Annemarie Jutel (Author)
Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science
Volume: 45
Issue: 1
Pages: 100764
One common contemporary usage of the term “diagnostic uncertainty” is to refer to cases for which a diagnosis is not, or cannot, be applied to the presenting case. This is a paradoxical usage, as the absence of diagnosis is often as close to a certainty as can be a human judgement. What makes this sociologically interesting is that it represents an “epistemic defence,” or a means of accounting for a failure of medicine’s explanatory system. This system is based on diagnosis, or the classification of individual complaints into recognizable diagnostic categories. Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine’s epistemic setting, for it purports to explain illness via diagnosis, and yet is not always able to do so. This essay reviews this paradoxical use, and juxtaposes it to historical explanations for non-diagnosable illnesses. It demonstrates how representing non-diagnosis as uncertainty protects the epistemic setting by positioning the failure to locate a diagnosis in the individual, rather than in the medical paradigm.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Aragona, Massimiliano;
(2013)
Neopositivism and the DSM Psychiatric Classification. An Epistemological History. Part 1: Theoretical Comparison
(/isis/citation/CBB001320328/)
Article
Hane Htut Maung;
(2016)
Diagnosis and causal explanation in psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB953313116/)
Article
Mauricio V Daker;
(2019)
The theory of symptom complexes, mind and madness
(/isis/citation/CBB264539507/)
Article
Jonathan Y Tsou;
(2016)
Natural kinds, psychiatric classification and the history of the DSM
(/isis/citation/CBB258474975/)
Article
Steven Tresker;
(2020)
A typology of clinical conditions
(/isis/citation/CBB690319995/)
Chapter
Pierdaniele Giaretta;
(2021)
Classifications from an Epistemological Point of View with Particular Attention to the Classifications of Diseases
(/isis/citation/CBB537876116/)
Book
Pierre-Olivier Méthot;
(2020)
Vital Norms: Canguilhem's "The Normal and the Pathological" in the Twenty-First Century
(/isis/citation/CBB485036105/)
Article
Erik Børve Rasmussen;
(December 2020)
Making and managing medical anomalies: Exploring the classification of ‘medically unexplained symptoms’
(/isis/citation/CBB131501262/)
Article
Cooper, Rachel;
(2010)
Are Culture-Bound Syndromes as Real as Universally-Occurring Disorders?
(/isis/citation/CBB001023970/)
Article
Rachel Cooper;
(2018)
Understanding the DSM-5: Stasis and Change
(/isis/citation/CBB641094844/)
Article
Egidio Priani;
(2017)
Les archives de l’ancien asile psychiatrique de San Servolo (Venise), 1840-1877: Trames, classifications, sujets
(/isis/citation/CBB854623470/)
Article
Egidio Priani;
(2017)
‘Shrouded in a dark fog’: comparison of the diagnosis of pellagra in Venice and general paralysis of the insane in the United Kingdom, 1840–1900
(/isis/citation/CBB044149316/)
Article
Zorzanelli, Rafaela Teixeira;
(2010)
Psicastenia
(/isis/citation/CBB001420498/)
Article
Hane Htut Maung;
(2016)
To what do psychiatric diagnoses refer? A two-dimensional semantic analysis of diagnostic terms
(/isis/citation/CBB007035563/)
Book
Edward Shorter;
Max Fink;
(2018)
The Madness of Fear: A History of Catatonia
(/isis/citation/CBB544899834/)
Article
Hein van den Berg;
(2023)
The essentialism of early modern psychiatric nosology
(/isis/citation/CBB175695180/)
Article
Åsa Jansson;
(2022)
From Melancholia to Depression: Disordered Mood in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB956265052/)
Article
M. Cristina Amoretti;
Elisabetta Lalumera;
Davide Serpico;
(2021)
The DSM-5 introduction of the Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder as a new mental disorder: A philosophical review
(/isis/citation/CBB881537603/)
Article
Andresen, Christopher Schroeder;
German E Berrios;
(2020)
‘My insanity in the year 1783’, by C.S. Andresen (1801)
(/isis/citation/CBB296326403/)
Thesis
Steven Warech;
(2021)
The Serpentine Genesis of Hysteria: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Artificial Intelligence
(/isis/citation/CBB692045705/)
Be the first to comment!