ABSTRACT
This chapter centres on controversies in the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in the 1960s and 1970s over the relevance of gender, sexuality, and race to psychiatric theory, clinical practice, and professional identity. In particular, it argues that by advancing sociopolitical concerns to counter the influence of psychoanalysis within the APA, including on the classification model used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), activists made common cause with anti-Freudian biological psychiatrists and thus bolstered the standing of what became an apolitical, biomedicalised psychiatry. The chapter also surveys the origins of mad activism and the psychiatric survivor movement during this period.
