Neither healthy nor sick

The article examines the tensions involved in the development of treatment for mental disorders during the period 1950-1980 in the United States. It relates those tensions to the diffusion of a social ideal strongly influenced by the subjectivist fervor characteristic of post-war America but also internally contradictory. Psychiatric diagnosis came to be seen as a way of disqualifying the individual, and this line of criticism went so far as to question the very existence of mental illness. But this context also worked to identify psychic disorder with an incomplete self, so that mental health came to be understood as a kind of generic measure of individuality. The article first considers the antagonism between these representations as suggested by the effects they had on professionalization and the division of labor in the psychiatric field. It then seeks to show how the set of nosographic standards that were established at the end of the period—the famous DSM-III—offered a means of negotiating and reconciling the different visions of mental disorder, by separating both health and pathology out from questions of social normality.