During the mid-twentieth-century, psychiatry ‘widened its net’ to include the treatment of, not only the more severe categories of mental disorder, but also neurotic disorders: depression, anxiety and phobias. Increasingly, the ‘problems of daily living’ were redefined as medical conditions. Agnes Miles has noted that there has been a rising expectation that all human problems should be amenable to solutions by science and medicine. Unhappiness has become medicalized; doctors have replaced the clergy – medical problems seem more acceptable than social ones. An extensive range of behaviours are listed in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), and in the equivalent used in Britain, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). In 1952, the DSM listed 112 disorders; this figure had expanded by 1994 to 374.

This process has not been undertaken overtly; instead, the expansion of medicine has been largely ‘an insidious and often undramatic phenomenon, accomplished by medicalizing much of daily living by making medicine, and the labels “healthy” and “ill”, relevant to an ever increasing part of human existence’. During the 1960s, Thomas Scheff, the key proponent of labelling theory as related to mental illness, held that society creates a set of rules about behaviour that are deemed as ‘normal’.