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Autre publication scientifique Année : 2009

Neither healthy nor sick

Résumé

The article examines the tensions involved in the development of treatment for mental
disorders during the period 1950-1980 in the United States. It relates those tensions to the diffusion of
a social ideal strongly influenced by the subjectivist fervor characteristic of post-war America but also
internally contradictory. Psychiatric diagnosis came to be seen as a way of disqualifying the
individual, and this line of criticism went so far as to question the very existence of mental illness. But
this context also worked to identify psychic disorder with an incomplete self, so that mental health
came to be understood as a kind of generic measure of individuality. The article first considers the
antagonism between these representations as suggested by the effects they had on professionalization
and the division of labor in the psychiatric field. It then seeks to show how the set of nosographic
standards that were established at the end of the period—the famous DSM-III—offered a means of
negotiating and reconciling the different visions of mental disorder, by separating both health and
pathology out from questions of social normality

Domaines

Sociologie
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Dates et versions

halshs-00351670, version 1 (09-01-2009)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00351670 , version 1

Citer

Philippe Le Moigne. Neither healthy nor sick: Psychiatric standards of deviance and conformity. 2009. ⟨halshs-00351670⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 28/04/2024
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