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 |  Subject: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders  Tue May 14, 2013 11:27 pm | |
| Review - All We Have to Fear
Psychopathology has become a popularized and medicalized field and is no longer a social stigma. It was transformed into a profitable global fad where problems of living are labeled as illnesses through a factitious and consensual diagnostic DSM system. A partnership developed between a dying psychiatric field and hungry pharmaceutical companies each serving their own purpose for self-preservation and profits. This partnership has given a novel pseudo-medical face to psychiatry while selling three-dollar ineffective pills to a narcissistic culture obsessed with a quick fix and immediate gratification. Ironically, the number of disorders listed in the DSM has exploded from 112 in 1952 to about 374 in 1994, an increase of almost 70% and keeps growing. No field has ever been so prolific in finding and generating disorders!
Authors Horwitz and Wakefield wrote a timely book All We Have to Fear. The volume argues that psychiatry itself has largely engendered the anxiety "epidemic" by distending many natural fears into psychiatric disorders leading to the over-diagnosis of anxiety disorders and the over-prescription of anxiety-reducing drugs. Unfortunately, the same process has taken place for Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Psychotic Disorders. As a result, we have an over-diagnosed and heavily sedated society searching for a happy pill in a drive-by psychiatric booth.
The book consists of nine provocative chapters starting with puzzle of anxiety disorders and ending with the setting of boundaries between natural fears and anxiety disorders. The cover is well designed, the research is relevant and thorough, and the writing style is graceful and fluent. Horwitz and Wakefield present in their volume some outstanding arguments about the overdiagnosis of anxiety disorders and the pathologizing of normal anxiety states. The book estimates that thirty years ago less than five percent of the population had an anxiety disorder, and today, some estimates are over fifty percent, a tenfold increase.
Employing a wide range of disciplines including psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the book attempts to define the difference between fear and anxiety, elucidate the nature and function of this condition, and provide a critical analysis of the contemporary concept of anxiety. The volume properly disputes the prevailing notions that perpetuate faux diagnosis, and uncloak the murky boundaries between sanity and insanity. It also seeks to illuminate the distinction between normal anxiety and disarrayed functioning, mismatched and disordered emotions, and between pathology and socially disapproved behaviors. In addition, Horwitz and Wakefield argue that disordered fears cannot be distinguished from normal ones, and make the case that mental disorders do not exist in nature, but rather their definitions reflect social values. The authors tackle the anxieties that appear to be irrational but are indubitably a natural product of our evolution like fear of snakes. They also attempt to distinguish between conditioned and vicarious learning, and argue against the psychiatric trend of calling any learned experience or problem of living as mental disorders of medical etiology.
The book has a wide appeal and will make a good reading for mental health practitioners and laypeople. It will provide the readers with a sane view of anxiety in an insane psychiatric world.
Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders
by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield
Oxford University Press, 2012
Review by Richard Skaff
May 14th 2013 (Volume 17, Issue 20)
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=6869&cn=396 |
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