ABSTRACT
The term 'race' appears to have entered the English language in the early sixteenth century to indicate lineage. Psychiatry and clinical psychology (the 'psy-disciplines') developed in the context of post-Enlightenment thinking in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; a feature of both, but more emphatic in psychiatry and so often seen as belonging to psychiatry, is the process of making 'diagnoses' as a short-hand way of conceptualising problems of individual thinking, feeling and behaving. Post-Enlightenment thinking in the psy-disciplines as they developed in Europe during the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by two main concepts, 'degeneration' as a basis for understanding poverty, lunacy and racial inferiority; and the idea of the 'born criminal' derived from the scientific study of crime. Studies of diagnostic patterns in New York and London, carried out in the 1960s, found that people diagnosed in the UK as suffering from mania or types of neurosis would be diagnosed as suffering schizophrenia in the US.
