Ruth Copland features her conversations on the street Out and About asking ‘Are we medicalising normal?” Obviously there is a need to help people with serious mental issues that are impeding their life and/or causing harm to others. But excluding these cases, there are a whole range of “disorders” that have sprung up that represent behaviour that used to be absorbed into normal life. In The Book of Woe: The DSM and the unmaking of Psychiatry, psychotherapist of 30 years Gary Greenberg states “When the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or DSM was [first] published there were 14 mental disorders and now there are 250 – it needs to scale back.” The number of people diagnosed with disorders has increased accordingly. Does this mean more people are getting the help they need or are we medicalising human experience? What do you think?
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