Structured ambiguity and the definition of psychiatric illness: Adjustment disorder among medical inpatients

Adjustment disorder is one of the most common psychiatric diagnoses given to patients hospitalized for medical and surgical problems. This article argues that the diagnosis, in this context, often serves strategic, non-clinical ends for consultation-liaison psychiatrists, who must negotiate their interstitial position through an essentially ambiguous diagnosis. In these cases, 'adjustment disorder' emerges from and reproduces tensions beween such cultural dichotomies as mind/body and social/individual that marginalize psychiatry in medical settings.