In psychiatric clinical practice, professionals pursue risk management alongside various uncertainties concerning diagnoses and treatment decisions. In this article, I draw on an ethnographic study of understandings of bipolar disorder in Finland to argue that risk management in psychiatry is better characterised as practical uncertainty work. I show how both the clinicians and the patients coordinate the uncertainties of bipolar disorder symptoms, risks and treatment decisions, into something that can be managed. I examine the ways in which temporality structures this uncertainty work and I explore two different modes of framing time. Clinical time stems from the current psychiatric thinking committed to the standardised diagnosis and the ideals of evidence-based medicine. Through this, professionals frame a task-oriented and linear treatment path from diagnosis and treatment to a managed life with bipolar disorder. Experienced time, in contrast, relates to the logics of care and self-care amid the embodied experiences of different actors. This framing of time involves a cyclical process where the patient, the clinician and the treatment interventions each need to adjust to changing situations.

在精神病学临床实践中，专业人员追求风险管理以及有关诊断和治疗决策的各种不确定性。在本文中，我将对芬兰对躁郁症的理解进行人种学研究，以证明精神病学中的风险管理可以更好地描述为实际不确定性工作。我展示了临床医生和患者如何将躁郁症症状，风险和治疗决策的不确定性协调到可以管理的方面。我研究了时间性如何构造这种不确定性，并探讨了两种不同的成帧时间模式。临床时间源于当前致力于标准化诊断和循证医学理想的精神病学思想。通过这种方式，专业人员可以构建从诊断和治疗到双相情感障碍的有计划的生活的面向任务的线性治疗路径。相反，经历的时间与不同行为者所体现的经历中的照顾和自我照顾的逻辑有关。时间的安排涉及一个周期性的过程，患者，临床医生和治疗干预措施都需要适应不断变化的情况。