Discourse, society and mental disorders: deconstructing DSM over time through critical and lacanian discourse analysis

This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary work aimed at investigate the discursive construction of otherness in mental health domain in the Western culture, and in detail the role of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the APA, in this process. Critical psychology perspective oriented the research and the data collection. The analysis is conducted through a multi-method approach (Critical Discourse Analysis, Semiotic Analysis and Lacanian Discourse Analysis), which integrates several traditions with a particular concern about the ways in which power and ideology are discursively enacted, produced and resisted by text and talk and shape the concept of mental disorders. The study (1) examines how legitimisation and hegemony have been discursively constructed, legitimised and consolidated over time. The study (2) aims to investigate the scientific debate around the deletion of NPD in order to reconstruct and deconstruct the decisional process through which the boundaries between normality and pathology are constructed. The study (3) aims to investigate how the discourse of DSM was contested by discourse of other social actors involved in the mental-health domain in order to analyze the effect on shaping subjectivity of patients and mental-health professionals.