Psychiatry’s New Rules Threaten to Turn Grieving Into a Sickness

Psychiatry’s New Rules Threaten to Turn Grieving Into a Sickness
2012 12 12

By Brandon Keim | Wired.com

A controversial change to official psychiatric guidelines for depression has raised fears that grief over the death of loved ones will be classified as clinical depression, turning a basic part of what it means to be human into a recognized sickness.

The change, contained in new revisions to the DSM-5, a set of standards used to categorize mental illness, eliminates the so-called bereavement exclusion, which exempts grieving people from diagnoses of depression for two months unless their symptoms are self-destructively extreme. Under the new standards, depression can be more easily diagnosed just two weeks after a death.

“Virtually everyone who is grieving has milder symptoms of depression. What the bereavement exclusion did is separate the normal responses from the severe ones,” such as feelings of worthlessness or suicidal impulses, said psychiatrist Jerome Wakefield of New York University, who studies bereavement and depression.

“This goes over a line. If you can pathologize this kind of feeling, any kind of suffering can be a disorder. It’s a disagreement over the boundaries of normality,” Wakefield said. “What kind of world do you want to have? One where intense, negative feelings we don’t like are labeled as disorders, or a world where people grieve?”

Defenders of the bereavement exclusion’s removal, officially announced Dec. 1 by the American Psychiatric Association, say worries of pathologized grief are overblown. They argue that though not all grieving is depressive, grief-related depression isn’t fundamentally different from what’s considered normal depression. As a result, they say the exclusion makes it unnecessarily difficult for clinicians to deal with bereaved people who legitimately need help.

“I think a good clinician can separate the two,” said Jan Fawcett, a University of New Mexico psychiatrist and head of the DSM-5 working group that authored the change, of normal grief and clinical depression. “We feel that clinicians have been making this judgment all along.”

The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, represents American psychiatry’s official tool for deciding between mental disorders and normality. First drafted in 1952, it’s now known euphemistically as psychiatry’s Bible, used by doctors, insurance companies, the legal system, and most any social institution that deals formally with mental health.

The DSM has been revised four times since its original publication, with the latest changes developed over the last seven years and culminating in the recent approval. These have been perhaps the most controversial changes ever, partly because they’re the first made in the cacophonous media environment of the internet age, but also because of the changes themselves. New conditions include hoarding, severe pre-menstrual syndrome, binge eating, temper tantrums and everyday forgetting among the elderly. Critics say these represent a tendency in modern psychiatry to medicalize the normal range of human experience.

Far and away the most controversial change is eliminating the bereavement exclusion, which discouraged clinicians from diagnosing as depressed grieving people whose symptoms were actually part of a normal, necessary emotional process, though in other people they’d be considered formal grounds for depression.

[...]

Read the full article at: wired.com

Share |

Latest News from our Front Page

So It Begins: Darpa Sets Out to Make Computers That Can Teach Themselves
2013 06 18
The Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency is readying a nearly four-year project to boost artificial intelligence systems by building machines that can teach themselves — while making it easier for ordinary schlubs like us to build them, too. When Darpa talks about artificial intelligence, it’s not talking about modeling computers after the human brain. That path fell out of favor among computer ...

Atacama Humanoid: Stanford-Geneticist Says Specimen "not worth scrutiny"
2013 06 18
The documentary SIRIUS has intrigued and shocked many, and has stirred debate about the scientific findings regarding the ’Atacama Humanoid’. Recently, daily German science news site GreWi.de followed up with Dr. Garry Nolan, the Stanford geneticist that headed the investigation into the mummified remains. grenz|wissenschaft-aktuell reports: Since the documentary movie "Sirius" showed the first results of an investigation of a just 15 ...

The Illuminati Depopulation Agenda
2013 06 18
While the global elite construct underground bunkers, eat organic and hoard seeds in Arctic vaults; the global poor are being slowly starved thanks to high commodity prices and poisoned with genetically modified (GMO) food. Austerity measures aimed largely at the poor are being imposed on all the nations of the world. Weather events grow more deadly and brushfire wars more ...

Ron Paul on Syria: This Is How Vietnam and Iraq Started
2013 06 18
President Barack Obama’s pledge to initiate a limited operation in Syria will likely escalate into a full-blown war, with Americans supporting a rebel cause that is backed by al-Qaida, retired Texas Rep. Ron Paul is arguing. "The president has opened a can of worms that will destroy his presidency and possibly destroy this country. Another multibillion dollar war has begun," Paul ...

Google’s deep CIA and NSA connections
2013 06 18
The Western media is currently full of articles reporting Google’s denial that it cooperated in a government program to massively spy on American and foreign citizens by accessing data from Googles servers and those of other U.S. software companies. The mainstream media has, however, almost completely failed to report that Google’s denial, and its surface concern over ’human ...

More News »