A New Yorker writer anticipates the release, next month, of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He finds it bizarre and unsettling, as does UD, that so many Americans are willing to medicalize their experience of life. Their children’s experience of life. He wonders why this organization, the American Psychiatric Association, retains its mental illness franchise.
The market for mental disorders is already enormous, thanks in part to the relentless effort of the A.P.A. to use the D.S.M. to convince us that our psychological suffering is best understood as diseases that should be treated by doctors.