ABSTRACT
The theories of Szasz and others in the antipsychiatry movement who believe that criteria employed in making judgments about mental health and mental illness are closely related to the status ideal of time are difficult to test experimentally, since no operational criterion of mental illness exists independent of psychiatric diagnosis. To designate is also to create and to enforce. By devising and allocating words, which are names, people create entities and modes of experience and enforce specific subjective experiences. Names render events, situations, and relationships available or unavailable for psychological life that might otherwise remain cognitively indeterminate. “There have always been those who argued that women’s high rate of mental disorder is a product of their social situation, both their confining roles as daughters, wives, and mothers and their mistreatment by a male-dominated and possibly misogynistic psychiatric profession”.
