Maggie's Farm

In the LA Review of Books, Andrew Scull on All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders.

It's a good summary of what has been going on in my field these days. One quote:

This reliance on symptoms, and on the simplistic approach of counting symptoms to make a diagnosis, creates a bogus confidence in psychiatric science. Such categories have an element of the arbitrary about them. When Robert Spitzer and his associates created DSM III, they liked to call themselves DOPs (data-oriented persons). In fact, DSM’s categories were assembled through political horse-trading and internal votes and compromise. The document they produced paid little heed to the question of validity, or to whether the new system of categorizing mental disorders corresponded to real diseases out there.