Social discrediting of psychiatry: the protasis of legal disfranchisement

The author believes that recent legal decisions against psychiatrists (including class action suits) have their genesis in writings by sociologists and other behavioral scientists, including psychiatrists, who have examined psychiatry in the context of social structure and social processes. The discrediting of the medical model could have been accomplished using theorectical assertions and research observations that had been published before 1940, but it did not occur until the human rights movement of the 1960s. The author reviews the assertions on which the discrediting of the medical model has been based. He stresses the distinction between the testing of a theory and the discrediting of a model and observes that the recent wholesale discrediting of psychiatry has relied less on theory testing than on polemical rhetoric and unwarranted extrapolation from empirical facts.