The biomedical aspiration of psychiatry has fundamentally reoriented clinical practice since the DSM-III in 1980 and reverberated in the public sphere. Over time, lay public understanding of the causes of mental suffering has increasingly endorsed biological conceptions. In this paper, I explore the sources from which a neurobiological model for mental suffering reaches ordinary people, and investigate its rhetorical appeal, personal appropriation, and consequences. Drawing on interviews and other data, I show that these sources—physicians, popular media, and advertising—share common ontological and moral assumptions. These assumptions, in turn, influence how people take up neurobiological explanation to account for their suffering, and how, paradoxically, they join it to their projects of self-determination. I conclude by considering how, from a phenomenological perspective, a neurobiological account fails to enhance self-knowledge or determination but leads to a hermeneutic dead end.

自 1980 年 DSM-III 以来，精神病学的生物医学愿望从根本上重新定位了临床实践，并在公共领域产生了反响。随着时间的推移，公众对精神痛苦原因的理解越来越支持生物学概念。在这篇论文中，我探索了精神痛苦的神经生物学模型影响普通人的来源，并调查了它的修辞吸引力、个人挪用和后果。我利用采访和其他数据表明，这些来源——医生、大众媒体和广告——具有共同的本体论和道德假设。反过来，这些假设会影响人们如何用神经生物学解释来解释他们的痛苦，以及矛盾的是，他们如何将其加入到他们的自决计划中。我通过考虑如何得出结论，