AmericanChronicle.com – Karen Franklin, Ph.D.
It’s a tried-and-true formula:
Do a quick-and-dirty study or two. Find a huge, perhaps escalating, problem that has heretofore been overlooked. Create a product label (aka diagnosis). And, voila! The drug companies will take it from there. A diagnosis that was once just a twinkle in the eye of a creative researcher becomes reified as a concrete entity.
Over the past couple of decades, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association has risen from its humble origins to an object of worship, regarded as the absolute scientific truth. Privately, however, many mental health professionals refer to it as a “joke.”…