More confirmation on how "mental illness" is not an illness nor a disease:
Excerpts:
"The
reason there is so much controversy about DSM-5 is that psychiatric diagnosis
has become, if anything, too important — not only in clinical decisions
but also in school services, disability and in the courtroom. There's a
tremendous amount at stake," says Frances, of Coronado, Calif., a professor
emeritus at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
Because
the DSM contains a detailed list of psychiatric disorders, it's a
guidebook for the U.S. health care system and insurance
coverage...
Psychotherapist
Gary Greenberg, of New London, Conn., has written about the DSM for more than a
decade and says the DSM disorders are "simply
collections of symptoms that some experts agree constitute mental illnesses.
There's not a single diagnosis in DSM that lives up to the standards of medical
diseases."
"If I as a therapist tell you (that) you have a mental disorder,
it's not the same thing as my telling you you have diabetes or cancer because
diabetes and cancer are diseases that can be confirmed through biochemical
findings. They meet the requirements for a disease in the way we generally think
of a disease. There is not a single disorder in DSM-5 or any DSM that does
that," says Greenberg, author of The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking
of Psychiatry, out earlier this month.
"The whole disease model that underlies the DSM has been an utter
scientific failure," says Stuart Kirk, a professor emeritus of social welfare at
UCLA, who has been tracking DSM for decades. "There's not a single biological
marker for any of the 300-plus disorders. What we do instead is descriptive.
This describing is creating a disorder and pretending it's a medical illness
rather than just human behavior."...
Psychiatrist
Michael Taylor, of Ann Arbor, Mich., author of Hippocrates Cried: The Decline of
American Psychiatry, out last month, says psychiatry has to go back to the
medical model for disease.
"The
reason why so many of the syndromes don't work out when they do field trials is
that they don't exist in biological reality," he says. "They only exist
in the DSM."
The
focus on biomarkers and away from symptoms got attention just weeks ago when a
blog post by Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental
Health, said the DSM is "at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and
defining each" and that "its weakness is its lack of validity." He says
NIMH will reorient its research away from the manual because "DSM
diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any
objective laboratory measure."
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