Loading the Dice in Favor of Madness

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The gloomy biographies of mental patients most often represent psychiatric artifacts-produced through a loaded process of sampling only the bleak events of the patients' lives. If a social identity were constructedfor any person based on a biased sample of his life events, he could easily be portrayed as a villain or as a man of character, as a criminal or as a man of law and order, as a sinner or as a saint, and as an insane or as a sane person. In the present study, a group of college students were asked to compile their biographies highlighted by the bleak experiences of their past. These biographies were then rated and classified by a panel ofjudges intofour categories of psychosis, neurosis, personality disorders, and normal. Over 90 percent of the biographies fell into one of the three categories of psychiatric disturbances. Thisfinding tends to support the argument that,following the current psychiatric ideology and practice of loading the dice in favor of madness, a pathological case could be constructed for almost anyone regardless of the individual's psychological well-being. IN the process of initiation into the status of a mental patient, a crucial social-psychological event is the construction of a biography - in the form of a dossier - for the individual in trouble. This biography, similar to an irrevocable criminal record, furnishes grounds for official discreditation of the individual and provides a justification for any special