The inclusion of adjustment in human lived experience as a mental disorder is problematic. Adjustment disorder has been criticised for its overuse and its lack of specificity in its employment as a diagnostic category. We present a preliminary reading of the mal/adjusted subject through a Foucauldian theoretical perspective by focusing on how it is told in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and positions the subject in a moral (dis)order. In turning the history of clinical mal/adjustment on itself through a reading of the DSM, we tentatively conclude that mal/adjustment continues to be problematic because of discontinuities in its own rules of formation. We conclude that the DSM’s (re)productions of mal/adjusted subject positions form an uncontrollable excess of emotion that morally constitutes and (dis)orders the subject as feminine. This is despite the DSM-IV claims that adjustment disorder is equally prevalent in men and women
