The effects of mental disorder are apparent and
pervasive, in suffering, loss of freedom and life
opportunities, negative impacts on education, work
satisfaction and productivity, complications in law,
institutions of healthcare, and more. With new editions
of the 'bibles' of psychiatric diagnosis - the ICD and
DSM - under development, it is timely to take a step
back and re-evaluate exactly how we diagnose and define
mental disorder.
This new book by Derek Bolton
tackles the problems involved in the definition and
boundaries of mental disorder. These problems are
evident now in many contexts: in the diagnostic manuals
themselves, in epidemiological estimates of prevalence,
in distinguishing normal sadness from depressive
illness, for example, or childhood temperamental traits
from developmental psychopathology, and in mental health
legislation and criminal law. In many ways these
problems are contemporary expressions of those
identified in the heated debates surrounding psychiatry
in the 1960s and 1970s: does psychiatry pathologize what
is really normal life suffering? Is mental illness
really social deviance, not a proper domain of medicine?
Is psychiatry really a form of social control?
However, these original problems have been
transformed by crucial developments over the past few
decades, and the book seeks to update the position
taking them into account. The last few decades have seen
the closing of the asylums and the appearance of care in
the community: mental disorder is now in our midst,
intensifying the problems of the '60s and '70s. Attempts
have been made to define clearly a concept of mental
disorder that is truly medical as opposed to social,
inevitably relying on the distinction between human
nature and culture. In the science, there is increasing
evidence that this distinction is unviable, and
accumulating evidence that there is no clear line
between what is normal in the population and what is
abnormal. What is Mental Disorder? reviews
these various crucial developments and their profound
impact for the concept and its boundaries in a
provocative and timely book.
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