Abstract
This article offers a critique and reconstruction of the concept of medicalization. Most researchers describe medicalization as the redefinition of social problems as medical concerns, and track its spread by the proliferation of disease language and diagnostic categories. Forensic psychiatry and disorders like psychopathy are often cited in these debates. I argue that focusing on discourse overlooks how medical language can justify or mask non-medical practices and outcomes, and lead researchers to identify medicalization where it has not occurred. Building on other critiques of medicalization and recent studies of medical and legal expertise, I propose an alternative conception based on conditions for the performance of medical practice and other forms of expert labor. I distinguish the participation or intervention of medical practitioners from the medicalization of expert practice and identify several institutional factors that facilitate the latter. I illustrate this approach using a critical historical case: the first adult penal psychiatric clinic in the United States, founded by the eminent psychopathologist Bernard Glueck at New York’s Sing Sing Prison in 1916. Glueck’s extensive writings reveal little evidence of medicalization: psychopaths were largely defined and diagnosed according to penal rather than medical criteria, and they received additional punishment rather than treatment. A review of recent research confirms that psychopathy remains primarily a penal rather than medical condition. I conclude that focusing studies of medicalization on practice rather than discourse clarifies the concept and avoids reifying the notion of a medicalized society.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Wacquant (2009, p. xxii) sharpens the insight by pointing out that “medicalization often [serves] as a conduit to criminalization at the bottom of the class structure as it introduces a logic of individual treatment” that resembles the assignation of criminal guilt.
Psychiatry was not a primary focus of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1910s. But the Foundation did regularly support the efforts of the National Committee on Mental Hygiene, including providing ten thousand dollars to fund Glueck’s work at Sing Sing. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Foundation’s president, was interested in the theories of eugenics that undergirded many medical and charitable interventions of the time, and used foundation funds to support eugenic efforts (Fosdick 1952; Gunn 1999; Rockefeller Foundation 1916).
For these reasons, Glueck’s clinic can be considered in analytic terms a “most likely” case: if medicalization did not occur under these favorable circumstances, it is less likely to have elsewhere (Flyvbjerg 2006, p. 231).
Debates over the links between psychopathy and criminality repeat themselves “as regularly as clock-work,” though unfortunately with an “extreme paucity of enlightenment” (Karpman 1948, p. 523). See, among many examples from across the decades, Blackburn 1988; Bowman and Rose 1952; Huddleston 1926; Karpman 1948.
The jurisdictional distinctions between these fields were constantly at issue, with psychologists typically claiming the feebleminded and psychometric techniques and psychiatrists claiming the mentally diseased and medical techniques. For a view of the disciplinary terrain at the time, see Healy 1922.
Some defense experts, however, have used fMRI brain scans of defendants in capital cases to argue for leniency (Phillips 2013), while one experimental study suggests that the label of psychopathy is less relevant to hypothetical juror decisions than predictions of high propensity for future violence (Cox et al. 2010).
Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346 (1997); Kansas v. Crane, 534 U.S. 407 (2002).
References
Abbott, A. (1982). The emergence of American psychiatry, 1880–1930. PhD dissertation: University of Chicago.
Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions: An essay on the division of expert labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Acker, C. J. (1993). Stigma or legitimation? A historical examination of the social potentials of addiction disease models. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 25(3), 193–205.
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: The Free Press.
Benedikt, M. (1881). Anatomical studies upon brains of criminals. New York: William Wood.
Berrios, G. E. (1999). J.C. Prichard and the concept of ‘moral insanity. History of Psychiatry, 10(37), 111–126.
Birnbaum, K. (1914). Die psychopathischen Verbrecher: die Grenzzustände zwischen geistiger Gesundheit und Krankheit in ihren Beziehungen zu Verbrechen und Strafwesen. Berlin: Langenscheidt.
Blackburn, R. (1988). On moral judgements and personality disorders: The myth of psychopathic personality revisited. British Journal of Psychiatry, 153(4), 505–512.
Blair, R. J. R. (2003). Neurobiological basis of psychopathy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 182(1), 5–7.
Blais, J., & Forth, A. E. (2014). Potential labeling effects: Influence of psychopathy diagnosis, defendant age, and defendant gender on mock jurors' decisions. Psychology, Crime & Law, 20(2), 116–134.
