Psychiatry Reborn: Biopsychosocial psychiatry in modern medicine

Psychiatry Reborn: Biopsychosocial Psychiatry in Modern Medicine is a comprehensive collection of essays by leading experts in the field, and provides a timely reassessment of the biopsychosocial approach in psychiatry.

Spanning the sciences and philosophy of psychiatry, the essays offer complementary perspectives on the ever more urgent importance of the biopsychosocial approach to modern medicine. The collection brings together ideas from the series of Loebel Lectures by world leaders in the field of psychiatry and associated Workshops at the University of Oxford, including revised versions of the Lectures themselves, and a wide range of related commentaries and position pieces. With contributions from psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, the book provides the most comprehensive account to date of the interplay between biological, psychological, and social factors in mental health and their ethical dimensions.

The 23 chapters of this multi-authored book review the history and place of the biopsychosocial model in medicine, and explore its strengths and shortcomings. In particular, it considers how understanding this interplay might lead to more effective treatments for mental health disorders, as developments in genomic and neurobiological medicine challenge traditional conceptions and approaches to the research and treatment of mental health disorders.

The book explores the challenges and rewards of developing diagnostic tools and clinical interventions that take account of the inextricably intertwined bio-psycho-social domains, and the ethical implications of the conceptualization. It concludes with chapters drawing together the book's range of expertise to propose a best conception of the model, and how it might be adopted going forward in an age of exponentially increasing technological advances and of integrated/collaborative care. The volume is intended to present the BPS model as it stands today in the academy, the lab, and the clinic, and to start to address the challenges and potential that the model has for each.

Will Davies, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Birmingham,Julian Savalescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford,Rebecca Roache, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dr Will Davies is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, specialising in the Philosophy of Psychology and Psychiatry. He completed his BPhil and DPhil at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Jowett Senior Scholar, and then held a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge before joining the faculty at Birmingham in 2017. Dr Davies has published articles in journals such as Analysis, Philosophical Studies, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Science. He is currently PI of a British Academy/Leverhulme grant on Colour and Form in the Disordered Mind.


Professor Julian Savulescu has held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002. He has degrees in medicine, neuroscience and bioethics. He directs the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics within the Faculty of Philosophy, and leads a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator award on Responsibility and Health Care. He directs the Oxford Martin Programme for Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He co-directs the interdisciplinary Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.
He is a leader in medical and practical ethics, with more than 400 publications, an h index of 61 and over 14,315 citations in total. He spent 10 years as Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, the highest impact journal in the field, and is founding editor of Journal of Practical Ethics, an open access journal in Practical Ethics.


Dr Rebecca Roache was educated at the universities of Leeds and Cambridge, and worked at the University of Oxford before moving to Royal Holloway in 2014. She writes on issues in ethics, language, and psychiatry, and frequently appears in the media. She is currently writing a book on the philosophy of swearing for OUP.

J. Pierre Loebel was born in Romania, schooled in Palestine and England, studied philosophy and experimental psychology at Oxford University, followed by medical school in South Africa, and psychiatry at The Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospitals, London. Influenced by the teaching and training of Alwyn Lishman, Michael Shepherd, and Isaac Marks and influenced by their wide ranging patient formulations, he developed his interest in bio-psychosocially oriented clinical practice. Specializing in geriatric psychiatry and team based care in Long Term Care institutions, he moved after some years into private practice using the full range of bio-psychosocially oriented evaluation and treatment modalities, in tune with the aphorism ascribed to Hippocrates that "it is insufficient to understand the nature of the illness that the patient has but to understand the nature of the patient that the illness has."

1. Introduction
1. Introduction, Pierre Loebel and Julian Savulescu
2. The biopsychosocial model in psychiatry: Engel and beyond, Rebecca Roache
2. Multi-level Interactions
3. Multi-level Interactions and the Dappled Causal World of Psychiatric Disorders, Kenneth Kendler and Chistopher Gyngell
4. When answers are hard to find, change the question: Asking different causal questions can enable progress, Rachel Cooper
5. A developmental approach to understanding psychiatric disorders: Mapping etiological pathways, Simone PW Haller and Kathrin Cohen Kadosh
6. Which biopsychosocial view of psychiatry?, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Jesse S. Summers
7. The Truth in Social Construction, Neil Levy
8. Minority Report: Values-based Practice and Making it Real, Bill Fulford
9. Formulation in the face of complexity, Graeme C. Smith
3. Risk and Resilience
10. Developmental risk and resilience: The challenge of translating multi-level data to concrete interventions, Essi Viding
11. The case for a preventative approach to mental health: Childhood maltreatment, neuroimaging and the theory of latent vulnerability, Eamon J. McCrory
12. Biopsychosocial pathways to mental health and disease across the lifespan: The emerging role of epigenetics, Charlotte A.M. Cecil
13. Reacting to Abuse, Richard Holton
14. The First Steps on Long Marches: The Costs of Active Observation, Peter Dayan, Jonathan P Roiser, and Essi Viding
15. Psychiatry's inchoate wish for a paradigm shift and the bio-psycho-social model of mental illness, Tim Thornton
16. Ignoring faces and making friends, Matthew Parrott
4. Neurobiology and the Biopsychosocial Model
17. Mental illness: The collision of meaning with mechanism, Steve Hyman and Doug McConnell
18. The biopsychosocial model, DSM, and neurobiology: The need for a new approach, Doug McConnell
19. The proper place of subjectivity, meaning, and folk-psychology in psychiatry, Jonathan Glover
20. Psychiatry, folk psychology and the impact of neuroscience - a response to Steven Hyman's Loebel Lectures, Nassir Ghaemi
21. Objectification: Ethical and Epistemic Concern of Neurobiological Approaches to the Mind, Jan Christop Bublitz
5. The Future
22. How to adopt the biopsychosocial model, Rebecca Roache
23. Specifying the best conception of the biopsychosocial model, Doug McConnell