Shyness, grieving soon to be classified as mental illness -- Health & Wellness -- Sott.net

Millions of healthy people - including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes - may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.

In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health experts said its new categories and "tick-box" diagnosis systems were at best "silly" and at worst "worrying and dangerous."

Some diagnoses - for conditions like "oppositional defiant disorder" and "apathy syndrome" - risk devaluing the seriousness of mental illness and medicalising behaviors most people would consider normal or just mildly eccentric, the experts said.

At the other end of the spectrum, the new DSM, due out next year, could give medical diagnoses for serial rapists and sex abusers - under labels like "paraphilic coercive disorder" - and may allow offenders to escape prison by providing what could be seen as an excuse for their behavior, they added.

The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and has descriptions, symptoms and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders. It is used internationally and is seen as the diagnostic "bible" for mental health medicine.

More than 11,000 health professionals have already signed a petition (at dsm5-reform.com) calling for the development of the fifth edition of the manual to be halted and re-thought.

"The proposed revision to DSM ... will exacerbate the problems that result from trying to fit a medical, diagnostic system to problems that just don't fit nicely into those boxes," said Peter Kinderman, a clinical psychologist and head of Liverpool University's Institute of Psychology at a briefing about widespread concerns over the book in London.

He said the new edition - known as DSM-5 - "will pathologise a wide range of problems which should never be thought of as mental illnesses."

"Many people who are shy, bereaved, eccentric, or have unconventional romantic lives will suddenly find themselves labeled as mentally ill," he said. "It's not humane, it's not scientific, and it won't help decide what help a person needs."

Radical, reckless and inhumane

Simon Wessely of the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London said a look back at history should make health experts ask themselves: "Do we need all these labels?"

He said the 1840 Census of the United States included just one category for mental disorder, but by 1917 the APA was already recognizing 59. That rose to 128 in 1959, to 227 in 1980, and again to around 350 disorders in the fastest revisions of DSM in 1994 and 2000.

Allen Frances, Emeritus professor at Duke University and chair of the committee that oversaw the previous DSM revision, said the proposed DSM-5 would "radically and recklessly expand the boundaries of psychiatry" and result in the "medicalisation of normality, individual difference, and criminality."

As an unintended consequence, he said an emailed comment, many millions of people will get inappropriate diagnoses and treatments, and already scarce funds would be wasted on giving drugs to people who don't need them and may be harmed by them.

Nick Craddock of Cardiff University's department of psychological medicine and neurology, who also spoke at the London briefing, cited depression as a key example of where DSM's broad categories were going wrong.

Whereas in previous editions, a person who had recently lost a loved one and was suffering low moods would be seen as experiencing a normal human reaction to bereavement, the new DSM criteria would ignore the death, look only at the symptoms, and class the person as having a depressive illness.

Other examples of diagnoses cited by experts as problematic included "gambling disorder," "internet addiction disorder" and "oppositional defiant disorder" - a condition in which a child "actively refuses to comply with majority's requests" and "performs deliberate actions to annoy others."

"That basically means children who say 'no' to their parents more than a certain number of times," Kinderman said. "On that criteria, many of us would have to say our children are mentally ill."

Reader Comments

GabR · 2012-02-11T19:44:01Z

Huh!

Soon, all normal people will be labeled as mental ill, and psychopaths as the "normal" ones.

Ruth · 2012-02-12T04:00:33Z

Yeah Huh!

Soon all the 'normal' people will be only the 'animal humans' the 'mechanical humans' and the psychopaths who control them (and aren't afraid of them).

inverse · 2012-02-11T21:09:52Z

Reader

Follow the $'s: More patients, more treatment, more staff, more drugs, more community workers more insurance more scientists more research grants etc etc... Where does all this money come from, sheeple...

l_e_cox · 2012-02-12T01:38:22Z

Compulsive mental disorder labeling disorder.

Mental hospitals, where most criminally insane individuals are taken, have served two main purposes as far as I can tell:
1) Incarcerate or kill dissenters.
2) Recycle MK-Ultra personnel into black projects.

Psychiatry has always enjoyed experimenting on social cast-offs, secret agents, and soldiers.

The non-institutional drugging of the general public in the name of "mental health" seems to be mostly a lower-order money-making racket.

Either way, lives are destroyed, and with them, future bright hopes for the planet.

The whole operation should just be outlawed. It does not serve Life in any way, as far as I can tell.

Good Optics · 2012-02-13T19:34:53Z

L - O -frickin'-L ! ! !

That's the funniest thing I've in a bout a week :-)

hjackson ·

I'm a fan of shy males.

· 2012-02-12T01:56:20Z

Luke · 2012-02-12T06:54:54Z

The psychiatry industry for the most part DON'T force anyone to take the drugs...(This is in the case of the vast majority)! What happens is people for whatever reason, find they can't live what is considered as normal lives in society... This is either because people are always telling them this like "why can't you just have some fun"(this is responsible for a lot of alcoholism and drug taking, usually they say "live a little, stop being so uptight") or "Why are you anti-social" etc or the individual notices something is holding him/her back from really going after what they want, like that promotion, maybe they pinpoint it to anxiety, shyness, fear, anger etc etc...

The psychiatry industry then step forward and say, "Do you want to be fun to be around? Do you want to be more in control of yourself? Do you want bla bla bla? Well we have this FDA approved drugs that will make you just that"... Maybe the individual then goes to his/her psychiatrist or if under-age is taken by the parents to get the pills...

So I am not particularly surprised by this article, one would assume anything that gets in the way of the individual being what is socially acceptable to be considered as a disease...