From The Daily Beast more creative writing by the authors of the DSM-V.
Midnight snacker? Compulsive shopper? Bitter? The new edition of the mental health bible may classify you as having a psychological disorder.
The most controversial issue at last week’s annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco was the upcoming publication of the DSM-V, the revised edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder. The bible for the mental-health industry—originally published in 1952 and revised about once a decade—the DSM has been translated into 13 languages and is recognized around the world as the authoritative text on mental health.
Even though the APA asked the psychiatrists working on the manual’s revision to sign a nondisclosure agreement, leaked proposed additions to the new version have already stirred debate. “Psychiatrists manufacture mental diagnoses the way the Vatican manufactures saints,” says Dr. Thomas Szasz, an outspoken critic of modern psychiatry and author of Psychiatry: The Science of Lies. This view may be extreme, but some of the new “mental illnesses” under consideration for the new edition nonetheless sound a little…crazy. Here are eight you may already be suffering from, whether you knew it or not.
What are the eight this article speaks of?
Here:
1. Binge-Eating Disorder
2. Night-Eating Syndrome
3. Internet Addiction
4. Sex Addiction
5. Compulsive Shopping
6. Embitterment Disorder
7. Pathological Hoarding
8. Pathological Bias
Go to the article to read how they are explained.
These are all clearly brain disorders with biological causation, right?? Yeah, right.
If this wasn’t so damn horrifying it would be hysterically funny. Maybe for our sanity that is what we should do. Laugh in all these fuckers faces.
Unfortunately big pharma will respond by doing trials on meds to medicate all these “disorders.”
For each new disorder there will be a new drug to prescribe. The DSM has long been wielded as a weapon to label and stigmatize. There is no science here. Doctors take a cluster of symptoms, picking and choosing to come up with a diagnostic code that will make the insurers happy. Different doctor, different bias. It’s Russian roulette of the most life ruining, over medicating sort. It’s enough to make you sick. Really sick.
Hmmm…. they skipped ‘jaded’. Guess no one cared.
Missinglabelphobia: the label for those who are compelled to label everyone (usually followed rapidly by overprescribingitis). Sometimes all you can do is laugh.
This makes me bitter. If you need me, I’ll be out shopping for food so I can eat a whole ton of it tonight during the midnight movie
Ugh, I’m more of a gawker person and rarely read the dailybeast, but I went there for this article. Like most things on the internet, I found the comments over there far more instructive than the article. Very few of these commenters, who I’m assuming are well-adjusted, more or less mainstream people, had much good to say about the pharma industry. I also found a cool blog I hadn’t seen before.
Honestly, it would be really funny if it weren’r real! The people who make up this stuff, pardon my French, are crazy. Just reminding everyone to go back and re-read Paula Caplan’s excellent 1996 book about the making of the DSM-III-R, “They Say You’re Crazy,” which shows exactly how these people come up with these completely political social constructs that allow them to collect insurance money.
Now I get it, being an American is a mental illness, unless of course you’re an MHP.
lol @ Marian – Over-Medicalising-Disorder anyone?
“Pathological bias” – hm, looks like they now are trying to even label each other.