A Shrink Shrinks the Shrink Profession

The American Psychiatric Association is publishing the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on May 22^nd. Gary Greenberg, a psychotherapist and critic of his own profession, has written a book, Manufacturig Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease and has just finished a critique of the new diagnostic manual, The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM-5 and the Unmaking of Psychiatry.

Greenberg has talked to Hope Reese, a journalist who published their conversation in the current issue of The Atlantic. Greenberg contends convincingly that the scientific methodology used by all other medical specialties is absent in psychiatry. Other medicine has causes and effects, with treatments attacking the causes. Psychiatry has "disorders" which do not have to be described and treated with the logical approach of other specialties. In the Atlantic article, Greenberg says:

"The difference between disease and disorder is an attempt on the part of psychiatry to evade the problem they're presented with. Disease is a kind of suffering that's caused by a bio-chemical pathology. Something that can be discovered and targeted with magic bullets. But in many cases our suffering can't be diagnosed that way. Psychiatry was in a crisis in the 1970s over questions like "what is a mental illness?" and "what mental illnesses exist?" One of the first things they did was try to finesse the problem that no mental illness met that definition of a disease. They had yet to identify what the pathogen was, what the disease process consisted of, and how to cure it. So they created a category called "disorder." It's a rhetorical device. It's saying "it's sort of like a disease," but not calling it a disease because all the other doctors will jump down their throats asking, "where's your blood test?" The reason there haven't been any sensible findings tying genetics or any kind of molecular biology to DSM categories is not only that our instruments are crude, but also that the DSM categories aren't real. It's like using a map of the moon to find your way around Russia."
It’s a fascinating and disturbing article available at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/