ABSTRACT
According to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to properly attribute a mental disorder to someone requires not just evaluating the person’s capacity (or incapacity) to avoid harms or losses of freedom, but also to consider the “clinical” importance or nature of those losses as well as of cognitive or reason-responsive capacities or competencies that are impaired or incapacitated. In somatic medicine, during a massive epidemic nearly everyone may have the causally relevant illness. Frequency does not count against being ill. The clinical coalface of mental disorder is human suffering and the need to ameliorate or relieve it. Educated compassionate judgment when addressing the needs of particular people with possible disorders may be, in certain instances, not just unavoidable but urgently desirable. Psychiatric medicine has long suffered from what seems to some prominent observers to be an unflattering contrast with somatic illness medical specialties.
