you've been framed
A central claim of much social-scientific critique of psychiatric nosology is that psychiatry too often naively adopts a (let's-call-it) realist perspective on psychiatric illness categories, whereas in truth we'd do better to see a diagnostic category like 'depression' as one, optional, sometimes useful, sometimes not, way of framing human distress / problems in living. It's the second part of this claim that I'd like to focus on here. What do we mean when we talk of framing? Regarding that talk, what's its value; what are its limitations? The first useful thing to point out about frames (conceptualisations, constructions) is that they aren't themselves in the truth-speaking game. They have to do with what's prior to this: with ways of seeing/thinking/talking/conceptualising. (This is part of the complaint against the realist: the realist is oblivious to these prior questions, and their only critical apparatus is geared up to answering questio