Psychiatric diagnosis as rationalization of the homeless’ negative ontological classification

Abstract

Since the late 20^th century, intervention on homelessness became increasingly medicalized. Using fieldwork that consisted of more than 500 hours of direct observation in a medium-sized Portuguese city from 2010 to 2014, I discuss how social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, among other actors, understand homelessness as the result of a ontological-psychiatric limitation of each homeless individual. In this medicalized context, psychiatric diagnosis is an important intervention technique since it validates the collective judgment on each homeless individual’s abnormality. The official psychiatric diagnosis pronounced by a psychiatrist, rather than a moment of medical-scientific discovery of this abnormality, constitutes an instant in which a previous negative ontological classification is rationalized in medical-scientific terms. By procedures such as the psychiatric diagnosis, medicalization renders the structural features of homelessness invisible, thus operating to legitimize an unjust and unequal societal model that makes certain individuals homeless.

Keywords: Homelessness; Medicalization; Psychiatry; Rationalization; Social Work