diagnosisindustrialcomplex
You have been through the machine. Maybe a psychiatrist gave you the label in a fifteen-minute appointment. Maybe a therapist worked with you for months before suggesting it. Maybe you diagnosed yourself after reading enough and recognizing enough and deciding that the pattern fit. However it arrived, you now
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
In 2013, two weeks before the American Psychiatric Association published DSM-5, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health did something extraordinary. Thomas Insel published a blog post announcing that the NIMH would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” The largest funder of mental health
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Somewhere in America right now, a hiring manager is looking at a candidate’s Myers-Briggs results and making a decision about fit. In the same building, someone is making fun of a coworker for checking their horoscope. The hiring manager believes they are being data-driven. The horoscope reader
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
For most of the twentieth century, autism was a tragedy. It was a thing that happened to families, a developmental catastrophe, a life sentence spoken in clinical monotone across a desk. The child was broken. The parents were heartbroken. The system existed to minimize the damage and, if possible, make
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Thomas Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness in 1961 and the psychiatric establishment has been furious about it ever since. His central claim was blunt to the point of provocation: mental illness is not illness. There is no lesion, no pathogen, no broken bone. What psychiatry calls disease is
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
In 2011, a psychologist named Daryl Bem published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claiming to demonstrate precognition. Nine experiments, over a thousand participants, statistically significant results suggesting that human beings could perceive the future. The paper passed peer review at one of the most prestigious
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet in 1998 claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The study had twelve subjects. Twelve. It was a case series, not a controlled trial. It contained no statistical analysis. The subjects were referred by lawyers who were building a lawsuit
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
The United States has an ADHD diagnosis rate of approximately 11.4 percent among children aged 4 to 17, up from 7.8 percent in 2003. That is a 46 percent increase in roughly a decade. The rate is not uniform. It varies by state, by county, by school district,
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
The serotonin hypothesis of depression goes like this: depressed people have low serotonin levels in the brain. SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) increase available serotonin by blocking its reabsorption at the synapse. More serotonin, less depression. The hypothesis is clean, mechanistic, and satisfying. It gives patients a story about their
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
There is no blood test for depression. There is no brain scan for anxiety. There is no biomarker for ADHD, no genetic panel for borderline personality disorder, no lab result that distinguishes bipolar II from major depressive disorder with mixed features. After more than a century of modern psychiatry and
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
On December 15, 1973, the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The vote was 13 to 0, with two abstentions. A disease that had been treated with electroshock therapy, chemical castration, aversion conditioning, and involuntary
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Carl Jung believed in synchronicity, the collective unconscious, mandalas as psychic maps, and a shadow self that lived inside every human being like a feral twin. He thought personality could be divided into attitudes and functions that operated in paired opposites, and he laid this out in a 1921 book