The workshop focuses on new medical technologies in psychology and psychiatry and is relevant to everyone interested in health policy, STS and the sociology of knowledge, professions and expertise.

Workshop: New technologies and expertise in the psy-disciplines

Time and venue: Friday, May 22, 10.00-12.00, room 124/1330 (small meeting room), Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. Contact: Lars Thorup Larsen.  

Topic: This workshop presents new cross-disciplinary research on the role of new technologies in the professional fields of psychiatry and psychology. Scholars and students interested in these topics are invited to join. No need to sign up. The workshop includes two research presentations followed by a joint discussion.

First presentation: The Social Life of ECT: Psychiatry, Radical Uncertainty, and Work with an Unsettled Technology

Mariana Craciun, Associate Professor, Tulane University, New Orleans

This project examines how medical professionals manage the challenges of working with an unsettled technology. Many technologies (medical or otherwise) are broadly accepted and seem well-understood. Yet some, like electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), a psychiatric intervention used to treat some of the most severe forms of mental illness, raise questions about risks, ethics, and costs, as well as about the knowledge and moral commitments of the experts (in this case, psychiatrists) who claim such technologies as their domain. Public and professional perceptions of ECT’s legitimacy have waxed and waned, particularly since the late 1970s when it came to be viewed as a symbol of psychiatric overreach and abuse. Today, though it remains stigmatized, ECT is also undergoing a quiet resurgence, as psychiatrists seek to re-establish it as a safe and effective option for their sickest patients. But akin to other psychiatric treatments, questions remain about ECT’s mechanism of action, its treatment applications, and its associated risks, contributing to its unsettled status. However, unlike other such treatments, the stigma associated with ECT has endured. This talk will give an overview of ECT's current status in psychiatry, share empirical data about some of the challenges that psychiatrists who practice it face and how they navigate these challenges, and offer a social scientific theory of how professionals work in conditions of radical uncertainty with technologies that I call “unsettled,” those that have eluded their epistemic and symbolic grasp, remaining precariously anchored in the jurisdictional domain.

Second presentation: Psychology and STS in the age of ‘AI’: reconfiguring subjectivity?

Rasmus Birk, Associate Professor, Aalborg University

Throughout 2025, multiple journalists reported on a new (and seemingly international) phenomenon: “AI psychosis”. Soon, psychiatrists and psychologists started warning that excessive use of chatbots could, seemingly, unmoor people from reality – causing symptoms that were strongly akin to delusions usually connected with psychosis. This newly emerging phenomenon of “AI psychosis” has lead to both a flurry of research papers and much discussion within psychology and psychiatry. How should this phenomenon be understood? How widespread is it? How should AI companies safeguard and prevent the ill effects of chatbot use. AI psychosis both poses a scientific and practical challenge for psychology and psychiatry, and is instrumental for understanding how the ‘psy-sciences’ are (re)constituting themselves in the age of generative AI. In this talk I take the case of AI psychosis as my point of departure to explore how the contemporary AI “revolution” is becoming entangled with psychology and psychiatry. This takes place, I argue, in at least two ways: AI is both becoming entangled with the psy-sciences as sciences, for example by raising scientific questions, or in the attempted harnessing of AI to predict mental ill health. And secondly, the proliferation of AI technologies is arguably also reconfiguring “the global psyche” (Béhague & MacLeish, 2020) – reconfiguring how we think about ourselves and others in psychological terms; remaking and reconfiguring subjectivities.