Guest post by Rachel Bingham

In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the official classification of ‘mental disorders’.  This was the result of a successful public campaign and changing political views.  Yet, if homosexuality could be (wrongly) diagnosed as a mental disorder – using an official classification – what does this say about the other states that remain in the classification?  How can we be sure that other states are not being labeled as mental disorders solely due to discrimination and stigma?

One way to respond to these concerns is to offer a definition of mental disorder, aiming to capture all and only genuine mental illness.  Unfortunately, this has proved exceptionally difficult to do.  Definitions that rely only on ‘facts’ – information about the brain, the genes, and so on – do not tell us whether or not a condition is really an illness.  They simply tell us about the underlying biology once we already recognize an illness to be present.  For example, finding differences in the brains of people who are criminals or of people who have recently fallen in love would not prove these states to be “illnesses”; it would only show that different states of being are reflected differently in the brain.  It is widely acknowledged that defining mental disorder requires some sort of value judgment – that is, recognition that the state in question is undesirable or harmful.  But once we bring value judgments into play concerns about social discrimination are amplified.  Might other states be wrongfully diagnosed solely because of social or political dimensions that have not yet been recognized for what they are?  If value judgments are permitted to define disorder, do we risk repeating a history of wrongful psychiatric diagnosis?  These questions are explored at greater length in the full paper in the JME, available here.