\nPsychiatric Group Push to Redefine Mental Illness Sparks Revolt<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>
Bloomberg<\/font><\/strong>
By Elizabeth Lopatto
January 24, 2012<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
An effort that promises to broaden the definitions of mental illnesses is spurring a revolt among health-care professionals in the U.S. and the U.K. A panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association is proposing changes to the industry’s guide for mental illnesses, which determines how patients are diagnosed and treated, and whether insurers pay for care. The new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is scheduled to be published next year. The draft is sparking a backlash among practitioners concerned the expanding mandate will increase the number of patients treated with drugs. The guide would loosen diagnostic criteria on some existing ailments and brand as mental disorders some common behaviors, including having temper tantrums three times a week or a lack of sexual arousal. The changes may spur unneeded and dangerous treatment of the healthy, said Allen Frances, a psychiatrist who helped write the current guidelines.<\/p>\nEveryday disappointments, sufferings and eccentricities are being redefined as psychiatric disorders, and that could lead to medication treatment,” said Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke University who lives in San Diego, California. “This is expanding the boundaries of psychiatry.” In many cases, family doctors will use the new definitions to treat patients, Frances said by telephone. Pressure from drugmakers to use medications can combine with media representations to create “an epidemic,” he said. “Once primary care doctors and patients have the idea that they saw a certain condition on TV, it becomes real.”<\/p>\n
Darrel Regier, the psychiatric group’s research director, characterized critics as being unconvinced medical treatment is better than counseling. The idea of “medicalizing normality comes from a perspective that there are no psychiatric disorders, and you need to avoid stigmatizing people by giving them one,” he said in a telephone interview…<\/font><\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I’d like to linger on this last paragraph because it typifies how the leaders of the DSM-5 Task Force respond to criticism [maybe I should say, don’t<\/em> respond to criticism]. For starters, Dr. Regier says that the DSM-5 critics are "unconvinced medical treatment is better than counseling<\/font><\/strong>." That is a logical fallacy known as a F<\/strong><\/u><\/font>alse Dichotomy<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a> for starters. The statement implies that there is a war over which is better<\/font><\/strong> – counseling or medical treatment. I know of no such war. I suppose I would be placed on the "counseling" side of that fictitious war because most of my practice was psychotherapy. I wouldn’t argue that what I did was better<\/font><\/strong>, it was simply more appropriate for the kind of patients I saw then. Now, many of the patients I see in the charity clinic where I work are receiving medical treatment. It’s not better<\/font><\/strong>. It just happens to be the indicated treatment for the patients that come there. And in neither place is the predominant treatment modality the only treatment modality. Those of us criticizing the DSM-5 Revision aren’t thinking about counseling versus medical treatment. We’re thinking about something very different from that. In fact, if anybody is thinking about "medical treatment is better than counseling<\/font><\/strong>" – it’s Dr. Regier and his colleagues.<\/div>\n