ABSTRACT
During the 1960s the concept of mental illness itself, and the legitimacy of psychiatry as a medical specialty, came under the scrutiny of scholars in Europe and America. Mental illness was reframed as labeling, and psychiatry as social control. French intellectual Michel Foucault (1973) suggested that insanity was a cultural construct invented in the eighteenth century; the asylum functioned to control the behavior of the unreasonable in the age of reason. On the other side of the channel, British psychiatrist R.D. Laing
proposed that schizophrenia was not a disease but, rather, a strategy of coping with destructive circumstances (Laing, 1969: 102-103).The Decline of Electroshock, 1966-1980
These reframings of insanity and its cures were echoed in the United States. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1961) portrayed asylums as sites of social control, and the symptomatic behavior of patients as self-protective strategies. Both Goffman and fellow-sociologist Thomas Scheff (1966) pointed to the use of everyday-life norm violations as an aspect of psychiatric diagnosis. Howard Becker (1961) proposed the labeling theory of deviance, in which madness is constituted by the reactions to it (from observation to psychiatric labeling) rather than anything intrinsic to it. Even psychiatry had its labeling theorist: Thomas Szasz (1961) wrote of psychiatry as parallel to witchcraft. These ideas, particularly those of Foucault and Goffman, were influential in an interdisciplinary scholarship of social control that flourished in America from the 1970s onward (see, for example, Rothman 1971; Grob, 1977; Staples, 1991). These intellectual currents joined with the popular media in portraying electroshock in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
