IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB252103230

How personality became treatable: The mutual constitution of clinical knowledge and mental health law (February 2013)

Pickersgill, Martyn (Author)

Social Studies of Science
Volume: 43
Issue: 1
Pages: 30-53

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712457722

DOI: 10.1177/0306312712457722

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Personality disorders Psychiatry Mental health and illness Psychology Science and law Technoscience; science and technology studies Public policy 21st century 20th century Great Britain

In recent years, personality disorders – psychiatric constructs understood as enduring dysfunctions of personality – have come into ever-greater focus for British policymakers, mental health professionals and service-users. Disputes have focussed largely on highly controversial attempts by the UK Department of Health to introduce mental health law and policy (now enshrined within the 2007 Mental Health Act of England and Wales). At the same time, clinical framings of personality disorder have dramatically shifted: once regarded as untreatable conditions, severe personality disorders are today thought of by many clinicians to be responsive to psychiatric and psychological intervention. In this article, I chart this transformation by means of a diachronic analysis of debates and institutional shifts pertaining to both attempts to change the law, and understandings of personality disorder. In so doing, I show how mental health policy and practice have mutually constituted one another, such that the aims of clinicians and policymakers have come to be closely aligned. I argue that it is precisely through these reciprocally constitutive processes that the profound reconfiguration of personality disorder from being an obdurate to a plastic condition has occurred; this demonstrates the significance of interactions between law and the health professions in shaping not only the State’s management of pathology, but also perceptions of its very nature.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB252103230/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Jonas Rüppel; Torsten H. Voigt; (2019)
The Death of the Clinic? Emerging Biotechnologies and the Reconfiguration of Mental Health (/isis/citation/CBB246876726/)

Article Martyn Pickersgill; (2019)
Psychiatry and the Sociology of Novelty: Negotiating the US National Institute of Mental Health “Research Domain Criteria” (RDoC) (/isis/citation/CBB630004689/)

Article Martyn Pickersgill; (August 2019)
Access, accountability, and the proliferation of psychological therapy: On the introduction of the IAPT initiative and the transformation of mental healthcare (/isis/citation/CBB273628370/)

Article Jonas Rüppel; (2019)
“Now Is a Time for Optimism”: The Politics of Personalized Medicine in Mental Health Research (/isis/citation/CBB269148677/)

Article Cesare Bondioli; (2017)
Dalla salute mentale alla psichiatria: un arretramento? (/isis/citation/CBB796646272/)

Article Mario Colucci; (2017)
Prospettive della salute mentale in Italia (/isis/citation/CBB437764979/)

Article Vera Fusco; Francesca Gollo; Marco Salustri; (2019)
Il Museo Laboratorio della Mente come risorsa per la salute mentale (/isis/citation/CBB096289987/)

Article Raffaella Campaner; (2017)
Quale “salute mentale”? Significati, usi, contesti (/isis/citation/CBB390334473/)

Book Jinee Lokaneeta; (2020)
The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India (/isis/citation/CBB848872389/)

Thesis Braitman, Laurel; (2013)
Animal Madness: A Natural History of Disorder (/isis/citation/CBB001567524/)

Article Hammack, Phillip L.; Windell, Eric P.; (2011)
Psychology and the Politics of Same-Sex Desire in the United States: An Analysis of Three Cases (/isis/citation/CBB001220665/)

Article Marcel Streng; (2020)
«Krass aus der Norm gefallen»? Das Konzept der «schweren Persönlichkeitsstörung» in der Auswahl männlicher Delinquenten für Sozialtherapeutische Anstalten in Nordrhein-Westfalen in den 1970er Jahren (/isis/citation/CBB232456863/)

Book Daynes, Byron W.; Sussman, Glen; (2010)
White House Politics and the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (/isis/citation/CBB001034526/)

Article Phil Brown; (2021)
From the Radical Psychology Movement to STS: A Journey From the 1960s in Multiple Parts (/isis/citation/CBB099951762/)

Article Danilo Dondici; (2019)
Change Minds: Una storia di archivi e di manicomi per andare oltre la psichiatria (/isis/citation/CBB435808463/)

Book Oisín Wall; (2017)
The British Anti-Psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychiatry to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971 (/isis/citation/CBB248999877/)

Article Andrea Narracci; (2019)
Scenari per il futuro della salute mentale (/isis/citation/CBB708807900/)

Book David J. Hess; (2016)
Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions (/isis/citation/CBB272081586/)

Article Tessa Dunlop; (2022)
Energy efficiency: The evolution of a motherhood concept (/isis/citation/CBB065010125/)

Article Fabio Cirifino; Paolo Rosa; Leonardo Sangiorgi; (2019)
Musei, memorie e narrazioni per la salute mentale. Narrazioni, immagini, interattività (/isis/citation/CBB525269710/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}