ABSTRACT
A photograph in The New York Times on Monday, January 29, 1990, showed an attractive, groomed, well-dressed young couple sitting at a kitchen table graced by flowers and candles, dining on gnocchi alla Gorgonzola that the 33-year-old husband had just prepared. In the duPont case, however, the outcome appears to rest on the accuracy of a psychiatric diagnosis and what that diagnosis implies about an individual's capacities to manage his life. Their sharply divergent opinions, therefore, must be due to the uncertain state of psychiatric knowledge or the uncertain art of psychiatric diagnosis. The major vehicle in this campaign to rebuild public respect for psychiatric diagnosis and practice was a revolutionary revision of the diagnostic manual-DSM-III. The new diagnostic manual provides the official justification for psychiatry's expanding control over what some have labeled the "medicalization of deviance". Psychiatric diagnosis provides the fundamental rubric for discourse about mental illness.
