What counts as a “disorder” is often not based on empirical evidence but on what is determined as undesirable, maladaptive, or outside the social norm…by Americans. The DSM in many ways represents the worst of so-called social science.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3480686/
> Fate, which takes away healthy, free, young people, never pardoned me once. It has let me live all this time, quite lucid, but closed up in here ... since I was ten years old .... eighty years in psychiatric hospital for a headache
Take modern medicine with a grain of salt.
Surely you’re not trying to draw some conclusion between an entire countries modern day medical field and a theory a person proposed in the 1800s, right?
That would depend on whether anything has changed since the 1800s. But that's very clearly not so -- consider that recovered memory therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy), based on as much science as drapetomania, was practiced in the 1990s, and still has adherents today.
Also, for human psychology to be regarded as a medical field, it would have to be based in science. But human psychology studies the mind, therefore by definition it's not based in science.
Understanding changes as we do more research into a thing.
Im not arguing people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder shouldnt get benefits.
Its that the spectrum isnt as related enough that insividual disorders would make more sense. But that would require getting the health insurance industry to do more adjustments.
With the same argument, we could arguue that working and social life are getting in the way how I am, thus working and social life should be considered disorders.
I don't get this reference (that is likely rooted in US popular culture).
If the proposition here is that mental health disorders are fabricated maliciously in order to sell more medication or enforce some sort of social order, then I don't see how the very rare court-ordered enforcement of short-term stays at psychiatric institutions could be the mechanism for that.
The vast majority of people in the US who receive psychiatric care do so voluntarily, because they experience real symptoms that really affect their life, for which they need real treatment.
That's true, but that's not what the parent comment claimed. They didn't say a majority receive psychiatric care involuntarily, they said it's not hard to find examples who receive it involuntarily, and that's true. Lots of people are forced to take psychiatric medication right now, in developed countries including the US.
Just as an example, in the UK the verb "to section" is shorthand for "to commit to involuntary confinement in hospital under the legal authority of one or more sections of the Mental Health Act"
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/legal-rights/sec...
For example, you can be detained for up to 6 months under Section 3, if all four of these conditions are met:
1. you have a mental disorder
2. you need to be detained for your own health or safety or for the protection of other people
3. doctors agree that appropriate treatment is available for you
4. treatment can't be given unless you are detained in hospital
Ahh, you sweet summer child
Tell that to all multiple sclerosis patients that were tortured by psych departments of hospitals before (and after) the MRI machine was created.
Tell that to sleep apnea patients (especially the women, especially especially the younger thinner women in whom they say “it cannot happen to”) that are given a psych diagnoses for seeking treatment for symptoms before sleep disordered breathing issues are ever even brought into question.
The main problem is that DSM diagnoses are indeed forced on people. Usually highly incorrectly, too.
What's the alternative then? What would "empirically" determining what a "disorder" is look like?
>…by Americans
Most of the world outside of the US uses the ICD, not the DSM.
No. You need to read the thing.
The DSM only aims to be a tool to help standardize communication of often nebulous and otherwise ill-defined entities. It says so in the introductory pages.
People shouldn’t treat it like a biology textbook, it’s a self-described ontology at most.
You cannot have an authoritative textbook proscribing definitions, and then expect people to treat them as just "a self-described ontology" with all the nuances and caveats around that just because it says so somewhere in the introduction. Psychology of all fields should know that.
This stuff is complicated. People are going to get it wrong. That sucks.
But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself, don’t judge it by how a third party misrepresents it.
As long as the boards don't go after the shrinks who "misrepresent" the DSM, I would claim that this misrepresentation is systemic of (and possibly even intended by) the psycho-industrial complex.
I think this comment just reinforces a misunderstanding of what the DSM actually is.
> But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself
Doctors (at least the good ones) aren't usually going in blind and just doing whatever the DSM tell them to as if they were following a flowchart or checklist. The DSM (which I'm not even fully defending here, I personally it feel has all kinds of problems) is just a guide. It's not the only tool in a doctor's arsenal and they aren't obligated to follow it.
> Why shouldn't it include a bunch of treatments if they've been shown to be beneficial?
There’s a well-known concept of “diagnosis by treatment” because unfortunately that’s often the best we can do in practice. It sounds backwards, and yeah, it is backwards, but oftentimes it’s the best we’ve got.
At the same time you want treatments and clinical presentations to be somewhat coherent, and you don’t want practitioners going totally rogue and deviating from the standard of care in a way that could harm people, so yeah the conditions and their potential treatments are associated.
Most discussion of treatments in the DSM are various forms of therapy. Most pharmaceutical treatments that are mentioned are about broad classes of medications, and they’re all old drugs with generics on the market. It’s not a book you consult for pharma info.
I've seen that used before to dismiss the severity of conditions like autism and especially ADHD. It's often coming from a well-meaning place, and sometimes it's just a comforting story people tell themselves in order to not feel as deficient ("The problem isn't me, it's the system!").
It's also absolutely true that the demands society places on all of us are unnatural and often excessive, but the fact is that even absent all external expectations some people with mental illness will be unable to accomplish what they themselves want and should be able to accomplish.
Even the most utopian, accepting, accommodating society it wouldn't be enough to make up for some people's inability to function.
I feel the same about a lot of the "super power" talk when it comes to mental illness. There are advantages and disadvantages to just about anything, but on the whole conditions like ADHD or autism tend to do way more harm than good.
The DSM only matters if somebody is actively seeking treatment for something that they have a problem with in their own situation. So what’s in there is totally irrelevant for the public at large. It’s only if somebody shows up and says there’s something going on that they don’t like. It’s really just billing codes, man. The reality is far different anyway, and it just gets distilled down to these primitive codes.
By this criteria, you can then say many other non-psych conditions are not disorders.
What classifies as a disorder other than making life worse for someone?
There is no universal book given by a holy entity that we can read to classify something as normal or a disorder.
Why do we have arbitrary cutoffs for cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc?