Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?

[MADem]

46. And that is what the article is keying off of, really....DSM revisions.

Critics claim that the American Psychiatric Association's increasingly voluminous manual will see millions of people unnecessarily categorised as having psychiatric disorders. For example, shyness in children, temper tantrums and depression following the death of a loved one could become medical problems, treatable with drugs. So could internet addiction.

Inevitably such claims have given ammunition to psychiatry's critics, who believe that many of the conditions are simply inventions dreamed up for the benefit of pharmaceutical giants.

A disturbing picture emerges of mutual vested interests, of a psychiatric industry in cahoots with big pharma. As the writer, Jon Ronson, only half-joked in a recent TED talk: "Is it possible that the psychiatric profession has a strong desire to label things that are essential human behaviour as a disorder?"

Psychiatry's supporters retort that such suggestions are clumsy, misguided and unhelpful, and complain that the much-hyped publication of the manual has become an excuse to reheat tired arguments to attack their profession.

But even psychiatry's defenders acknowledge that the manual has its problems. Allen Frances, a professor of psychiatry and the chair of the DSM-4 committee, used his blog to attack the production of the new manual as "secretive, closed and sloppy", and claimed that it "includes new diagnoses and reductions in thresholds for old ones that expand the already stretched boundaries of psychiatry and threaten to turn diagnostic inflation into hyperinflation".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/12/medicine-dsm5-row-does-mental-illness-exist