Citation

Dodd J. Hist. Psychol. 2015; 18(3): 312-323.

Affiliation

Vanderbilt University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Educational Publishing Foundation)

DOI

10.1037/a0039520

PMID

26375158

Abstract

This article examines protests of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the mid-1980s to show how feminists working in mental health fields grappled with the tensions between their politics and their work. I argue that the DSM became a site where women attempted to tease out issues relating to gender, professionalization, and the power and stakes of labeling. Feminists privileged a sociological reading of gender, which butted up against mental health care workers' professional investment in psychiatric ones. Women's responses to the DSM, however, reveal that the line between the sociological and the pathological was unclear. This debate over labels is exemplified by a proposal to diagnose rapists as mentally ill. Women's advocates framed sexual assault as an issue of violence against women, rather than an issue of male sexuality. For many women, the American Psychiatric Association's proposal implied that rape was a primarily sexual act, and that male socialization needn't be examined. Others, however, saw this as one more way to label and address bad male behavior; psychiatric treatment might not ultimately put an end to rape, but these women saw any sort of treatment as a step forward. For women professionals, this proposal and the DSM more broadly raised questions about whether the 2 frameworks could be integrated, and whether psychological treatments for social problems were appropriate. (PsycINFO Database Record

Language: en