Labeling Madness is a compact 1970s intervention into the social construction of mental illness.

Edited by Thomas J. Scheff, it gathers essays around the question of what counts as “madness,” who gets to name it, and what happens once deviance is turned into identity. It sits right in that tense corridor between sociology, psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, and institutional critique, where diagnosis starts to look less like neutral description and more like a technology of social order.

A sharp period piece, but not merely that: the arguments still feel uncomfortably alive.

1975 Spectrum paperback in good condition.