Mental Disorders in Animals from an Anthropological Point of View: A Research Reconnaissance

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31261/ZOOPHILOLOGICA.2022.09.01

Keywords:

mental disorders, mental diseases, suicides, nonhuman animals, posthumanism

Abstract

It is still widely believed that only people can be mentally ill, and that this trait distinguishes us from other species. The interest of 21st-century scholars representing the humanities in the issue of animal mental disorders can be studied from the perspective of posthumanism and the animal turn, in that it means crossing another line between the “human” and the “non-human.” In her article, Magdalena Kozhevnikova highlights the most common mental disorders diagnosed in pets and captive animals, provides examples of unethical animal experiments in psychology, and briefly discusses the phenomenon of animal addiction and suicide. Her findings allow her to emphasize that, while analogies to mental disorders in humans can and should be used in the study of mental disorders in non-human animals, their primary goal of animal research ought to be to study the psyche of non-human animals.

Author Biography

Magdalena Kozhevnikova, Polish Academy of Sciences

Magdalena Kozhevnikova – holds a PhD in humanities, is a graduate of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw and of the German-Russian Master’s degree program in Intercultural Communication at the Moscow University for the Humanities (Russia) and Alice Salomon Hochschule (Germany). She is an ethnologist and a bioethicist. In the years 2015–2018, she worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia); currently she is an assistant professor at the IEiAK U W and a member of the Undisciplined Anthropology Team of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research is concerned with non-human subjects, posthumanism, and interspecies ethics. The most important works include: monograph Gibrida i khimery cheloveka i zhivotnogo: ot mifologii k biotekhnologii (Гибриды и химеры человека и животного: от мифологии к биотехнологии) (2017), articles “Człowieko-zwierzęce hybrydy i chimery w nauce. Historia i współczesność” [“Man-Animal Hybrids and Chimeras in Science. History and Modernity” (Lud, No. 100 (2016) and Zapertyye v bestelesnosti: Robot Gordon i mozgovyye organoidy (Запертые в бестелесности: Робот Гордон и мозговые органоиды) (Etnograficheskoye obozreniye / „Этнографическое обозрение”, No. 6 (2018). Email: kmagdalena@yandex.ru

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Published

2022-02-14

How to Cite

Kozhevnikova, M. (2022). Mental Disorders in Animals from an Anthropological Point of View: A Research Reconnaissance. Zoophilologica. Polish Journal of Animal Studies, (1 (9), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.31261/ZOOPHILOLOGICA.2022.09.01

Issue

No. 1 (9) (2022): Zoophilologica: Zwierzęta w antropocenie

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ARTICLES

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