ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship of the medical model to cognitive neuroscience, introducing some important concepts in psychiatry and explaining how they relate to neuroscience. It also discusses psychiatry in relation to neuroscience and recent mechanistic elements in philosophy of science that seem to fit well with neuroscience. Reductive, physical explanations for mental disturbances have existed in the West since classical antiquity, and these have often involved speculative theories about the brain. Neurobiological explanations for mental disturbances become the dominant approach until the mid-20th century, except for a select group of illnesses including neuromuscular disorders. The shift to the contemporary perspective perhaps began in the 1930s when psychiatrists working in mental hospitals experimented with various somatic treatment methods, including barbiturates, psychosurgery, and electric shock therapy. Psychiatry as cognitive neuroscience aims to explain how and why a person develops a particular suite of symptoms by elucidating a dysfunctioning mechanism.
