The Politics Of Psychiatry

But while mental disorders are indeed medical diseases, with their own culprit molecules and aberrant anatomies, they are also different from "physical" diseases in important ways. For no matter how thoroughly "medical" mental illnesses are, they are also thoroughly social. The reasons for this stem from the nature of mental disorders themselves.

There is no question that pathologies like heart disease, pneumonia, or diabetes have a large impact on a sufferer's sense of self and place in the community. But only in illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression do we find disease processes that directly and profoundly transform a person's self, identity, and place in the community.