The DSM-5

If you want to discover how nuts you are (sorry mentally ill) look at the DSM-5. But you can also  look at the DSM-5 if you want to discover how normal you are. 

I recently found myself leafing through this huge thick psychiatric diagnosis book. It is stuffed with all sorts of fancy terms and definitions and diagnosis. The folks who wrote this thing must be some of the smartest people on the planet….or the most bureaucratic. 

Many shrinks (sorry, psychiatrists) are now saying this manual is pretty useless….except for billing insurance companies in the USA. Why? It’s a matter of heterogeneity and co-morbidities.

Heterogeneity

This problem is with dividing up a human personality into different categories. Sure this method (reductionist science) helps with understanding (whatever that means) mental illness but sorta ignores the fact that each DSM diagnosis has a wide variety of signs (what the patient does or the doctor sees) and symptoms (what the patient tells the doctor).  A sorta reverse analogy is that if you have some infection in an area/organ of your body you have a fever. Many different types of infections give you a fever. In the psychiatric diagnosis world one label gives a multitude of different things.

Comorbidity

This is sorta the opposite of heterogeneity. If you have one diagnosis (and like you are in therapy, let’s say) then you can get a lot of different labels from different categories in the big DSM-5. So everyone has probably  got all of those traits somewhere in their brain…..some have too much (they are mentally ill) and some have too little (they are mentally ill) and some have just the right amount of whatever (they are not mentally ill).

Ps-dividing the problem into heterogeneity and co-morbidities is just yet another categorization.

When I was in general practice my impression was that most people who had a mental problem were either depressed and living in (ruminating about) the past or anxious and living in (worried about) the future. There were very few who were completely off the scale bat sh*t crazy…psychotic…dangerous…whatever.

It’s probably not a bad exercise for every person on the planet to go through the major categories and discover for themselves what they are…personality wise. There are tons of resources/tests online. 

Inside this formal and fake psychological haze
Lot of warm water flowing in the front door these days