Prof. Dr. Carlos Gabriel Chada Castro is a psychiatrist and psychopathologist. His career spans four countries of clinical practice —Argentina, the United Kingdom, Spain and France— and an education divided between eight European and Argentine universities, on the border between medicine and philosophy.
Full name: Carlos Gabriel Chada Castro
Profession: psychiatrist and psychopathologist
Specialty: phenomenological psychiatry, clinical psychopathology, adolescent and adult psychiatry
Accreditation: Full Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, United Kingdom
Languages: Spanish, French, English, Italian and German
Countries of practice: Argentina, United Kingdom, Spain, France; teaching also in Italy and Germany
Early training
He first qualified as a doctor at the Catholic University of Córdoba (Argentina) and went on to complete, at the National University of Córdoba, the specialty in Psychiatry, a licentiate in Philosophy, the University Teaching Qualification in Medicine and two postgraduate diplomas: Existential Psychotherapy and Biological Psychiatry. Between 1993 and 2000 he taught there as Associate Professor of Psychopathology.
That double enrolment —medicine and philosophy— shaped from the outset the direction of all his later work: psychopathology understood not merely as a catalogue of symptoms, but as an anthropological question.
The British years
In the early 2000s he moved to the United Kingdom. Between 2001 and 2004 he worked as a staff psychiatrist in Cambridge and, between 2005 and 2007, at the Suffolk Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust. At the same time he took the Master of Philosophy in Medical Sciences and Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on the conceptual history of borderline personality disorder supervised by Prof. G. E. Berrios, one of the leading figures in the history of psychiatry.
From that period date his accreditation as a Specialist in General Adult Psychiatry by the Specialist Training Authority of the Medical Royal Colleges and his Full Membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
The Spanish and Italian years
Between 2007 and 2012 he worked as a hospital psychiatrist at the Mateu Orfila Hospital in Menorca. It was also the period of his most intense academic output: he obtained the European doctorate at the Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca’ Foscari with a critical review of the philosophical sources of Karl Jaspers’s General Psychopathology, and the Doctor Europæus in Medicine and Psychiatry from the University of Salamanca, graded sobresaliente cum laude and honoured with the doctoral vítor that this university has awarded since the fifteenth century.
The French years
Since 2013 he has worked mainly in France: the Léon-Jean Grégory Hospital in Thuir, the Sainte Marie Hospital in Nice, Narbonne Hospital and, between 2021 and 2024, as head of the Neurology and Psychiatry Department at the La Teppe Medical Institution. There he completed two university diplomas: psychiatric phenomenology at the Université de Nice and geriatric psychiatry at the Université de Montpellier.
The orientation of his work
His work belongs to the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry: the tradition which, following Jaspers, Minkowski or Binswanger, holds that understanding a mental disorder requires reconstructing the patient’s lived world, not merely classifying their symptoms. Hence his continuing interest in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Aristotle, and in Henri Ey’s formula that psychiatry is the discipline that studies the pathology of freedom.
That approach extends into the personal space that gives this website its name, Eudemoniapsyche, devoted to psychiatry, philosophy and what the inscription on the library of Ramesses II called ψυχῆς ἰατρεῖον: remedies of the soul.