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Tuesday, January 03, 2006

HOW WE LIVE - A Psychiatric Review

Psychiatric diagnosis is used when doctors can't seem to find out what ails you, or won't take the time to try to figure it out. There is something here for you to think about, and if you need a real medical detective visit

Psychiatry's sick compulsion from the Los Angeles Times

By Irwin Savodnik
Irwin Savodnik is a psychiatrist and philosopher who teaches at UCLA.

January 1, 2006

affective disorder, or SAD — at least according to the American
Psychiatric Assn. As Americans rush to return Christmas junk, bumping
into each other in Macy's and Best Buy, the psychiatric association
depression, dysthymic disorder, bipolar disorder and generalized
anxiety disorder, the association is waving its Calvinist flag to remind
"develop" some variation of depressive illness.

The association specializes in turning ordinary human frailty into
edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
or DSM-IV, published by the association. As it turns out, the association
original diagnostic manual appeared in 1952 and contained 107 diagnoses
number of diseases over 42 years.

Nowhere in the rest of medicine has such a proliferation of categories
occurred. The reason for this difference between psychiatry and other
medical specialties has more to do with ideology than with science. A
the premise that disease is a manifestation of diseased tissue.
Hepatitis comes down to an inflamed liver, while lung tissue
infiltrated with pneumococcus causes pneumonia. Every medical student learns this
principle. Where, though, is the diseased tissue in psychopathological

Unlike the rest of medicine, psychiatry diagnoses behavior that society
doesn't like.