The February 27, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried an article called “Why psychiatry needs therapy,” by Edward Shorter, professor of history at the University of Toronto. Dr. Shorter is a social historian of medicine, specializing in the history of psychiatry.
Shorter says, “Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.”
Making fun of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, is a pastime we understand, and Shorter makes short work of the DSM, calling it horse-trading in symptoms, “defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses.”
Although, to be sure, the DSM is no laughing matter, as it aims to eventually diagnose everyone with some form of mental illness for which harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs can be prescribed.
Here are some actual diagnoses of “mental disorders” in the DSM-IV (DSM fourth edition):
V61.20 Parent-Child Relational Problem