Andreas Heinz

With respect to concepts of mental health and disease, Heinz criticized the view that mental disorders can be understood referring to a concept of “normality”; he argues that the frequency in which mental disorders are present (e.g. rising rates of Alzheimer’s Dementia in old age) does not offer a valid criterion to decide whether a certain state can be understood as a disease or not. Instead, Heinz suggests that discussions about mental maladies should distinguish between the medical (“disease”) aspects of any disorder, the subjective illness experience (centered about individual suffering) and impairments in social participation (the “sickness” aspect of a mental malady). Heinz suggests that a clinically relevant mental malady should only be diagnosed, if the disease criterion and either the illness or sickness criterion are fulfilled. With respect to the medical aspect, Heinz claims that the disease criterion of a mental malady is only fulfilled if an impaired mental function is generally relevant for survival or at least the ability of the afflicted person to live with other human beings in a common world (“Mitwelt”). With respect to clinical practice, Heinz suggests that medically relevant symptoms of mental disorders such as a delirium or dementia are directly life-threatening, while key symptoms of psychosis and major affective disorders can impair the ability of an afflicted person to live with others, e.g. because own intentions and acts are attributed to outside forces such as “imperative acoustic hallucinations” or “inserted thoughts”. Heinz emphasizes that such impairments at the symptom or disease level of a mental disorder are not sufficient to diagnose a clinically relevant mental malady, because some subjects experience acoustic hallucinations (thus fulfilling the disease criterion) but neither suffer from them nor are impaired in social participation. He claims that in such cases, no clinically relevant mental malady should be diagnosed. Heinz suggests focusing the mental health care system on subjects with clinically relevant mental maladies in order to promote inclusion in the community and on the work place.

In 2011 he was elected as a Leibnitz chair at the Leibnitz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, in recognition of outstanding research in Neuroscience. For fall semester 2014/2015 he got a Karl Jaspers- guest professor at the University of Oldenburg.

Since 2002 Heinz has been the director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Campus Charité Mitte Berlin. Since 2012, he has been the vice chair of an organization for Psychiatric Reform and Humanization, the Aktion für Psychisch Kranke. From 2010 to 2014, he was the president of the German Society for Biological Psychiatry (DGBP). From 2008 to 2011, he was the speaker of the Conference of University Chairs of Psychiatry in Germany. Since 2009, he has been a member of the board of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology. He is the leader of several research projects including the international research project “Mental Health and Migration”. He is a proponent of a person centered approach and open wards in psychiatry.

Heinz worked as a post-doc at the National Institute of Health, Bethesda, MD. He qualified for professorship (Habilitation) in psychiatry and psychotherapy in 1998 The Dopaminergic Reward System. In 2013, he obtaied a PhD in philosophy The Concept of Mental Health at the faculty of philosophy of the Universität Potsdam.

Andreas Heinz studied medicine, philosophy and anthropology in Bochum at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, in Berlin at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the Howard University of Washington D.C.. In 1988 he submitted his dissertation (MD) Anthropological and Evolutionary Models in Schizophrenia Researchat the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Andreas Heinz (born February 4, 1960 in Stuttgart) is a German psychiatrist and psychotherapist.