When is a disorder a disorder?

Though that can get complicated since a lot of people self medicate with drugs due to underlying issues....so I feel diagnosing that person with drug abuse/addiction problems without adressing the underlying issue is more of disservice to that person. A diagnostician could easily try to say all my issues are related my excessive drinking I was doing for a while, or even the fact I use cannabis....well truth of the matter is I attempted suicide before I even had a grasp on what drugs where let alone tried any....and then with the excessive drinking and some other drug abuse pretty sure that was me trying to escape the PTSD symptoms I have as well as the depression and anxiety issues I've essentially always had.

Of course some substance abuse and what not can cause problems even if the person doesn't have any underlying mental condition...so they'd certainly have to try and distinguish between that.

My worry about the DSM is the number of so called professionals setting the standards for the DSM are paid by drug companies. They have an invested interest in diagnosing the widest number of people as disordered, so that they can then be medicated.

True professionals are objective and not paid by a third party that will benefit financially by the outcome of the DSM.

that is a major issue, drug companies are after profit so having them influence the DSM and standards for diagnoses and treatments is obviously not going to have very good results. Though this is certainly not just limited to mental condition/disorder/illness diagnoses...they try and push a lot of drugs on people for other ailments as well.

Also what is really messed up is we have a system designed to make people dependent on these conventional drug/therapy treatments, I mean insurance and medicaid only cover that sort of treatment...not any alternative methods really to my knowledge. So it discourages people from seeking out other forms of treatment that might work better for them....though I do not deny drugs can be useful for treating various ailments, sometimes they are needed and of course based on statistics people using them for other reasons isn't going away any time soon. So either way they have their place...but over-prescribing of things, or prescribing a certain drug because its more profitable but not nessisarily the right thing for that person is not something that should be going on. I mean for example if you go to a psychatrist and they have effexor post it notes, pens, hell maybe even posters and they prescribe you effexor are you really going to be convinced they are doing that because they for sure think it could be beneficial to the patient or suspect it might have something to do with whatever they are getting out of prescribing that for every case of depression they run into?

Anyways the very system makes it difficult to seek out alternative treatment, unless of course you have $$$ to afford alternative treatments...which a lot of people who need help they aren't getting don't.