These historical examples do, in fact, show how psychiatric diagnoses have been misused. But they also illustrate something else: The very fact that we now recognize misuse is evidence that we have made progress in weeding out the insidious biases that may have been smuggled into particular categories. In retrospect, we can easily see clearly how a fundamental ethical principle of medical practice—that diagnoses be used for the benefit of the individual patient—had been subverted by the malevolent intentions of a racist society, by moral or religious ideologues, or by sexist norms.