ABSTRACT

This chapter explains some questions of mental disorder and pathologization. The term moral signified something much broader than our contemporary understanding of morality but moral treatment was nonetheless based on explicit moral values, and involved the creation and administration of corrective experience within a specialized setting. The first direction of medical health care, where morality became significantly downplayed when moral sinners' became psychiatric degenerates and morality was medicalized in the course of the nineteenth century. The second direction is the humanistic one, where psychotherapy became a secular technology of self-realization, incarnated most clearly in Carl Rogers's client-centred therapy. Many critics have argued more generally that there is an ongoing cultural process of pathologization, which means that many traits and behaviours that used to be considered as normal human problems are now conceptualized as mental disorders that can be diagnosed and treated medically and therapeutically.