“Now Is a Time for Optimism”: The Politics of Personalized Medicine in Mental Health Research
Abstract
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, personalized medicine has become one of the most influential visions guiding medical research. This paper focuses on the politics of personalized medicine in psychiatry as a medical specialty, which has rarely been investigated by social science scholars. I examine how this vision is being sustained and even increasingly institutionalized within the mental health arena, even though related research has repeatedly failed. Based on a document analysis and expert interviews, this article identifies discursive strategies that help to sustain this vision and its promises: “complexity talk,” “extension,” and “boundary work.” These practices secure its plausibility, protect it from criticism, and maintain stakeholder support.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Many clinicians and researchers are well aware of the limited or ambiguous evidence for the meaning of test results and possible treatment outcomes and regard the lack of practice guidelines as a barrier for the implementation of tests.
“Many clinicians and researchers are well aware of the limited [27, 30, 31, 35, 42, 79, 84] or ambiguous evidence [32] for the meaning of test results and possible treatment outcomes and regard the lack of practice guidelines as a barrier for the implementation of tests [27, 79].”
From Patients’ and professionals’ views related to ethical issues in precision medicine: a mixed research synthesis (2021) · cites this paper as [35]
Cites
Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research
Tavory, I., & Timmermans, S. (2014) · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226180458.001.0001 · Cited by 1,726 · see citing works
Stratified medicine for mental disorders
Schumann, G., Binder, E. B., Holte, A., de Kloet, E. R., Oedegaard, K. J., Robbins, T. W., Walker-Tilley, T. R., Bitter, I., Brown, V. J., Buitelaar, J., et al. (2014) · European Neuropsychopharmacology · doi:10.1016/j.euroneuro.2013.09.010 · Cited by 186 · see citing works
How can we realize the promise of personalized antidepressant medicines?
Holsboer, F. (2008) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn2453 · Cited by 177 · see citing works
Thome, J., Ehlis, A.-C., Fallgatter, A. J., Krauel, K., Lange, K. W., Riederer, P., Romanos, M., Taurines, R., Tucha, O., Uzbekov, M., et al. (2012) · The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry · doi:10.3109/15622975.2012.690535 · Cited by 130 · see citing works
Horwitz, R. I., Cullen, M. R., Abell, J., & Christian, J. B. (2013) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1234106 · Cited by 49 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Erdmann, A., Rehmann-Sutter, C., & Bozzaro, C. (2021) · BMC Medical Ethics · doi:10.1186/s12910-021-00682-8 · Cited by 86 · see citing works
- Authors
- Rüppel, J.
- Affiliations
- Goethe University Frankfurt (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Rüppel, Jonas
- ORCID
- Rüppel, Jonas
- Venue
- Science, Technology, & Human Values
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2019-04-25
- Volume
- 44
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 581-611
- ISSN
- 0162-2439 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-8251
- OpenAlex
- W2942094609
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 1.48
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Science Technology & Human Values (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (LE 1104/9-1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Reproductive Medicine › Science, Research, and Medicine
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
- Keywords
- personalized medicine, mental health research, politics of science, Human Genome Project, extension, boundary work, discursive strategies, institutionalization of research, stakeholder support
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
