Devenir un informateur : le soupçon dans le diagnostic par l’entremise d’autrui

• Main Author: Laurence Tessier
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2016-11-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: suspicion; knowledge; diagnosis; Alzheimer’s; United States; mistrust
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/6725

This article explores how clinicians in a U.S. specialist center for the diagnosis of dementia probe, interpret and mistrust the “loved ones” who accompany patients during their consultation. Drawing on observations of clinical consultations and team meetings, I ask how trust in these “informants” is challenged. The informant is thus sometimes transformed from being a routine means of gathering information about the patient into an object of diagnosis. The article shows how mistrust towards the informant is actually a tool, rather than an obstacle, for the making of clinical knowledge. Faced with a “bad informant”, rather than merely bracketing or discounting what the informant says, clinicians use what they understand of the affective relationships between the patient and the “bad informant” in order to make a diagnosis. The diagnosis of dementia in an individual is thus shown to draw on and inquire into “relational dimensions” in the patient’s life, made visible and enunciable only when they pose a problem.