Disqualification and Professional Jurisdiction

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how stigma can separate scientists from their jurisdiction. It analyses 84 interviews with health professionals and researchers, primarily psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurologists. The chapter examines disqualification—the stigmatization of facts, science, and knowledge—in terms of between-group relations and professional jurisdictions. First, the chapter demonstrates how psychologists and psychiatrists critique their own field while lauding neuroscience. Much of this critique centers on issues of complexity, with psychiatry positioned as messy and complex, while neuroscience is contrastively described as clean, straightforward, and doable. Second, complexity moves from being a stigma to a resource when psychiatrists and psychologists discuss their professional jurisdiction. Here, psychiatric disorders are too complex to be reducible to neurology, and the brain alone can no longer explain such disorders. As the chapter argues, this use of complexity works to prevent psychiatry from being reduced to neurology. Third, interview data from neurologists demonstrates that they see neuroscientific work as proving that psychiatric disorders are brain diseases and they should move into the jurisdiction of neurology. Rather than psychiatrists joining neurologists in studying brain-based disorders, neurologists argue psychiatrists are best positioned to manage complex, messy, and poorly explained conditions that do not have physiological causes. This chapter demonstrates how the stigmatizers become stigmatized, how disqualification is a network of social relations, and how disqualification is used to separate scientists from their jurisdiction.