Suchergebnisse

Why has there been a very rapid elaboration of the category of personality disorder within psychiatric classifications over the last 20 years? Personality disorder is the site of considerable psychiatric controversy. Its classification, diagnosis, and treatment are disputed not only within psychiatry, but also in closely related fields of forensic and psychological work. For severe cases, the Home Secretary in Britain has recently suggested that pre-emptive incarceration is justified, and many psychiatrists feel that personality disorder is not amenable to treatment. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the sociology of psychiatric knowledge, drawing both on recent work on the sociology of science and technology, and on the relationship between psychiatric practice and government in the late 20th century.

This paper considers the problem of putting ideology into practice. The radical idea of the therapeutic community within psychiatry in the 1950s never became completely translated into action. This ideal-real discrepancy is explored for a major therapeutic community established in the 1950s, Henderson Hospital, and a comparison is made between staff and patient treatment values and their evaluation of the helpfulness of actual group practice over an 18-year period. It was hypothesized that the gap between values and practice would widen under the impact of informal social processes, distorting the transfer of ideology into practice. The results confirm this hypothesis, which is explicated by reference to the generation of group norms and informal social processes, such as leadership "careers. "