Paper short abstract:

In recent years, personalized psychiatry has become an influential vision that increasingly guides psychiatric research and practice. Based on a document analysis, I will reconstruct the competing narratives on this notion and how the foundations of psychiatry are renegotiated.

Paper long abstract:

Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, personalized psychiatry has become an influential vision that increasingly guides psychiatric research and practice. The notion has been a matter of scientific controversies ever since and experienced significant transformations. In the early 2000s, it was mostly identified with pharmacogenetics and its suggested potential to improve both drug safety and drug efficacy. Since then its meaning has changed. Personalized psychiatry has turned out to be a theoretical umbrella that incorporates (pharmaco-)genomics as well as proteomics and neurosciences. According to this narrative, personalized psychiatry will be realized by means of a systemic integration of various biomarkers and a consistent re-classification of mental illness. The objective of its advocates is not only an improvement of drug treatment but rather a post-genomic revolution of psychiatry itself - its way of knowing, diagnosing and intervening. This narrative is currently challenged by some psychiatrists, who conversely describe the targeted biomarkerization as a kind of depersonalization. Instead of biomarker research, they ask for new bio-psycho-social approaches to realize their vision of personalized psychiatry.

Based on an analysis of psychiatric journals and documents with a focus on the period from 2000 to 2015, I will reconstruct these competing narratives of personalized psychiatry and outline how the very foundations of psychiatry are renegotiated in this discourse.