Feyeux, Alice
The psychiatric making of gender (dis)order(s)
- 2021.
97
This article offers an analysis of therapeutic practices within a psychiatric unit dedicated to adolescents treated for anorexia, depression, or borderline disorder, in order to show that these therapeutic practices are gender-oriented. We focus first on the interpretive framework through which the care practitioners of the hospital under investigation identify gender and sexual disorders behind mental disorders, referring themselves to situated gender norms. We then examine the therapeutic practices based on this interpretive framework. These practices vary according to the disorder and the assigned gender of the patients. Finally, we reveal that even the patients’ responses to their therapies are gender-oriented: the adolescents react to medical practices and discourse in accordance with their former gender socialization, which determines the way they understand their disorder in terms of gender.