Brian, D. (2005). Sing sing: the inside story of a notorious prison. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Boccaccini, M. T., Murrie, D. C., Clark, J. W., & Cornell, D. G. (2008). Describing, diagnosing, and naming psychopathy: How do youth psychopathy labels influence jurors? Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 26(4), 487–510.
Bourdieu, P. (1990 [1980]). The logic of practice. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Bowman, K. M., & Rose, M. (1952). A criticism of the current usage of the term “sexual psychopath”. American Journal of Psychiatry, 109(3), 177–182.
Brown, P. (1990). The name game: Toward a sociology of diagnosis. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 11(3/4), 385–406.
Brown, P. (1995). Naming and framing: The social construction of diagnosis and illness. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Extra Issue: Forty Years of Medical Sociology: The State of the Art and Directions for the Future: 34–52.
Burns, S. L., & Peyrot, M. (2003). Tough love: Nurturing and coercing responsibility and recovery in California drug courts. Social Problems, 50(3), 416–438.
Camp, J. P., Skeem, J. L., Barchard, K., Lillenfeld, S. O., & Poythress, N. G. (2013). Psychopathic predators? Getting specific about the relation between psychopathy and violence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 81(3), 467–480.
Campbell, N. (2012). Medicalization and biomedicalization: Does the diseasing of addiction fit the frame? In J. Netherland (Ed.), Critical perspectives on addiction (pp. 3–25). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Castel, R. (1988 [1976]). The regulation of madness: The origins of incarceration in France. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chamberlain, R. W. (1935). There is no truce: A life of Thomas Mott Osborne. New York: Macmillan.
Clarke, A. E., Shim, J. K., Mamo, L., Fosket, J. R., & Fishman, J. R. (2003). Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and U.S. biomedicine. American Sociological Review, 68(2), 161–194.
Conrad, P. (1975). The discovery of hyperkinesis: Notes on the medicalization of deviant behavior. Social Problems, 23(1), 12–21.
Conrad, P. (1979). Types of medical social control. Sociology of Health and Illness, 1(1), 1–11.
Conrad, P. (1992). Medicalization and social control. Annual Review of Sociology, 18, 209–232.
Conrad, P. (2005). The shifting engines of medicalization. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 46, 3–14.
Conrad, P. (2008). The medicalization of society: On the transformation of human conditions into treatable disorders. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Conrad, P., & Schneider, J. W. (1992 [1980]). Deviance and medicalization: From badness to sickness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Cooke, D. J., & Michie, C. (1997). An item response theory analysis of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. Psychological Assessment, 9(1), 3–14.
Cooke, D. J., & Michie, C. (1999). Psychopathy across cultures: North America and Scotland compared. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 108(1), 58–68.
Cooke, D. J., Michie, C., Hart, S. D., & Clark, D. A. (2004). Reconstructing psychopathy: Clarifying the significance of antisocial and socially deviant behavior in the diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder. Journal of Personality Disorders, 18(4), 337–357.
Cooter, R. J. (1976). Phrenology and British alienists, c. 1825–1845, parts 1 and 2. Medical History, 20(1–2), 1–21 135–151.
Courtwright, D. T. (2010). The NIDA brain disease paradigm: History, resistance. and spinoffs. BioSocieties, 5(1), 137–147.
Cox, S. D. (2009). The big house: Image and reality of the American prison. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cox, J., DeMatteo, D. S., & Foster, E. E. (2010). The effect of the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised in capital cases: Mock jurors’ responses to the label of psychopathy. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 28(6), 878–891.
Cox, J., Edens, J. F., Rulseh, A., & Clark, J. W. (2016). Juror perceptions of the interpersonal-affective traits of psychopathy predict sentence severity in a white-collar criminal case. Psychology, Crime & Law, 22(8), 721–740.
Dain, N., & Carlson, E. T. (1962). Moral insanity in the United States 1835–1866. American Journal of Psychiatry, 118(9), 795–801.
Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: how psychology found its language. London: SAGE Publications.
Davis, J. E. (2006). How medicalization lost its way. Society, 43(6), 51–56.
