Why are women more likely to be labeled borderline personalities? Is transphobia being treated as was homosexuality in the past? Has “protest psychosis,” a term used to diagnose Black men during the civil rights era, simply been renamed schizoaffective disorder? How different is our current label of “intellectual disability” from the history of eugenics? What, in other words, does it mean to be diagnosed with a “mental illness”?
In his clear, empathetic style, Jonathan Foiles, author of the critically acclaimed This City Is Killing Me, walks us through these and other troubling examples of bias in mental health, placing them in context of past blunders in the history of psychiatry and the DSM. Diagnoses are helpful but not necessary, he argues, and here he offers a pragmatic and sympathetic guide to how we might craft a better and more just therapeutic future.
