Some excerpts from a piece off the Huffington Post by Francesca Biller-Safron
It’s difficult to remember when the slightly abnormal and “normal” physical and mental characteristics began hysterically calling for immediate medications in order to stop, start, maintain or prevent anything from happening at all, with some side effects worse than the diagnoses itself….
…There is even an ad that irresponsibly suggests that “anyone” may be bipolar with symptoms such as fatigue, irritability, sleeplessness, excitability, moodiness and lethargy. Just bring in your ad from your Ladies Home Journal into your doctor’s office and you could get lucky with a load of meds.
Rodney Dangerfield once said, “My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said that I want a second opinion. He said okay, you’re ugly too.”
Imagine a world where we diagnose ourselves with mental illnesses and disease, prescribed psychotropic medications by General Practioners after viewing ads in Newsweek and on Larry King–drugs that change the characteristics of our brains and behaviors forever. No, this is not from a book by George Orwell, this is now…
…We all suffer from painful problems at one time or another, be they physical or emotional, with the latter making us wonderfully unique from any other species on the planet. But when we are pimped medications that are unnecessary, dangerous, no amount of therapy or antidote in the world will be able to soothe this modern tragedy we have allowed to infest our culture….
…The hardest lesson will be that of facing ourselves as hypocrites of the worst kind if we continue to preach to our children to say no to drugs while our medicine cabinets overflow with quick fixes for every real or imagined malady– and as studies show, home is often where our children get their first fix, leading us all to become unfixable, and for how long, we cannot begin to fathom. (read the whole thing here)
I’ve got nothing to add for now. Perhaps I’ll add to comments.
The DSM is a political not a scientific document. It pathologizes everyday behavior. It pathologizes women, children, and minorities. It defines existentially normal behaviors, such as grief and sadness as mental illnesses. It is a money making endeavor for psychiatry and other mental health professionals. It dangerously defines what is normal and what is abnormal and who should be free or detained against their will. For more detailed critical article about the DSM go to http://www.zurinstitute.com/dsmcritique.html .
actually it doesn’t say anything about what should be done about the people who get these labels…it’s entirely descriptive…what gets done is at the discretion of the “treating physician.”
otherwise what you say is true.