Capital, Shame, and the Neurobiological Imaginary

Abstract

Teaching an online course on mental health and the law during a global pandemic, the subject of psychiatric diagnosis and the pros and cons of diagnostic categories arose very early in the conversation. One of my students, a physician who was likely heavily invested in the utility of biomedical systems of categorization, expounded on the benefits of diagnosis this way: despite the documented human rights abuses of Western psychiatry and the scandalizing amount corruption within the pharmaceutical industry (and the psychiatric profession), he offered, a DSM diagnosis might be useful and beneficial because it could reduce a person’s shame.