Psychiatry has always been associated with controversies. Psychiatric diagnoses are often vulnerable to public and scientific criticism and studies that are frequently cited to claim success in resolving the reliability problem are often themselves flawed, incompletely reported and inconsistent. The interpretation of data has also been found to be often partially misleading. These factors have combined to create various controversies in psychiatry. To resolve the problem of reliability, the late 20th century saw the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, written by the American Psychiatric Association. The first edition (DSM-I), published in 1952, was a pamphlet that listed a mere 60 disorders. However, the most recent edition DSM-IV, published in 1994 has 886 pages and this dramatic increase in the number of disorders seems to suggest that ordinary human troubles are today being reclassified as disorders (Cohen, 2005). Hence one of the major controversies in psychiatry is that psychiatry tends to pathologize everyday life and whether a person” is happy or sad, neat or messy, chaste or promiscuous, bumptious or withdrawn, fat or thin, drunk or sober” (Cohen, 2005, 30), he will have the symptoms of a mental disorder and he can always be considered ill or if he is a criminal, he always has an alibi. Thus psychiatry is and always has been a field of controversies ranging from diagnosis, interpretation, treatment, and post-treatment labeling. Some critics such as Szasz and Foucault have accused psychiatrists of labeling individual differences as signs of pathology (Cohen, 2003) to maintain the existing social order. Thomas Szasz (1970) held that the very construct of mental illness is a myth. He said, “instead of calling attention to conflicting human needs, aspirations and values, the concept of mental illness provides an amoral and impersonal “thing” – an ‘illness’ – as an explanation for problems in living” (Szasz, 1970, 20). His statement shakes the very foundation of psychiatry. He further said that belief in mental illness is only similar to belief in demonology and witchcraft (Szasz, 1970). It is amazing to find that this concept of Szasz has wide support even in recent times. According to a recent survey, 71% of the U.S. population views mental illness as a state caused by emotional weakness, 65% think it is the outcome of bad parenting, 45% believe that it is the victim’s fault, 43% believe that it is incurable and 35% view it as punishment for “sinful behavior”. Only 10% of the population believes that mental illness has a biological basis or involves the brain (Cohen, 2003, 8). Szasz did not accept that the government had any kind of role to play in the problems of mental suffering. According to Szasz, those who are named mentally ill suffer from problems in living, an inability to live by the expectations of society. Instead of ‘institutional psychiatry’ with its custodial approach to the mentally ill, Szasz suggested ‘contractual psychiatry’ where the affected people will be legally empowered to seek help on a personal basis. The controversy as to whether biological psychiatry is real science or not has been further fueled by the ideas of