Parent perspectives on brain scans and genetic tests for OCD: Talking of difficult presents, desired pasts, and imagined futures

This paper investigates parent perspectives on potential future applications of neuroimaging and genetic research in the OCD clinical setting. Grounded in qualitative interviews with parents whose children had participated in an OCD neuroimaging and genetic research study in the United States, we situate parent discussions of imagined futures in their projections from difficult presents and into desired pasts. Parents reported apparently high receptivity to potential future neuroimaging and genetic tests. Yet when they responded, ‘yes, anything that helps’, uncertainty, caution, and resistance were expressed in implicit negotiations over what it means to ‘help’. We situate the discussion of future technologies in the wider context of how a biological approach figures in parents’ understandings of OCD. A biological perspective was prioritised when it facilitated a journey towards understanding-as-acting; the intense gathering of knowledge judged likely to lead to better outcomes. When biological knowledge did not seem likely to lead to or itself constitute action, parents were often reluctant to even discuss it. The perspectives of those who may encounter future technologies are relevant to shaping their development, but gathering and interpreting such perspectives presents methodological, conceptual, and normative difficulties. These difficulties with time-travelling talk are discussed throughout the paper.