Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder that is characterized by three main classes of symptoms and features: (1) positive symptoms (e.g., hallucinations and delusions), (2) negative symptoms (e.g., anhedonia and alogia), and (3) cognitive features (e.g., poor memory and concentration). While textbooks routinely suggest that schizophrenia occurs in one percent of any given population, African American men are three to five times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Epidemiological studies have failed to examine the interaction of different institutions of power that have contributed to this disparity in diagnosis as scientific institutions often operate in a binary between the biological and social. Guided by theories of co-production and intersectionality, I aim to interrogate the truths that the psychiatric institutions suggest about schizophrenia by arguing that oppressions linked to racism, classism, and the patriarchy co-produce realities of schizophrenia with psychiatric knowledge-making. The established realities of schizophrenia begin with the Scientific Method and its deliberate distancing of the subject from the examiner in the research laboratory. Research studies inform the creation of descriptive tools that aim to enumerate the experience of schizophrenia, used to define schizophrenia in the clinical setting through diagnosis. This thesis aims to reconcile the flaws of psychiatric knowledge-making by reconceptualizing the Scientific Method according to models suggested by feminist scholars in the sciences. By examining myself as both actor and subject in research, I will examine my research in the Schizophrenia Cognition Laboratory at Wesleyan –– which aims to compare the efficacy of two types of cognitive remediation (CR) in people with schizophrenia –– to offer an alternative conclusion to our study. By focusing on the lived experience of schizophrenia, I argue that narrative approaches to evaluating schizophrenia are as important to research studies as the tools that enumerate symptoms. Thus, in order to reconcile the inability psychiatric knowledge-making to consider the influence of race, class, and gender in the creation of schizophrenia, scientists must place themselves on a mutual footing with their subjects and materials. Such reconciliation is crucial to distance psychiatry and its research from its long history of marginalizing already oppressed individuals.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Schizophrenia","Intersectionality of race class and gender","Co-production"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Access was restricted until April 15, 2022.
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