Medical Characterisation of Mental Illness as a Risk Management Tool in a Postmodern Society

Abstract

This critical reflection endeavours to discuss why science’s monopolisation of mental health understanding and categorisation is illogical within a postmodern society. I will consider how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has become a risk management tool and how psychiatry itself is a failed attempt at paradigmatically fulfilling modernity’s aspiration of objective scientific knowledge and truth (Lewis, 2000:72).