{"id":61915,"date":"2015-12-06T18:20:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-06T23:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=61915"},"modified":"2015-12-06T18:49:56","modified_gmt":"2015-12-06T23:49:56","slug":"reflections-on-original-sin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2015\/12\/06\/reflections-on-original-sin\/","title":{"rendered":"reflections on original sin…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The pre-DSM-III version of psychiatry was fine with me. My internal medicine and research training had been heavily weighted on the objective side. But practicing, I had realized that the subjective experience of illness [and life] was a much more important part of things than I had realized. So the mix of objectivity and subjectivity in those days was exactly what I personally was looking for. And when the DSM-III and its changes came, I naively thought that it was a call for more balance. It took me a while to get it that subjectivity [at least the version I was interested in] was being given its walking papers. Once I realized it was more war zone with a long history than a matter of emphasis, I walked.<\/p>\n

Looking back, psychiatry itself might’ve been better off aiming for that balance after all, but that’s a speculation about things long passed. What still haunts us, however, are some of the consequences of the decisions made in those days – specifically the decisions about classifying the depressions [see what price, reliability?…<\/a>]. Whether an honest mistake or testimony to bias, those choices became a tragic flaw that’s still playing out thirty-five years later. Paradoxically, they crippled research into both Depression-the-Disease<\/font> [Endogenous Depression, Melancholia, the Depressions of Manic Depressive Illness, etc] as well as the much more common depression-as-a-symptom<\/font>. And it became a categorical error that opened a wide portal for commerce-driven  bull-shit <\/strike> malarkey like this…<\/p>\n