Consuming Realities

"This DSM-5 overreach touches the lives of everyone who is medically ill. The fundamental change is that they're allowing the diagnosis if a person has just one physical symptom that they worry about (for at least six months), and they've eliminated the hierarchies that previously protected against over-diagnosis.
"In DSM-IV you wouldn't pin a mental disorder label on someone with a medical illness until you had first ruled out several different important possibilities."
"If a person has a medical illness that's worrisome, they should be worried about it."
Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University

Dr. Frances is obviously a stickler for caution and due diligence. The previous edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the fourth of the series that represents the bible of psychiatrists globally, had him chair the task force of DSM-IV. So he is no novice when he assesses the latest issue of the manual, but he does, obviously, represent an earlier era of the profession, perhaps less professionally diagnosis- and treatment-aggressive in nature.

This latest incarnation appears to be wedded to the idea that people who are concerned about their health conditions represent individuals who have succumbed to a pathology of fear and mental disequilibrium, needful of care from those in the psychiatric profession. The newest version of psychiatry's official catalogue of mental disorders now contains a newly expanded definition of "somatic symptom disorder".

According to the American Psychiatric Association, publishers of the manual "some patients with illnesses like heart disease or cancer will indeed experience thoughts, feelings or behaviours related to their illness that will be extreme or overwhelming"; therefore it should be obvious according to their professional standards that these individuals "may qualify for an SSD diagnosis."

To the unlettered in human behaviourial sciences and mind destabilization, it might seem a logical enough reaction to feel depressed and rather more than a little upset to have been diagnosed with heart problems, with cancer or any other troublesome and life-threatening illness. To these health professionals manifestations of prolonged fear of the end-results of these illnesses represents a mental disability.

Their criterion for establishing that type of diagnosis appears to the onlooker to reflect the need to expand their services directory, to include a wider, more inclusive menu of mental health impairment. On the other hand, perhaps their high-handed inclusion of normal human reaction to adverse events in life representing yet another mental malady represents a professional pathology devoted to ascribing ever wider areas of human emotion which they offer their services to amend.