Question: Are personality quirks turning into disorders?
The American Psychiatric Association has recently decided to publish a new, revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This nearly 1,000-page manual, having not been changed in more than 15 years, is an enormous part of how doctors are able to diagnose and treat their patients’ mental illnesses.
And this updated edition promises to have a brand new mental disorder for every single person who wants one.
Aside from the politics involved in changing the manual, like the implications for pharmaceutical companies and the overwhelming plight of parents who don’t want their children with Asperger’s disorder to be categorized as autistic, the newest changes can be summed as disorders created for people who behave like people.
Two of the new changes include something called “temper dysregulation disorder” for children who are prone to tantrums (all of them) and another called “hypersexual disorder” for people who are lucky enough to indulge in their sexual desires. And as if that weren’t enough, all of those “Farmville” addicts may want to check for the segment on Internet addiction in the new appendix of the DSM, (although not mentioned in the actual text of the manual due lack of significant evidence). Looks like those lonely pink cows are going to have to find themselves from now on.
A few of the proposed changes aren’t even necessary. For example, the term “mental retardation” may be replaced with “intellectual disability” — just like when our advisors became Academic Success Specialists — same thing, more confusing name.
So why all the revisions? It looks like nothing new has been discovered, but only looked upon differently by different people.
Psychiatric diagnoses are not measurable. They are subjective opinions by people who are subjective by human nature, the very thing they seem to want to take away in the first place. It’s especially hard to take these changes seriously when Robert Spitzer, a major architect of the DSM, said about the manual in a 2005 interview, “To say that we’ve solved the reliability problem is just not true.”
This change is nothing but one step closer to Huxley’s soma-induced nightmare vision.
These changes (hopefully) won’t make our generation think that they have something wrong with them, but when our children are born, to whom are they supposed to compare themselves to when the psychiatric bible says that their excessive happiness is going to be a problem? There’s nothing wrong with being human and having weird thoughts and feelings. It’s part of life. We need to make sure that the celebration of individuality continues throughout our time.
We don’t want our children reading “Brave New World” and thinking that it’s a comment on modern life. Let’s not get to that point. Go online to the DSM-5 Web site and look at all of the proposed changes. Read them all and evaluate yourself with their criteria, and if you still don’t think you have a disorder — well, you must be crazy.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