Davis, J. E. (2010). Medicalization, social control, and the relief of suffering. In W. C. Cockerham (Ed.), The new Blackwell companion to medical sociology (pp. 211–241). Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
DeMatteo, D., & Edens, J. F. (2006). The role and relevance of the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised in court: A case law survey of U.S. courts (1991–2004). Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 12(2), 214–241.
DeMatteo, D., Edens, J. F., Galloway, M., Cox, J., Smith, S. T., & Formon, D. (2014). The role and reliability of the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised in U.S. sexually violent predator evaluations: A case law survey. Law and Human Behavior, 38(3), 248–255.
Dolan, M. (1994). Psychopathy—A neurobiological perspective. British Journal of Psychiatry 165(2), 151–159.
Edens, J. F., Davis, K. M., Fernandez Smith, K., & Guy, L. S. (2013). No sympathy for the devil: Attributing psychopathic traits to capital murderers also predicts support for executing them. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 4(2), 175–181.
Eghigian, G. (2015). A drifting concept for an unruly menace: A history of psychopathy in Germany. Isis, 106(2), 283–309.
Eigen, J. P. (2010). Diagnosing homicidal mania: Forensic psychiatry and the purposeless murder. Medical History, 54, 433–456.
Elam, M. (2015). How the brain disease paradigm remoralizes addictive behavior. Science as Culture, 24(1), 46–64.
Eyal, G. (2013). For a sociology of expertise: The social origins of the autism epidemic. American Journal of Sociology, 118(4), 863–907.
Fine, C., & Kennett, J. (2004). Mental impairment, moral understanding and criminal responsibility: Psychopathy and the purposes of punishment. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 27(5), 425–443.
Fink, A. E. (1938). Causes of crime: Biological theories in the United States, 1800–1915. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.
Follis, L. (2008). Ordering penal space: New York state prison governance in nineteenth century America. The New School: PhD dissertation.
Fosdick, R. B. (1952). The story of the Rockefeller Foundation. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Foucault, M. (1970 [1966]). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, M. (1972 [1969]). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1973 [1963]). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1977a [1975]). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, M. (1977b [1971]). Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews (pp. 139–164). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). About the concept of the ‘dangerous individual’ in 19th-century legal psychiatry. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 1(1), 1–18.
Foucault, M. (2003 [1999]). Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. New York: Picador.
Foucault, M. (2006a [1961]). History of madness. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2006b [2003]). Psychiatric power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974. New York: Picador.
Foucault, M. (2015 [2013]). The Punitive society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fox, A. R., Kvaran, T. H., & Fontaine, R. G. (2013). Psychopathy and culpability: How responsible is the psychopath for criminal wrongdoing? Law & Social Inquiry, 38(1), 1–26.
Freedman, E. B. (1987). “Uncontrolled desires”: The response to the sexual psychopath, 1920–1960. Journal of American History, 74(1), 83–106.
Friedland, S. I. (1999). On treatment, punishment, and the civil commitment of sex offenders. University of Colorado Law Review, 70, 73–154.
Freidson, E. (1970). The profession of medicine: A study in the sociology of applied knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galanek, J. D. (2013). The cultural construction of mental illness in prison: A perfect storm of pathology. Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry, 37, 195–225.
Garton, S. (2010). Criminal propensities: Psychiatry, classification and imprisonment in New York State 1916–1940. Social History of Medicine, 23(1), 79–97.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gildemeister, G. A. (1987). Prison labor and convict competition with free workers in industrial America, 1840–1890. New York: Garland Publishing Company.
Glueck, B. (1916). Studies in forensic psychiatry. Boston: Little Brown.
Glueck, B. (1917). Types of delinquent careers. Mental Hygiene, 1(2), 171–195.
Glueck, B. (1918a). Concerning prisoners. Mental Hygiene, 2(2), 177–218.
Glueck, B. (1918b). Psychiatric aims in the field of criminology. Mental Hygiene, 2(4), 546–556.
Glueck, B. (1918c). A study of 608 admissions to Sing Sing Prison. Mental Hygiene, 2(1), 85–151.
Glueck, B. (1919). Review of: Die psychopathischen Verbrecher. (The psychopathic criminal.) by Karl Birnbaum. Mental Hygiene, 3(1), 157–166.
Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Anchor Books.
Goldstein, J. E. (1987). Console and classify: The French psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gong, N. (2017). “That proves you mad, because you know it not”: Impaired insight and the dilemma of governing psychiatric patients as legal subjects. Theory and Society, 46, 201–228.
