Disorder Identity: Opportunity or Obstacle?

Abstract

This thesis develops a social psychological analysis of Hacking’s (1999) “looping kinds” account of psychopathology. Informed by Social Identity Theory (SIT, Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Self Categorization Theory (SCT, Turner et al., 1987), a Disorder Identity Analysis is proposed, according to which the symptoms of psychopathology are partly shaped by the interaction between expert clinical categorisation schemes and first person Disorder Identities, represented as self-categories and shared by fellow individuals who experience disorder. A set of theoretically informed predictions are then derived for empirically scrutinising Hacking’s “looping kinds” account and to help explain apparent coherence, stability and change observed in psychopathology. Results from five experimental studies are then reported, demonstrating support for one of the predictions derived from the Disorder Identity analysis: that identifying with fellow disorder sufferers could either enable or be a barrier to clinical change, depending on the group’s normative understanding about the malleability of the condition. These findings suggest that the proposed Disorder Identity Analysis shows promise as a means of specifying, and empirically operationalising, Hacking’s “looping kind” arguments.