'The Explanation You Have Been Looking For': Neurobiology as Promise and Hermeneutic Closure.

PSYCHIATRY; NEUROBIOLOGY; MASS media; MATHEMATICAL models; SELF-perception; PSYCHOLOGY; INTERVIEWING; PHENOMENOLOGY; ADVERTISING; INTELLECT; CLASSIFICATION of mental disorders; PHYSICIANS; ONTOLOGIES (Information retrieval); MEDICAL practice; MENTAL illness

The biomedical aspiration of psychiatry has fundamentally reoriented clinical practice since the DSM-III in 1980 and reverberated in the public sphere. Over time, lay public understanding of the causes of mental suffering has increasingly endorsed biological conceptions. In this paper, I explore the sources from which a neurobiological model for mental suffering reaches ordinary people, and investigate its rhetorical appeal, personal appropriation, and consequences. Drawing on interviews and other data, I show that these sources—physicians, popular media, and advertising—share common ontological and moral assumptions. These assumptions, in turn, influence how people take up neurobiological explanation to account for their suffering, and how, paradoxically, they join it to their projects of self-determination. I conclude by considering how, from a phenomenological perspective, a neurobiological account fails to enhance self-knowledge or determination but leads to a hermeneutic dead end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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