Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: CARLOS CALEBE AFONSO FERREIRA PINHEIRO

Contemporary bacamartism: the DSM and the illusion of neutral science

Discourse analysis, DSM, Psychiatry, Ideology, Discursive Formations, Mental Disorders

In recent years, the proliferation of mental disorder diagnoses has taken a devastating toll on the world's population. According to the WHO (World Health Organization), mental disorders affect around 700 million people worldwide, representing 13% of all illnesses. This results in a high number of people being medicated. The sale of antidepressants and mood stabilizers is already leading the pharmaceutical market. The instrument used by psychiatry to produce diagnoses is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - DSM, which has five editions. Since the DSM was first published, the number of people diagnosed with a mental disorder has grown dramatically. With the hegemony of the psychiatric manual and its biologizing discourse, mental suffering has been dislocated, throughout its publications, from its political dimensions and placed entirely in the biological, i.e. individual, field. Defending a neutral science, the manual calls itself apolitical. As a theoretical reference, we opted for French Discourse Analysis (DA), as conceived by Michel Pêcheux. In addition to structural linguistics, which understood language as a system closed in on itself, with its own laws and transformations, DA brings together elements from other areas of the human sciences, namely psychoanalysis and historical materialism, and criticizes not only linguistics, but also the scientific work of the human sciences of its time, undoing the supposed neutrality of discourse. Thus, in order to find the regularities of language in its production, the discourse analyst relates language to its exteriority. This project aims to investigate how the meanings of the concepts of health, diagnosis and mental disorders are produced in the manual, as well as their relationship with medicalization. The direct contribution of this project to a movement to break the political silencing in psychiatric discourse and the erasure of the social dimensions of mental suffering in which this theme has found itself until now is relevant. Thus, discourse analysis is presented as a possibility of amplifying symbolic work by understanding the language making sense, revealing notions of its context and the historical positions previously assumed by the subject.