Globalizing Pathologies: Mental HealthAssemblageand Spreading Diagnoses of Eating Disorders

Kristin Edquist
2008 International Political Sociology  
During the last two decades, psychiatric researchers have published evidence of eating disorders in regions around the world, despite previous conceptions of eating disorders as "culture-bound syndromes." This paper explores the pressures or processes encouraging this spread of diagnoses and their implications for our understanding of state mentalhealth policy making today. It argues that the increased willingness to diagnose eating disorders results from global-level instances of assemblage,
more » ... at is, conglomerations or ensembles of scientific expertise, state policy, international institutions, and practices that frame interventions of a governmental or "improving" kind in a discourse that presumes a particular type of problem and entails a particular set of solutions. Specifically, the paper argues that elements of a mental-health assemblage are emerging at the global level, centered around the production of a core global mental disorder diagnostic code and its related research agenda, such that a broad array of actors in an increasingly broad array of world regions find it medically, politically, and economically expedient to diagnose and treat persons as suffering from eating disorders (as defined by the code). Thus eating disorders are diagnosed where once they were not. Cases include several recent instantiations of the eating-disorders research agenda in non-western, less developed states. The likely effects of these assemblages include the limitation of political agency to elites who can manage the medical, political, and economic dynamics of shifting diagnostic criteria, and the reduction of non-elites' agency to mere rejection of the "rationalization" of rule, for example by rejecting a diagnosis of mental disorder, to accepting it and thereby rendering themselves "citizen-subjects" of governance, or to embracing it and attempting resistance within that diagnosis.
doi:10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00057.x fatcat:c5gkhsr4hnethkt3tpmrebhxe4