O’Callaghan, A.K.
‘The medical gaze’: Foucault, anthropology and contemporary psychiatry in Ireland
(2021) Irish Journal of Medical Science
DOI: 10.1007/s11845-021-02725-w
Open access
Abstract
Michel Foucault developed the concept of ‘the medical gaze’, describing how doctors fit a patient’s story into a ‘biomedical paradigm, filtering out what is deemed as irrelevant material’ (Misselbrook, 2013). Doctors are perceived within this model to focus on selecting the biomedical elements of patients’ problems only, filtering out all other elements of a person’s life story, but this paper argues that in the subspecialty of psychiatry, this is not the case, and such a filter is not so easily applied. © 2021, The Author(s).
Author Keywords
Foucault; Medical anthropology; Psychiatry
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