Fornits
General Interest => Feed Your Head => Topic started by: DannyB II on May 19, 2013, 04:55:29 PM
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DSM-5: Psychiatry's Contested Bible
The new 1,000-page psychiatrists' Big Book will redefine addiction. Critics are already demanding a boycott. The Fix guides you through the highlights.
http://www.thefix.com/content/DSM-5-sub ... ective8083 (http://www.thefix.com/content/DSM-5-substance-use-disorder-cost-effective8083)
Interesting is the new labels for addictions and abuse.
I found this interesting, maybe with the new labels we can keep more substance abusers from having to go to treatment.
(My Internet is out at home and my IPad is going down at the local McDonalds. I will comment further later.)
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4 wasn't bad. I was hoping 5 wouldn't get infected with the pseudo-scientific, but it appears that's what's happened.
The first, loudest and longest-dissenting voice belongs to the man who ran the revision of the guide's previous incarnation, the DSM-IV: Allen Frances, MD, a professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at Duke University Medical School, has penned one vitriolic editorial after another since 2009, calling the fifth edition “clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound” and accusing his own profession of being “in the business of inadvertently manufacturing mental disorders.”
What troubles Frances most is “diagnostic inflation.” His particular bugaboos include: “binge eating disorder,” defined by excessive eating 12 times in three months; the spectrum approach to substance disorders that lumps first-time abusers with hard-core addicts, despite vastly different treatment needs; and the recognition of behavioral addictions, “creating a slippery slope that can spread to make a mental disorder of everything we like to do a lot.”
Just what's needed. More people labeled. More people adopting unhealthy identities.
And at least one study supports that worry; research in Australia found that the DSM-5 recommendations would increase diagnoses of alcoholism by a whopping 61.7%
I'd wager that the rate of alcoholism diagnoses would increase quite a bit worldwide if relatively puritanical American standards were applied worldwide.
Peter Kinderman, PhD, co-chair of the boycott group and professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, tells The Fix. The DSM-5 turns isolated and unrelated psychological or social problems into symptoms and force-fits them into a medical condition, he says: “Problems should be treated as problems, not illnesses.”
And this is the general vein of thinking in Europe. AA never took hold in Europe like it did in the states and as a result science, rather than dogma, is the preferred method of treating people's problems. The disease model of addiction as it's accepted in the states will never be accepted here.
All that being said, I realize for some people there may be a biological motivation behind their bad habits, and as a result some medications may be useful to reduce cravings and so forth, but I worry about unintended consequences.
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I agree we don't need more young adults being labeled alcoholics when they are clearly not even close. But we do need all the help we can get to turn the tide on this opiate epidemic hitting our youth right now.
Thanks for your comments Pys.
I'll be back later.