Tag Archives: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

New Psych Disorder Could Mislabel Sick as Mentally Ill

Lori Chapo-Kroger was an active intensive care unit nurse, but after a series of mysterious symptoms began a decade ago, her thinking became “cloudy” and she said her legs “felt like they were made of lead.”

“I felt like every system in my body was collapsing,” said Chapo-Kroger, who lives in Grand Rapids, Mich. “I remember not even being able to stand up to make my own bed. I literally lay on the floor and had to ask my daughter to change the bed sheets for me. She was 13.” But for three years she went from doctor to doctor, all who told her she was crazy, that her symptoms were in her head.

Critics Blast Big Psychiatry for Invented & Redefined Mental Illnesses—13,000 Professionals Petition the APA

“[The DSM] is wrong in principle, based as it is on redefining a whole range of understandable reactions to life circumstances as ‘illnesses,’ which then become a target for toxic medications heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry,” clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone with a Health Board in Wales told Reuters. “The DSM project cannot be justified, in principle or in practice. It must be abandoned so that we can find more humane and effective ways of responding to mental distress.”

Countless other experts agree, according to recent news reports, with many questioning whether a private group of individuals who stand to benefit by creating more diseases should really be writing the manual in the first place. Among the most vocal critics of the new proposals is Duke University psychiatry Prof. Allen Frances, who told the New York Times that the overly broad and vague definitions would create more “false epidemics” and increase the “medicalization of everyday behavior.”

Reuters—Battle Looms in Pychiatry World Over Controversial Manual Update

Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist for the Cwm Taf Health Board in Wales agreed: “(The DSM) is wrong in principle, based as it is on redefining a whole range of understandable reactions to life circumstances as ‘illnesses,’ which then become a target for toxic medications heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry,” she said.

“The DSM project cannot be justified, in principle or in practice. It must be abandoned so that we can find more humane and effective ways of responding to mental distress.”

Grief is not an illness- Medicalising normal human emotion is not only dangerously simplistic, but flawed.

Should grief be classified as a mental illness? Editors from The Lancet, a highly regarded medical journal, argue no.

The recently published editorial warned against prescribing antidepressants to treat grief, arguing that “medicalising” a normal human emotion is “not only dangerously simplistic, but also flawed”.

The warning has been prompted by the release of the draft version of the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). In this upcoming edition of the ‘psychiatrist’s bible’ there is no exclusion for bereavement in the diagnosis of a major depressive disorder.

This means that “feelings of deep sadness, loss, sleeplessness, crying, inability to concentrate, tiredness, and no appetite, which continue for more than 2 weeks after the death of a loved one, could be diagnosed as depression, rather than as a normal grief reaction.”