Neutrality Was Never Neutral: Objectivity as Settler Logic, Psychiatry as Empire’s Epistemic Machine
The DSM is a Colonial Document: How ‘Objectivity’ Pathologises Structural Harm.
The DSM’s objectivity masks empire’s long dislocation: mind from body, person from land, suffering from power. This is a story of refusal, of relational knowing, and of healing what empire unmade.
Introduction
I speak now not as clinician, nor as scholar, though I have lived long in those halls. I speak as seanchaidh — not the archivist of kings, but the keeper of long memory, the witness of patterns across generations. Mine is not the language of neutral catalogues, nor of detached measurement. It is the language of echoes. Of fractures carried in bodies. Of harm dressed as order. Of stories whose telling might yet loosen the grip of empire upon the living world.
For this story begins long before any diagnostic manual was written.
The world we inhabit today — a world where suffering is counted, coded, and pathologised — rests upon an ancient dislocation. A fracture so embedded into the structure of Western knowledge that it often passes unspoken: the separation of mind from body, of knower from known, of human from world. This was no accident. It was not a universal truth waiting to be discovered. It was a technology of empire.
In the 17th century, René Descartes, seeking certainty in a Europe torn by religious wars and collapsing authority, severed thinking from embodiment. His declaration — cogito ergo sum — established the sovereign mind as private and immaterial, separate from the mechanised world of flesh and matter. From this fracture was born the fantasy of detached observation, of neutral measurement, of objectivity as supreme virtue.
This Cartesian dream would become the scaffolding of colonial expansion, of capitalist extraction, of eugenic science, of psychiatric classification. For to extract, one must first dislocate. To dominate, one must first pretend detachment. To pathologise, one must first strip suffering of its history and render it into symptoms floating free of context.
The DSM — psychiatry’s sacred text — is one of the purest descendants of this lineage. It codifies human distress into lists of observable traits, abstracted from power, from poverty, from dislocation, from historical violence. The clinician is cast as the neutral observer, the client as a malfunctioning object to be classified. But every act of diagnosis is already entangled — a collapse of meaning, not a discovery of it. The observer is never outside the system.
What gets named as disorder is so often the embodied residue of unmet needs, of unsafe environments, of stolen autonomy. Depression, anxiety, autistic distress — these are not diseases of the brain awaiting chemical correction. They are relational wounds carried by bodies forced to survive inside disordered systems.
When people are fed, housed, held in safety, granted sovereignty over their own lives — much of what we call “mental illness” dissolves. Not because their brains have been fixed, but because the relational field has been restored. What psychiatry calls treatment, solidarity names differently: justice, care, sufficiency, repair.
And so, I begin this telling — to spiral backward through this long lineage, to trace the epistemic machinery that shaped objectivity into an instrument of empire, to remember what was dismembered. For in the unspooling of this thread, another world begins to pulse beneath our feet — a world of entanglement, of relation, of life refusing erasure.
The Myth of Objectivity: Cartesian Foundations
I did not always live within this critique. Once, I served the architecture that Descartes built.
In those years, my world was the forensic laboratory. Precision. Proof. Certainty. The domain of measurement, of calibration, of methods designed to hold fast against uncertainty. There, objectivity was not merely a virtue; it was a demand. My own published work speaks to it still — pages written in pursuit of ground truth, where the very language insists upon reproducibility, quantification, and procedural integrity.
But even there — especially there — the fracture revealed itself.
What we called “objective” was always shadowed by choice:
Which tool to use.
Which standard to apply.
Which frame to compare.
Which algorithm to trust.
And beneath it all, abductive reasoning — the art of the most plausible guess, dressed in the language of science.
The dream of objectivity as detached, neutral observation begins long before my own hands worked those tools. It is born from Descartes, who, in a Europe torn by war and theological crisis, sought an unshakable foundation upon which to rebuild knowledge.
I think, therefore I am.
With these words, he severed mind from body.
He declared the thinking self certain, but cast the world of bodies — the flesh, the land, the others — into a realm of uncertainty, mechanism, and suspicion.
