On the politics of madness: a preliminary analysis of the relationship between social roles and psychotherapy.

This study presents a brief account of a theory that argues that diagnostic categories of madness and their prototypes are equivalent to the fulfillment of the roles and role stereotypes of the status groups that tend to receive the diagnoses most often. Two studies provided tentative support for the theory. The results of the first study revealed that clinicians attributed to the stereotypes of various status groups precisely those diagnoses that the groups tend to receive. The second study revealed that undergraduates who were given diagnostic prototypes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition (1980) (DSM-III) and were asked to predict the status characteristics of the persons described therein correctly reproduced well known epidemiological data. These results imply an intimate relationship between social and psychiatric taxonomies, and thus raise questions about the meaning of madness in our society.