Has the biomedical myth : the one that has so completely dominated psychiatry and so, by extension, all “mental health” services , either by design or accident, succeeded in reducing our idea of normal human experience to the point that everyone is now abnormal?
Has that great ocean of humanity, or even that “pool” as Allen Frances called it, been reduced to a dirty puddle in a back alley?
The latest telling of this myth – codified in DSM5 – would have it that we are now all disordered, diagnosable, and dependent on doctors and drugs for a fix or a fix-up.
DSM-5 is but the latest edition of the compendium of so-called “mental disorders” and has quickly become the world’s best known book that no one has actually read. It seems we all know what’s in it even without reading it….and we know what’s in it because it is simply the culmination of the last fifty years [at least] of myth-building and indoctrination. It is merely the latest stage in having us all accept the delusion that there is but one way to think about the way we struggle, but one way to name it, and but one way to deal with it..and that there is only one small group who can do that.
The 48,000 membership of the private members club that is the American Psychiatric Association [APA] – that self-appointed authority on these things – predicts that 48 % of Americans will be diagnosed and in need of the expert corrections of its own members .
Now, anyone living outside America might observe that at least 100% of Americans ought to be diagnosed with some from of madness – so what of the remainder?
Still, committees upon committees of psychiatrists and drug reps deem that the human design is so faulty that half of us need them to correct the faults and chemical imbalances inherent in our biological design and operating system. Quite how they came to think they know better than either a divine creator or millions of years of evolution is yours to guess but that’s the nub of it. It’s a bit like the old joke about the British empire – it took God six days to make the world, but it needed the British Empire to make it work properly. Well, the Brit empire didn’t end too well for many….
According to the worldview of this well funded private club of 48,000 American psychiatrists, we humans are biologically and biochemically faulty and we need them to manipulate the basic operations of our minds with their patented and manufactured pharmaceuticals.
Exactly who’s supposed to be crazy?
Yes, we are now all diagnosable: the APA and it’s pet project the DSM5 says so.
They have successfully brainwashed journalists and media-persons, “thought leaders” and even decent doctors to parrot that hackneyed “bible” phrase when , clearly, DSM is no such thing.
Really, why do people call it “the bible of mental health?”
Perhaps…
For Pete’s sake – as well as, Paul, Mathew, John etc: if nothing else: let’s stop calling the bloody DSM a “bible” of anything.
to be continued…..
Now we’re all crazy
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- it’s so we might think every cheap hotel room should have one.
- its because it represents the best efforts a long time ago to describe the best understanding we had at the time but which has long since been overtaken by knowledge gained from science.
- having us think of it as a “bible” makes it easier to indoctrinate us into thinking that the DSM speaks of The Truth: yes, we are now all “children of the book” only with this book the phrase takes on a whole new meaning.
- mind games – Kwame McKenzie (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)
- DSM: mad, bad, or just plain daft? (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)
- psychiatry: in recovery? (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com
- Mamma weer all crazee now https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/mama-weer-all-crazee-now/