Schizophrenia Infrastructures: Local and Global Dynamics of Transformation in Psychiatric Diagnosis-Making in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

This article uses the concept of infrastructures of diagnosis to propose a framework for telling the history of schizophrenia as a global entity in the twentieth century. Infrastructures of diagnosis include the material and architectural arrangements, legal prescriptions and professional models that organize the way patients come to clinics and navigate in the world of schizophrenia, as well as clinicians organize their diagnostic work. They organize the way schizophrenia was identified as a disorder. The article then explores three moments in the history of the infrastructures of the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the twentieth century. The first is German psychiatrist Kurt Schneider's discussion of first and second rank symptoms in the interwar period. The second is the work on the criteria for defining schizophrenia in the framework of the WHO International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia at the turn of the 1970s. The last moment concerns recent discussions on deconstructing psychosis the in the framework of the development of the fifth edition of DSM.

„Was uns Schizophrenie heisst …“ – Das sowjetische Schizophreniebild in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren und dessen Integration in die internationale Klassifikation der Krankheiten

“…sluggish ) Schizophrenie sei aus dem internationalen Wissensbestand zur Schizophrenie entstanden, war in gewisser Hinsicht nicht falsch. Eine recht reichhaltige historische Forschung untersucht und problematisiert die Entwicklung der Schizophrenie und ihre politischen, sozioökonomischen und den Denkstil bestimmenden Diagnose-Infrastrukturen ( diagnosis infrastructures ), wie Henckes treffend formuliert (Henckes 2019 : 551–554. Zu Denkstil und Denkkollektiv siehe Fleck 1999 [1935]).…”

Strategic universality in the making of global guidelines for mental health

“…A growing body of literature conceptualizes the field of GMH, and the unfolding of its various interventions, as an empirical object—tracing decision-making, scale-making, and evidence-making (see Bemme, 2019; Bemme & D’Souza, 2014; Cooper, 2015; Henckes, 2019; Kienzler, 2019; Lovell et al, 2019; Mills & Hilberg, 2019). Yet interdisciplinary scholarship into the standardization, classification, and development of medical protocols and guidelines (Bowker & Star, 2000; Lakoff, 2005; Timmermans & Berg, 1997, 2003a, 2003b) has rarely been used in relation to GMH (see Bemme, 2019; and Henckes, 2019 for rare examples). This article makes the argument that addressing this gap is significant in order to better document the nuanced strategic nature of universality in relation to mental health.…”

Global Mental Health: Interdisciplinary challenges for a field in motion

“…The second special issue in 2016 offered further counterpoint to the public health oriented GMH approach through ethnographic accounts highlighting the cultural specificity of mental health in context (Ecks, 2016; Jain & Orr, 2016). Efforts to harness social science insights to critique and refine GMH practice have led to important edited volumes (Kohrt & Mendenhall, 2015; White, Jain, Orr, & Read, 2017) and a thematic issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (Lovell, Read & Lang, 2019) that takes the field itself as its empirical object, and analyses the history of its institutions (Henckes, 2019; Lovell, et al., 2019), its interventions as they unfold (Bemme, 2019; Kienzler, 2019; Read, 2019), and the sometimes paradoxical effects of public mental health surveillance (Béhague, 2019; Lang, 2019).…”