An investigation into mental illness and its comorbidities from the perspective of supervenience physicalism.
Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM May 8, 2025 Ping Yang, Xinyue Zhang, Hongwen Song et al.
Anomalous monism, a theory proposed by Donald Davidson in the 1970s, offers a non-reductionist way to understand the mind-body relationship, asserting physicalism without reducing mental phenomena to physical laws. This paper applies anomalous monism's three principles to explore the origin of mental illness and uses supervenience theory to explain comorbidity among mental illnesses. The argument suggests that mental illness and its comorbidities can be understood through a framework that respects both physical causation and the irreducibility of mental states.