부산대학교 도서관

The article presents information on women, child sexual abuse and borderline personality disorder. From the perspective of scientific medicine, mental disorder can be understood as being a fixed and internal property of individuals, which can be deciphered through tracking causality and interpreting symptoms. Diagnosis, therefore, holds a central place within the practice of scientific medicine because it represents the mechanism through which abnormality can be recognized, named and fixed. Diagnosis translates individual experience into internalized disorder through categorizing some forms of human misery as medical problems. Whilst diagnosis necessarily relies on interpretation, the ways in which human misery is discursively regulated through the structuring effects of categorization remains hidden. This is because opinion is presented as truth; such truths subjugate other knowledge; and their ready availability further confirms their veracity. Hence, the practice of diagnosis does not simply reveal facts about human misery, but rather is implicated in the social production of what counts as the truth about human misery. With over four hundred possible ways to be considered miserable/abnormal, psychiatry rarely has difficulty in force-fitting individuals into its many predetermined narratives of distress.