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Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, personalized medicine has become one of the most influential visions guiding medical research. This paper focuses on the politics of personalized medicine in psychiatry as a medical specialty, which has rarely been investigated by social science scholars. I examine how this vision is being sustained and even increasingly institutionalized within the mental health arena, even though related research has repeatedly failed. Based on a document analysis and expert interviews, this article identifies discursive strategies that help to sustain this vision and its promises: “complexity talk,” “extension,” and “boundary work.” These practices secure its plausibility, protect it from criticism, and maintain stakeholder support.

ZusammenfassungIm Mittelpunkt dieses Artikels stehen Hoffnungen und Erwartungen, die angesichts der gegenwärtigen „Krise der psychiatrischen Diagnostik“ diskursiv mit computationalen Technologien verknüpft werden. Auf der Grundlage von Dokumentenanalysen, qualitativen Expertinneninterviews sowie ergänzenden Labor- und Konferenzethnografien wird die Fiktion eines „unvoreingenommenen Blicks“ herausgearbeitet. Demnach haben die Verfahren der „Künstlichen Intelligenz“ das Potenzial, die Tatsachen selbst zur Sprache kommen zu lassen. Da jedoch auch die „datengetriebene“ Forschung von konzeptuellen und normativen Entscheidungen durchzogen ist, droht diese Vorstellung, epistemische Hierarchisierungen und ontologischen Priorisierungen zu verdecken. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird für eine Position argumentiert, die Abhängigkeiten und Selektivitäten nicht negiert, sondern zum Gegenstand einer offensiven Debatte macht.

This guest editorial opens with a brief overview of the transformations of medicine and mental health that can be observed since the second half of the twentieth century. New genetics and biotechnologies hold out the promise of overcoming presumed limitations in the field of mental health care, that is, the fact that diagnostic procedures in psychiatry and clinical psychology still largely rely on the narratives of patients and questionnaires, supposedly subjective assessments by physicians and psychologists. It is envisioned that innovative genetic and proteomic tools, (neuro)imaging technologies, and objective laboratory tests for blood biomarkers will enable better diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases. We argue that emerging biotechnologies do not revolutionize mental health, despite their promise to do so. Instead, we observe a pluralization of research and treatment approaches in the domain of mental health. The second part of

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