Is Psychiatry Out of Touch with Science?
In an excerpt from Gary Greenberg’s book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, the author argues that psychiatry is out of touch with today’s science. He writes:
In the four revision of the [American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.)] since 1980, diagnoses have appeared and disappeared, and symptom lists have been tweaked and rejiggered with troubling regularity, generally after debate that seems more suited to the floors of Congress than the halls of science. The inevitable and public chaos—diagnostic epidemics, prescription-drug fads, patients labelled and relabelled—has only deepened psychiatry’s inferiority complex. But it’s not entirely clear that psychiatrists want a solution to the problem…
What do you think ? . . .
