**Conceptualising mental illness is really about power and control and maintaining social order?** - Conceptions of psychopathology and the various categories of psychopathology are not mappings of psychological facts about people. Instead, they are social artifacts that serve the same sociocultural goals as do our conceptions of race, gender, social class, and sexual orientation—those of maintain- ing and expanding the power of certain individuals and institutions and maintaining social order, as defined by those in power (Beall, 1993; Parker et al., 1995; Rosenblum & Travis, 1996). As with other social constructions, our concepts of psychological normality and abnormality are tied ultimately to social values—in particular, the values of society’s most powerful individuals, groups, and institu- tions—and the contextual rules for behavior derived from these values (Becker, 1963; Parker et al., 1995; Rosenblum & Travis, 1996). As McNamee and Gergen (1992) state: “The mental health profes- sion is not politically, morally, or valuationally neutral. Their practices typically operate to sustain certain values, political arrangements, and hierarchies of privilege” (p. 2). Thus, the debate over the definition of psychopathology, the struggle over who gets to define it, and the continual revisions of the _DSM,_ are not aspects of a search for “truth.” Rather, they are debates over the definition of socially constructed abstractions and struggles for the personal, political, and economic power that derives from the authority to define these abstractions and thus to determine what and whom society views as normal and abnormal. As David Patrick (2005) concluded about a definition of mental disorder offered by the British government in a mental health bill, “The concept of mental disorder is of dubi- ous scientific value but it has substantial political utility for several groups who are sane by mutual consent” (p. 435). - These debates and struggles are described in detail by Allan Horwitz (2000) in _Creating Mental Illness_. - According to Horwitz, - The emergence and persistence of an overly expansive disease model of mental illness was not accidental or arbitrary. The widespread creation of distinct mental diseases developed in specific historical circumstances and because of the interests of specific social groups.... By the time the _DSM-III_ was developed in 1980, thinking of mental illnesses as discrete disease entities...of- fered mental health professionals many social, economic, and political advantages. In addition, applying disease frameworks to a wide variety of behaviors and to a large number of people benefited a number of specific social groups including not only clinicians but also research sci- entists, advocacy groups, and pharmaceutical companies, among others. The disease entities of diagnostic psychiatry arose because they were useful for the social practices of various groups, not because they provided a more accurate way of viewing mental disorders. (p. 16)