Context
The owner asked for fifteen works to be filed: Engel’s biopsychosocial
model, Kendler’s philosophical structure for psychiatry, Borsboom’s network
theory, Hofmann and Hayes on process-based therapy, Salkovskis et al. on
mechanisms of change, the contextual-behavioural line (relational frame
theory, experiential avoidance, the ACT model, psychological flexibility,
the 2024 meta-analysis of ACT’s mechanisms), Bandura on self-efficacy, and
four works of emotion theory. The vocabulary could hold the emotion theory
in emotion-and-affect, but nothing held the rest. Medicine sits in
natural-sciences and psychology in social-science. Both are true of
these works and neither says what they are about, which is the nature of
mental disorder and how treatment changes it.
Decision
Add psychopathology-and-treatment to topics, outside the philosophy
group: what a mental disorder is and how psychological treatment changes
it. It covers medical models of illness (biomedical, biopsychosocial,
network), the philosophy of psychiatry, functional and transdiagnostic
accounts of psychopathology, and psychotherapies and their mechanisms of
change. Fifteen of the batch’s eighteen notes take it, eleven as the first
tag: Engel (LIT-548), Borsboom (LIT-547), Hofmann and Hayes
(LIT-544), Salkovskis et al. (LIT-538), the RFT summary
(LIT-541), Hayes et al. 1996 and 2006 (LIT-551, LIT-555),
Kashdan and Rottenberg (LIT-553), Macri and Rogge (LIT-543) and
Bandura (LIT-545). Kendler’s two papers (LIT-552, LIT-539)
take philosophy-of-science first and this second.
The word is outside the philosophy group because most of what it holds is
clinical science. A philosophical work on psychiatry carries
philosophy-of-science beside it, as Kendler’s do.
Alternatives considered
- Leave it to
social-scienceandnatural-sciences. Each is true of these works, and both are very large. A reader looking for the record’s account of mental disorder would have to read all of psychology, and a network theory of disorders would sit beside economics. - Two words,
psychiatryandpsychotherapy. The batch shows why not. Borsboom, Hofmann and Hayes, and Salkovskis each argue that the model of the disorder and the mechanism of its treatment are one question. Two words would split each of those papers across both. clinical-psychology. It names a profession rather than a subject, and it leaves out the psychiatric and philosophical half (Engel, Kendler).
Consequences
The filing agents named three gaps the word does not close. None is filled here:
- Psychometrics and measurement. Borsboom’s home field, latent-variable and network psychometrics, has no word.
- Language as behaviour. Relational frame theory took
philosophy-of-languageas the nearest fit, becauselinguisticsis scoped to language as linguists pose it. - Learning and conditioning in organisms.
learning-theoryis the machine-learning sense, so behaviour analysis has no word.
Each should get its word when a second work needs it.