Tag Archives: diagnosis

How PTSD took over America

The suffering is very real. We’re not saying that people don’t have difficult emotional experiences and aren’t suffering. What we’re saying is this is not necessarily a disorder that people are experiencing, and if people think like that, it can be very disempowering to them. When we think of ourselves as suffering from a disorder in a medical sense, well we go to the doctor and we expect the doctor to prescribe whatever the medical treatment is. We’re not in the driver’s seat. We go along – we tell them [our] symptoms, they listen to us, they diagnose what the problem is, and then they work out what the appropriate treatment is. That’s the mind-set when we’re working within a medical framework and we think of ourselves as suffering from a disorder. We sit down in front of the therapist and we expect the therapist to be like a doctor – to be looking out for what the symptoms are so that they can make the correct diagnosis and prescribe us the right treatment. The language of PTSD invokes those ideas, and I think it’s those ideas that can be quite unhelpful at times. For what we’re talking about here, if it’s a normal, natural process, what’s really important is for the person to be in the driver’s seat for themselves – to make their own choices, their own decisions, because we’re dealing not with a disorder, but a battle within the person to find new meanings and new ways of understanding the world. That’s what they have to do. Nobody else can do that for them.

Diagnoses aren’t the quick fix people think they are

More and more people, especially young adults, are being diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder. From depression and anxiety, to Attention Deficit Disorder and bipolar disorder, mental disorder diagnoses are convenient. They sum up all of our problems on a prescription bottle filled with pills that will fix everything.
Pharmaceutical companies obviously want to sell their drugs, but the selling involves deceiving the consumer. They have to sell the illness first. They present advertisements that say, “Do you have symptoms A and B? Well, this is what’s wrong with you.” It offers consumers a solution to their everyday problems. But let’s face it; when it comes to the symptoms presented by the commercials you see while watching TV, we probably all feel them at some point.

The Guardian: Mental Health Diagnoses Mask the Real Problems—Range of new diagnoses is mythology, not scientific text

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, whose updated fifth edition will include a range of new diagnoses, is a mythology, not a scientific text. It is created by American psychiatrists who meet in groups to consider whether or not a certain diagnosis should be included in the DSM. These groups meet a number of times so that they can say that their agreement about a certain diagnosis is reliable. Thus they could reliably agree that there is a mental disorder called Guardian Readers’ Personality Disorder with the symptoms of a need to read this paper regularly, an overvaluation of the Guardian, and so on. Who knows, it might already be in the most recent version of the DSM.