Challenging the mechanistic view of integration in psychiatry

The mechanistic approach has been proposed as a way of integrating different levels of explanation in psychiatry. It has also been put forward as a non-essentialist and yet realist model for psychiatric classification, which does not privilege a specific level at which the relevant mechanisms are to be found. I argue that the mechanistic view of inter-field integration cannot address the challenge of integrating both variables and mechanisms of different kinds, which in turn casts doubt on its potential to provide a foundation for psychiatric classification. The main obstacle, I contend, is the variations in styles of mechanistic modelling one finds in the fields concerned with different levels of explanation. I outline an alternative view of explanation and classification of mental disorders, which is still mechanistic in spirit, but does away with a substantive ideal of integration.