Affordances, mental health and psychiatry

Abstract

This paper suggests that new directions in mental health and psychiatry are being driven by anomalies within epidemiology, mechanisms, and integration-based cognition. Three contrasting kinds of new work on mental disorder are critically discussed: enactive, ecological and active inference approaches, drawing from work by Varela, Gibson and Friston. These are detailed together with debates about their similarities and differences. All of these positions in fact make common use of ‘affordance’ as a core perception-action mechanism, suggesting promising options for new or enhanced psychiatric interventions. This leads to a critical review of the current state of knowledge on affordances, and their limitations, together with some suggestions as to how this approach might be applied in mental health and psychiatric practice.