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Abstract: The paper proposes that frameworks typical to metaphysics and art could be used in clinical treatment in somatic and psychiatric contexts to ensure improved care. The concept of the “body electric” of somatic patients which I introduced in previous work is developed further and paired with the “mind electric” of psychiatric patients. Both are defined as a patient's personally generated metaphysical possibility of being healthy‐within‐illness which is experientially actualized. Both concepts are used here to explore the alternative and the serious challenges to treatment approaches focused on clinical categories, disease, provision, and promotion of standardized or “black‐box” therapies. An argument against the idea implied by the hope for such mass treatments and corresponding overreliance on science, namely, that health comes from fixing and regularizing, is developed based on cultural history and the evidenced fact that personally assumed health, just like art and metaphysics, is transgressive of scientific data, and accommodates the untrue, the impossible or the irregular as actual and normal. Because normality is created only with the help of disorder and from within it for chronic patients, clinicians should offer them the metaphysical care they need to produce and actualize their possibility of irregular normality or their body/mind electric. Better treatments can only be provided when scientific advances will be matched with advances in the humanistic competence of clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses and comments on Korf and Bosker's paper entitled, `The depressed patient in a biological world: on philosophical and diagnostic strategies'. The author opines that treating mental disorders as being either only biological or strictly psychological, which according to his analysis, renders an objective instead of subjective view. The author opines that such an analysis by clinicians hinder the scope of identifying and developing new treatments.