Digital Self-Monitoring, Bodied Realities: Re-Casting App-Based Technologies in First Episode Psychosis

Abstract

Smartphone technology has seen expanding interest across nearly all areas of medicine, including psychiatry. This paper discusses the burgeoning use of digital technologies for symptom monitoring in the field of first episode psychosis. Drawing on Foucauldian theory as well as intersectional feminist materialist and critical disabilities scholarship in science and technology studies (STS), we trace a novel landscape of technologies of the self. We explore the discursive strategies that position first episode psychosis and digital technology as progressive, curative paradigms and utilize our own ethnographic work within the field of first episode psychosis to consider how lived experience is transformed within and through digital technologies. We trouble the unfettered enthusiasm for digital technologies in first episode psychosis in light of how these transformations can be understood within a larger neoliberal political rationality and demarcate the importance of having intersectional feminist STS scholarship attend to this burgeoning field.