Psychiatry: Creating Disorder

Psychiatry is on a never-ending quest to find new symptoms and new labels for those symptoms to ensure that, like it or not, one way or another, they'll determine that we're all "disordered."

—Naomi Fox, July 3, 2006

- - -

"...'Fifty percent of Americans mentally impaired - are you kidding me?' said Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

"...Dr. McHugh said, 'the problem is that the diagnostic manual* we are using in psychiatry is like a field guide and it just keeps expanding and expanding.'

"'Pretty soon,' he said, 'we'll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys with a Boston accent, and I'll be mentally ill.'"

—"Most Will Be Mentally Ill at Some Point, Study Says," by Benedict Carey, June 7, 2005, nytimes.com, The New York Times

*a reference to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)