Can Psychiatry Distinguish Social Deviance From Mental Disorder?

Can psychiatry distinguish social deviance from mental disorder? Historical and recent abuses of psychiatry indicate that this is an important question to address. Typically, the deviance/disorder distinction has been made, conceptually, on the basis of dysfunction. Challenges to naturalistic accounts of dysfunction suggest that it is time to adopt an alternative strategy to draw the deviance/disorder distinction. This article adopts and follows through such a strategy, which is to draw the distinction in terms of the origins of distress with the relevant conditions. It is argued that psychiatry’s ability to distinguish deviance from disorder rests on the ability to define, identify, and exclude socially constituted forms of distress. These should lie outside the purview of candidacy for mental disorder. In pursuing this argument, the article provides an analysis of the social origins of a form of distress with the personality and sexual disorders, and indicates in what ways it is constituted socially.