Washington Post – Psychiatry’s bible, the DSM, is doing more harm than good

One of our members – Manic Muses – has very kindly sent me notification about a very interesting and relevant article published within The Washington Post which is entitled “Psychiatry’s bible, the DSM, is doing more harm than good”.

In this article the author – one Paula J Caplain – makes the statement…

Since the 1980s, when I first made public my concerns about psychiatric diagnosis, I have heard from hundreds of people who have been arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label and are struggling because of it. ¹

Going on to say that…

About half of all Americans get a psychiatric diagnosis in their lifetimes.¹

Which I believe is a statistic (going by the link they provide) from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention – although that link didn’t sem to work for me.)

Another particularly interesting quote from this article reads..

In our increasingly psychiatrized world, the first course is often to classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder, assume it is based on a broken brain or a chemical imbalance, and prescribe drugs or hospitalization; even electroshock is still performed.¹

I am very grateful to Manic Muses for sharing this article with me so that I could bring it to member’s attention and I encourage all those who are interested to pop over to this article in The Washington Post’s online site and check it out for themselves.