Gowan, T., & Whetstone, S. (2012). Making the criminal addict: subjectivity and social control in a strong-arm rehab. Punishment & Society, 14(1), 69–93.
Grob, G. N. (1973). Mental institutions in America: Social policy to 1870. New York: Free Press.
Grob, G. N. (1983). Mental illness and American society, 1875–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Grossman, T. M. (1999). Kansas v. Hendricks: The diminishing role of treatment in the involuntary civil confinement of sexually dangerous persons. New England Law Review, 33(2), 475–513.
Gunn, J. (1999). A few good men: The Rockefeller approach to population, 1911–1936. In T. Richardson & D. Fisher (Eds.), The Development of the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy (pp. 97–114). Stamford: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Gusfield, J. R. (1963). Symbolic crusade: Status politics and the American temperance movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hacking, I. (1991). The making and molding of child abuse. Critical Inquiry, 17(2), 253–288.
Hacking, I. (1995). Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Halfmann, D. (2012). Recognizing medicalization and demedicalization: Discourses, practices, and identities. Health, 16(2), 186–207.
Hall, J. R., & Benning, S. D. (2006). The “successful” psychopath: Adaptive and subclinical manifestations of psychopathy in the general population. In C. J. Patrick (Ed.), Handbook of psychopathy (pp. 459–480). New York: Guilford Press.
Hall, W., Carter, A., & Forlini, C. (2015). The brain disease model of addiction: Is it supported by the evidence and has it delivered on its promises? The Lancet Psychiatry, 2, 105–110.
Halleck, S. (1965). American psychiatry and the criminal: A historical review. American Journal of Psychiatry, 121(9), i–xxi.
Hare, R. D. (1998). Psychopaths and their nature. In Millon, T., E. Simonsen, M. Birket–Smith, & R. D. Davis (Eds.), Psychopathy: antisocial, criminal, and violent behavior (pp. 188–212). New York: Guilford Press.
Hare, R. D. (2003). Manual for the Revised Psychopathy Checklist (2nd ed.). Toronto: Multi-Health Systems.
Hare, R. D., & Neumann, C. S. (2005). Structural models of psychopathy. Current Psychiatry Reports, 7(1), 57–64.
Hare, R. D., & Neumann, C. S. (2010). The role of antisociality in the psychopathy construct: Comment on Skeem and Cooke (2010). Psychological Assessment, 22(2), 446–454.
Hare, R. D., Harpur, T. J., Hakstian, A. R., Forth, A. E., Hart, S. D., & Newman, J. P. (1990). The Revised Psychopathy Checklist: Reliability and factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 2(3), 338–341.
Hasenfeld, Y. (1972). People processing organizations: An exchange approach. American Sociological Review, 37(3), 256–263.
Haydu, J. (1998). Making use of the past: Time periods as cases to compare and as sequences of problem solving. American Journal of Sociology, 104(2), 339–371.
Healy, W. (1915). The individual delinquent. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
Healy, W. (1922). Psychiatry, psychology, psychologists, psychiatrists. Mental Hygiene, 6(2), 248–256.
Hilgard, E. R. (1980). The trilogy of mind: Cognition, affection, and conation. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 16(2), 107–117.
Holmes, C. A. (1991). Psychopathic disorder: A category mistake? Journal of Medical Ethics, 17(2), 77–85.
Horley, J. (2014). The emergence and development of psychopathy. History of the Human Sciences, 27(5), 91–110.
Huddleston, J. H. (1926). The part of conduct disorders in the concept of constitutional psychopathic inferiority. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 64(2), 151–156.
Huertas, R. (1993). Madness and degeneration, III: Degeneration and criminality. History of Psychiatry, 4(2), 141–158.
Illich, I. (1976). Medical nemesis: The expropriation of health. New York: Pantheon Books.
Jenkins, P. (1998). Moral panic: changing concepts of the child molester in modern America. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jutel, A. G. (2009). Sociology of diagnosis: A preliminary review. Sociology of Health & Illness, 31(2), 278–299.
Jutel, A. G. (2011). Putting a name to it: Diagnosis in contemporary society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Karpman, B. (1948). The myth of the psychopathic personality. American Journal of Psychiatry, 104(9), 523–534.
