Psycho-ramblers go rambling

A journalist in the Boston Globe, has written what can only be described as poetry to those who recognise the idiocy of psychiatry. 'So who's crazy now?' considers all of the psycho-ramblers [psychiatrists] and their psycho-ramblings ['disorders'] who periodically come together to form the comic known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

And I thought I was needed to trivialise psychiatry. In an editorial published in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Allen Frances, the editor of DSM-IV, called DSM-V "a wholesale imperial medicalization of normality that will trivialize mental disorder and lead to a deluge of unneeded medication treatment - a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry but at a huge cost to the new false positive 'patients' caught in the excessively wide DSM-V net." Exactly doc.

And psychiatrist, Dr Daniel Carlat, has described the rambling process on his blog, the Carlat Psychiatry Blog, as a 'Bar Room Brawl'. He says, "There can be no dramatic improvements in psychiatric diagnosis until we make a fundamental leap in our understanding of what causes mental disorders. The incredible recent advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, and brain imaging that have taught us so much about normal brain functioning are still not relevant to the clinical practicalities of everyday psychiatric diagnosis. The clearest evidence supporting this disappointing fact is that not even one biological test is ready for inclusion in the criteria sets for DSM-5."

What? No biological test ready? Surely not.

My tongue, by the way, is once again firmly planted in my cheek.