Here begins the fracture.
The world becomes an external object, to be measured from without.
The observer stands apart, untouched, sovereign.
Knowledge becomes a matter of detachment.
This is the fantasy of objectivity:
That the knower may stand cleanly outside the known.
That measurement may occur without entanglement.
That truth lies in removal.
It is a fantasy built for power.
For empire, which must see the land not as relation but as resource.
For science, which must displace the knower’s body to render data pure.
For medicine, which must isolate organs from persons, symptoms from stories.
For psychiatry, which must catalogue distress without hearing its histories.
In my former work, I sought “ground truth” — the stable reality behind the evidence. I saw, again and again, how fragile that quest became under real conditions. Tools misbehaved. Data sets were incomplete. Human bias crept into pattern recognition. Uncertainty lurked inside every claimed certainty.
Even within the most technical domains, objectivity was never pure.
The observer was always inside the system.
The tools themselves carried assumptions.
The legal system framed which conclusions were permitted to stand.
What we called neutral was always already participating.
And yet, the legacy of Descartes survives, not because it is true, but because it serves.
It serves the administrator, who seeks quantifiable standards.
It serves the clinician, who requires diagnostic codes.
It serves the empire, which requires scalable control.
The forensic laboratory, like the psychiatric clinic, operates on inherited machinery:
detached observation
codified classification
disembodied knowledge
But even the cleanest evidence chain cannot sever the observer from the observed.
The ‘ground truth’ we seek is always mediated by our entanglement with it.
I carry that knowing forward now — into this telling.
For what Descartes dislocated, Indigenous and embodied knowers have long refused to forget:
That knowledge lives in relation.
That the world is not object but kin.
That we are never outside what we seek to know.
Objectivity as Colonial Technology
The fracture that Descartes named did not remain a matter of abstract philosophy. It became a tool.
Empire, rising in the centuries that followed, found in this model a perfect instrument. For to dominate a world, one must first dislocate oneself from it. To extract, one must first pretend detachment. To take, one must first unsee relationship.
The colonial project — whether in the Highlands, the Americas, Africa, or the Pacific — was not simply a campaign of armies. It was a campaign of knowledge. The map, the ledger, the census, the catalogue — these became its weapons.
Where once the Gael stood within a web of kinship — with land, sea, stag, stone, and ancestor — the empire arrived with its maps and parcels. The land was measured, divided, fenced. Relations were recast as property. The world was rendered into objects to be owned, charted, extracted.
The old ways of knowing — stories carried in the body, names sung into stone, meanings woven into seasons — were declared irrational, backward, unscientific. Only the detached observer, armed with instruments of measurement, was permitted to speak of truth.
This was not mere cultural arrogance. It was systemic design.
Objectivity served as epistemic gatekeeping.
Who was allowed to speak?
Whose knowledge was counted?
What forms of knowing were admissible?
Indigenous, queer, disabled, neurodivergent, and land-based knowers were declared suspect.
Their embodied knowledge dismissed as “anecdote.”
Their affective knowing labelled as “irrational.”
Their relational orientation framed as “primitive.”
Empire did not simply seek new territories. It sought to remake the very architecture of knowledge — to ensure that only its own ways of seeing could rule.
And so objectivity became a colonial technology — the perfect mask for power:
To measure Indigenous children by foreign IQ tests.
To classify colonised bodies into racial taxonomies.
To codify difference as defect.
To render affective suffering into medical disorder.
To translate complex histories of harm into detached symptom lists.
In the cold ledger of objectivity, the stolen became quantifiable; the dislocated became diagnosable; the relational became pathological.
This is the soil from which the statistical regimes of modern governance emerged.
The census, the eugenic registry, the diagnostic manual — all designed to produce knowledge about, but never with.
Power positioned itself as observer, never participant.
Those observed were reduced to categories, ratios, prevalence rates.
The DSM is a child of this lineage — not an accident, but an inheritance.
