Despite the currency of the notion of mental illness, there are those who take the radical skeptical line that mental illness is a fabrication. This is a book which takes this skeptical line seriously - perhaps more seriously than almost any other book not written by skeptics themselves. The Metaphor of Mental Illness is a revaluation of the traditional philosophical disputes about the existence and nature of mental illness. It puts forward a new view of mental illness and proposes a resolution of the issues, carefully guiding the reader through the issues and debates. Accessible to the specialists and those new to the field, the book is full of practical examples, both historical and modern. --- from the publisher About the Author: Neil Pickering is a lecturer in the Bioethics Centre of the Dunedin School of Medicine, at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He has a PhD from the University of Wales. He teaches on undergraduate and graduate bioethics programmes at Otago. His primary research interests are in the philosophy of medicine (in particular the nature of disease and the nature and existence mental illness), medical humanities (where he has written on the use of poetry to teach ethics) and alternative medicine. Member of the Executive Committee of the Australasian Bioethics Association, and an Associate Editor of Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and of Medical Humanities Edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics.
| 
