Psychiatry’s Little Other: DSM-5 and Debates over Psychiatric Science

• In Event: 132 - Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Paper Session. Topics in Science, Knowledge and Technology Studies

Abstract

In 2013, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) broke rank with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) over the release of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), announcing that it would use its own biological categorization system in its place. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, we analyze the debates sparked by the release of the DSM-5 and suggest that psychiatry is propelled forward by a fundamental mismatch between its imaginary identification as an objective, biologically-based science and its fragmented actuality as a symbolic system. Leaders in psychiatry continuously bump into the field’s failure to elucidate the biological causes of mental disorders, compelling them to reiterate psychiatry’s fantasy identifications anew: by pinning the profession’s future on the “mysterious” brain; by reinventing the structure of the unconscious through brain imagery; and by absorbing “the social” into neural function. We suggest that biologizing mental illness serves to ontologize rather than destigmatize social differences.

Authors

• Claire Laurier Decoteau, University of Illinois-Chicago

• Paige Lenore Sweet, University of Illinois-Chicago