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Two main approaches concerning the relation between sexism and psychiatry have been developed in the feminist literature. One, now less fashionable, follows Phyllis Chesler's influential Women and Madness (1972) in emphasising the centrality of sexism within psychiatry and its constructs of mental illness. The other, emphasising the sexism within Society as a whole and the way it generates mental suffering and disturbance, suggests the potential of psychiatry and the mental health professions to ameliorate that suffering. This paper looks once more at the second approach to see whether it should now be abandoned. It analyses the role gender plays within psychiatry, distinguishing three levels of definition and identification -- official definition, the delineation of `normal cases', and the identification of individual cases. It points to the way in which issues of gender impinge on all three levels and argues that there is little evidence of the increasing marginalisation of the dimension of gender within psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses an interview describing how K came to be defined by her friends as mentally ill. The method of analysis assumes that the structure of the conceptual scheme `mental illness' which the reader uses in recognizing 'mental illness' is isomorphic with that organizing the text and hence is discoverable 'in' it. The full text of the interview is presented as the data. The analysis explicates the interpretation of the text as a method of reading. The text is found to provide instructions for its interpretation and for the authorization of its facticity. K's mental illness is to be located in the collection of instances of K's behaviour which the interview records. How is behaviour to be described as `mentally ill type' behaviour? It is suggested that the interview as a whole organizes a `cutting-out' procedure whereby K's behaviour is presented as making sense neither to her friends nor to the reader of the text. The procedure involves showing for each instance of her behaviour as well as for the collection as a whole that K's behaviour is not properly provided for by relevant social rules or definitions of the situation. To be recognizable as 'mentally ill type' behaviour examples of K's actions must be constituted as anomalies rather than as deviations from a norm or rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]