DL_The perfect language 1/9
The first edition « Saving normal. An insider’s look at the epidemic of mental illness » of Frances Allen appears in 2013. On the back of the book, they tell us that he has won the award for the most controversial book of the year by the German magazine Bild der Wissenschaft book.
What makes it so controversial? Frances Allen, a psychiatrist and president of the committee of DSM IV, writes this book to warn of the dangers of inflation diagnosis of mental illness that the DSM have been created along its editions. Today, in the fifth, Frances gives a cry of alarm of this inflation accused arguing the reasons and warns of the danger of hyperinflation.
The acronym DSM means Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And it is a manual sponsored by APA (American Psychiatric Association). For Frances this book originally was essential to psychiatry because it allowed systematize the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. According to Frances, psychiatry before the onset of DSM was "a pure form of art."
With the third edition, published in 1980, psychiatry is saved, it is given a new scientific statute that finally allows to find its place in the medical discourse, far from the idiosyncrasies and chaos that characterized it.
The manual has been refined to the point that it has become a perfect language and seamless but disconnected from the reality of the patient, leaving him unprotected, at the mercy of his own problems and dependent on a diagnostic that des-blame can reach to convert normal pathogenic symptoms and thus be susceptible to psychopharmacological treatment clearly inappropriate.
And the DSM III was a revolution, which got unseat the Psychoanalytic Egopsychology, its evolution into a relentless statistical tool has made in 2013 with the publication of DSM V has appeared a crisis around the Manual, which marks the beginning of involution.
What those responsible for previous editions of the DSM, who deny the latest edition say? Robert Spitzer, founder of DSM project, especially criticizes the bureaucratic processes for preparing the DSMV. Nancy Andreasen, one of the managers of DSMIII highlights the pernicious effects of a manual that has become the dominant reference in Psychopathology.
Her proposal to fix is to return to the sense of being true to the description of the symptom, repeating DSM from a phenomenological perspective; company certainly laudable but difficult to implement in our current bio-political context. Frances Allen criticism is not so much what the DSM project aims but in its misuse has been made of it. The context was who changed the essence of the DSM. In the words of Frances :
"The DSM III was a victim of its own success; It became the bible of psychiatry, excluding other aspects of their specialty that should not have been hidden in its shadow. The diagnosis should be only part of a comprehensive evaluation but, instead, became so dominant. You understand the whole patient is often reduced to check off all the items in a list."
Frances' save Psychiatry "allow" saving normal. " What he proposes is that psychiatrists are limited to treating people with psychiatric problems, without broadening its field ordinary people. What psychoanalysis says, that position does psychoanalysis to this crisis and the contemporary malaise ?. We take the article "The post-crisis and DSM psychoanalysis" of Eric Laurent to define the position of psychoanalysis in these two aspects. That will have to wait until the next post.