The Politics of Psychiatric Evaluation: Towards a Critical Anthropology of Forensic Psychiatry

In the legal context, psychiatric evaluations are subject to controversy, considered as either indispensable or flawed, and yet rarely studied in their own right. This article puts forward a political anthropology of mental healthcare that is attentive to social context (the problem of recidivism), professional logic (the evaluation of dangerousness) and liminal practices (at the limits of the correctional and the medical). It thus intends to delimit the methodological and theoretical stakes of a study of (i) the psychiatric creation of the expert witness report (ii) its legal use (iii) its consequences on psychiatric care in prison and beyond. What makes reports authoritative or, on the contrary, how are they contested? What are the political issues at stake? Thus, the complexity of the politics of psychiatric evaluations can be drawn out from delineated ethnographic fields; a complexity linked to the situation of these evaluations between, on the one hand, legal and psychiatric theories of personality and, on the other, how they are received and effectively applied by the legal system.