ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argue that much of the strong resistance to the brain disorder view relies on a very specific notion of brain disorder which is modelled on infectious diseases such as syphilis. There is a prominent school of thought according to which mental disorders are not brain disorders because they are fundamentally different from paradigmatic brain disorders in a number of ways. One prominent motivation for saying that mental disorders are brain disorders is that this will rehabilitate them as bona fide health conditions. He have introduced and criticized a restrictive notion of brain disorders. It tries to align brain disorders with somatic medicine more generally and with its insistence that the people need to be able to point to specific dysfunction in the brain in order to say that the people are dealing with a brain disorder.
