Given a history in which women’s voices and experiences have frequently been discounted as “mad”, it is perhaps not surprising that feminist bioethics has also pioneered the critical ethical examination of mental health issues, in particular the role of psychiatry and its treatment of women. Revealingly, as early as 2001 the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy published a special issue devoted to feminist bioethics and containing some key  papers on psychiatric issues (volume 26, number 4). In a special issue of IJFAB (volume 4, number1, 2011) several authors examined questions of mental health and illness. Again, this scrutiny is not unique to feminist bioethics; what is distinctive is the way these issues are refracted through a feminist lens that pays close attention to thorny questions of power, authority and the silencing of anomalous voices.  Especially pertinent in this area is the question of epistemic power—judgments about the validity of subjective experiences, symptoms, or perceptions that may lie outside the norm—with a close eye to the power of institutions such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), and what some critics see as the pharmaceutical industry’s problematic investment in the medicalization of people’s distress.