ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the limited relativity or proliferation that must be accepted in light of even the strictest of Anglo-American postmodern epistemologies. The fields of psychiatric medicine, clinical psychology, and psychiatric social work are notorious for their proliferation of widely divergent points of view regarding mental illness. The medical model of mental illness premises that 'mental' illness is best understood as a disease of the body that adversely affects those aspects of the person that have traditionally been classified as mental, for example, emotions, cognition, personality. Under the psychosocial model, find psychoanalysis and other depth psychologies, Carl Rogers's psychology of the person and client-centered therapy, family systems therapy, cognitive therapy, and a host of others—in short, all of the schools whose prescribed form of treatment for mental illness that commonly call psychotherapy. To examine the contrasts between the medical and psychosocial models of mental illness, some attention must be paid to the matter of causation.
