DSM-5—Flawed or Something Much Worse?
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DSM-5—Flawed or Something Much Worse?

05 Dec DSM-5—Flawed or Something Much Worse?

Posted at 15:36h in Critical psychiatry, DSM-5, Human Development, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy by

December 5, 2012

As Allen Francis, one of the DSM-5’s most vocal critics, writes in his recent Psychology Today column, the final approval of the “deeply flawed DSM-5” by The Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association “will start a half or dozen or more new fads which will be detrimental to the misdiagnosed individuals and costly to our society… Many millions of people with normal grief, gluttony, distractibility, worries, reactions to stress, the temper tantrums of childhood, the forgetting of old age, and ‘behavioral addictions’ will soon be mislabeled as psychiatrically sick and given inappropriate treatment.”

Francis recounts the background of the controversy surrounding the DSM-5—its economic and political motivation, its disregard for the basics of scientific method, and the outpouring of protest from more than 50 mental health professional associations and thousands of individual practitioners. He then advises everyone to “just avoid the 10 changes that make no sense.”

Under the circumstances and for the moment, I agree with his advice. But not with what it implies—namely, that the rest of the manual DOES make sense (and is not harmful and costly). As I’ve shared in several posts throughout the year, the publicity over DSM-5 could/should have been an opening for a developmental, inclusive, international conversation—where professionals and the public put the diagnostic activity on the table open to scientific, cultural, political and philosophical scrutiny, and where non-diagnostic practitioners are sought out for their experience and expertise. It’s never too late.

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5 Comments
  • George Kaliaden
    Posted at 19:20h, 13 December

    It is understandable that more funds are made available for research that would serve the interest of pharmaceutical companies. Such is the fate of scientific / medical research. It is sad that even psychiatry text books sometimes act as vehicles for dissemination of such biased knowledge.

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 23:33h, 09 December

    Thanks for your comment, Helen. As for the history within Marriage and Family Therapy, I don’t know it, but your national association surely will. Why “we” let the insurance companies power this boat is, I think, both simple and complex—having to do with the institutions that mediate relationships between people and their hidden and not so hidden political, economic and cultural subtexts, including people’s unawareness of their power to change things and their lack of being organized to do so.

  • Helen Peterson
    Posted at 23:10h, 06 December

    The saddest thing of all is that somehow feeling better after counseling is not considered enough for insurance to pay for us especially Marriage and Family Therapists. We must show we have cured someone of depression or an adjustment disorder when what is causing the depression is grief, or the adjustment disorder is living with a disability. Or that the void that exists in a relationship is the fault of some disorder, not lack of empathy or communication. When did the Insurance people start to power this boat, and why do we let them??

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 20:19h, 06 December

    Thanks much, David!

  • David Chaloner
    Posted at 19:53h, 06 December

    Good to see that there are people who can see and who can be considered competent to criticize putting that hegemony on notice

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