Uses and Abuses of Psychiatric Diagnosis

Abstract

The concept of mental illness has changed over the centuries, and even more so during recent decades. In the 1970s, for example, the antipsychiatry movement, inspired by the counterculture, decreed, as we have seen in Chapters 2 and 4, that mental illness did not exist and so-called « madness » was just a label society (itself alienated) brandished to marginalise minorities, transforming them into scapegoats for all the ills of our culture. The justification of the profession of ‘psychiatrist’ was questioned and the role of mental hospitals challenged.