The land was not empty when they arrived.
The people were not silent.
The world was not inert.
But under the banner of objectivity, empire insisted otherwise.
And so, I continue the telling.
For this is not only history. The machinery remains. The DSM codes its numbers. The institutions still pretend neutrality. The clinician still claims detachment.
Yet beneath it, the pulse of relational knowing endures — carried in bodies that refuse dislocation, in languages that refuse erasure, in solidarities that refuse to be diagnosed.
Psychiatry as Empire’s Domestic Arm
The colonial machinery did not halt at distant shores. It turned inward, finding new domains to govern. Having mapped the land, it sought now to map the body. Having classified the colonised, it sought now to classify its own.
Thus, psychiatry emerged — not as pure medicine, but as domestic empire. An internal bureaucracy of the mind.
At first, madness was framed as moral failing — deviation from reason, from virtue, from the orderly Christian soul. The asylums were built not merely to treat, but to contain; to sequester those whose distress disrupted the orderly functioning of industrial life.
But as the scientific ethos of objectivity matured, so too did psychiatry’s ambitions. The messiness of moral judgement was replaced by the precision of classification. Symptoms were extracted from stories, catalogued, systematised. The person’s history was dissolved into checklists.
Thus was born the taxonomic impulse — the drive to name, to sort, to stabilise uncertainty by creating ever finer categories of disorder.
The DSM became psychiatry’s map.
Its pages are cartography, not care.
Behaviours became data points. Internal anguish became external observation. The clinician, trained in the methods of detached measurement, stood as neutral arbiter of disorder.
Does the child make eye contact?
Does the adult show “appropriate affect?”
Are gestures synchronous with speech?
Is the body aligned with statistical expectations?
Each answer feeds the machine. Each deviation feeds the code.
Autism—once just a different way of being—was reframed into deficit:
A failure of social reciprocity.
A disorder of communication.
A pathology of repetitive behaviour.
Neurodivergence — once simply variation — was medicalised into disorder.
The diagnostic frame insists that distress lives inside the person. The social field is rendered invisible. Poverty, trauma, marginalisation, erasure — these become “risk factors,” footnotes at best.
The body absorbs what the system denies.
Clinicians, trained within this architecture, are positioned as neutral authorities. But neutrality itself is the lie. Every act of diagnosis is a power move:
It creates eligibility for services.
It creates vulnerability to surveillance.
It creates dependency on pharmaceutical intervention.
It creates institutional containment.
The act of labelling transforms relational suffering into individual pathology.
The clinician is not outside the system.
They are its instrument.
And so the DSM serves the state:
As an administrative ledger.
As a gatekeeper of access.
As a standardiser of deviance.
As a way to render complex social wounds into treatable individual conditions.
It masks systemic violence behind the language of care.
The problem is not that people suffer.
The problem is that the system refuses to see why.
And so I speak the pattern forward.
What empire once enacted upon distant lands, psychiatry now enacts upon domestic bodies. The epistemic machinery has shifted inward, but the logic remains:
Dislocate.
Observe.
Classify.
Contain.
And yet, even here, cracks begin to show. The bodies do not comply. The distress does not resolve. The edges resist reduction.
Quantum Collapse: The Failure of Detached Objectivity
For centuries, the machinery held. The observer stood apart; the world submitted to measurement. The sovereign mind, as Descartes imagined it, ruled unchallenged. Science expanded across land, body, and psyche, confident in its detachment.
But reality itself would not remain silent.
In the 20th century, a quiet but profound rupture emerged: quantum mechanics — the mathematics of uncertainty. The world, when looked at closely enough, refused to conform to the dream of detached objectivity.
The act of observation collapses probability into outcome.
The observer is no longer outside the system but inside the becoming of what is measured.
The knower and the known are entangled.
The very conditions that Descartes sought to banish — uncertainty, interdependence, participatory knowledge — proved fundamental to existence.
At the deepest levels, reality is relational.
And so, the fantasy of neutrality began to fray.
