ABSTRACT
One of the most obvious illustrations of the power of language in the mental health professions is in the use of diagnostic labels. This chapter addresses the gender bias of such labels and explores the professions’ resistance to change that perpetuates their continued usage. Via diagnosis, mental health professionals have the power to define normal and abnormal, crazy and sane. Professional resistance to feminist revisions of diagnoses occurs in a context that struggles to preserve mainstream ideas and to contain deviant and frightening behavior in categories that explain the non-normative. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (DSM-IV) has been established as the diagnostic manual for all of the psychotherapy professions. When psychology, social work, and marriage and family therapy bought into managed care, lobbying with great energy to be included alongside psychiatry on provider panels, they also bought into the use of DSM-IV.
