Ren

@renburd.bsky.social

Trainee counselling psychologist, dog-mum. Passionate about the art of, and the arts within psychotherapy. Also interested in TV comedy, and occasionally existential philosophy. Views my own.

"A person’s own sense of their life, their trajectory and commitments and emotions are first reduced to nine questions and then to a single number" Fascinating paper by Armstrong & Byrom, reflecting on the PHQ-9 and using this as the standardised measure of depression tinyurl.com/mr3w3bnm

An anthropological critique of psychiatric rating scales

Neil Armstrong and Nicola Byrom

This article discusses sceptical arguments about measurement scales. Measurement scales are part of a promising agenda of openness, transparency and patient and public involvement (PPI) in medical research, but have received critical, sometimes hostile attention from anthropologists. This is because scales repackage localised cultural assumptions about distress as something universal and pan-human and have the capacity to reshape people's interior lives in unhelpful, possibly harmful ways. We take as an example the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Use of the PHQ-9 is currently mandated by major funders. But its history suggests flawed PPI and a lack of openness. The article suggests a constructive role for anthropology in mental health research, using ethnographic evidence and theory to show how, although they have their uses, mental health scales should not be regarded as inert or harmless.