Not only in physics, but across every field built upon Cartesian separation.
In ecology, where the health of a system depends on complex interrelations.
In economics, where rational actors are shaped by collective dynamics.
In neurodivergence, where behaviour cannot be meaningfully separated from environment.
In psychiatry, where diagnosis shapes the very experience it claims to merely observe.
Diagnosis is not passive observation.
It is participatory intervention.
The moment a label is applied, identity shifts.
The social meaning of a person’s distress changes.
Institutions react, policies trigger, treatments commence.
The label itself becomes part of the person’s reality.
The clinician does not simply discover disorder; they help construct its social existence.
Every act of diagnosis collapses possibility:
Before the label, distress remains open — relational, situational, contextual.
After the label, it hardens — into disorder, prognosis, treatment plan.
The observer’s act of naming participates in the creation of what is now “known.”
This is not metaphor. It is entanglement.
And yet, psychiatry pretends otherwise.
It continues to claim the mantle of objective science, even as the diagnostic act functions as an apparatus of power, identity-formation, and social sorting. The DSM codes behaviours as symptoms, but ignores the relational fields that produce them. It quantifies the person, but refuses to see its own role in the quantification.
The hungry child diagnosed with inattentive disorder.
The anxious adult diagnosed with generalised anxiety.
The autistic person’s sensory and relational distress cast as inherent dysfunction.
These are not discoveries.
They are collapses — the freezing of relational suffering into individual pathology.
The epistemic fracture first opened by Descartes now stands fully exposed:
There is no “outside” position.
The observer is always already entangled.
The diagnostic system is part of what it claims to observe.
And so the spiral tightens.
What was once framed as medical disorder is revealed as relational breakdown, structural deprivation, social dislocation. The problem lies not in the brain but in the world the brain inhabits.
The Medicalisation of Structural Harm
Here, at the centre of the spiral, we arrive at the place where theory meets flesh — where the machinery of classification translates directly into the weight borne by living bodies.
What psychiatry calls disorder is so often the residue of systems that refuse to see the wounds they inflict.
A person stands in the ruins of precarious housing, unpaid labour, insecure wages, generational debt, crumbling communities.
Their body trembles.
Their mind wearies.
Their spirit folds inward.
The system declares:
Depression.
But this is not a defect in serotonin metabolism.
It is grief. Exhaustion. Affective response to sustained precarity.
Another watches the rising tides of climate collapse, the tightening grip of empire, the surveillance of state and corporation.
Their chest tightens.
Their senses scan.
Their thoughts race.
The system declares:
Anxiety.
But this is not faulty wiring.
It is vigilance — a correct reading of instability.
The world is dangerous. The body knows.
A child, overwhelmed by sensory intrusion, forced into environments designed without them in mind, lashes out, withdraws, scripts, repeats, resists.
The system declares:
Behavioural disorder. Oppositional defiance. Autism spectrum.
But this is not pathology.
It is protest.
It is protection.
It is refusal to comply with environments built for others.
The medicalisation of neurodivergent lives serves as the perfect sleight of hand:
Income inequality becomes ADHD.
Housing instability becomes generalised anxiety disorder.
Food insecurity becomes mood dysregulation.
Generational trauma becomes complex PTSD.
Systemic marginalisation becomes personality disorder.
Female autism becomes anxiety, depression, personality disorder — or is missed entirely, recast as “emotional dysregulation” in a system that never wrote its criteria to recognise us.
The body carries what society disavows.
The diagnosis isolates what the collective refuses to hold.
Pharmaceutical interventions are offered where structural interventions are denied.
A new antidepressant, instead of universal housing.
Cognitive-behavioural therapy, instead of guaranteed food security.
Social skills training, instead of dismantling ableist institutions.
ABA, instead of radically inclusive neurodivergent education.
The treatment becomes the substitute for justice.
This is not to say that medical support is never needed.
But when medicine becomes the only available response to relational harm, we mistake adaptation for disorder, survival for dysfunction.
The question is not whether people suffer.
