(10-4-19) From My Files Friday: Back in 2012, questions were being raised about the usefulness of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which defines what is and isn’t a mental disorder. A Washington Post opinion piece by a prominent psychologist got considerable attention and this 2012 blog response from me. Would love to read your reactions on my Facebook page.
“Psychiatry’s Bible: The DSM is doing more harm than good.”
This was the headline of a guest opinion piece printed in yesterday’s Washington Post. The editorial was written by psychologist Paula J. Caplan who argued that “hundreds of people [are being] arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label and are struggling because of it.”
As an example, Caplan recounted the story of a “young mother” who had been told after a quick assessment by an emergency room doctor that she had bipolar disorder. The woman was committed to a psychiatric ward and started on dangerous psychiatric medication.
Over the next 10 months, the woman lost her friends, who attributed her normal mood changes to her alleged disorder. Her self-confidence plummeted; her marriage fell apart. She moved halfway across the country to find a place where, on her dwindling savings, she and her son could afford to live. But she was isolated and unhappy. Because of the drug she took for only six weeks, she now, more than three years later, has an eye condition that could destroy her vision.
Unfortunately, Caplan never identifies this woman nor does she provide us with the name of the hospital where the diagnosis was given. Instead, we are told the woman was simply suffering from nothing more than severe exhaustion.
Caplan writes that in our “increasingly psychiatrized world, the first course is often to classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder, assume it is based on a broken brain or a chemical imbalance, and prescribe drugs or hospitalization; even electroshock is still performed.”
She correctly points out that issuing a psychiatric diagnosis is unregulated. Medical doctors – regardless of their specialty – psychologists, social workers, therapists, even school officials can declare that someone has a mental disorder.
Narrowing her focus, she takes aim at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the manual that doctors rely on to diagnosis mental disorders. She challenges the notion that the DSM is based on any scientific information and claims its editors use poor-quality studies to support categories they want to include while ignoring or distorting high quality research.
Caplan concludes: “I now believe that the DSM should be thrown out.” She announces that she is joining ten people who are filing a lawsuit against the DSM’s editors because the plaintiffs have been “harmed by a diagnosis” based on the DSM.
At last count, more than 350 readers had posted comments about her editorial. Several came from the anti-psychiatry crowd that is quick to rally around any article that attacks psychiatry. (On her website, Caplan has posted a disclaimer that states she is not affiliated with the Church of Scientology.)
I found her editorial to be both thought provoking and troubling.
I was skeptical when I read her story about the young mother. I am not suggesting that Caplan’s concocted the anecdote. But what is missing is context. Caplan suggests there are “hundreds” of persons in America today who have been arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label. Is that true? Are there “hundreds” who are being hospitalized unnecessarily? Are there ‘hundreds” who are being forced to take dangerous medications?
During the past six years, I have visited 47 states, toured more than 100 treatment programs and talked to persons with mental disorders and those who love them. What I have seen — and what countless studies have documented — is that community based treatment services are so scarce that it is nearly impossible for people who have serious mental disorders to obtain meaningful psychiatric care. This lack of services is a national scandal. This doesn’t mean that a young woman can’t be arbitrarily entrapped in our needy mental health system.
But hundreds?
I understand the importance of personal stories. My book describes my son’s arrest after I failed to get him help. But I backed up his story with research that showed 16 percent of inmates in jails and prisons have been diagnosed with a severe mental disorder. Studies have shown that the Los Angeles County Jail is the largest public mental facility in America today and that more than one million persons with mental disorders go through our criminal justice system.
Where are the statistics to support Caplan’s anecdotal evidence?
Caplan makes several good points. Psychiatric problems are difficult to diagnosis. Because of stigma, they should never be rushed. My son has been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, schizo-affective disorder and schizophrenia. This has been extremely frustrating. However, an incorrect diagnosis doesn’t always mean a problem doesn’t exist. How many diagnoses made by doctors about non-mental related problems turn out to be premature or faulty? A minor stomach pain proves to be something much more serious.
It’s also true that many of these diagnoses are rushed because psychiatrists have been pressured by insurance companies to become pill pushers. Few of my son’s psychiatrists have known anything but his name and symptoms. They have seen their job as simply figuring out which pill to dispense. This is bad psychiatry.
Caplan’s statement that doctors are quick to “classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder” is demeaning both to psychiatry and patients. Such claims pander to a popular prejudice that people who have been diagnosed with mental disorders really don’t have anything wrong with them, they simply are weak and looking for an excuse to explain their doldrums.
I agree when Caplan states that : “Mental health professionals should use, and patients should insist on, what does work: not snap-judgment diagnoses, but instead listening to patients respectfully to understand their suffering.” I also agree that “[Mental health professionals should ] help patients find more natural ways of healing. Exercise, good nutrition, meditation and human connection are often more effective — and less risky — than drugs or electroshock.” Finally, she concludes that “patients should not be limited in their choices of treatment, but they should be better informed. If someone knows about the many ways that suffering can be addressed, including a drug or a treatment with potential benefits and harms, and they still want to try it, they should be able to.” Yep, that makes sense.
What does not make sense is her conclusion that the entire DSM should be discarded. Improved. Yes. That is what the current rewrite is supposed to be doing. But there is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Does Caplan believe the DSM’s description of the symptoms of schizophrenia are invalid?
It’s true that we live in a society that depends more and more on pills to solve our problems.
But I found a troubling thread in Caplan’s editorial. It was the idea that because we have trouble defining and diagnosing mental illnesses that these disorders are not real.
Those of us who have seen someone, who is hearing voices that are telling him to kill himself, know better. Those of us, who love someone so depressed that it impossible for him to get out of bed in the morning, know better.
About the author:
