Sexuality, Modern Identities and Psychiatry (original) (raw)
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The aim of this essay is to indicate the centrality of psychiatry's scientific discourse in the negotiation, construction and normalization of human sexuality. After a short historical account upon the dominant psychiatric discourse about homosexuality from the beginning of the nineteenth century when psychiatry emerged as a medical specialty, our focus will be on the presentation and negotiation of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). DSM was the first formal recording and scientific categorization of mental disorders, which was edited by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1952 and is still being constantly enriched. Our target is to highlight the role of psychiatry and its functions as a means of the normalization of human bodies, as well as to highlight the role of gender within specific regimes of truth as another regulative norm.
Doing psychiatry in postwar Europe, 2024
In the late 1970s, a new model for sex reassignment was developed in Norway. While people seeking medical treatment to transition had until then been cared for in an unorganised way, a new team based in a medical sexology department at the Oslo Health Council became the main medical facility for this group of patients. The team consisted of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses and GPs with a professional interest in lesbian and gay health, sexuality and the negative health effects of stigma and discrimination, and many of the professionals were themselves lesbian or gay. However, the team’s normalising and depathologising approach to lesbian and gay patients did not translate into a similar approach to transgender patients. The professionals approached the question of sex reassignment from the standpoint of sexology and social medicine, but anchored it in a diagnostic and pathologising model of transsexuality. Based on archival material and oral history interviews with health professionals and former patients, the chapter analyses the role of psychiatric expertise in the welfare state context. It argues that the role of psychiatric expertise in trans healthcare, i.e. the administrative function of psychiatrists in decisions about non-psychiatric hormonal and surgical treatment, highlights the historical significance of the non-formalised evaluative expertise of psychiatry to the welfare state – of psychiatric practices beyond psychiatry. Drawing on science and technology studies, I explore how experts standardised and legitimised psychiatric practices by incorporating them into existing epistemologies and infrastructures, but also how psychiatry was transformed in the process.
British psychiatry and homosexuality
The British Journal of Psychiatry, 1999
Access the most recent version at DOI: 1999, 175:106-113. BJP M King and A Bartlett British psychiatry and homosexuality. References http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/175/2/106#BIBL This article cites 0 articles, 0 of which you can access for free at: permissions Reprints/ permissions@rcpsych.ac.uk to To obtain reprints or permission to reproduce material from this paper, please write to this article at You can respond http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/eletter-submit/175/2/106 from Downloaded The Royal College of Psychiatrists Published by on March 9, 2013 http://bjp.rcpsych.org/ http://bjp.rcpsych.org/site/subscriptions/ go to: The British Journal of Psychiatry To subscribe to
‘Who are you today?’ Problems of identity in psychiatry
BJPsych International
Our attributes change. Sometimes they are changed so dramatically (for instance by organic brain disease, traumatic brain injury or psychiatric disease) that it is hard to see any significant continuity with the premorbid person. Sometimes this can have important ethical and legal consequences, but the problems are often ignored. This article highlights some of the difficulties.
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Psychiatry today faces challenges on many fronts, with vigorous critiques of its theory and practice from clinicians, scholars, and people with lived experience of mental health problems. These critiques target the slow progress in understanding and treating mental illness, overreliance on medications and other biomedical treatments, and the lack of attention to patients’ lifeworlds and aspirations, but extend to much broader concerns about the medicalization of everyday life, and even wholesale condemnation of psychiatry as a source of heavy-handed social control, stigma, and harmful interventions that actually undermine recovery. In recent years, many of the concerns of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s have been reasserted by a new critical psychiatry literature that builds on these earlier critiques but includes attention to contemporary questions of epistemology, political economy, and globalization (Bracken et al., 2012 Cohen & Timimi, 2008; Fernando, 2014; Mills, 2014;...
The Crisis of Present-Day Psychiatry: Regaining the Personal
The Crisis of Present-Day Psychiatry: Regaining the Personal , 1999
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Culture, mental health and psychiatry - Spring 2024
While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as brain disease, there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?