This book shows how the “mentally ill” category serves as a form of social control that has evolved directly from the category of “heretic.” Although psychiatry uses the language of medicine, it has been more commonly used as a justification for the involuntary incarceration and remolding of behavioral deviants. The “diseases” that psychiatry discovers are defined not by their nature as medical pathology, but by their behavioral symptoms which are defined as “disease” in order to prohibit or suppress them.