Is Anybody Normal Any More?
Are you ever worried that you (or a loved one) have mental problems that require professional attention? If not, then maybe you should be. Consider the following list of symptoms:
- Do you binge out on forbidden foods [Häagen-Dazs, Cheetos] more than a couple of times a month?
- Were you extremely sad and depressed for a month or two after your mother died, or even longer?
- Does your seven-year-old have frequent temper tantrums?
- Do you get cranky before your period?
- Are you forgetting more things than you used to?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, beware. Taken from the top, these behaviours could be symptoms of: Binge Eating Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (or possibly an even more serious condition, Child Bipolar Disorder), Premenstrual Attention Deficit Disorder, and Mild Neurocognitive Disorder. All of these conditions could wind up in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), due out next year.
The DSM, which is used by doctors, clinicians, health-care providers, social workers and insurance companies, is the bible of psychiatry. It has a big impact on the way millions of people lead their lives and on the way mental health resources are spent. Now it has become the focus of a fierce controversy over the distinctions between normal and abnormal behaviour, the role of pharmaceutical marketing in the treatment of mental illness, the overtreatment of children and the medicalization of the ups and downs of everyday life.
“We’re being overdosed and overmedicated,” says Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University, who is a leading critic of the DSM and of what’s known as “diagnostic inflation.”