Diagnostic categories like homosexuality and deafness reflect normative choices, not mere science

Evidence

It would seem that this boundary should be critical in the process of creating typologies of mental disorders. According to Cooper (2013), the current definition was inherited from previous editions and was not the topic of much discussion in revising for the fifth edition. But again, there are gray zone and controversial cases. As stressed in chapter 1, there are often very important normative issues in conceptualizing “disorder.” Quite famously, homosexuality was a disorder until it was classified out of the DSM in the 1970s. In some prominent measures of health, deafness is considered not-healthy or “illness”; that is another critical boundary decision. There is probably a large gray zone between “physical” and “mental” diseases. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 1223

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the book’s claim that conceptualizing democracy embeds normative decisions.
• SEED: Essay angle: when does a state of being stop being a disease? Homosexuality’s removal and deafness-as-illness as a study in how taxonomies launder politics as medicine.