The sociology of emotions in the psychiatric practice: how residents in psychiatry learn to dislike patients with borderline personality disorder

Abstract

According to the literature, the most disliked patient subgroup is the one diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). The current study aimed to explore how psychiatry residents’ emotions toward patients with BPD are learned during biomedical training and how their emotional socialization within an inpatient psychiatric ward contributes to the formation of a professional, authoritative identity, while also strengthening ingroup members’ bonds and reinforcing the asymmetric relationship in terms of power between psychiatrists and hospitalized patients. This article reports on the findings coming from a combination of ethnographic field research in a psychiatric ward of a general hospital and in-depth interviews with eight residents in psychiatry, regarding their emotions toward patients with BPD. The transcriptions of the interviews and the descriptions from field notes were analyzed by thematic analysis. One of the main themes revealed during the analysis of the data is called ‘socialized emotions’ and consisted of three subthemes: a) representational emotions, b) experienced emotions, and c) performed emotions. The three subthemes could correspond to three phases of the process of emotional socialization of the residents in psychiatry regarding patients with BPD: a) formation of emotionalized schemes, b) lived experiences, and c) clinical practices. The sociological understanding of how emotional aspects of the professional identity of the doctor are taught during the residencies is of particular interest. Both clinical and research implications are discussed.