National Institute Of Mental Health Task Force On Homosexuality Final Report And Background Papers

Author : Regina Kunzel
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226831841
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Download or read book In the Shadow of Diagnosis written by Regina Kunzel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-04-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people. In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.