NY Times: Depression and the Limits of Psychiatry

Foucault is, then, right: psychiatric practice makes essential use of moral (and other evaluative) judgments.  Why is this dangerous?  Because, first of all, psychiatrists as such have no special knowledge about how people should live.  They can, from their clinical experience, give us crucial information about the likely psychological consequences of living in various ways (for sexual pleasure, for one’s children, for a political cause).  But they have no special insight into what sorts of consequences make for a good human life.  It is, therefore, dangerous to make them privileged judges of what syndromes should be labeled “mental illnesses.”