Psychobabble

“I would like to give the penultimate word on the handbook’s unwarranted aura of scientific precision to Matthew Dumont, a psychiatrist who has written about the DSM* Work Group’s hollow pretensions to scientific authority:

I read the [DSM-III-R] compiler’s Introduction (will I be the only person in the civilized world, except for a few copy editors, to have done so?) and found it an interesting statement, part apologia, part three imperious knocks from the wings. The humility and the arrogance in the prose are almost indistinguishable, frolicking like puppies at play. They say: ‘…while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder…no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept…’ [APA, 1987]. They then provide a 125-word definition of mental disorder which is supposed to resolve all the issues surrounding the sticky problem of where deviance ends and dysfunction begins. It doesn’t.

They go on to say: ‘…there is no assumption that each mental disorder is a discrete entity with sharp boundaries between it and other mental disorders or between it and no mental disorder’ [APA, 1987].

This is a remarkable statement in a volume whose 500-odd pages are devoted to the criteria for distinguishing one condition of psychopathology from another with a degree of precision indicated by a hundredth of a decimal place.”

—Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., They Say You’re Crazy—How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal (1995, Addison-Wesley), P. 223

*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders