This Is Your Brain in Politics
Posted by Pythia on December 18, 2008
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.