Kiehl, K. A. (2006). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on psychopathy: Evidence for paralimbic system dysfunction. Psychiatry Research, 142(2-3), 107–128.
Kittrie, N. N. (1971). The right to be different: Deviance and enforced therapy. Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Knox, H. A. (1914). A scale, based on the work at Ellis Island, for estimating mental defect. Journal of the American Medical Association, 62(10), 741–747.
Kraepelin, E., & Diefendorf, A. R. (1907). Clinical psychiatry: A text-book for students and physicians. New York: Macmillan.
Kvaale, E. P., Haslam, N., & Gottdiener, W. H. (2013). The “side effects” of medicalization: A meta-analytic review of how biogenetic explanations affect stigma. Clinical Psychology Review, 33, 782–794.
La Fond, J. Q. (1992). Washington’s sexually violent predator law: A deliberate misuse of the therapeutic state for social control. Puget Sound Law Review, 15(3), 655–708.
Lamb, S. D. (2014). Pathologist of the mind: Adolf Meyer and the origins of American psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lamb, H. R., & Weinberger, L. E. (2005). The shift of psychiatric inpatient care from hospitals to jails and prisons. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 33(4), 529–534.
Lamb, H. R., Weinberger, L. E., & DeCuir, W. J., Jr. (2002). The police and mental health. Psychiatric Services, 53(10), 1266–1271.
Lebensohn, Z. M. (1973). In memoriam: Bernard Glueck, Sr. 1884–1972. American Journal of Psychiatry, 130(3), 326.
Levy, K. (2011). Dangerous psychopaths: Criminally responsible but not morally responsible, subject to criminal punishment and to preventative detention. San Diego Law Review, 48, 1299–1395.
Lloyd, C. D., Clark, H. L., & Forth, A. E. (2010). Psychopathy, expert testimony, and indeterminate sentences: Exploring the relationship between psychopathy checklist–revised testimony and trial outcome in Canada. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 15(2), 323–339.
Lombroso, C. (2006 [1876]). The criminal man. Durham: Duke University Press.
McGann, P. J., & Hutson, D. J. (2011). Sociology of diagnosis. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.
McGovern, C. M. (1985). Masters of madness: Social origins of the American psychiatric profession. Hanover: University Press of New England.
McKim, A. (2017). Addicted to rehab: Race, gender, and drugs in the era of mass incarceration. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
McLennan, R. M. (2008). The crisis of imprisonment: Protest, politics, and the making of the American penal state, 1776–1941. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Metzl, J. M. (2010). The protest psychosis: How schizophrenia became a black disease. Boston: Beacon Press.
Metzl, J. M., & Kirkland, A. (Eds.). (2010). Against health: how health became the new morality. New York: New York University Press.
Millon, T., Simonsen, E., Birket–Smith, M., & Davis, R. D. (Eds.). (1998). Psychopathy: Antisocial, criminal, and violent behavior. New York: Guilford Press.
Moran, R. (1992 [1980]). Medicine and crime: The search for the born criminal and the medical control of criminality. In P. Conrad & J. W. Schneider (Eds.), Deviance and medicalization (pp. 215–240). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Mullins-Sweatt, S. N., Glover, N. G., Derefinko, K. J., Miller, J. D., & Widiger, T. A. (2010). The search for the successful psychopath. Journal of Research in Personality, 44, 554–558.
Murphy, J. (2015). Illness or deviance? Drug courts, drug treatment, and the ambiguity of addiction. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Nadelhoffer, T., & Sinnott-Armstrong, W. P. (2013). Is psychopathy a mental disease? In N. A. Vincent (Ed.), Neuroscience and legal responsibility (pp. 229–255). New York: Oxford University Press.
New York Times. (1916). Sing sing will be country’s first clinic of crime. 16 July, p. 1.
New York Times. (1917). Prison at Beekman for feeble-minded. 19 January, p. 4.
New York Times. (1922). Crime clinics growing: New experiments to check young delinquents yield good results. 18 June, p. 75.
New York Times. (1924). Expert says Loeb admitted he was the actual slayer. 7 August, p. 1.
Nolan, J. L. (2001). Reinventing justice: The American drug court movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ortner, S. B. (1984). Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(1), 126–166.
