Beyond social construction: toward new histories of psychiatry (review essay)

Focusing on symptom classification and on the outcome of somatic interventions, Berrios and Shorter challenge the social constructionist and anti-psychiatry tendencies that have framed the writing of the history of psychiatry for the past quarter-century. Contextualizing clinical interventions, these studies point out the value of examining the proposition that practitioners were motivated as much about curing distress as they were about eliminating nonconformity. Such examinations require an understanding of the strengths and limits of medical science that often have been trivialized or ignored by some social constructionists. Together the studies under review open the possibility that recent biological interventions may have transformed psychiatry in such fundamental ways that they call into question the assumptions that have underlay in an almost two-century-old classification system. Ironically, adherence to the scientific method (falsification) reveals that the biological revolution in psychiatry fits post-modern claims about the tentative nature of knowledge claims, while it simultaneously undercuts the particular historical interpretations of post-modern scholarship.