DSM of the Future
We’re reading a novel by Rick Moody called The Four Fingers of Death (2010, Little, Brown and Company,) about the adventures of astronauts on a mission to Mars in the very near future, among other amazing occurrences.
Not that we’re particularly reviewing or recommending this novel, but the author regularly lampoons the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by the psychiatric industry to record every condition for which they are allowed to bill insurance carriers.
The current version is DSM-5. The novel quotes a future eighth revision. I thought it might be amusing to list a few of the imaginary disorders from the book. We’re only up to page 136 out of 725, so we’re expecting many more gems from DSM-VIII.
- Gambling para-addiction syndrome with socially unacceptable perspiration feature
- Aggravated hydrophobia with hygiene aversion
- Mixed caffeine obsession with chronic caffeine dependence
- Conversational pseudo-uremia
- Unorthodox chess openings
- Waitstaff, habitual harassment thereof
- Belief in extraterrestrial intelligence
- Repeated re-organizing of household objects
- Hearty laughter at neutral remarks
- Fear of photosynthesis and photosynthesizers
- Elective pseudodementia
- Planetary exile syndrome
- Interplanetary disinhibiting disorder
Don’t even ask me what these are; and if you ask psychiatrists, you’re liable to get a different answer from each one.
OK, we’ve had our fun. What’s the point?
With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific or medical validity to the “disorders,” the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening “treatments” based solely on opinion.
The psychiatricizing of normal everyday behavior by including personality quirks and traits is a lucrative business for the APA because by expanding the number of “mental illnesses” even ordinary people can become patients and added to the psychiatric marketing pool.
Every single psychiatric label stigmatizes the person being labeled and as long as we continue to use psychiatric labels (contained within the DSM) to describe behaviors—psychiatry will continue to profit while the public suffers.
Psychiatric disorders are not medical diseases. There are no lab tests, brain scans, X-rays or chemical imbalance tests that can verify any mental disorder is a physical condition. This is not to say that people do not get depressed, or that people can’t experience emotional or mental duress, but psychiatry has repackaged these emotions and behaviors as “disease” in order to sell drugs. This is a brilliant marketing campaign, but it is not science.
Coming up with new lists of behaviors and new “disorders” is the bedrock of the multi-billion dollar psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry. It’s how they get paid. Remember, no psychiatric label, no billing insurance. No psychiatric label, no drug prescribed. The psychiatric labels are backed by corporate interests—not medicine, and not science.
By educating yourself with the facts about psychiatry, you will have the information you need to never become a victim of this vicious pseudo-science. Protect yourself with the truth. Find out what psychiatrists don’t want you to know. Watch the CCHR documentary Psychiatry’s Deadliest Scam; show it to your family, friends and associates.
Contact your State Senator and Representative and ask them to remove all references to the DSM from your state’s Law.