<p>A central debate within the philosophy of psychiatry revolves around the nature of mental disorders. Positions in this debate have traditionally been divided into two distinct camps: naturalism and normativism. Naturalist views identify the presence of mental disorders with a set of value-free facts, while normativist views consider mental disorders as irreducibly normative and thus dependent on certain social norms or values. The naturalist camp presents some general objections against normativism that we could, following Miller Tate and Davies, group into three problems. The first two revolve around absurd consequences that are thought to result from normativism’s alleged commitment to an unwanted relativism: first, the idea that a mental disorder could be cured with a change in the attitudes of the community where the subject is immersed, and second, the idea that certain repugnant past diagnoses should be “true back then”. In the third place, it is considered that normativism falls into a vicious circle when trying to explain what allows us to justify a medical intervention based on the identification of a mental disorder. The aim of this paper is to argue that a variety of normativism articulated in terms of MacFarlane’s assessor relativism could avoid the aforementioned problems while retaining what we take to be its central virtue: its accounting for the contingency of our attributions of mental disorder.</p>