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

精神病学研究和临床实践目前正在经历一场转变，许多观察家认为这是一场真正的范式转变。到目前为止，精神病学的干预是基于病人的经历、叙述和行为，它们越来越依赖于生物参数，即所谓的生物标志物。根据个性化精神病学的愿景，生物标志物为精神疾病提供更好的诊断、预后和治疗，允许针对个人的特定身体特征和生物特征进行“量身定制”的干预。今天，一些生物标志物测试已经可用，而其他的将在可预见的未来进入临床实践。拟议的研究项目是第一个对这一重要转变进行社会学调查的项目。它从这篇论文开始，对生物标记物的新关注不仅改变了精神病学的专业实践和学科界限，而且还将修改制度结构和实践，并产生精神疾病和健康以及精神和身体过程的新概念。根据情境分析的研究设计，该项目以抑郁症为例，考察了精神病学生物标志物研究的条件、动态和含义。为此，文献和媒体分析、专家访谈和精神病学会议的民族志将提供对生物标志物研究的实际背景和技术前提的见解，以及精神病学领域内随着抑郁症生物标志物的引入和扩散而产生的期望、希望和恐惧。该项目将米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）的政府分析与科学与技术研究的见解相结合，为精神病学知识的社会学做出了贡献。它调查了抑郁症作为一种流体和有争议的医学分类的历史本体论，并寻求在概念上锐化生物标记化的概念。除了科学目标之外，该研究项目还为个性化精神病学愿景的社会影响的公众辩论提供了高度相关的经验见解和理论反思。

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.