The Trouble With The DSM
How do you diagnose disorders of the mind? Dreamstime With the release of the DSM-5 this month, psychotherapist Gary Greenberg questions whether psychiatry's diagnostic Bible can truly get at the nature of mental suffering. In 2012, I got a voice-mail message from a former patient; I'll call him Sandy. I last saw him about ten years ago. I'd worked with him from the time he was in his junior year in high school until he finished his graduate studies. He'd been plagued by anxiety so severe that he was unable to attend school and, eventually, to leave his house at all. Early on in therapy, he'd told me that he was sure he was gay, and that this was what had led him to hole up in his room contemplating suicide as the preferable alternative to what his parents and pastor, who hadn't deleted homosexuality from their book of sins,...