A Pattern-Oriented Approach to Health; Using PAC in a Discourse of Health

Interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary research is becoming more common and their importance is increasingly being recognized. However, in practice many of these efforts tend to end up in more or less isolated activities around a common theme. In many areas where it is becoming more recognized that collaboration around certain research themes is essential to understand certain phenomena, it becomes important to develop a vocabulary that all parties involved can share, and which reflects the essential concepts that are needed to grasp subject matter. This could contribute to a ‘lingua democratica’, a cooperative and deliberative means of cross-scientific research. Within limits, many research disciplines can easily adapt their regular ‘dialects’. For instance, biology and informatics share a common framing in mathematics and systems approaches. Likewise, some disciplines within the social sciences and humanities can find each other in certain schools of thought or theoretical frameworks. However, the gap between the natural sciences on one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other, is quite problematic, and in part, this is due to mathematical and graphical orientation of the former, as opposed to the linguistic orientation of the latter. This article explores the notion of patterns as means to develop a graphical vocabulary that may assist in cross-domain research that includes contributions from both the natural sciences as social sciences and the humanities. It will be clear that this is targeted for research themes that take place at the boundaries of the traditional disciplinary focus. In this article a number of patterns will be discussed and used to model a discourse on the theme of ‘mental health’, which is currently being recognized as being a concept at the interface of biological, psychological and social interactions