Commentary: the psychiatry of hubris

摘要

The medical profession in general, and the psychiatric profession in particular, have moved away from the liberal use of descriptive, usually pejorative, terms to describe people who are difficult, dangerous, or different. It is over 40 years since psychiatry abandoned the concept of hysterical personality disorder, ever since Paul Chodoff showed that it was simply a caricature of male views of femininity. We no longer use ‘psychopath’ simply to mean a nasty piece of work, and we leave megalomaniac to the script writers for James Bond.