Are you unhappy? What are you going to do about it?

Dr, Joy Bliss at Maggie's Farm links to a 2013 City Journal article by psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple entitled Everyone on the Couch. In it Dalrymple asserts that

Today’s psychiatry undermines self-reliance and morality.

Here are some excerpts:

The DSM is ultimately an instrument for weakening human resilience, self-reliance, fortitude, and resolve. It turns human beings into mechanisms, deprives their conduct of meaning, and makes them prey to entrepreneurs of human misery. The authors, one could say, suffer from PNOD—psychiatric nosology overvaluation disorder—the criteria for which are as follows:

A: The grandiose belief that all human weakness can and should be divided into valid diagnostic categories.

B: At least two of the following: a firm and unshakable belief that all human distress arises from malfunctioning serotonin metabolism; a firm and unshakable belief that functional MRI scans will soon teach humans how to live; a firm and unshakable belief that the seven deadly sins have been scientifically superseded by psychiatric diagnoses.

...Psychiatric diagnosis — more overblown, all-inclusive, and shallow in the DSM-5 than ever before — has almost driven the word “unhappy” from the English lexicon. This is hardly surprising: according to the DSM, depression can be diagnosed after only two weeks. Among the thousands of patients who consulted me over a period of 15 years, only three whom I can recall ever used the word “unhappy” (and one was a prisoner, who told me, “I’m not happy in this prison, Doctor”). By contrast, thousands said that they were “depressed.”

The semantic change is significant. The word “unhappy” is an implicit call to self-examination; the word “depressed” is, at least nowadays, a call to the doctor. It is no coincidence that the age of the DSM should coincide with a tenth of the population’s taking antidepressants — drugs that, for the most part, are placebos when not outright harmful. None of this excludes the possibility, of course, that some diagnoses will run afoul of pressure-group politics by the time the DSM-6 comes out. How long, for example, can gender dysphoria disorder survive every right-thinking person’s moral duty to celebrate transsexualism?

Read more here.