Mental disorder as a Roschian concept: A critique of Wakefield's "harmful dysfunction" analysis.

J. C. Wakefield (1992a, 1992b, 1993) recently proposed that mental disorder is best conceptualized as a "harmful dysfunction," whereby "harm" is a value judgment regarding the undesirability of a condition, and "dysfunction" is the failure of a system to function as designed by natural selection. The authors maintain, however, that (a) many mental functions are not direct evolutionary adaptations, but rather adaptively neutral by-products of...