Occupy the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5 protests)

[LadyHawkAZ]

17. Having spent 30 years being put through the mental-illness wringer:

and having read the responses in this thread, there's one observation I would like to make before I get to the main point of the article.

Recommending medication for mental illness is not necessarily a bad thing. I really wish people would take a small step back from the "Medication is EVIL!!" mindset for a moment and think about the people their attitude can affect. I see this here all the time: "Big Pharma just wants to sell you pills!".

Here's a perspective on that perspective. I lived through (barely) the 70s and 80s, when physical causes were the LAST thing checked for and medication was the LAST line of defense. At 8 they said I was just too smart for my own good. At 12 I was told I just needed to get over my shyness, learn to communicate and talk it out with someone. At 16 I was told I was perfectly normal for a teenager and just needed a little counseling. At 22 I was told I would be fine once I had kids and my hormones settled (this guy was actually close to being right). I was 29 years old before one therapist and one doctor- and a GP at that- finally decided there might be something really wrong with me, and 38 before they finally figured out what that was. The antidepressants I was finally put on-21 years after onset- did not work correctly or for very long, but to give them credit they kept me alive for a few extra years until they could find the problem and fix it. The "no medication" rule almost killed me several times, is the point I'm trying to make here. So please, please everyone: stop the knee-jerk, broad-brush condemnation of psych medications. Yes, they are overprescribed now, but they weren't always, and some of us can remember when they were barely prescribed at all. There are a lot of people out there that really need them.

/rant

Re the article: it certainly looks like a lot of new "disorders" are being added that are either clearly part of other disorders, part of completely normal behavior or just junk science. Mixed anxiety depression? Hypersexuality disorder? Behavioral addiction? Good grief. If we tried to avoid or treat all the new disorders- just the new ones- we would have no lives at all, and no basic human experiences. If we are all abnormal, as defined by this new release, then what exactly is their baseline of "normal"? The doctors are right- this needs a rewrite.