Maggie's Farm

 Readers know that I consider the trend in Psychiatry to obsess about diagnoses and nosology to be a silly pursuit. From Gary Greenberg's latest:

 (Dr. Alan) Frances has become the loudest and most influential public voice questioning the DSM’s latest revamp. “The fact that we had a descriptive system only revealed our limitations,” he says. “If you believe that labels are only labels, you don’t want to keep changing the language arbitrarily. It just confuses everybody.”

Frances has been warning everyone who will listen that the newest DSM revision will turn even more of human suffering into mental illness and thus into grist for the pharmaceutical mill. I once asked him whether he thought a good definition of a mental disorder would establish a bright boundary line that would definitively sort the sick from the unusual and keep psychiatry in its proper place.

“Here’s the problem,” Frances said. “There is no definition of a mental disorder...”

Cui bono?