Abortion and the DSM ... From 2004 to 2014

We first wrote about the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, back in 2004, as reprinted here by Abortion Recovery International, specifically how the DSM had actually, for seven years, included abortion as a life event which could lead to PTSD, and then, bowing to politically-correct pressure, removed it from the DSM without a shred of scientific research to justify doing so.

It's long but well worth reading. It is important to know how seriously the psychiatric world took abortion as a trauma to women, based on its own accumulated, clinical counseling and research experience, once upon a time.

It's ironic that now, a decade later, psychiatrists themselves are revolting against the DSM:

Psychiatrists split on whether to ditch DSM
Tuesday 19 August 2014 3:40PM

Led by the powerful US National Institute of Mental Health, practitioners across the world are in open revolt, demanding that the practice be brought into the modern world and be anchored not in conjecture but in contemporary science.

‘There are many practitioners, including psychiatrists, who wonder about the sanity and the soundness of the enterprise in general,’ says Dr Gary Greenberg, a practicing psychotherapist and trenchant critic.

The essential problem with traditional psychiatric practice, according to its detractors, is its over reliance on ‘symptom-based’ diagnosis. That is, the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions based almost exclusively on clinical observations.

Under the current system, a standard consultation goes something like this: the psychiatrist talks with a patient about his or her problems and then uses the substance of that verbal exchange to identify the underlying cause of the patient’s mental illness.

Then, in order to prescribe treatment, the symptoms exhibited by the patient are matched to a set of pre-determined psychiatric labels, for example depression or ADHD—attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—and medication is dispensed accordingly.

Those labels—or ‘disorders’, as they’re known—are listed in a book called the DSM, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, and is often referred to as the ‘psychiatrist’s Bible’. Though it’s an American publication, it heavily influences the practice of psychiatry and affiliated mental health professions around the world.

However, critics charge that treating people according to their mental health symptoms makes as much sense as a physician prescribing the same medication to everyone with chest pain, regardless of whether that pain is the result of heartburn, a simple muscle spasm or the beginnings of a massive myocardial infarction.

In other words, it makes no sense at all.

...Dr Greenberg argues that a failure to anchor psychiatric disorders [or we could add: the mysterious removal of same] in evidence-based research has led to the manipulation of diagnoses over time in order to suit funding priorities, the demands of the big pharmaceutical companies and social fashion.

Funding priorities? Like perhaps abortion provider Planned Parenthood's $540 million a year from the federal government in taxpayer dollars?

Social fashion? Like that of the pressure from PPFA, N.O.W., NARAL, and almost every newspaper, magazine and news outlet on both coasts?

I suppose we could ask, "What took the shrinks so long?" But that would be ungracious of us.