Neither healthy nor sick: Psychiatric standards of deviance and conformity

article relatif à la catégorisation du trouble mental et de la normalité par la psychiatrie américaineThe article examines the tensions involved in the development of treatment for mentaldisorders during the period 1950-1980 in the United States. It relates those tensions to the diffusion ofa social ideal strongly influenced by the subjectivist fervor characteristic of post-war America but alsointernally contradictory. Psychiatric diagnosis came to be seen as a way of disqualifying theindividual, and this line of criticism went so far as to question the very existence of mental illness. Butthis context also worked to identify psychic disorder with an incomplete self, so that mental healthcame to be understood as a kind of generic measure of individuality. The article first considers theantagonism between these representations as suggested by the effects they had on professionalizationand the division of labor in the psychiatric field. It then seeks to show how the set of nosographicstandards that were established at the end of the period—the famous DSM-III—offered a means ofnegotiating and reconciling the different visions of mental disorder, by separating both health andpathology out from questions of social normalit