“Disease” reasoning in psychiatry generally assumes some primary disruption in brain functioning; thus, as noted by McHugh and Slavney, a disease is something a patient has (McHugh and Slavney, 1998). Some diseases with prominent psychiatric symptoms have a known histopathology (e.g., Alzheimer’s Disease), and some even a known etiology (e.g., Huntington’s Disease), while in other putative psychiatric diseases these characteristics are less clear. For example, psychiatrists routinely employ disease reasoning in conceptualizing problems of patients with schizophrenia or mania; the spontaneous nature of the symptoms and their discontinuity from normal human experience suggest a primary disruption in brain functioning (McHugh and Slavney, 1998). Disease logic is also often used in conceptualizing the emergence of depressive or anxiety syndromes (McHugh and Slavney, 1998, Sheehan, 1983).
