A critical analysis of digital phenotyping and the neuro-digital complex in psychiatry

Abstract

This article critically examines the emergence and uses of digital phenotyping in contemporary psychiatry. From an analysis of its discourses and practices, we show that digital phenotyping diffusion is directly related to its promise to solve some of the major impasses of the so-called "neuro-turn" in contemporary psychiatry. However, more than a new tool to address old objects of pre-digital psychiatry, we consider digital phenotyping as participating from a new onto-epistemological matrix, the “neuro-digital complex,” which entails the redefinition of psychiatric objects (e.g., brain and mind), diagnostic categories and procedures, subjectivities (e.g., users of mental health apps), and the emergence of a new regime of truth which promises to reveal the neuropsychological core at the individual scale. Despite this techno-utopia, digital phenotyping does not produce neutral mirrors for self-knowledge. We show that it resorts to population statistics, grounded truth data sets built with pre-digital neuropsychological assumptions, and human categorization processes. Nevertheless, we propose not to approach this gap as a misleading ideological fact but to emphasize its productive possibilities. From this perspective, the gap becomes the measure between whom we think we are and who we really are, working as a guide to conduct our lives in neuropsychological terms. Thus, we conclude that, rather than providing personalized diagnoses and treatments, digital phenotyping produces individualized pathways to normalization and neuropsychologization.