[With each revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], the number of diagnosable conditions increases. With each increase, psychiatry is criticized for ‘creating’ diagnoses to: 1) increase revenue to clinicians; 2) partner with big pharma to expand the mental health market; or 3) simply raise money for the DSM publishers. Consequently, in the absence of research demonstrating that new definitions meaningfully advance the utility of our diagnoses, our credibility with the public and our medical colleagues is challenged with each DSM revision.
October 24th, 2011 at 5:02PM
To what extent is this not confined to psychiatry?
The U.S. will soon change from the ICD-9 (International Classification of Disease) to ICD-10. The number of coded diagnoses for clinicians will increase from about 18,000 to about 140,000.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904103404576560742746021106.html
October 24th, 2011 at 5:21PM
meh, the American public is literally eating it up.
sadly the question of an uninformed/unengaged population is one of the key driving factors in most of our health woes as a country with no magic pill in sight for that social ill.
maybe we should start a contest to come up with a diagnosis for it.
October 27th, 2011 at 4:38AM
dmf,
I agree but unfortunately it’s not just about being unengaged or uninformed. That condition derives from more than simple laziness. Digging deeper it seems that this is about avoiding a fearful state – ignorance is bliss.
Psychiatry and clin. psych., as conceived in the popular mind and as presented by many in the field, purport to offer the answer/solution/treatment/cure to life’s difficult problems. In reality these problems often lack solutions, or at least solutions which are palatable. It can be disheartening and even terrifying to confront this, and so people would rather do something else than acknowledge it.
I know many persons for whom curiosity, a will to labor and intellectual ability are not at issue. Yet they remain ignorant of many issues for one reason: they lack the will to look upon many things (often those which relate to human suffering) simply because doing so will make them extremely uncomfortable.