Something's going on at The Los Angeles Times. On New Year's Day, the paper ran not one, but two articles questioning America's therapeutic culture and addiction to the latest psychological or psychiatric fads. When a major American newspaper publishes two articles in one issue making this essential point, we ought to take notice.
In "Psychiatry's Sick Compulsion: Turning Weaknesses into Diseases," psychiatrist and philosopher Irwin Savodnik of UCLA argues that his own field of psychiatry is infected with a preoccupation that focuses on illusory diseases. Referring to the holiday season, Savodnik explains that the American Psychiatric Association [APA] has now identified a new disease--seasonal affective disorder, or SAD--and this may explain why some people feel depressed, frustrated, or elated during and after the Christmas season.
"As Americans rush to return Christmas junk, bumping into each other in Macy's and Best Buy, the psychiatric association ponders its latest iteration of feeling bad for the holidays," Savodnik informs. "And what is the association selling? Mental illness. With its panoply of major depression, dysthymic disorder, bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, the association is waving its . . . flag to remind everyone that amid all the celebration, all the festivities, all the exuberance, many people will 'come down with' or 'contract' or 'develop' some variation of depressive illness."
What Savodnik describes is part and parcel of what many observers identify as the diseasing of America. Problems large and small, real and imagined are packaged as new diseases to be treated with everything from seminars to pharmaceuticals.
Irwin Savodnik is a well-known critic of modern psychiatry. Last year, he traced what he saw as positive developments in Russian psychiatry, even as he lamented that his colleagues in America are "moving in exactly the opposite direction." As he explained: "For the better part of the 20th century, psychiatry was dominated by psychoanalysis, so much that in the public eye the two were nearly synonymous. Five-day-a-week-on-the-couch treatment was de rigueur. Psychoanalysts authored most of the prominent textbooks in the field. Gradually, though, psychoanalysis, under attack from some sectors of the intellectual community, perceived as too expensive and unscientific, began to lose its grip on the psychiatric community." Abandoning psychoanalysis, American psychiatrists turned to drugs. "In the past 30 years," Savodnik suggests, "the overriding ideology of American psychiatry has shifted to a biological model. Psychopharmacology has become its therapeutic backbone."
In his most recent article, Savodnik points to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-IV], published by the APA. He warns that ads have recently appeared in psychiatric journals proposing that shyness be diagnosed as a new "syndrome" that will be soon on its way to becoming a disease. Savodnik bets that the next edition of the DSM-IV will include shyness as a disease.
"As it turns out, the association has been inventing mental illnesses for the last 50 years or so," Savodnik recounts. "The original diagnostic manual appeared in 1952 and contained 107 diagnoses and 132 pages, by my count. The second edition burst forth in 1968 with 180 diagnoses and 119 pages. In 1980, the association produced a 494-page tome with 226 conditions. Then, in 1994, the manual exploded to 886 pages and 365 conditions, representing a 340 percent increase in the number of diseases over 42 years."
Are we actually to believe that Americans are now afflicted with 258 "conditions" that did not even exist (or were absolutely unknown) in 1952?
A quick look through the DSM-IV will reveal that almost every living human being is afflicted with one or more of the "conditions" described in this encyclopedia of mental and emotional problems. More than anything else, this just goes to prove the adage of the psychotherapeutic industry--you are either in therapy or in denial.
