Julia Knopes’s (2025) article aims to explain how models of disability apply in the lives and experiences of people with lived mental health conditions who serve as peer support providers. However,...

The discourse surrounding mental health conditions (MHCs) can fluctuate between versions of the medical model, which views such conditions as pathologies requiring clinical intervention, and the ne...

Recent years have seen a lot of debate between those who consider mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, and so forth, as pathologies that require medica...

While the term and concept of neurodiversity emerged within autistic communities, it has never been limited to autism. As Knopes reviews, neurodiversity scholars have identified meaningful overlaps...

The continental tradition in ethics and philosophy of technology provides a useful differentiation between “system” and “lifeworld” imperatives (Ihde 1990). Behaviors toward system components admit...

In their article, Ineichen and Glannon (2025) explore the therapeutic benefits of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), addressing the complexities of targeting certain psychiatric conditions and the limit...

The rise of the neurodiversity movement marks a critical shift in understanding mental health, yet medicine has been slow to integrate neurodivergent perspectives into its frameworks. In Mental Hea...

Julia Knopes’s study (2025) provides a constructive contribution to neuroethics, demonstrating that individuals in peer support networks understand their mental health conditions in terms that draw...

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) represents a key area of neuromodulation that has gained wide adoption for the treatment of neurological and experimental testing for psychiatric disorders. It is associated with specific therapeutic effects based on the precision of an evolving mechanistic neuroscientific understanding. At the same time, there are obstacles to achieving symptom relief because of the incompleteness of such an understanding. These obstacles are at least in part based on the complexity of neuropsychiatric disorders and the incompleteness of DBS (...) devices to represent prosthetics that modulate the breadth of pathological processes implicated in these disorders. Neuroprostheses, such as an implanted DBS system, can have vast effects on subjects in addition to the specific neuropsychiatric changes they are intended to produce. These effects largely represent blind spots in the current debate on neuromodulation. Anthropological accounts can illustrate the broad existential dimensions of patients’ illness and responses to neural implants. In combination with current neuroscientific understanding, neuropsychiatric anthropology may illuminate the possibilities and limits of neurodevices as technical “world enablers”. (shrink)

Knopes (2025) argues that the neuroethical discourse on medical models of disability has largely overlooked the lived experiences of those who have or suffer from mental health conditions. She indi...

Julia Knopes (2025) claims that peer providers are drawing from two models of disability, the medical and neurodiversity models, to understand their experiences. I take no issue with Knopes’s claim...

Scholarship in neuroethics and related disciplines has long reflected on the value of different conceptual models of disability and impairment. While this theoretical work is valuable, centering the voices of people with mental health conditions in neuroethics research can help us better understand how such models apply in everyday people’s lives. Drawing on qualitative data from a study on mental health peer providers’ lived experiences of recovery, this paper will demonstrate that peers borrow from both a neurodiversity framework and the (...) medical model of disability, though their feelings toward the two models were often complex and ambivalent. These findings advance neuroethics by indicating that future research and clinical practice should take a nuanced approach to responding to the needs of people with mental health conditions and turn to peers as experts, honoring their values and recognizing both the promise and pitfalls of living with a mental health condition. (shrink)

Cluster headache, writes sociologist Joanna Kempner, is “the most painful phenomenon a human can experience.” Also known as “suicide headache,” this condition is reportedly more painful than gunsho...

In a recent article, Knopes (2025) examines how mental health peer support providers make use of the medical model and neurodiversity frameworks to better understand and express their mental health...

As is usually the case with other topics addressed by neuroethics, a rigorous analysis of neurorights requires an interdisciplinary approach. In response to this need and in the context of the global expansion of regulatory initiatives on neurorights, we coordinated, under the auspices of the International Center for Neuroscience and Ethics (CINET), an introductory course on neurorights from a neuroscientific perspective. The course, aimed at sixty students from diverse backgrounds (neuroscience, psychology, and law, among others), consisted of a 10-hr training (...) that showed the current approaches and discussions on neurorights and outlined cutting-edge technologies to register, analyze, and manipulate human brain activity from a realistic stance. The course succeeded in discarding some concerns and uncovering others not frequently found in the neurorights discussions. The most pressing issues identified were protecting brain data privacy, combating bias in algorithms used in neurotechnology, and improving informed consent mechanisms for interventions with invasive neuroscientific techniques. (shrink)

Knopes (2025) captures the lasting debate between biomedical, neurodiverse, and mad approaches to mental health and disability, while meaningfully centering the testimonies of peer providers who ha...

In diagnosing and treating mental health conditions, various explanatory frameworks have been proposed to explain their nature, identify causes, and facilitate appropriate therapies needed to treat...

At the beginning of the century, there was still debate as to whether neuroethics should be a separate discipline or part of bioethics or medical ethics. One argument in favor of the independence o...

Over the last decade, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has garnered significant attention as a potential treatment for psychiatric and neurological conditions (Alho et al. 2022). As our mechanistic und...