psychiatry’s bible, the dsm, is doing more harm than good - washington post

7/30/2019 Psychiatrys bible, the DSM, is doing more harm than good - Washington Post

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When a social w orker in the psychiatric w ard advised the patient to go on permanent disability,concluding that her bipolar disorder would make it too hard to work, the patient did as theexpert suggested. She a lso took a neuroleptic drug, Seroquel, that the doctor said would fix hermental illness.

Over the next 10 months, the woman lost her friends, who attributed her normal mood changesto her alleged disorder. Her self-confidence plummeted; her marriage fell apart. She movedhalfway across the country to find a place where, on her dwindling savings, she and her soncould afford to live. But she w as isolated and unhappy. Because of the drug she took for only six

weeks, she now, m ore than three years later, has an eye condition that could destroy her vision.

This patient is well-educated and white, and before her illness, she was wealthy. Researchreflects that she was more likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill than a man in hercircumstances. Racism, classism, ageism and homophobia can also affect who receives apsychiatric diagnosis.

It would be less troubling if such diagnoses helped patients, but getting a label often hindersrecovery. It can lead a therapist to focus on narrow checklists of symptoms, with littleconsideration for what is causing the patients suffering.

The marketing of the DSM has been so effective that few people even therapists realize thatpsychiatrists rarely agree about how to label the same patient. As a c linical and researchpsychologist who served on (and resigned from) tw o comm ittees that w rote the current editionof the DSM, I used to believe that the ma nual w as scientific and that it helped patients andtherapists. But after seeing its editors using poor-quality studies to support categories they

wanted to include and ignoring or distorting high-quality research, I now believe that the DSMshould be thrown out.

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Comments

y azmin el ghaz wrote:

This is precisely the reason I gave up on a career in mental health counseling after obtaining a Master's degree!

Working for one year in the field showed m e that diagnosis was the beginning and the end for any person, even

children as young as five years old were receiving diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. I mean serious ly, can we really

predict or say with absolute certainty that a child who was messed up by an alcoholic father and a m iss ing motheris Bipolar becaus e he has issues wi th authority and conduct??? What the kid needed was a normal. loving family

that could set proper boundaries for behavior. Not a psychiatrist telling him he is Bipolar and then putting a FIVE

YEAR OLD CHILD on m edications to cure his Bipolar behavior! I wasted too many years s tudying for a degree in a

field I was ashamed to be in. I had believed that counseling was about COUNSELING a person and helping him or

her cope with the stress that life brings. Thanks to the DSM I never got to practice the way I would have liked to.

Thanks to the DSM that five year old and countless like him will remain in psychiatric wards until they can graduate

to other state institutions. Very sad state of the field of Psychology.

Sasha7 wrote:

The author here is makng a sweeping claim, that the DSM does more harm than good, and offering not the

slightest bit of evidence to back it up. The story of one woman, who might not even exist, for all we know, is

emotionally manipulative, but useless to any attempt at a meaningful discourse a round these iss ues.

Weak. So, so, weak. I expect better from the Washington Pos t. This is appalling,

Greengoddess1 responds:

This is a short op-ed. If you want the evidence and a fully fleshed out argument, I invite you to read Dr.

Caplan's BOOK, "They Say You're Crazy." She was on the DSM committee, she's seen it from the inside.

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psychiatry’s bible, the dsm, is doing more harm than good - washington post

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