Every time dualism is mentioned in clinical debate, a philosopher is thrown out of heaven

Scamvougeras and Castle argue that appeals to dualism are frequently deployed to dismiss psychological explanations in favour of framing functional neurological disorder (FND) as a "brain disorder." Yet participants on all sides of this debate often conflate "dualism" with Cartesian substance dualism. Contemporary philosophy of mind, by contrast, accommodates multi-level, non-reductive accounts that are fully compatible with the brain as the organ of the mind. Positions such as property dualism and non-reductive physicalism demonstrate that recognising psychological mechanisms does not entail commitment to a non-physical substance, nor denial of the dependence of mental processes on brain function. A more pressing question, therefore, is why psychological explanations are resisted at all, given that scientific psychology, as opposed to folk psychology, does not necessarily equate the psychological with conscious will or personal control. We may be better off by ditching debates about dualism and focusing instead on the integration of neurobiological and psychological accounts within evidence-based models of FND, with each explanatory level evaluated on its merits.