Precision Psychiatry

• In Event: Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data - III

Abstract

Echoing the global advent of precision and translational medicine, the emerging precision psychiatry field embraces uses of genomic, clinical, and environmental data to identify the causes of mental disorders and innovate avenues for prevention and treatment. While in theory aiming to consider the range of factors causing mental disorders, the field builds on advances in psychiatric genetics and neurobiology and has homed in on the biologic processes that underlie these disorders in individual human bodies. Heightening the risk of this narrow scope, precision psychiatry develops against the backdrop of problematic uses of genetic concepts in criminal justice, eugenics, and the stigmatized position of people with mental disorders. It emerges in the uncertain context of an American precision medicine project that promises inclusivity and translates increasing DNA collections from minority populations into a vision of improved mental health care, without certainty about how medical data infrastructure building will lead to public benefit. As US biomedicine’s accelerating translational pipeline enables precision psychiatry’s simultaneous emergence in laboratories, universities and industry, future applications across clinical care, welfare, education, and policing are already being conceptualized. A precise trajectory in investigating and intervening on disordered human behavior and entailed visions of prediction and preemption fire up the funder’s imagination. While researchers are concerned with trust building and patients with care, only the accumulation of biocapital through growing DNA databases seems certain. At the outset of a new ethnographic project, this paper takes an STS perspective to problematize the logics, promises and emerging realities of precision psychiatry.

Author

• Anna Jabloner, Harvard University