ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, India has seen the emergence of a medicalised psychiatric therapeutic culture. As the dominant form of ‘psy-expertise’, psychiatrists have played an instrumental role in this phenomenon. Anthropological inquiries into the Indian psychiatric profession have shown the dominance of a biomedical paradigm in the discourse and praxis of its members; however, no study has been conducted on how this dominant epistemology, its associated technologies, and local adaptations are acquired and negotiated as part of the professional socialisation of psychiatry students in India. Using data gathered during a year-long ethnography of post-graduate psychiatry training, this chapter demonstrates how the broader tensions accompanying the emergence of a medically oriented therapeutic culture in India are represented in psychiatry trainees’ negotiations of the tension existing between the emergence of the “evidence-based” paradigm as a novel form of pedagogy and the “lived” experience that shapes their own and their teachers’ day-to-day practice. In doing so, this chapter highlights how the “evidence based” paradigm catalyses the emergence of a medicalised psychiatric therapeutic culture through the production of particular forms of selfhoods, both in psychiatry students and their patients, and how this process is often contested by cultural notions of pedagogy, hierarchy, and identity.
