What Do 1984, Brave New World and the DSM-5 Have in Common?

21 Aug What Do 1984, Brave New World and the DSM-5 Have in Common?

Thanks to APA symposium (“Beyond the DSM: Current Trends in Devising New Diagnostic Alternatives”) discussant Sarah Kamens for bringing to our attention a chilling essay reviewing the DSM-5. Author Sam Kriss “reviews” the book as if it were a dystopian novel like 1984 and Brave New World. The essay appeared in The New Inquiry with the title “Book of Lamentations.”  It’s a clever—at times brilliant—piece of writing that flings the DSM-5’s thousand pages into outer (as opposed to the very sick inner human) space.

Here’s a teaser:

If the novel has an overbearing literary influence, it’s undoubtedly Jorge Luis Borges. The American Psychiatric Association   takes his technique of lifting quotes from or writing faux-serious reviews for entirely imagined books and pushes it to the limit: Here, we have an entire book, something that purports to be a kind of encyclopedia of madness, a Library of Babel for the mind, containing everything that can possibly be wrong with a human being. Perhaps as an attempt to ward off the uncommitted reader, the novel begins with a lengthy account of the system of classifications used—one with an obvious debt to the Borgesian Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are exhaustively classified according to such sets as “those belonging to the Emperor,” “those that, at a distance, resemble flies,” and “those that are included in this classification.”

And another:

Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM-5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: “repetitive behavior, the goal of which is […] to prevent some dreaded event or situation.” Our narrator seems to believe that by compiling an exhaustive list of everything that might go askew in the human mind, this wrong state might somehow be overcome or averted.