Do Psychiatrists Create the Very Mental Problems They Claim to Treat?

[[deleted user]]

It's easy to blame Big Pharma and the DSM for creating trendy mental illnesses, but the real problem is psychiatry's blindness to culture.

http://www.alternet.org/personal-heal...

[Alicja]

Don't know about psychiatrists, but behind closed doors most osycholgists hate the DSM. It is useful in getting paid but there are so many issues. The first one being that you have to slap a diagnosis on someone for insurance to pay within the first session. The ridiculousness of this isn't missed by psychologists but they do it because otherwise they wouldn't get paid.

However, the reason we do have mutiple versions of the DSM is that culture, and the norms within our culture, do change. But one of the criteria for mental illness is that it causes distress/pain to the patient and/or significantly impairs their functionality in our society (for example the inability to hold a job or take care of children) along with a specific cluster of symptoms. Therefore, if a person contains the cluster of symptoms but function well and the symtoms cause no distress, then a disorder is not diagnosed. At least that is how its designed.