Psychiatric authority and social problems: A history of fears and expectations in 20th- and 21st-century America

Abstract

In the 1970s, activist attorneys took on what they saw as a major issue in American society – the authority of psychiatrists to lock up hundreds of thousands of people against their will in state psychiatric hospitals in violation of their civil liberties. After a series of legal challenges to psychiatric power, states constructed mental health codes to limit involuntary psychiatric hospital admissions to a much smaller population of individuals at imminent risk to harm themselves or others. Decades later, issues of psychiatric authority with regard to social dilemmas arose again, but this time with the expectation that psychiatric expertise could help solve the contemporary problem of gun violence. This paper examines the history of the intersection between psychiatry and social problems, especially dangerousness, and the fears and expectations that have accompanied impressions of psychiatric expertise and authority.