ABSTRACT
This chapter is a focus on the rise and consolidation of psychiatric power and its control of individuals and populations who have become problematised and classified as mentally ill and madness throughout a long and enduring history of the present. For example, Michel Foucault describes how the patient and madness are socially constructed through disciplinarian techniques, such as the ‘medical gaze’ – the use and abuse of surveillance to control societal ills and give credibility to medical institutions and professional power the truthful arbiter of labelling mental illness. The key aim of Foucault’s point here has been “to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture human beings are made subjects”. The history of how people are classified as subjects as having a medical disorder or mental illness is about revealing how psychiatry became embedded in the occidental culture in particular to have the legitimacy and power to define people as problems of scientific knowledge sanctioned by its truth claims that were rarely contested.
