Stephen Rowe (2-yr MA) for his paper "Can We Be Realist About Mental Disorders Like We Can Be About Universals?"
In the 1960s Thomas Szasz provocatively proclaimed that mental disorders are a ‘myth’, or not a real entity like people assume diseases are. Now, if one asked whether mental disorders are real entities (i.e., should they feature in our ontology like particulars and properties do), the most popular view “hybridism” would respond with a qualified no: the category of mental disorder is not a real category like some argue ‘‘horse’’ is. However, the syndrome (cluster of symptoms) that partly constitute the disorders is real — they are natural kinds and as natural and real as horse is. I argue that this is incorrect because the syndromes we pragmatically label as disorders are not a unified category. Or, in other words, there are no necessary conditions for something to be the kind of syndrome that we can count as a mental disorder. As such, some syndromes will not be natural kinds and thus not real.