DL_The crisis of DSM and contemporary discomfort 2/9
Eric Laurent's article, entitled "The Crisis and post-DSM psychoanalysis" published in lacanian magazines –digital and print- responds to the book of Allen Frances « Saving Normal. An Insider’s Look at the epidemic of mental illness » published in 2013. And from this book takes a tour of the main actors and institutions involved in this crisis.
Why DSM crisis? Why after 30 years in the fifth edition arise voices of disagreement both inside and outside the DSM project? Laurent answers the question of Frances following the arguments, partly clarified in the previous post, of epistemologists (non-psychiatrists) Demazeux Steeves and Ian Hacking.
But there are other voices raised this crisis that are trying to replace the research model of DSM, with its statistical techniques, based on Evidence Based Medicine. It then points to a paradigm shift in research but this, however, is in it beginning and the pharmaceutical industry is not sure where to go. And where is the patient with this diagnostic drift? How around the map?.
The contemporary discomfort has to do with all this, with forgetting the subject to a science without limits, with no limit from their own excesses. Each time with its excesses and our time has to do with the « superegotization » of the world. What ways open for people in this sea of troubled waters? Let's go step by step. In the next post, we stop at Frances arguments about this crisis and Laurent replicas.