEN

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195389379 ISBN 13: 9780195389371

Publisher: Academic, 2016

Synopsis

The context for this interdisciplinary work by a philosopher and a clinician is the psychiatric care provided to those with severe mental disorders. Such a setting makes distinctive moral demands on the very character of the practitioner, it is shown, calling for special virtues and greater virtue than many other practice settings. In a practice so attentive to the patient's self identity, the authors promote a heightened awareness of cultural and particularly gender issues. By elucidating the nature of the moral psychology and character of the good psychiatrist, this work provides a sustained application of virtue theory to clinical practice. With its roots in Aristotelian writing, The Virtuous Psychiatrist presents virtue traits as habits, able to be cultivated and enhanced through training. The book describes these traits, and how they can be habituated in clinical training. A turn towards virtue theory within philosophy during the last several decades has resulted in important research on professional ethics. By approaching the ethics of psychiatric professionals in these virtue terms, Radden and Sadler's work provides an original application of this theorizing to practice. Of interest to both theorists and practitioners, the book explores the tension between the model of enduring character implicit in virtue theory and the segmented personae of role-specific moral responses. Clinical examples are provided, based upon dramaturgical vignettes (caseplays) which illustrate both the interactions of the case participants as well as the inner monologue of the clinician protagonist.

About this title

Review:

Radden and Sadler have written a book that is a just tribute to psychiatry. (Hanna Pickard, MIND)

...those seeking to understand the distinctive ethical context of psychiatric practice and to aspire to a professional life of virtue will be richly rewarded. (Psychological Medicine)

The Virtuous Psychiatrist is an interesting read. It does an excellent job in advancing the existing conversation and debate about such topics as: the fundamentally interpersonal nature of psychiatric practice and training, the social-cultural construction of mental illnesses and their diagnoses, the benefits and burdens of the consumer and biomedical models of psychiatry, and the affective/ emotional components of virtues. (Journal of Ethics in Mental Health)

The book is a timely antidote to an excessively technological psychiatry and one might hope that journal clubs could find some time for it in addition to the usual diet of evidence-based medicine. (The British Journal of Psychiatry)

The Virtuous Psychiatrist is a book that I would recommended not only to its original audiences of psychiatrists and philosophers of psychiatry, but also to all philosophers who may want to see virtue ethics at work. (Philosophical Psychology)

About the Author:

Jennifer Radden is Professor of Philosophy, U Mass Boston, and editor of The Nature of Melancholy, The Philosophy of Psychiatry, and Moody Minds Distempered (all OUP). John Sadler is Daniel W. Foster Professor of Medical Ethics, UT Southwestern Medical School

About this edition

• Publisher: Academic
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0195389379
• ISBN 13: 9780195389371
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 252