Osborne, T. M. (1914). Within prison walls: Being a narrative of personal experience during a week of voluntary confinement in the state prison at Auburn, New York. New York: D. Appleton & Company.
Panetta, R. (1999). Up the river: A history of Sing Sing in the nineteenth century. PhD dissertation, City University of New York.
Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York: The Free Press.
Partridge, G. E. (1930). Current conceptions of psychopathic personality. American Journal of Psychiatry, 87(1), 53–99.
Petchesky, R. P. (1993). At hard labor: Penal confinement and production in nineteenth century America. In D. F. Greenberg (Ed.), Crime and capitalism: Readings in Marxist criminology (pp. 595–611). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Pfohl, S. J. (1977). The “discovery” of child abuse. Social Problems, 24(3), 310–323.
Phillips, K. D. (2013). Empathy for psychopaths: Using fMRI brain scans to plea for leniency in death penalty cases. University of Alabama Law & Psychology Review, 37, 1–48.
Pick, D. (1993). Faces of degeneration: A European disorder, c. 1848 – c. 1919. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pickersgill, M. (2009). Between soma and society: Neuroscience and the ontology of psychopathy. BioSocieties, 4(1), 45–60.
Pickersgill, M. (2011). Ordering disorder: Knowledge production and uncertainty in neuroscience research. Science as Culture, 20(1), 71–87.
Pisciotta, A. W. (1994). Benevolent repression: Social control and the American reformatory–prison movement. New York: New York University Press.
Pressman, J. D. (1998). Last resort: psychosurgery and the limits of medicine. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rafter, N. H. (1992). Criminal anthropology in the United States. Criminology, 30(4), 525–546.
Rafter, N. (1997). Psychopathy and the evolution of criminological knowledge. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2), 235–259.
Rafter, N. (2004). The unrepentant horse-slasher: Moral insanity and the origins of criminological thought. Criminology, 42(4), 979–1008.
Rafter, N. (2005). The murderous Dutch fiddler: Criminology, history, and the problem of phrenology. Theoretical Criminology, 9(1), 65–96.
Rafter, N. (2008). The criminal brain: Understanding biological theories of crime. New York: New York University Press.
Raine, A. (2013). The anatomy of violence: The biological roots of crime. New York: Vintage.
Reinarman, C. (2005). Addiction as accomplishment: The discursive construction of disease. Addiction Research & Theory, 13(4), 307–320.
Rhodes, L. A. (2002). Psychopathy and the face of control in supermax. Ethnography, 3(4), 442–466.
Rhodes, L. A. (2004). Total confinement: Madness and reason in the maximum security prison. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rhodes, L. A. (2007). Ethnography “inside”: Acknowledging the 2005 Anthony Leeds prize for Total confinement. City & Society, 19(1), 77–80.
Rockefeller Foundation. (1916). Psychopathic clinic at sing sing prison. The Rockefeller Foundation, 1(3), 15.
Rose, N. (1989). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. London: Routledge.
Rose, N. (1996). Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, N. (2007a). Beyond medicalisation. Lancet, 369, 700–701.
Rose, N. (2007b). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Roter, D., & Hall, J. A. (2006). Doctors talking with patients/patients talking with doctors: Improving communication in medical visits. Westport: Praeger Publishers.
Rothman, D. J. (1971). The discovery of the asylum: Social order and disorder in the new republic. Boston: Little, Brown.
Rothman, D. J. (1980). Conscience and convenience: The asylum and its alternatives in progressive America.
Schneider, J. W. (1985). Defining the definitional perspective on social problems. Social Problems, 32(3), 232–234.
Schnittker, J. (2017). The diagnostic system: Why the classification of psychiatric disorders is necessary, difficult, and never settled. New York: Columbia University Press.
Scull, A. (1975). From madness to mental illness: Medical men as moral entrepreneurs. European Journal of Sociology, 16(2), 218–261.
Scull, A. (1979). Moral treatment reconsidered: Some sociological comments on an episode in the history of British psychiatry. Psychological Medicine, 9, 421–428.
Scull, A. (1989). Social disorder/mental disorder: Anglo-American psychiatry in historical perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scull, A. (2005). Madhouse: a tragic tale of megalomania and modern medicine. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Simon, J. (2000). The ‘society of captives’ in the era of hyper-incarceration. Theoretical Criminology, 4(3), 285–308.
