Psychiatry has recently witnessed the launch of digital phenotyping as a new research agenda. According to digital phenotyping’s hypothesis, data about a patient’s daily behavior can be continuously collected through wearable monitoring devices and used to build software that would send warnings of mental relapse or would tailor treatment choices. The research is exploratory, and the claims upon which it is based are contentious. Drawing on interviews, we followed a research team that aspired to build a digital system that could send such warnings to patients with mental health disorders like depression and epilepsy. This enabled us to learn how a new instrument to measure mental function becomes constructed and what translations take place in this process. Here we pay particular attention to the role of patients as research collaborators. We observed the frictions and debates in the research team between different mental health knowledge regimes, seeing them before they were black-boxed and lost from sight. We aimed to understand how actors anticipate software and data analytics to function alongside physicians and patients, as well as how different accounts reconstitute the ‘mental’, ‘therapy’, or the ‘social’ itself. We discuss several ‘dissociations’ that occur along the research trajectory regarding: less motivated and underrepresented patients, the role of clinical knowledge derived from patient self-reporting, and the social, political, and economic aspects of a patient’s life affecting mental health. In this sense, we want to open the black box of this new behavioral technoscience.

中文翻译：

---

计算心智的技术政治：打开数字精神病学的黑匣子


精神病学最近见证了数字表型作为一项新的研究议程的推出。根据数字表型分析的假设，可以通过可穿戴监测设备持续收集有关患者日常行为的数据，并用于构建软件，以发送精神复发的警告或定制治疗选择。这项研究是探索性的，其所依据的主张是有争议的。通过采访，我们跟踪了一个研究团队，该团队渴望建立一个数字系统，可以向患有抑郁症和癫痫等心理健康疾病的患者发送此类警告。这使我们能够了解测量心理功能的新工具是如何构建的，以及在此过程中发生了哪些转化。在这里，我们特别关注患者作为研究合作者的作用。我们观察了研究团队中不同心理健康知识制度之间的摩擦和辩论，在它们被黑箱和消失之前看到了它们。我们旨在了解参与者如何预期软件和数据分析与医生和患者一起发挥作用，以及不同的账户如何重建“心理”、“治疗”或“社会”本身。我们讨论了研究轨迹上发生的几个“解离”，涉及：积极性较低和代表性不足的患者、从患者自我报告中获得的临床知识的作用，以及患者生活的社会、政治和经济方面影响心理健康。从这个意义上说，我们想打开这种新的行为技术科学的黑匣子。