Institutionalized Madness

Book excerpt: Institutionalized Madness takes a critical, wide-ranging look at the ways in which psychiatry and the psychiatric “mental disorder” paradigm are embedded within various institutions. It examines how the specialty of psychiatry and its accompanying controversial menu of “mental disorders”, or “mental illnesses” are omnipresent throughout various facets of everyday life. Issues that will be explored include how psychiatry and the law interact, such as in the areas of guardianship, informed consent, and expert testimony in courts. Other topics covered will be psychiatry’s influence on “Big Pharma,” the role of psychiatric diagnosis in schools (e.g., the provision of school-based services, such as Special Education support), the interplay between psychiatry and government (such as the mandated use of psychiatric diagnosis in healthcare), and more. In short, this volume attempts to bring to the surface the many differing ways in which psychiatry and mental illness/disorder rhetoric can or do touch our lives, whether we are aware of their influence or not. Institutionalized Madness is the sixth Volume of the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series.