Classifications in Psychiatric Education. A Postcolonial Approach

Abstract

This article contributes to the understanding of psychiatric classifications by adopting a postcolonial approach to science and technology. For this purpose, I examine the case of a psychiatry training program in a medium-sized city in Colombia. The method I used was ethnography, taking part in classes, case presentations, and academic meetings. It was found that learning about psychiatric classifications involves dynamics in which the global and the local are reconfigured according to the positions assumed by psychiatrists and psychiatry students. In this study, some participants stated that there is a cultural domination of North American psychiatry over its Colombian counterpart, and, therefore, they should adhere to the classification of the former. Others argued that psychiatric education should follow the European orientation and leave the North American classification aside. And a small group considered that they should use Latin American classifications. I conclude that the manuals of the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization are established as what Rodríguez Medina calls subordinating objects, while Latin American classifications are positioned as local entities that serve specific purposes. However, the hierarchies involved in the geopolitics of knowledge can be contested in daily pedagogical practices.