Concepts, Diagnosis and the History of Medicine: Historicising Ian Hacking and Munchausen Syndrome

Millard, Chris

doi:10.1093/shm/hkw083

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…As indicated above, then, psychiatrists are fully able to critique the DSM, and actively do so. Importantly, these critiques can also be expressed in registers that accord with some of the vernaculars of critical historians and sociologists of biomedical knowledge—underscoring the longstanding entwinements of psychiatry and sociology (Millard, 2017). Ultimately, many of the concerns I encountered related to the reality that the DSM was purported to represent.…”

Section: Categorical Diagnosis and Its Discontentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stalling or oiling the engines of diagnosis? Shifting perspectives on the DSM and categorical diagnosis in psychiatry

Pickersgill

2023

Sociology Health & Illness

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Diagnosis in psychiatry and its precursors has long attracted debate and dissent. Attempts to discipline professional praxis are associated especially with the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In this article, I explore how social actors with the institutional power to contribute in important ways to shaping psychiatric contexts construct the problems with and purposes of the DSM and of diagnosis in psychiatry. I suggest that despite common assumptions that influential psychiatrists and related stakeholders uncritically adopt the DSM and other tools of categorical diagnosis, their relationship with these is rather more nuanced, ambivalent, and even fraught. However, I will also show that critiques can themselves be folded into particular styles of psychiatric thought in ways that do little to impact wider concerns about biomedicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation—and might even further accelerate these processes. Moreover, since professional critiques of the DSM often underscore its ubiquity and entrenchment, when positioned against implicit or explicit justifications of the ongoing use of this text they might inadvertently contribute to a ‘discourse of inevitability’—acting to ‘oil’ rather than ‘stall’ what Annemarie Jutel terms the ‘engines of diagnosis’.

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Section: Categorical Diagnosis and Its Discontentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stalling or oiling the engines of diagnosis? Shifting perspectives on the DSM and categorical diagnosis in psychiatry

Pickersgill

2023

Sociology Health & Illness

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“…Rivers, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, and others. Anthropological insight about the power of culture and environment in human life still forms the basis of many social sciences, and in fact underwrites many of the claims of postmodern and poststructuralist thought (Millard 2017;Millard, forthcoming). James Clifford's introductory essay in the influential anthropological collection Writing Culture (1986a) addresses perhaps the most crucial methodological technique in anthropology: participant-observation.…”

Section: The Practice Of Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Using personal experience in the academic medical humanities: a genealogy

Millard

2019

Soc Theory Health

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The inclusion of personal experience in academic work, especially in the medical humanities, has increased markedly in the recent past. This article traces the roots of this development, arguing that it is not a simply offshoot of 'experts by experience' in mental health, but has its own specific set of precursors and enabling conditions. Three of these are explored in detail, under the headings of 'psychoanalysis', 'social history' and 'anthropology'. The continuing influence of psychoanalysis privileges the public expression of personal experience as a vital tool and site for self-development. Social history (from the 1960s onwards) takes 'experience' as its privileged object in understanding the past. The tools of twentieth-century anthropology animate much social constructionist and cultural history. This anthropology is based upon the 'lived experience' of the anthropologists, who immerse themselves into the life-world of the 'natives'. The article concludes by cautioning against the unthinking or naïve use of experience as a sure foundation for work in the medical humanities, drawing upon the theoretical insights of Joan Scott, Judith Butler and Sarah Shortall.

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“…I have written elsewhere about the relationship between another prominent Foucauldian philosopher (Ian Hacking), the history of the self and a particular twentieth-century flourishing of anthropology. 22 Vast numbers of historians have built on the idea that one's self is malleable, constructible and fundamentally related to material and intellectual conditions. But the idea that the self is malleable at all seems to escape investigation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%