If your anxiety or depression is trying to tell you something, it’s better to take heed than to silence the messenger with drugs. Stuart Schneiderman writes that
Sigmund Freud discovered that when you present strange ideas as scientific fact you can gain authority, power and prestige. Few people give it all up for the truth.
Yet, Schneiderman observes,
psychiatry continues to invade the culture. Through its Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children.
Schneiderman points out that Allen Francis was the lead writer of the last edition of the DSM.
This new disease reminded Frances of one of his keenest regrets about the DSM-IV: its role, as he perceives it, in the epidemic of bipolar diagnoses in children over the past decade. Shortly after the book came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes.
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