Skålevåg, S. A. (2006). The matter of forensic psychiatry: A historical enquiry. Medical History, 50, 49–68.
Skeem, J. L., & Cooke, D. J. (2010a). Is criminal behavior a central component of psychopathy? Conceptual directions for resolving the debate. Psychological Assessment, 22(2), 433–445.
Skeem, J. L., & Cooke, D. J. (2010b). One measure does not a construct make: Directions toward reinvigorating psychopathy research--reply to Hare and Neumann (2010). Psychological Assessment, 22(2), 455–459.
Smith, S. T., Edens, J. F., Clark, J., & Rulseh, A. (2014). “So, what is a psychopath?” Venireperson perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes about psychopathic personality. Law and Human Behavior, 38(5), 490–500.
Sofaer, S., & Firminger, K. (2005). Patient perceptions of the quality of health services. Annual Review of Public Health, 26, 513–559.
Spaulding, E. R. (1923). An experimental study of psychopathic delinquent women. Montclair: Patterson Smith.
Stein, D. J. (1996). The philosophy of psychopathy. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 39(4), 569–580.
Stuart, F. (2016). Down, out, and under arrest: Policing and everyday life in skid row. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Szasz, T. S. (1958a). Men and machines. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 8(32), 310–317.
Szasz, T. S. (1958b). Psychiatry, ethics, and the criminal law. Columbia Law Review, 58(2), 183–198.
Szasz, T. S. (1961). The myth of mental illness: Foundations of a theory of personal conduct. New York: Harper & Row.
Szasz, T. S. (1970). The manufacture of madness: A comparative study of the inquisition and the mental health movement. New York: Harper & Row.
Szasz, T. S. (1977). Psychiatric slavery. New York: The Free Press.
Szasz, T. S. (1994). Cruel compassion: Psychiatric control of society’s unwanted. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Szasz, T. S. (2002). Liberation by oppression: A comparative study of slavery and psychiatry. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Szasz, T. S. (2007). The medicalization of everyday life: Selected essays. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Tiger, R. (2012). Judging addicts: Drug courts and coercion in the justice system. New York: New York University Press.
Tighe, J. A. (1983). A question of responsibility: The development of American forensic psychiatry, 1838–1930. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Tighe, J. A. (2005). “What’s in a name?”: A brief foray into the history of insanity in England and the United States. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 33(2), 252–258.
Viljoen, J. L., MacDougall, E. A. M., Gagnon, N. C., & Douglas, K. S. (2010). Psychopathy evidence in legal proceedings involving adolescent offenders. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 16(3), 254–283.
Wacquant, L. (2002). The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass incarceration. Ethnography, 3(4), 371–397.
Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Washington Post. (1916). Dr. Glueck guest of honor: Tendered a farewell dinner on eve of departure to new post. 13 July, p. 10.
Werlinder, H. (1978). Psychopathy: A history of the concepts. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International.
Whetstone, S., & Gowan, T. (2017). Carceral rehab as fuzzy penality: Hybrid technologies of control in the new temperance crusade. Social Justice, 44(2/3), 83–112.
Whitlock, F. A. (1967). Prichard and the concept of moral insanity. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 1(2), 72–79.
Williams, R. (1983 [1976]). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Fontana.
Willrich, M. (2003). City of courts: Socializing justice in progressive era Chicago. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wootten, B. (1959). Social science and social pathology. New York: Macmillan.
Zinger, I., & Forth, A. E. (1998). Psychopathy and Canadian criminal proceedings: The potential for human rights abuses. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 40(3), 237–276.
Zola, I. K. (1972). Medicine as an institution of social control. The Sociological Review, 20(4), 487–504.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Bernard Harcourt and Kristen Schilt for advising the undergraduate thesis that formed the original basis for this article. I also thank Alex Barnard, Lindsay Berkowitz, Leah Jacobs, Christopher Muller, Josh Seim, Loïc Wacquant, discussants at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, and the Editors and reviewers at Theory and Society for their extensive and incisive comments. This research was partially supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Showalter, D. Misdiagnosing medicalization: penal psychopathy and psychiatric practice. Theor Soc 48, 67–94 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09336-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09336-y