Although many views on contemporay philosophy of psychiatry accept the need to understand the role of shared values and preferences in the configuration of mental disorder and mental health , few have focused on recent advances in the philosophy of social cognition. They have overlooked, precisely, proposals that emphasize the idea that our socio-cognitive capacities substantially consist in shaping each other's cognition and behavior according to the values and norms that populate our social niche. This so-called mindshaping view lies in the idea that we display certain regulative strategies—e.g., blaming, asking for reasons, or justifying actions by ascribing mental states—that make individuals behave in accordance with the normative standards of the social niche in which they find themselves. Furthermore, these mindshaping dynamics that exert pressure to behave in ways that meet the expectations associated with communal values and norms are not only fundamental for social behavior, but for our own individual agency. The normative expectations grounded on the social dynamics permeate our capacities for metacognition, self-control or motivation, so displaying individual agency does not automatically depend on intrinsic states but on the capacity of living up to the subjects’ normative commitments, values, principles, or preferences that have a socially mediated dispositional and relational character. 

The corollary of the mindshaping views is, thus, a conception of agency that is socially mediated, normative, and not purely psychological which, we believe, may help us to elucidate the nature of psychiatric disorders and their value-laden component. More specifically, we believe that the mindshaping view, to the extent that it grounds ascriptions in their evaluative character and defends a particularistic and dispositional approach to normative domains is a better candidate than other positions attempting to integrate naturalism and normativity, which normally appeal to a flawed conception of normativity according to which norms and values are fixable and specifiable once and for all. As such, the general objective of this project is to articulate a plausible theory of the nature of psychiatric disorders elaborated upon the mindshaping approach to agency. 

Articulating this proposal in terms of mindshaping will allow us to take a position within the debate on the nature of mental illness, and by extension, of mental health. To evaluate its explanatory capacity in contrast to the rest of the theories on the market, we will do so through 3 dimensions. 

(1) First, a conceptual dimension. We believe that this theoretical framework can provide us with the key to address two fundamental conceptual challenges of modern psychiatry and clinical psychology: the analogy problem, or the problem of the analogy between physical and mental health problems; and the boundary problem, or the problem of the demarcation between those behaviors, cognitions or experiences evaluated as “wrong” or “undesirable” and those that are evaluated as pathological in character. Furthermore, we aim to address some of the objections and problems that are usually presented to these positions as involving some degree of relativism.

(2) Second, we will evaluate our proposal according to its empirical dimension. We will try to test how the mindshaping view of mental illness might be able to account for some phenomena, for example, the cultural variability that exists between the onset of some specific disorders like schizophrenia, the existence of the so-called cultural syndromes (Godman 2016), or how different types of diagnoses, clinical practices or therapeutic stances affect the process of mental illness itself. Furthermore, we will focus on a study of cases. In particular, we will assess the capacity of our proposal to generate specific hypotheses to account for transdiagnostic factors involving metacognitive deficits, such as experiential avoidance -or, more broadly, Psychological Inflexibility- and rumination -or, more broadly, Repetitive Negative Thinking. Both have been considered by third wave psychological therapies as transdiagnostic factors involved in a host of mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, delusions, or hallucinations.

(3) Finally, we will evaluate our view according to a political dimension. We did not want to neglect the opportunity to evaluate our proposed theory in terms of its capacity for taking on certain socio-political aspects related to the oppression and injustice suffered by patients with mental illness by virtue of their identity. Within the political turn in analytic philosophy, there has been a tendency to evaluate certain positions in epistemology, philosophy of language, or philosophy of mind by virtue of their capacity to explain certain political phenomena like certain forms of injustices and oppressions. Following this wake, we will evaluate the ability of the theory to explain the structural dimension of certain types of injustice experienced by people with mental suffering, such as, for example, epistemic or contributory injustice. In addition, we will analyze the capacity of our approach to justify certain interventions. In particular, how a mindshaping approach can justify different ways of understanding mental disorders that at the same time promote certain ethical and political treatments towards patients and against stigmatization and injustice.