ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an account of the twists and turns in the theories and management of madness from the 1960s to end of the century. In 1973, the American psychologist Daniel Rosenhan published a pseudopatient study that further undermined the status of psychiatry and contributed to radical reform in the classification of mental disorders in the United States. Inspired by the critics of psychiatry, Rosenhan wondered how to distinguish between sanity and insanity. In his commentary to Spitzer's rebuttal, Rosenhan refers to a problem that in my view has haunted patients since the beginning of institutional mental health care. Spitzer defended the use of schizophrenia as the only proper diagnosis in cases of auditory hallucinations of longer duration. Indeed, the fact that there are probably many happy people with mild or even severe mental disorders in modern society is a useful reminder to all of us who like to think that we are experts in the field of mental illness.
