Many people think this definitional debate is only seen around addiction. But the same is true in schizophrenia, bipolar, autism, depression, and all the other conditions in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual. In none of these diagnoses has a single pathology, present in all affected people and absent in others, been found. In fact, once a specific genetic profile or a unique physiology can be detected reliably, it may be redefined as “neurological” rather than psychiatric and removed from the manual, which leaves psychiatric diagnosis open to ongoing controversy.
