This Is Your Brain in Politics

In today’s NY Times: Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles

The American Psychiatric Association is working on the DSM-V.

Is compulsive shopping a mental problem? Do children who continually recoil from sights and sounds suffer from sensory problems — or just need extra attention? Should a fetish be considered a mental disorder, as many now are?

Panels of psychiatrists are hashing out just such questions, and their answers — to be published in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — will have consequences for insurance reimbursement, research and individuals’ psychological identity for years to come.

The American Psychiatric Association, who publishes the book, made contributors sign a non-disclosure agreement and put a $10,000 per year limit on the income they can receive from pharmaceutical companies.

Some groups want to have their cake and eat it too:

Transgender people are themselves divided about their place in the manual. Some transgender men and women want nothing to do with psychiatry and demand that the diagnosis be dropped. Others prefer that it remain, in some form, because a doctor’s written diagnosis is needed to obtain insurance coverage for treatment or surgery.

Some want to be special:

The same team is likely to make a recommendation on so-called sensory processing disorder, a vague label for a poorly understood but disabling childhood behavior. Parent groups and some researchers want recognition in the manual in order to help raise money for research and obtain insurance coverage of expensive treatments.

Others just want to make money:

Industry influence was questioned after a surge in diagnoses of bipolar disorder in young children. Once thought to affect only adults and adolescents, the disorder in children was recently promoted by psychiatrists on drug makers’ payrolls.

It is absolutely astonishing to see just how much influence politics, special-interest groups, and pharmaceutical companies have these days in medicine. I wonder how many more new diagnoses the fifth edition will have than the last.

Ritalin Kitteh

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Better Days, I’m Having Them

I feel horrible today, but that’s ok because it just means that I’ve been doing well for a while. The bupropion (Wellbutrin) is working well, and it seems my body is adjusting to it, so that I have to take a Xanax or Klonopin only once every 3 or 4 days. And I’m still on lithium and lamotrigine (Lamictal). I feel crappy today because I missed the Wellbutrin yesterday.

I’ve been busy tending my other blogs and washing the mountain of dishes that had been piling up on the counter top for several months (no, I’m not kidding). I’m almost done; I can even see the counter top. Now I have only to keep up with the dirty dishes. My husband is scheming against me—he keeps cooking and using the damned things.

Drugs Make You Stupid, M’kay

Every time I have tried to stay on an antidepressant lately, I just get all hypomanic. But, Mister Doctor wants me to take them, and I agree. Now, if take anti-anxiety drugs with the antidepressant, all is hunky-dory, except that I can’t think.

That whole thought process is pretty fuzzy, I stumble over myself, and I completely forget words (i.e. no recall). This makes me crazy. I can either live my life staying up two days at a time and being unbearably agitated and being so all over the place that I can’t get anything done, or I can be stupid—able to live with myself—but stupid. This in itself is very frustrating, but I’m also about to start trying to get a job. What the hell am I going to do then?

And this is not an isolated incident—it doesn’t matter which antidepressant (although some are worse than others) or which anti-anxiety med (benzos). Although, I am hoping that I can convince Mr. Doctor to let me try Buspar again. We shall see.

And yes, I am on mood stabilizers—lithium and Lamictal.