Manual de diagnóstico e estatístico de transtornos mentais (DSM-V) como operador biopolítico no cenário contemporâneo

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as the principal technical-discursive operator within the biopolitical dispositif of contemporary mental health. The dispositif is understood as a heterogeneous network of discourses, institutions, norms, practices, and techniques that traverse and organize bodies and conducts, producing effects of truth and regimes of visibility. The study investigates how the DSM-V is configured as a strategic artifact in the articulation between psychiatric knowledge and governmental rationality. The methodology employed is a bibliographic approach, which makes it possible to trace the historical and political conditions of emergence of the DSM-V and the power dispositifs that sustain its authority. The central question guiding this research is: what ethical, political, and ontological implications result from the capture of madness by dispositifs that classify, normalize, and silence it? What regimes of truth are established in this process, and what possible forms of subjectivation become viable or unviable within the correlation between knowledge, power, and experience? The investigation identifies three central mechanisms that grant the manual its biopolitical character, namely: the ambiguity of the boundaries between health and mental illness, the use of statistical and population criteria as normative foundations, and the continuous expansion of diagnostic categories. The results suggest that the DSM-V not only classifies disorders but also participates in the normalization of everyday life, promoting processes of diffuse medicalization and neoliberal governmentality. By bringing into tension the limits between technique and politics, science and power, suffering and management, the dissertation highlights that the DSM-V actively participates in the production of a normative ontology of life, and concludes by pointing to the urgency of ethical and clinical practices that resist the capture of difference by the logic of pathologization. It is concluded that the DSM-V should be understood as a technical-discursive operator that acts in the constitution of contemporary subjectivities, producing ethical, political, and epistemological effects that require critical problematization. By evidencing the entanglement of science, power, and subjectivity, the dissertation contributes to the reflection on more plural alternatives that are sensitive to singularities in the field of mental health.