Abstract

Enactive psychiatry challenges a traditional medical model and its guiding assumption that it is the source of mental disorder in the individual and their malfunctioning brain. Instead, it emphasizes that mental disorder is fully embodied and involves a disruption in the relationship between an agent and their world. Proponents have argued this enactive approach to psychiatry offers a way to view mental disorders in more holistic terms, recognize the role of social factors, and make psychiatric practices more just. However, critics have argued that this approach (1) remains overly individualistic, (2) does not provide us with the means of critiquing problematic social norms, and (3) ends up unduly pathologizing neurodiversity. To address the first criticism, I discuss how the enactivist notion of mindshaping helps to make sense of the way in which sense-making is deeply socially embedded. To address the second criticism, I argue that social norms themselves can be “unhealthy” in the sense that they lack “adaptive openness” and make it difficult for diverse forms of life to flourish. To address the third charge, I argue that although enactivism pushes us to challenge a social model of disability, it is fully consistent with the neurodiversity movement’s practical and political aims.