Tag Archives: mental disorder

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.”

Latest list of mental disorders leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth

It has come to my attention that I am mentally ill.

I always knew I was neurotic – who isn’t? – but it still comes as something of a surprise to learn that I am suffering from an actual mental illness. Others, perhaps, will not be surprised in the least.

The particular mental illness that afflicts me was added only recently to the so-called Bible of psychiatry, otherwise known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This is the big reference book that officially catalogues all the mental illnesses recognized by modern psychiatry. The latest edition is nearly 1,000 pages. You would have to be almost pathologically normal to find nothing in there that applies to you.

Shy children now candidates for dangerous psychiatric drugs

New guidelines for mental illness turn shyness in children from a personality trait into a mental disorder that warrants drug treatment. Drug companies already target children, who fidget too much in class or have trouble concentrating on their homework, with stimulant drugs for treating attention deficit disorder. Now children who sit too quietly or are more withdrawn than their peers will also be targeted with medication for social anxiety disorder or depression.

Grief is most definitely not a mental illness

Those of us working at Nanaimo Hospice were shocked at this headline. The proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders designating grief as a mental illness leaves us wondering if we, as humans, have lost our way. And although I am not a cynical person, one has to wonder who is behind this kind of move to “medicalize” grief — who would benefit most?

Let me be clear — grief is not a mental disorder. It is a natural reaction to a life transition that we must all face many times over a lifetime.