As DSM5 goes to press midst lots of criticism, a different perspective…

Is DSM5 a spectacularly sinister and stoooopid project designed to put us all in nice little boxes – like the ones for sale at those fetishistic organising emporia ?

Or could DSM actually have a positive effect?

When DSM5 is published there will surely be no human left alive who does not have a mental illness.

So, now we’re all equal right?

As George Orwell’s allegory Animal Pharm tells us: if  we’re all equal, then some of us must be more equal-er than others.
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So is it that the APA are the pigs ?

Do they see themselves  leading a glorious revolution to free us from the tyranny of broken brain biology?

Yet, mired in their own growing suspicion and fear of their fellow beasts, they diagnose that we need them to  think for us?  -and to protect us from ourselves? 

Is the APA now the council of pigs staking out their ground to claim the sole right to decide who’s more equal? …who gets to live in the house? …who can sleep on the beds? …who can walk on two legs?

Besides being so very wrong that anyone with a brain not bathed in psych meds can see  what they are up to, the APA insist ever more strongly on being right; being the only people who possibly could be right; the only people who have a right to be right;  and, anyway,  it’s their ball so only they get to play with it. 

In Animal Farm, with each rising sun the rule of the the self appointed leaders of the revolution – the pigs –  it becomes easier for the other animals to see what is really going on: they,  more and more, are being ruled by tyrants who they thought were friends.

The pigs who, growing ever more drunk on power, become ever more afraid of being found out by their brethren beasts, isolate themselves and tighten their grip on power.

Devoid of ideas about how they might change the pigs insist ever more fiercely that their way is the only way. And so, the pigs dig their own hole deeper and keep doing  more of what they already know doesn’t work – but, hey, it is all they know, so it’s all they can do. 

It’s only a story but it doesn’t end well for the pigs.

It rarely does. 

So  – maybe history is about to offer us yet another example of how tyranny always ends in the spectacularly mundane self-destruction of the tyrants.

For the APA , maybe, DSM 5 will see to that.

And this revolution will be televised…and on youtube and facebook, and twitter, etc…