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A New Method for Inducing a Depression-Like Behavior in Rats
Published on: February 22, 2018
Psychiatric conditions and the social sciences
1University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. hfabregajr@adelphia.net
Abstract:
Psychiatric disorders have a distinct shape, come in types and are inherent in Homo sapiens. To a social scientist, disorders exist by stipulation: contingent on a psychiatric frame of reference. Their materiality has meaning only in that framework. What is important is what that material might correspond to in a society's systems of representation and associated institutions. If one assigns disorders some sort of 'objective' reality (a scientific ontology), then one needs to explain what that corresponds to in cultural terms. Moreover, if disorders exist and have an evolutionary history, one has to formulate how they might have been perceived and understood during phases of biological and cultural evolution. The article provides a way to conceptualize meanings psychiatric disorders have had in these two systems of representation and their change during evolution.
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