The Book of Woe
The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno.” —Errol Morris
Since its debut in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the “official” view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5 has taken fire for encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses—and to prescribe sometimes unnecessary or harmful medications.
Respected author and practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition, and returned with an unsettling tale. Exposing the deeply flawed process behind the DSM-5’s compilation, The Book of Woe reveals how the manual turns suffering into a commodity—and made the APA its own biggest beneficiary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The rewriting of the bible of psychiatry shakes the field to its foundations in this savvy, searching expos . Greenberg (Manufacturing Depression), a journalist and practicing psychotherapist, follows the American Psychiatric Association's years-long revision of DSM-5, the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which dictates to the industry everything from diagnoses and research programs to the all-important insurance billing codes. In his telling, it's a saga of fraught politics masquerading as disinterested medicine, as controversies explode around proposals to add grieving a family member's death to the roster of mental illnesses, delete Asperger's syndrome, and concoct vague new maladies Attenuated Psychosis Symptom Disorder? that could be used to rationalize treating millions of patients with ravaging drugs. The author digs deeper, questioning whether there is any organic reality underlying the DSM's confident taxonomy of disorders and suggesting that "psychiatric diagnosis is built on fiction and sold to the public as fact." Deploying wised-up, droll reportage from the trenches of psychiatric policy-making and caustic profiles of the discipline's luminaries, Greenberg subjects the practices of the mental health industry his own included to a withering critique. The result is a compelling insider's challenge to psychiatry's scientific pretensions and a plea to return it to its humanistic roots.
