Psychiatry has always done political "diagnosis". Before WWII, psychiatrists regularly "diagnosed" poor, Eastern European immigrants as "feebleminded" and ordered forced surgical sterilizations for them. Psychiatry was at the forefront of eugenics in those days; the American (or Canadian, or German) "race" had to be kept pure from contamination by "feebleminded" genes.
It is surely pure coincidence that the demographics targeted for sterilization by the doctors were associated with Socialism: pre-war voter suppression. Psychiatry was there, spearheading protection of the elites.
Then there was the century of rabid psychiatric homophobia, which has now learned to hold its tongue in public -- though the American Psychiatric Association appointed a practitioner of conversion therapy on children to head its Gender Identity Disorder committee for DSM-V. Chairman Dr Kenneth Zucker's life work of torturing gender variant children into gender conformity would make him a criminal today in California, which has just passed legislation prohibiting conversion therapy on children aged 18 and under. Yet the APA appointed this criminal to head its committee on gender variant children. This is truly a profession that won't ever give up.
More below the Ritalin fumes.
Psychologists of course do not have the power to order sterilizations, electroconvulsive "therapy", lobotomies, or medications -- those things are the prerogative of MDs. Pychologists would probably have no authority at all in the US if they were not handed that mantle of medical "science", the DSM.
Though sanctioned by American psychiatrists, the DSM is seldom paid much attention by practicing MDs, who are far more concerned with the infinitely more lucrative business of prescribing pills. Outside the US and Canada, the DSM has no authority and another, international system is used -- the ICD. DSM is largely controlled by US Big Pharma and is primarily a way they can prescribe drugs to ever-increasing numbers of people in the US. Psychiatrists in the US are basically a front line sales force for Big Pharma. The people who sit on DSM committees are paid handsome "consulting fees" and taken on expensive vacations by the drug industry.
But that second, political function of psychiatry -- the one that is aimed at protecting elites and pathologizing potential discontents -- is still quite potent; only today the actual US foot soldiers of psych political oppression are more likely to be the cheaper psychologists, armed with copies of the DSM. The MDs are too valuable as pill pushers -- lower paid psychologists can do the political hack work.
Most of the political themes picked up in DSM could have come (and perhaps did come) from ALEC. For example, consider Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder. Basically these are people who grew up with abusive parents who beat the shit out of them if they were openly defiant, and so instead they fought back through sabotage. Such people are common as rain in our society because abusive parents are common as rain.
Do the shrinks see this as a problem with society? Of course not. Shrinks never see a problem with society. Society is good to them, especially if they are the sort who sit on DSM committees and are taken on Big Pharma junkets; society has privileged them and pays them well. The problem is necessarily with those passive-aggressive people, who create a cost for others and gum up this nice society -- even, sometimes, for the privileged (quelle horreur).
Certainly, people who have been abused and become like tortured dogs that bite everyone who comes near them are not much fun to be around. In the same way, psychiatrists used to point to the "paranoia" of homosexuals to pathologize them further, so that they could be punished even more and have still more reasons to be paranoid. Instead of blaming the actual abusers, psychiatry systematically exculpates and enables the abusers while blaming their victims.
This pattern defined the field long before Freud blamed female incest victims for their "hysteria" by projecting his own rape fantasies onto them. The pattern is there because psychiatry and psychology are profoundly patriarchal and authoritarian professions, which attract sadists, dystonic LGBTs, and lots of just dumb, second rate people who love having some power over others. These people create self-esteem by crushing the souls of others; the classic portrait was done by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway: Dr Bradshaw is the prototypical shrink. Naturally, there is no "diagnostic" catagory for this severe personality disorder, just as there are none for homophobia, racism or sexism. Established forms of oppression are "normal" -- "disorders" are whatever threatens the "normal" and the privilege it confers on the Dr. Bradshaws.
Not all front-line psychiatrists and psychologists are evil; many are just unwitting tools of a system run by people like Kenneth Zucker, Big Pharma, and probably ALEC (or similar forces). Their education doesn't equip them for critical thinking or political analysis. Those people don't rise to head their professions or chair DSM committees. But in their small ways, they usually work to perpetuate our capitalist hell.