Sexism and Psychiatry

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Abstract
Two main approaches concerning the relation between sexism and psychiatry have been developed in the feminist literature. One, now less fashionable, follows Phyllis Chesler's influential Women and Madness (1972) in emphasising the centrality of sexism within psychiatry and its constructs of mental illness. The other, emphasising the sexism within Society as a whole and the way it generates mental suffering and disturbance, suggests the potential of psychiatry and the mental health professions to ameliorate that suffering. This paper looks once more at the second approach to see whether it should now be abandoned. It analyses the role gender plays within psychiatry, distinguishing three levels of definition and identification - official definition, the delineation of `normal cases', and the identification of individual cases. It points to the way in which issues of gender impinge on all three levels and argues that there is little evidence of the increasing marginalisation of the dimension of gender within psychiatry.

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