The Book of Woe Quotes

“Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry

“Kendler himself is the researcher who reported that when Walter Cassidy, the psychiatrist who first proposed diagnostic criteria for depression, was asked why he set the threshold at six out of ten symptoms, he responded, “It sounded about right”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“Grassley ordered the APA to disclose how much of its income was drug money. The answer turned out to be a lot—according to the Times, nearly one-third of the organization’s $62.5 million annual revenue41 in 2006. Some of it came from advertising, but much of it went to educational programs in which drug companies tutored doctors attending APA conferences in the fine points of prescribing their drugs.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“But we all know that the DSM is at its best a clumsy and imperfect field guide to our foibles and at its worst a compendium of expert opinions masquerading as scientific truths, a book whose credibility surpasses its integrity, whose usefulness is primarily commercial, and whose most ardent defenders are reduced to arguing that it should be taken less seriously even as all of us - clinicians, researchers, and copyright holders alike - cash in on the fact that it is not.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“Descriptive psychiatry can't determine whether or not a person's story [...] is a true one. More important, it can't tell us whether the list of symptoms, no matter how reliable, constitutes a disease. It can gather scattered particles into a category [...], but it can't say whether those amount to the natural formation known as disease.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“[O]ur inner lives are too important to leave in the hands of doctors [,] because they don't know as much about us as they claim, because a full account of human nature is beyond their ken.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“Or maybe you're like me - a mental health professional who has been faithfully filling out insurance forms for thirty years, jotting down those five-digit codes from the DSM that open the money taps, rendering diagnoses even though you are pretty sure you're not treating medical conditions, and for just a moment you hesitate, contemplating the bad faith of pouring a lie into the foundation of a relationship whose main and perhaps only value is that it provides an opportunity to look someone in the eye, and, without fear of judgment or the necessity to manipulate, speak the truth.
And, having contemplated it, you tell yourself whatever story you have to and you sign the paper, and the best you can do is to curse the DSM in a kind of incantation against your own bad faith.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“But psychiatry’s appeal is not just about the possibility of cure, which is why the profession continues to flourish even when it cures nothing and relieves symptoms only haphazardly. It’s in the naming itself. What Wallace Stevens called the “blessed rage to order.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry

“The diagnostic enterprise hinges on an optimistic notion: that disease is part of a natural world that only awaits our understanding. But even if this is true, nature gives up its secrets grudgingly, and our finite senses are in some ways ill suited to extracting them. More important, our prejudices lead us to tear nature where we want it to break. Science, especially modern medicine, is founded on this equally optimistic idea: that experts can purge their inquiry of prejudice and desire, and map the landscape of suffering along its natural boundaries.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry