Saturday, October 19, 2013

How does this continue?


Scientific American MIND recently reviewed Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe. The review contains this paragraph:
Relying heavily on interviews with distinguished insiders in the psychiatric establishment, Greenberg paints a picture so compelling and bleak that it could easily send the vulnerable reader into therapy. The basic message is this: everyone in the mental health profession knows full well that the DSM is a work of fiction—that the hundreds of “disorders” described therein are just labels for fuzzy, overlapping clusters of symptoms and that we have never found a definitive biological marker for even one of those disorders. Mental health professionals pretend that the disorders are real, but they're not, period.
Psychiatry is supposed to be a branch of medicine. It seems impossible that we could be living in a situation in which an entire field of medicine rests on a foundation of pseudoscience, this is well known and has even been publicly acknowledged by the leaders of the profession, and yet this game of pretend is allowed to continue. Amazingly, we are.

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