Meet the DSM: Big Pharma’s Psychiatric Bible

You manufacture pills and drugs, and you also write the reference manual for prescribimg them. You want to sell more of your drugs. Therefore you invent a new ailment for which you just happen to have the pills, and you add that ailment to the prescription reference manual. Pretty soon everyone "needs" your flu vaccine or is "crazy" and needs your drugs, now perhaps required by law. You laugh all the way to the bank. 11-minute video.

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Bruce

'Since 1952, the American Psychiatric Association has published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, as a guideline for the classification and diagnoses of mental health issues. The DSM, according to the APA itself, “is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States and contains a listing of diagnostic criteria for every psychiatric disorder recognized by the U.S. healthcare system.”

Earlier this year, the APA published the DSM-5, the fifth major revision of the manual.

Commonly referred to as the psychiatric diagnostic “bible,” the guide has always generated controversy. How are disorders diagnosed? What criteria are used to establish disorders in the first place? Are the categories subjective? Do they reflect cultural biases?
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In the end, what is at stake is not merely the utility of the DSM as a diagnostic guideline, but the credibility of the psychiatric profession as a whole. As critics like Dr. Frances and others have argued, in the relentless drive to expand the number and the scope of mental disorders (with the attendant increase in potential customers it brings for the drug manufacturers), more and more people are being driven from the ranks of the normal into the care of psychiatrists. This diverts attention from the extreme cases of individuals most in need of mental healthcare and makes impersonal interactions dictated by DSM guidelines and ending with knee-jerk drug prescriptions all the more likely. For many, the direction of psychiatry has to be diverted from its current course before the very human condition itself is pathologized and medicated out of existence.'