Personalized Depression? Investigating the Preconditions, Dynamics and Implications of Psychiatric Biomarker Research

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Lemke
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 299429261

Psychiatric research and clinical practice are currently undergoing a transformation that many observers regard as a real paradigm shift. While psychiatric interventions have so far been based on the experiences, narratives and behavior of patients, they increasingly rely on biological parameters, the so-called biomarkers. According to the vision of a personalized psychiatry, biomarkers provide for better diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic treatment of psychiatric diseases allowing 'tailored' interventions to the specific bodily features and biological characteristics of individuals. Today, a few biomarker-tests are already available while others will enter clinical practice in the foreseeable future. The proposed research project is the first to sociologically investigate this essential transformation. It starts from the thesis that the new focus on biomarkers not only changes professional practices and the disciplinary boundaries of psychiatry, but will also modify institutional structures and practices and result in new concepts of mental illness and health, as well as psychic and corporal processes. Informed by the research design of situational analysis, the project examines the conditions, dynamics and implications of psychiatric biomarker-research using the example of depression. For this purpose, document and media analysis, expert interviews and ethnographies of psychiatric conferences will provide insights into both the practical contexts and the technical preconditions of biomarker research and the expectations, hopes and fears within the psychiatric arena that go along with the introduction and proliferation of biomarkers for depression. The project contributes to the sociology of psychiatric knowledge by combining an analytics of government, following the work of Michel Foucault, with insights from Science and Technology Studies. It investigates the historical ontology of depression as a fluid and contested medical classification and seeks to conceptually sharpen the notion of biomarkerization. Beyond the scientific objectives, the research project also provides empirical insights and theoretical reflections highly relevant for the public debate on the societal implications of the vision of a personalized psychiatry.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants