ABSTRACT
In this chapter I ask how we should defi ne and approach not just psychiatric categories (diagnoses), but also the referents of diagnoses (what they are meant to refer to), which is to say mental disorders as such, from a cultural psychological perspective. First, I provide an outline of defi nitions of mental disorder from leading scholars (neuroscientists, Boorse, Wakefi eld and phenomenological perspectives), and I argue that the concept of mental disorder is not held together by necessary and suffi cient conditions, but by what Wittgenstein called family resemblance. This leads to the subsequent development of a cultural psychological account of mental disorder on a non-essentialist background, which is meant to articulate a third perspective on diagnoses between essentialism and social constructionism.
