Digitising psychiatry? Sociotechnical expectations, performative nominalism and biomedical virtue in (digital) psychiatric praxis
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Digital artefacts and infrastructures have been presented as ever more urgent and necessary for mental health research and practice. Telepsychiatry, mHealth, and now digital psychiatry have been promoted in this regard, among other endeavours. Smartphone apps have formed a particular focus of promissory statements regarding the improvement of epistemic and clinical work in psychiatry. This article contextualises and historicises some of these developments. In doing so, I show how purportedly novel fields have been constituted in part through practices of 'performative nominalism' (whereby articulations of a neologism in relation to established and recent developments participate in producing the referent of the new term). Central to this has been implicit and explicit extolment of what I term biomedical virtues in public-facing and professionally orientated discourse. I document how emphases on various virtues have shifted with the attention of psychiatry to different digital modalities, culminating with knowledge-production in mental health as one significant focus.
Source: Sociology of Health & Illness
Author: Martyn Pickersgill
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Topic: Mental Health and Psychiatry
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $1,949
Funder: Wellcome Trust
Awards: Developing a centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, Beyond Diagnosis? Novelty, Need and the Normative in Twenty-First Century Psychiatry., G339059223, Developing a centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, Access Denied: The Roles of Clinical Knowledge and Moral Discourse in Mediating Access to Psychological Therapies., Beyond Diagnosis? Novelty, Need and the Normative in Twenty-First Century Psychiatry., Patienthood and Participation in the Digital Era
OpenAlex ID: W2889358587