When I lived in Seattle, I spent more than 4 years as a phoneworker on the King County Crisis Clinic hotline. This is a terrific organization in which trained volunteers, supervised by clinical psychologists, field phone calls 24/7 from people in all sorts of distress. During breaks, when there were few or no active calls, we would often talk about mental illness — does it really exist, who defines it, what does it consist of, how to treat it. Among the things we discussed was the psychologists’ reference bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association. A short version can be found here. It lists and describes the diagnostic criteria for all mental illnesses.

The DSM-IV is one of the most dangerous and simultaneously silly books in the world. It is dangerous because, if you look into it, you will find that virtually any behavior can be classified as a mental disorder. The danger is that everyday behaviors, when diagnosed as illnesses, are used to launch medical treatments attacks upon people, often children, who are not ill in any way. So we get kids being medicated with anti-depressants and anti-psychotic drugs because their parents or teachers can’t handle them. I have previously commented on the idiotic aspect of the DSM-IV here and here. Its listing of mental disorders includes such things as:

Academic Problem
Acculturation Problem
Body Dysmorphic Disorder
Borderline Intellectual Functioning
Child or Adolescent Antisocial Behavior
Conduct Disorder
Disruptive Behavior Disorder
Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder
Histrionic Personality Disorder
Identity Problem
Male Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder
Malingering
Neglect of Child
Oppositional Defiant Disorder
Parent-Child Relational Problem
Partner Relational Problem
Phase of Life Problem
Reading Disorder
Religious or Spiritual Problem
Sibling Relational Problem
Stuttering
Transvestic Fetishism

Though the above list includes behaviors that clearly have nothing to do with mental illness, yet from the DSM-IV point of view, nearly all of us are sick and need treatment. This is an important tool for the State when it acts as our parent and wants to control our behavior. It can have us declared mentally ill and then do whatever it wants to try to change our behavior. The experience in the Soviet Union, where political dissidents were declared mentally ill and forced into "treatment", is an example of the dangerous usage of mental health diagnoses.

We now learn of the existence of yet another "mental illness" — intermittent explosive disorder (don’t you just love the terminology). The Scotsman.com reports:

A PSYCHIATRIC condition that can be behind road rage is much more common than previously thought, according to a United States study.

Up to 16 million Americans suffer from intermittent explosive disorder, researchers who studied 9,282 adults found.

(Pause while I roll on the floor laughing.) So we have another idiotic so-called mental disorder to add to the list of everyday behaviors that need medical (i.e., drug) treatment. It’s an internet cliché to say, "You can’t make this stuff up." Well, yes you can. In fact, that’s what the psychologists and psychiatrists do. They make these diagnoses up, dress them in impenetrable language and pseudo-statistics and incorporate them into the DSM. Intermittent Explosive Disorder — my foot!

I propose 2 new disorders to add to the DSM:

  1. DSM Reference Disorder: characterized by attempting to put all human behaviors into the DSM

  2. Libertarian Defiant Disorder: characterized by failure to sufficiently love the State and attempting to defy State control over human behavior

I wonder which drugs should be used to treat these new illnesses.