Re-thinging Embodied and Enactive Psychiatry: A Material Engagement Approach.

Philosophers and embodied mind theorists increasingly agree that understanding mental illness requires looking beyond the brain to the surrounding ecology. This paper argues that adopting Material Engagement Theory (MET) can reshape debates about mental disorders and improve treatment. Using schizophrenia and dementia as examples, the authors examine how material objects, habits, practices, and environments influence memory, self-awareness, embodiment, and temporality—phenomena shared across these conditions. Studying socio-material relations reveals the semiotic significance and agency of specific materials, environments, and technical mediations. The approach offers unrealized potential for creating new treatments that broaden, challenge, or complement existing interventions and care practices.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Emerging consensus among enactivist philosophers and embodied mind theorists suggests that seeking to understand mental illness we need to look out of our skulls at the ecology of the brain. Still, the complex links between materiality (in broadest sense of material objects, habits, practices and environments) and mental health remain little understood. This paper discusses the benefits of adopting a material engagement approach to embodied and enactive psychiatry. We propose that the material engagement approach can change the geography of the debate over the nature of mental disorders and through that help to develop theoretical and practical insights that could improve management and treatment for various psychiatric conditions. We investigate the potential role of Material Engagement Theory (MET) in psychiatry using examples of aetiologically different mental illnesses (schizophrenia and dementia) in respect of their shared phenomenological manifestations, focusing particularly on issues of memory, self-awareness, embodiment and temporality. The effective study of socio-material relations allows better understanding of the semiotic significance and agency of specific materials, environments and technical mediations. There is unrealised potential here for creating new approaches to treatment that can broaden, challenge or complement existing interventions and practices of care.