The contested nature of psychiatry

Charles E. Rosenberg has an interesting paper on how psychiatry expanded in the last third of the 19th century to "include an ever-broader variety of emotional pain, idiosyncrasy, and culturally unsettling behaviors". Our modern somatic understanding of illness had to accommodate older "[h]umoral explanations of temperamental peculiarity", such as hypochondriasis, hysteria and melancholy. It began to do this at the beginning of the 19th century, by, for example, Benjamin Rush seeing hypochondria as having a corporeal cause. These "reductionist, mechanism-oriented, and antivitalist" ways of viewing illness created hypothetical disease entities, such as neurasthenia, regarded by George Beard in 1869 as a somatic condition which would eventually be confirmed by postmortem pathology.

As Rosenberg says:-

The dominance of reductionist styles ... has an extraordinarily salient place today. We have never been more infatuated with visions of molecular and neurochemical — ultimately genetic — truth.

As he also says, "yet at the same time we are reflexive [and] critical ... in our approach", even if this is a minority perspective. As discussed in my previous post, psychiatry is polarised about the nature of mental illness. Psychotropic medication has helped legitimate the specific disease entity model of mental illness. This is a "phenomenon that is always in process, always contested, and never completed". With the expansion of the "range of human dilemmas that we ask medicine to address", to quote from Rosenberg:-

[I]t is ... inevitable that the powerful concept of disease specificity has been — and will continue to be — employed as a tool for the ideological management of problematic emotions and behaviors.

(With thanks to a tweet from Richard Hassall)