=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2205/ecs_abstract1
|storemode=property
|title=None
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2205/ecs_abstract1.pdf
|volume=Vol-2205
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==None==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2205/ecs_abstract1.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
        Towards an Ontological Module of
                 Mental Disease
                              Fumiaki TOYOSHIMA
         Graduate School of Advanced Science and Technology, JAIST, Japan

Mental disease remains a nebulous concept despite the significance of wide agreement
about it for further development of the biomedical ontology research, partly because
there are some topics yet to be considered carefully in existing mental disease ontologies.
Examples include the vital role of signs and symptoms of mental disease as compared to
its physical (neurobiological) basis; the intricate, socio-cultural character of the abnor-
mality of mental disease; and consistency with the domain-level knowledge and prac-
tice concerning mental disease, including the terminological interchangeability between
‘disease’ and ‘disorder’.
     This research aims to build an ontological module for mental disease, thereby con-
tributing to its general understanding. Characteristic of my study is to explore the nature
of mental disease from a foundational perspective. In particular, I focus on the centrality
of the concept of causation to the whole biomedical field. Appropriate medical treatment
requires practitioners to identify accurately the cause of a disease by observing its symp-
toms as its effect. A proper ontological characterization of causation would therefore
help us approach the notion of mental disease from a clinically reliable viewpoint.
     Consequently, I elaborated a theory of causation whose core is the fundamentality
of the context to causation and offered a detailed account of causal chains. I then applied
the theory to the existing, River Flow Model (RFM) of diseases, which meshes with my
purpose of modeling mental disease because it takes disease to be causal chains of abnor-
mal states and attaches great importance to its symptoms. I further provided a coherent
extension of the RFM to mental disease based on the existing, causal functionalist theory
of mind (which, roughly, characterizes mentality in terms of its causal role). In the future
I plan to capture the sensitivity of the abnormality of mental disease to socio-cultural
contexts in terms of my context-based theory of causation.

</pre>