The Big Book: Following up on this week’s earlier postings on labeling, today we thought we’d take a look at the DSM, the hefty 943-page widely used Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM is used by mental health professionals as a diagnostic tool. Every mental disorder, from autism to depression to ADHD to schizophrenia to paranoid personality disorder, is defined according to how long and how intense a specific list of symptoms has been present. Take a look at this definition of Intermittent Explosive Disorder to get an idea of a diagnosis that has become a popular way of labeling people with road rage.
The Politics Behind the DSM: A little bit of background on the DSM. The first edition was published in 1952; the latest version came out in 2000. The first edition had only 50 diagnoses. Today’s DSM lists 374 diagnoses, more than seven times the original book. Does this mean cases of mental illness have grown in leaps and bounds over the past half century? Not exactly. The increase in the number of diagnoses is more reflective of insurance companies’ demands for very detailed and specific diagnoses. It is also related to the increasing availability of medications that can only be prescribed for certain clusters of symptoms, thus making it necessary to invent names for these symptoms.
Diagnoses end up in the DSM as a result of votes by a panel of psychiatrists. Of course, the panel reviews research, listens to recommendations from mental health experts, and spends lots of time discussing each diagnosis. In the end, though, a diagnosis gets into the DSM if it is the panel’s opinion, or value judgment, that it is actually a mental disorder. Consider the diagnosis of Homosexuality. For years, the DSM counted it as a mental disorder, in spite of the fact that there was no research to support this. Thanks to the efforts of gay and lesbian mental health professionals to educate the public about this, the Homosexuality diagnosis was finally voted out of DSM in 1973.
More and more people who work in the mental health field have been writing about how unfair and harmful DSM diagnoses can be. Women, for example, have been labeled with psychiatric disorders just for having normal mood swings because of changes in hormones related to childbirth or their periods. African Americans and other minorities, including Deaf people, have often been labeled as paranoid even though their fears and anger make a lot of sense due to the oppression they experience.
One Deaf Woman’s Misdiagnosis: If you are looking for a book for your summer reading list, here is one worth checking out. I Was #87, by Anne Bolander and Adair Renning is a story that makes us glad that more and more Deaf professionals work in the mental health field today, making it less likely that Deaf people will be misdiagnosed.