Managed care's reconstruction of human existence: the triumph of technical reason

Abstract

To achieve its goals of managing and restricting access to psychiatric care, managed care organizations rely on an instrument, the outpatient treatment report, that carries significant implications about how they view psychiatric patients and psychiatric care. In addition to involving ethical transgressions such as violation of patient confidentiality, denial of access to care, spurious use of concepts like quality of care, and harassment of practitioners, the managed care approach also depends on an overly technical, instrumental interpretation of human beings and psychiatric treatment. It is this grounding of managed care in technical reason that I will explore in this study. I begin with a review of a typical outpatient treatment report and show how, with its dependence on the DSM-IV, on behavioral symptoms and patient 'functioning', on the biomedical model of psychiatric illness, and on gross quantitative measures, the report results in a crude, skeletonized view of the human being as a congeries of behavioral symptoms and functions. I then develop the managed care construal of human existence further by showing its grounding in technical reason, exploring the latter in its modern embodiment and deriving it and its opposite, practical reason, from Aristotle's distinction between technical and practical reason, techne and phronesis. In this analysis of the role of technical reason in managed care, I point out that managed care did not have to develop its rationale de novo but could rather lift its arguments, e.g. the biomedical model, from contemporary psychiatry and simply apply them in a restrictive manner. Finally, I conclude this study by arguing for psychiatry's status as a discipline of practical knowledge.