The question is: why must they suffer in the first place?
And here, the spiral shows its most brutal function:
To individualise distress.
To medicalise what is political.
To pharmacologise what is systemic.
To keep the machinery turning, untouched by the consequences of its own design.
The DSM does not describe the disordered individual.
It describes a disordered society’s refusal to see itself.
The Relational Alternative
There is, and has always been, another way.
Long before Descartes separated mind from body, before empire classified bodies into categories, before psychiatry dissolved stories into symptoms — people lived in webs of relation. The Gael knew it. The ancestor knew it. The land still remembers.
Suffering was never a private defect. It was a signal of relational imbalance — between self and kin, self and land, self and the larger currents of life.
The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) names what the DSM refuses:
That distress emerges not from internal defect, but from lived experience within systems of power.
That what is called disorder is often a pattern of adaptation to threat.
That meaning lives within every act of survival.
Where the DSM asks: “What is wrong with you?”
The relational model asks: “What happened to you? What meanings have you made? What strengths carried you here?”
The mind belongs to the body,
the body belongs to the community,
the community belongs to the land.
There is no detached observer.
There is no disorder floating free of context.
When needs are met — when bodies are housed, fed, held, included — much of what we call mental illness dissolves not through medical intervention, but through relational repair.
Mutual aid is mental health care.
Basic income is mental health care.
Housing security is mental health care.
Universal healthcare is mental health care.
Relational safety is mental health care.
When empire’s machinery withdraws — when no one stands with a clipboard measuring deviance against statistical norms — the body settles. The child scripts not from distress, but from play. The anxious adult breathes not because the drug has dulled the mind, but because the world no longer demands constant vigilance.
The solution was never inside the brain.
The solution was always in the field.
And so, what psychiatry offers as containment, the relational world offers as care.
What psychiatry names as symptom, the relational world names as signal.
What psychiatry calls treatment, the relational world calls belonging.
The DSM catalogues deviations from a world already disordered by extraction.
The relational alternative restores the world that empire unmade.
Epistemic Refusal: Toward Decolonial Neurodivergence
Some will say that what I have spoken here is dangerous.
That to question objectivity is to abandon reason.
That to critique psychiatry is to endanger the vulnerable.
That to call this empire’s machinery is to step outside of science itself.
But I say this gently:
Look.
Simply look.
Look to the world as it now stands:
A planet in ecological collapse, precisely because it was treated as inert resource rather than living relation.
Economic systems that have engineered staggering inequality, precisely because human value was reduced to statistical productivity.
Institutions of care that fragment and pathologise, precisely because they mistake structural harm for individual defect.
Neurodivergent children forced into therapies of compliance, precisely because their natural ways of being are misread through norms built on disconnection.
This is not “anti-science.”
It is the recognition that science is never outside its own entanglements.
Quantum physics has already shown us:
The observer is never neutral.
The act of measurement alters the measured.
Ecology shows us:
Systems thrive in balance, not control.
Disability justice shows us:
Embodiment carries knowledge unrecognised by detached experts.
Neurodivergent lives show us:
Sensory, affective, relational knowing is real, valid, and often wiser than imposed frameworks.
Indigenous knowledge traditions have always known:
The world is alive, and we belong to it.
The claim of neutrality was always a convenience — a shield behind which power could claim its gaze was pure.
The refusal I offer here is not a rejection of knowing.
It is a restoration of plural epistemologies —
a making space again for what was dismembered:
Embodied knowing.
Sensory knowing.
Relational knowing.
Story as knowledge.
Land as teacher.
Community as medicine.
In the ruins of empire’s collapsing machinery, it is these forms of knowing that will carry us forward.
Not because they are new, but because they were never fully erased.
I speak this not as a theorist standing apart, but as one who has lived within the machinery, who once served its laboratories, who now carries the shape of its harm inside my own neurodivergent body.
The future belongs to those who remember that wholeness was never found in detachment.
It was always here — in relation.
And thus, the spiral completes its turn.
The wound named; the thread unbroken.