Classifying and medicating: the bio-political management of psychic sufferings

Abstract

Considering that the word ‘bio-politics’ has become the referential framework of multiple debates and topics, often without the due reflections concerning its scope and limits, in this paper, I intend to analyze, firstly, the central axes on which Foucault’s concept of bio-politics articulates: 1) the centrality of the norm and the opposition normality-pathology; (2) the statistical studies referred to the vital phenomena that characterize populations; (3) the problem of the risk and the mechanisms of security; (4) the government of the populations as a form of management that excludes the individual self-government. After that, a recent paper published by the former head of the task group of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) will be discussed. In that paper, he questions the current process of preparing the fifth edition of the Manual. This criticism allows us to show that this Manual is articulated around the same axes which characterize the bio-politics of populations, outlining a strategy, today hegemonic, for managing the psychic sufferings.