Thank you. Well said.
I've also noticed that there are many who almost seem to think that they are their diagnosis, and are basically helpless to do anything to change that fact. So, for them, it's self-fulfilling prophecy after self-fulfilling prophecy. They really are ______. It's been confirmed over and over.
Why not rather focus on changing whatever the behaviors problems are? I would think that is the reason for being diagnosed in the first place.
And I'm reminded of this episode of Science Friday about the DSM manual.
http://www.npr.org/2013/05/31/187534...ychiatry-bible
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The new edition of the DSM, the so-called "Bible" of psychiatry, is out. But many psychiatrists and psychologists say the manual's approach is outdated, boxing mental illness into discrete categories like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, when very little is known about the underlying causes of disease.
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Here are some quotes from the transcript.
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It's not abstruse and philosophical when people go into a doctor's office, get a diagnosis of a mental illness, that diagnosis not only follows them around for the rest of their lives, it determines the treatment. It sometimes determines the drugs they're taking, and it determines, often, their identity. It tells people how to think about their suffering in a way that telling somebody they had kidney disease does not, because we're talking about the human mind. We're talking about the self. I don't think that's a philosophical issue. I mean, it is a philosophical issue, but I also think it's a right-on-the-ground, pragmatic, concrete issue.
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GREENBERG: But let's add to that, Jeff, that under the current regime, 50 percent of the American people will suffer mental illness in their lifetime and 30 percent, close to 30 percent in any given year. Also, it's important to point out that those two moves which - the deletion of homosexuality and the addition of PTSD, both of which are great moves if you're going to have something like a DSM. Both took place by expert consensus on - basically on the basis of a vote. In fact, in the case of homosexuality, a referendum. And this is the problem of the DSM. It is that - it is presented to us as a scientific text, and yet in what other medical field are scientists voting on what a disease is?
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