DSM

In DSM-IV, a “diagnosis” of major depressive disorder is based on the presence of a major depressive episode. A major depressive episode, in turn, is defined by the presence of five or more items from the following list during a two-week period: (1) depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). Note: In children and adolescents, can be irritable mood. ...

There’s a take-no-prisoners article by Paula Caplan on Psychology Today. You can see Paula’s article here. (Thanks to @yobluemama2 on Twitter for the link.) Here are some quotes: "…the now well-established facts that psychiatric diagnosis is unscientific, does not reduce human suffering, and causes many kinds of serious harm." "…the chances even that two therapists simultaneously meeting with the same person will assign that person the same label are poor, which of course means that diagnosis is not helpful in choosing treatment or improving outcome." ...

Today I received a short comment from Ruth Elliot on my post Psychiatric “Diagnoses” for Children. Ruth linked to an article by Claudia Gold, MD. Claudia is a Freudian psychoanalyst. My ideological orientation is behavioral, and if you were to ask people in this business: what is the opposite of a behaviorist? you would probably get the answer: a Freudian psychoanalyst. And vice versa. They are two very different ways of conceptualizing human activity. ...

BACKGROUND There’s an article by Jack Carney, DSW, on this topic on Mad in America. Jack refers to the DSM-5 field trials published earlier this year in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Inter-rater reliability is measured by a statistic called a kappa score. A score of 1 means perfect inter-rater agreement; a score of 0 indicates zero agreement. In psychosocial research a kappa score of 0.7 or above is generally considered good. ...

Today, courtesy of Monica, I came across an article by Marilyn Wedge, PhD. It’s called Six Problems with Psychiatric Diagnosis for Children. You can read it here. Here are some quotes: "Psychiatric diagnoses contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders are not classified by causes like genuine medical diseases." "Perhaps worst of all, a child who has been labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis grows up believing that there is something wrong with her, that she is somehow “abnormal.” ...

There’s an interesting new article by Paula Caplan here. It discusses the harmful effects of psychiatric “diagnoses,” including the fact that because of these labels, people have lost their “… jobs, custody of children, health insurance, and the right to make decisions about their medical and legal affairs.” Paula also mentions a petition she created in December 2011 calling for “Congressional Hearings about Psychiatric Diagnosis.” The petition is still up. You can find it here ...

Until just a few years ago, the spurious nature of mental illness received little or no attention either in professional circles or in the general media. There were a few of us “cranks” who poked away at the issue, but peer condemnation was usually swift and outspoken. On one occasion I was called an “anti-science Nazi” for daring to suggest that the condition known as ADHD might have more to do with ineffective parental discipline than with brain chemistry. We were voices in the wilderness. ...

This post is a continuation of my post Steven Novella M.D. and Mental Illness Denial. In Mental Illness Denial Part I, Dr. Novella makes the point that various parts of the brain enable us to do certain things, and that if we are doing these things dysfunctionally, or not well, or perhaps not at all, then clearly there is something wrong with that part of the brain. The example he gives is the activity of paying attention – but I think this is provided as an example, and that Dr. Novella intended his comments to apply to the full range of problems embraced by the DSM. ...

Robert Whitaker’s website, Mad in America, is abuzz lately with articles challenging the medical model that underlies DSM and psychiatric “treatment” in general. Recently there was an article by Alice Keys, MD, called “Do Diagnoses Injure People?” Of course I believe emphatically that they do, and I read the article. Much of the content is valuable, and I encourage readers to take a look. There was one aspect of the piece, however, that I found troubling. Dr. Keys made the point that psychiatric diagnoses can be dangerous, but then mitigated this considerably by making the same assertion about medical diagnoses in general. Whilst there may be a measure of truth to this assertion, it is misleading, in that it creates the impression that psychiatric “diagnoses” are just as valid as real medical diagnoses, which is simply not the case. ...

Christopher Lane recently wrote an article called Anti-DSM Sentiment Rises in France. Here are some quotes: “Anger and concern about the growing influence of the DSM in France, as well as over a number of related, prominent pharmaceutical scandals here, has culminated in the creation of Stop DSM, a professional and political group that is strongly opposed to the manual’s diagnostic power and what it sees as its negative social consequences.” ...