Carving Its Empire

It isn't new, that members of the medical community who specialize in human psychology are protesting at the propensity of the American Psychiatric Association to conclude that there are not sufficiently existing categories of psychological illnesses. The American Psychiatric Association publishes a compendium of official, professionally-recognized descriptions, symptoms and allied criteria of mental illnesses. And they've been criticized previously for overstepping themselves.

The widely respected Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is about to be republished with updates, inclusions of new mental illnesses and categories of illnesses as designated by the American Psychiatric Association. And the mental health community is not amused. True to form, and typical of what they've done in the past, the APA has decided in their wisdom to formalize and institutionalize categories of human behaviour as representative of 'disorders' or pathologies.

In so doing, their detractors claim, they will be categorizing completely normal people who happen to have little quirks of character, and behavioural responses, who may do things differently, whose personalities set them aside from the general population, but who may be eccentric in small or large part, and definitely not displaying mental pathologies.

In the same token, by classifying some truly violent and socially-inimical characteristics of some as representative of mental illness, the APA may end up by listing the behaviours expressed by rapists, serial molesters, and others of their ilk, as illnesses, not simply vicious social crimes. While hating women may be a state of mind, misogyny, misandry and misanthropy are not mental illnesses in a real sense.

Psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health experts are not at all enthralled with the possibilities contained in the new international diagnostic manual with its sparkling new categories and "tick-box" diagnosis systems. Over 11,000 health professionals have committed to signing a petition (dsm5-reform.com) insisting the development of the fifth edition of the manual be set aside and reconsidered.

The concerns are various; that people otherwise considered normal may be labelled mentally ill simply because of their sometimes odd behaviours. Deviance delivered to the verdict of mental illness. And characterizing sexual abusers as "paraphilic coercive disorder" victims, would aid immeasurably in ensuring that courts would be lenient with them as a result of their 'mental illness'.

The new edition of the manual, familiarly referred to as DSM-5, would have the effect of pathologizing a whole range of problems which are not truly mental illnesses. "Many people who are shy, bereaved, eccentric, or have unconventional romantic lives will suddenly find themselves labelled as mentally ill", cautioned a clinical psychologist, and head of Liverpool University's Institute of Psychology.

"It's not humane, it's not scientific, and it won't help decide what help a person needs." An emeritus professor at Duke University, chair of the committee that had edited the previous DSM revision felt the new, proposed DSM-5 would "radically and recklessly expand the boundaries of psychiatry", resulting in the "medicalization of normality, individual difference, and criminality."

As for those new categories, try that one on with gays and lesbians, transgendered and queer, and see how far that gets them. Building an empire, expanding their influence, and inflating their value as medical experts, this committee has chosen to neatly categorize perceived differences in society from the accepted norms, and claim them to be psychologically warped.

Seems their values and sense of proportion and professional integrity is what has become warped.