DSM-5 and beyond: A critical feminist engagement with psychodiagnosis

Abstract

The history of critical feminist engagement with psychiatry is a long one. It stretches at least to 1892, the year when Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her autobiographical novella, The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman delivered a searing indictment of the ‘rest cure’ prescribed for her by Dr S Weir Mitchell. Some 70 years later, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) blasted Freudian ideas about women and femininity, ideas that held sway among psychiatrists and many clinical psychologists in the US. Friedan’s book, described by one social critic as ‘pull[ing] the trigger on history,’ galvanized the Women’s Liberation Movement. It is now 50 years since The Feminine Mystique was published. Over those years, feminists have relentlessly challenged many psychiatric diagnoses, psychological theories, and clinical practices. Feminist psychologists like Chesler (1972) and Weisstein (1968/1993) argued that much of what was passed off as scientific knowledge was, as Ehrenreich and English (1978/2005: 5) put it, ‘the ideology of a masculinist society dressed up as objective truth.’ In the mid-1980s, feminists in the mental health professions organized a concerted protest against the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994; hereinafter, DSM), a protest that would stretch to the present day. They were spurred on by three new diagnostic categories proposed for the DSM-III-R: masochistic personality disorder (later renamed selfdefeating personality disorder), premenstrual dysphoric disorder (renamed many times over), and paraphilic rapism (later called paraphilic coercive disorder and sexual sadism disorder). To block the inclusion of these categories, prominent