Thursday, November 17, 2011

Chapter 10 & 11

Chapter ten uses multiple individuals to provide evidence for how psychiatry is where it is today with an overt number of diagnosis and continually more prescription drugs. The way in which the chapter is structured leaves us wondering if the DSM was guess-work rather then medical analysis and if any disorders hold any validity at all. Ronson meets with Robert Spitzer, once the editor of the DSM, and Spitzer discribes the editing scene as one of chaos and riot. People would shout out conditions and as long as it had a checklist to accompany it, it would be rightfully added to the DSM. This is how many of the disorders came to be. Soon drug companies became dependant on the diagnosis of these disorders and made millions of drugs to "treat" them. Ronson also addressed the overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and the drugs used to treat them. The question is of the validity of these diagnosis or is it a way for drug companies to make a profit.
This book really opened my eyes about psychiatry as a whole. In the beginning I was very intriqued by the thought of psychopaths roaming about around us, but as the book came to a close I found myself more engaged in the thought of psychiatry being a hoax. The realism behind the ways in which the disorders were acknowledged or even created was unprofessional and to have someones diagnosis riding upon an individuals lack of ability to describe or even wrongly describe the disorder is outragous. How could we as a country, so unknowingly, let our population stick labels to people that are not even valididated by evidence or profound research. And then, feed them pills to treat this so called "disorder". I am fairly outraged at the thought of this and particularily in the fact that no body has even brought this to the worlds attention.

No comments:

Post a Comment