Ok, maybe a bad idea but let's go.
100 strong opinions and facts I wish more people knew about the psychiatric system:
Conversation
6. The diagnoses are picked out of the DSM. The DSM is written by committees within the American Psychiatric Association. New diagnoses are added to the DSM by vote amongst the committee members.
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7. There are several projects aiming to replace the DSM, including one funded by the NIMH, and they all replace 'has a disease' as a binary property of a patient with 'is at an extreme in one or more spectrums' for almost all diagnoses.
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8. There are a shitton of working psychiatrists, psychologists and other doctors who basically agree with this framing--disorder as a problem of getting stuck in extremes of normal experience rather than a disease like the flu.
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9. The reason the DSM and its disease-like diagnoses have to be used so much is that it is used to create the mental health part of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) which is the giant database of billing codes that insurers use to decide what to pay for.
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