The Psychiatric Lunatic Fringe (see GAD)

"We're hoping (the new manual) is going to help us work better, but we have to see ...  Sometimes, despite everybody's best intention, it's (only) a little bit afterwards that we see the repercussions."
Dr. Suzanne Renaud, president, Canadian Psychiatric Association

Does this auger an advance in clinical therapy for recognized psychiatric anomalies that people suffer, or does it merely give the authority of greater credibility to psychiatrists who believe their medical arts are under-recognized, and needful of shoring up through the formalization of the recognition of greater numbers of human beings whose minds go off on tangents of their own?

The news that official psychiatry is set to make it easier for their profession to swiftly identify some nuanced manifestations of what they take to be symptoms of mental illness may or may not be an advance in understanding the human brain and the mind that inhabits it. 

Certainly, identifying a greater number of psychological disorders may prove useful in courts of law, enabling defence lawyers to call expert witnesses who may exonerate their clients from responsibility of having committed vile acts of psychotic human rage.  Not a very happy prospect.  Like the confessional, it may promise release of responsibility where none is warranted.

And most certainly the pharmaceutical industry must be ecstatically throwing huge champagne-rewarding celebrations at this breakthrough with visions of sugarplum sales going through right to the outer limits of space.

Through the professional imprimatur of the American Psychiatric Association, with the publication
 of the latest issue of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, mind-derangement may now include issues and practices that people engage in heretofore considered to be in the range of idiosyncratic eccentricities.  Charming, harmless, but quite socially unusual.

"Generalized anxiety disorder", a loose term that is capable of huge expansion to include a wide range of human behaviours related to emotions unleashed by circumstances beyond one's control, has seen its threshold become exceedingly generous in its capacity to draw in nebulously specified symptoms. 

Concerned about something, worried about outcomes, anxious about life-stressors?  These responses to normal coping in situations ranging from the ordinary to the bizarre to the potentially life-threatening may be assessed by mental-health professionals as representing true mental illness.  Good enough reason to keep excess emotional outpourings within the confines of one's own brain.

Canadian medical historian Edward Shorter sums up the process of expanding the human condition into discrete segments of recognizable disorders neatly enough, explaining that what makes the grade is not scientific in nature, but owes more to the human propensity to bargain for leverage (might that be symptomatic of a mental illness under the rubric of  'excess dysfunctional proprietorship'?).

"...a lot of horse-trading around the table", not scientific evaluation of the appropriateness of agreeing on new categories of mental illness takes place --- "'I'll give you your diagnosis if you give me mine', which is a fundamentally unscientific process.  They didn't come up with the speed of light this way.
"Psychiatry claims to be a medical speciality that is based on neuroscience, but the whole diagnostic system is very questionable  The current DSM series is, in my view, a scientific disaster and should be discarded."

What a prospect ... people who become upset, disquieted, depressed for what is considered by these new standards - several weeks' duration - to be unacceptably long are now to be considered to represent clinical depression.  If you're anxious you are by definition a mental case.  "Bereavement exclusion" at one time existed in the manual to exclude people suffering from a profound bereavement.

Under that exclusion clause people who had recently undergone a life-shattering loss would be excused from a diagnosis of major depressive disorder.  At least until two months have passed and the individual is expected by then to have adapted to his/her new situation, the loss of a loved one.  Now, however, that two-month exclusionary period has been contracted to two weeks.

You have two weeks to grieve the loss of a parent, a spouse, a child, a sibling.  And then - just get over it.  Because formal psychiatry demands no less.  Those who exhibit "persistent irritability", "behaviour outbursts" - which at one time personified children having temper tantrums now have a medical diagnosis.  Hoarding, binging and excoriation are also now all livid symptoms of mental disorder.

"Disruptive mood disregulation disorder?  Temper tantrums, in a nutshell.  Hoarding disorder - where is the threshold?  When does hoarding become 'mentally sick:  Where's the tipping point?", asks Dr. Frank Farley, an Edmonton native, past president of the American Psychological Association