The latest update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-5-TR, 3/18/2022], the billing bible used by psychiatrists, includes a new officially voted-upon condition called “prolonged grief disorder” [PGD].
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) formally released on March 18, 2022 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), with prolonged grief disorder added.
This so-called disorder has these salient points:
1. The bereaved individual has experienced the death of a person close to them at least 12 months ago (for an adult).
2. The bereaved individual continues to be upset about it nearly every day for the last month, and the grief interferes with normal activities.
3. “The duration and severity of the bereavement reaction clearly exceed expected social, cultural, or religious norms for the individual’s culture and context.”
There is a lot more mumbo-jumbo in the official text of the diagnosis. Essentially, it is the opinion of a psychiatrist, since there are no medical tests against which such a diagnosis can be confirmed (and no medical treatment, either.)
Allen Frances, the American psychiatrist best known for chairing the APA task force for DSM-IV, tweeted about DSM-5-TR, “Its only new new diagnosis ‘Prolonged Grief’ is a disaster”.
Psychiatrists who support this ridiculous diagnosis may hope that it explains the difference between “normal grief” and “abnormal grief.”
In point of fact, there is such a thing as an upset of long duration. But it’s not a mental illness; it’s a spiritual trauma.
Really, what is an upset?
An upset is a sudden drop or cutting of one’s Affinity, Reality, Communication or Understanding with someone or something. It’s a lack of Affinity, Reality, Communication or Understanding that is common to all upsets. If one discovers which of these points have been cut, one can bring about a rapid recovery. When such an upset continues over too long a period, they become sad and mournful. This condition is handled by finding the earliest such upset and indicating which of these points were cut.
Psychiatrists want to prescribe an antidepressant for this (or some other harmful and addictive mind-altering drug to suppress the symptoms) instead of actually dealing with the original trauma — primarily because they don’t know how to deal with it, so they default to the quickest way to make a buck off of it.
Such brutal treatment is all too common in psychiatric mental health care.
The APA’s DSM extends the reach of psychiatry deeply into daily life, making as many people as possible eligible for psychiatric diagnoses and thus for psychotropic drugs. More than ten per cent of American adults already take antidepressants, in spite of their horrific side effects such as violence and suicide.
With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior, such as grief, 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 these “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.
There are non–psychiatric, non–drug solutions for people experiencing mental difficulty, there are non–harmful alternatives.
Contact your State Legislators and ask them to remove all references to the DSM from State Law.
