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  • Chapter 4 - Social Theory, Psychiatry and Mental Health Services

  • from Part I - Social and Institutional Contexts
  • Edited by George Ikkos, Nick Bouras, King's College London
  • Book:
    Mind, State and Society
    Published online:
    17 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021, pp 32-40
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  • Summary

    This chapter describes the development of social concepts within psychiatry and the mental services between 1960 and 2010. This occurred against the backdrop of the emergence of new social theories concerned with psychiatry, medicine, science and other institutions of liberal democracy from the very beginning of the period. Attacks on the legitimacy of psychiatry came from postmodernists on the left and neoliberals on the right and coincided with a distancing between psychiatry and sociology. Organised psychiatry reacted defensively to most, but not all, of its critics and had difficulty assimilating even those new social theories that appeared neutral with regard to the professional and scientific status of psychiatrists. In the last decade of the period, empirical evidence regarding social determinants of mental health, together with the failure of biomedical technology to deliver on promises of better treatments, led to the beginnings of a revival of interest in social factors within academic psychiatry.