The author believes that recent legal decisions against psychiatrists
(including class action suits) have their genesis in writings by
sociologists and other behavioral scientists, including psychiatrists, who
have examined psychiatry in the context of social structure and social
processes. The discrediting of the medical model could have been
accomplished using theorectical assertions and research observations that
had been published before 1940, but it did not occur until the human rights
movement of the 1960s. The author reviews the assertions on which the
discrediting of the medical model has been based. He stresses the
distinction between the testing of a theory and the discrediting of a model
and observes that the recent wholesale discrediting of psychiatry has
relied less on theory testing than on polemical rhetoric and unwarranted
extrapolation from empirical facts.Abstract Teaser