Tag Archives: American Psychiatric Association

Psychiatry’s Weapon of Mental Destruction (WMD)—The Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

In 1952, the first hydrogen bomb was detonated and the American Psychiatric Association, APA, published its first book of mental illnesses: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM.

No one, then, could have imagined that this seemingly innocuous manual would be more destructive, and result in producing more victims, than a nuclear weapon.

Since then the DSM has mushroomed and with each revised DSM untold millions carry the scars from its devastating effects.

Disordering Normal—Here comes the new DSM

Towards the end of May, the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), the iconic bible of psychiatry, is coming off the presses after much revision and delay. It’s bound to keep people asking, “Am I normal or do I have a mental illness?”

If you think most diseases are established with objective criteria and rigorous debate, you’d be somewhat wrong. The DSM has a strong track record of taking clusters of symptoms and wrapping labels around them, which lead to the accelerated use of some of the most toxic medications on the planet. How does this happen?

New mental disorders manual could have us all doped up

The new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) will be out this May and has received a lot of criticism. Published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the manual is the bible of who is not “normal” and has some kind of mental disorder that needs treatment.

Psychiatry Set to Medicalize Hissy Fits

Every decade or two, the American Psychiatric Association reworks its Diagnostic Statistical Manual, or DSM, to try to have diagnostic categories reflect the current state of theory and practice. Given enormous evidence that we’re currently overdiagnosing things and medicalizing normal behavior, many had hope that the upcoming DMS-5 — the fifth major revision — would show some restraint. We may see it yet — but not if we go down the track described in a post today by neuroscientist, blogger, and DSM watchdog Neuroskeptic:. It seems that the DSM-5 may include a new proposed “mood disorder” called “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” or DMDD.

Taking a Stand: The Only University To Formally Challenge the American Psychiatric Association

This is a crucial issue. As the Saybrook psychology faculty note in their remarkable blog “The New Existentialists:” “the DSM-5 inflates diagnostic criteria to such an extent that it pathologizes normal behavior and natural human functioning.”

Under this new “Bible of Psychiatry” every aspect of human life, every thought and feeling, can be considered a form of “mental illness” and treated with drugs. An egregious example is a proposed change that would make any depression about the death of a loved one that lasts longer than two months a mental illness treatable by anti-depressants.

This is madness. Millions of people who are perfectly healthy, who are not sick but are looking for help, will be forcibly turned into customers for the pharmaceutical industry. Psychologists are being encouraged to spend less and less time actually talking with those they are seeking to help, getting to know them as human beings, and taking their search for meaning in life seriously.