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If I'm to be honest, i'm on the side of the analysts suggesting all disorders are self-related or personality-related. The self (psyche, personality, soul, etc), whether we take a phenomenological, substantial, or "narrative identity" perspective is the only thing that can be called "persistent". I mean this in the Ship of Theseus sense of the word. Properties, such as neuroticism, dissociation, perfectionism, inhibition, disinhibition, absorption, wide temporal lobe dynamics, whatever (pick your 'poison'), are not things in themselves. Properties imply a self is causing them, whether they consciously endorse them or not (see Michelle Maiese' claims that non-reflective actions in the world, rather than manipulations of re-presentations, indeed cause persistent properties; she has defined them "desiradive habits"). And I'm saying that mental disorders cannot be "independent" of such a psyche. It would be like trying to isolate "pain" from psyche after observing a broken bone under an xray. If there is no psyche here, then what entity is "having pain"? Is the somatic disease or mental disease (take your pick in either example) having pain instead? Are mental disorders now all the sudden conscious entities? Do they too have selves? That sounds prima-facie absurd because it IS absurd. Given this, I'm suggesting your question loads more on first assumptions. Re-stated: I do not need to provide empirical evidence when the rest of psychology and psychiatry is too lazy to clarify these distinctions. It would be like demanding empirical evidence for whether kidnapping or rape is a-priori "other than healthy" for the brain/nervous system. Do we really need to gather empirical data for this? How about detonating a nuke on the moon. Is it bad? Well gee, i guess we cannot possibly know anything at all about astrodynamics without pure empiricism, independent of first assumptions. So maybe we need to nuke the moon to find out, because screw first-assumptions, right?

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