Intersection of values and health

Traditional theories of health and disease have a tendency to focus on either the evaluative aspect of health at the cost of capturing its descriptive character or they focus on the descriptive character at the cost of capturing its evaluative aspect. We provide a naturalistically respectable account of health that captures both these features of health by locating the value in health in the mode of presentation of the concept [health] instead of in the worldly property. We argue that understanding [health] as a thick concept allows us to make good sense of important features of health judgments.

Inferences from clinical research results to estimates of therapeutic effectiveness suffer due to various biases. I argue that predictions of medical effectiveness are prone to failure because current medical research overlooks the impact of a particularly detrimental set of biases: meta-biases. Meta-biases are linked to higher-level characteristics of medical research and their effects are only observed when comparing sets of studies that share certain meta-level properties. I offer a model for correcting research results based on meta-research evidence, the bias dynamics model, which employs regularly updated empirical bias coefficients to attenuate estimates of therapeutic effectiveness.

This paper draws on Quill Kukla’s “Institutional Definition of Health” to provide a definition of “psychiatric condition” that delineates the proper bounds of psychiatry. I argue that this definition must include requirements that psychiatrization of a condition benefit the well-being of 1) the society as a collective, and 2) the individual whose condition is in question. I then suggest that psychiatry understand individual well-being in terms of the subjective values of individuals. Finally, I propose that psychiatry’s understanding of collective well-being should be the result of a “socially objective” process, and give certain desiderata for this understanding.

Court cases involving sexual assault and police violence rely heavily on victim testimony. We consider what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument (TUA)” according to which we should be skeptical about victim testimony because people are particularly liable to misremember traumatic events. The TUA is not obviously based in mere distrust of women, people of color, disabled people, poor people, etc. Rather, it seeks to justify skepticism on epistemic and empirical grounds. We consider how the TUA might appeal to the psychology and neuroscience of memory for empirical support. However, we argue that neither support the TUA.