Junk Science

According to a 2001 international poll of mental health experts conducted in England, the DSM-IV was voted one of the 10 worst psychiatric papers of the millennium. The DSM was criticized for reducing psychiatry to a checklist: “If you are not in the DSM-IV, you are not ill. It has become a monster, out of control.”

In April 2003, in a Psychiatric Times article entitled “Dump the DSM,” psychiatrist Paul Genova said that psychiatric practice is governed by a diagnostic system that “is a laughingstock for the other medical specialties.”

Edward Shorter, author of A History of Psychiatry, states, “Rather than heading off into the brave new world of science, DSM-IV-style psychiatry seemed in some ways to be heading out into the desert.”

In July 2001, the Washington Post reported that while, traditionally, new drugs are manufactured for existing disorders, in the case of psychiatry, the business is “seeking new disorders for existing drugs.”

Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist, psychiatrist and author of A Dose of Sanity, said that the DSM has “led to the unnecessary drugging of millions.”

Carl Elliot, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, commented, “The way to sell drugs is to sell psychiatric illness.” With the DSM, psychiatry has at its disposal an expanding list of supposed mental disorders, for each of which a psychiatric drug can be legally prescribed.

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