The Epistemology of Pathology

The roots of the word 'psychiatry' simply mean 'the healing of the soul', suggesting that psychiatry is concerned both with a medical, even biological task of healing, as well as with the task of moral, even spiritual reform. In the first section, the author traces out a discursive foundation for each of these ways of talking about mental health, and how they (re)appear in the present with the rise of the biomedical model of psychiatry represented in the DSM system. In the second section, the author shows how our contemporary understanding of homelessness in the United States has been significantly shaped by the biomedical discourse of psychiatry. Here it is argued that the most prevalent mental disorders reported among homeless populations are moral and not clinical in nature, and that this serves as new evidence for Foucault's claims about the objectivity and value-neutrality of psychiatry. In the third section, the author traces out the conceptual foundations of both a moral and a scientific discourse of madness in the work of Plato.To conclude, the author gives us a 'positive problematization' of madness in a social justice framework.