Abstract
A received opinion in medical literature holds that Asians are prone to present psychiatric problems as physical complaints—depression as backache. Implying as it does that Asians lack a proper understanding of what ails them or, if they do understand, hesitate to call it by its right name, this dogma enshrines prejudices and misreadings as medical facts. If Asians have trouble speaking the foreign language of psychiatry, the reason may well be that they still possess traditional ways of managing ills like those now bundled into the diagnosis of depression.1 Cultures with tighter norms of self-restraint, which index stronger social institutions, will struggle to translate the concept of depression arising in a way of life whose theme is the free expression of selfhood.2 On this showing, psychiatry is the last man standing after the more communal supports of human life, from the family to the church, have been shaken by the rapid advance of Western individualism. Arguably, common problems come to be defined as psychiatric issues in the first place when the institutions in which we live fail us. Psychoanalysis itself arose amid the utter and complete collapse of the credibility of the public world in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian empire.3 So too, it was in the aftermath of the crisis that convulsed all American institutions in the 1960s that the general population, not just the seriously ill, came to be considered as the constituency of psychiatry.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Yuko Kawanishi, “Somatization of Asians: An Artifact of Western Medicalization?” Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 29 (1992): 5–36.
Cf. Derek Summerfield, “Depression: Epidemic or Pseudo-Epidemic,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99 (2006): 161–62.
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996).
Alan Stone, “Law, Science, and Psychiatric Malpractice: A Response to Herman’s Indictment of Psychoanalytic Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 147 (1990): 419–27.
William Frosch, cited in Mitchell Wilson, “DSM-III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History,” American Journal of Psychiatry 150 (1993): 407. Noting that Robert Spitzer assumed leadership of the Task Force amid a crisis of legitimacy in American psychiatry, Hannah Decker adds, “We are used to seeing such a pattern in history on a larger scale. An illustration of this occurred in the sixteenth century when a crisis in the Roman Catholic Church was taken in hand by an ardently devoted and charismatic monk and theologian, Martin Luther. The Protestant Reformation resulted. This is not at all to compare Spitzer to Luther nor DSM-III to the Protestant Reformation.” Hannah Decker, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 83.
Interview with Edward Shorter in Shorter’s How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 132. Cf.
Joseph Matarazzo, “The Reliability of Psychiatric and Psychological Diagnosis,” Clinical Psychology Review 3 (1983): 103–45.
T. M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 224. Cf.
Maurice Temerlin, “Suggestion Effects in Psychiatric Diagnosis,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 147 (1968): 352, 353.
Robert Spitzer and Jerome Wakefield, “DSM-IV Diagnostic Criterion for Clinical Significance: Does It Help Solve the False Positive Problem?” American Journal of Psychiatry 156 (1999): 1856.
Allan Frances, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-V, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (New York: William Morrow, 2013), p. 67.
Foreword to Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. viii.
Ethan Waiters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (New York: Free Press, 2010), p. 3.
The diagnosis of ADHD is so DSM-dependent that studies using successive editions of the manual find rising rates of ADHD, with DSM-III producing a 3.9 percent prevalence, DSM-III-R 5.8 percent, and DSM-IV 6.3 percent. DSM-V is expected to follow suit. See Rae Thomas, Geoffrey Mitchell, and Laura Batstra, “Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Are We Helping or Harming?” BMJ 347 (2013): f6172. On the DSM and the diagnosis of depression, see also Ronald Dworkin, “The Medicalization of Unhappiness,” Public Interest (2001): 85–99.
Lee Robins, “Diagnostic Grammar and Assessment: Translating Criteria into Questions,” Psychological Medicine 19 (1989): 63.
Simon Gilbody, Trevor Sheldon, and Simon Wessely, “Should We Screen for Depression?” BMJ 332 (2006): 1027.
John Feighner, Eli Robins, and Samuel Guze, “Diagnostic Criteria for Use in Psychiatric Research,” Archives of General Psychiatry 26 (1972): 57–63.
Kenneth Kendler, Rodrigo Muñoz, and George Murphy, “The Development of the Feighner Criteria: A Historical Perspective,” American Journal of Psychiatry 167(2010): 136.
Kurt Kroenke, Robert Spitzer, Janet Williams et al., “Physical Symptoms in Primary Care: Predictors of Psychiatric Disorders and Functional Impairment,” Archives of Family Medicine 3 (1994): 776.
On the illusory specificity of depression, see Hermann van Praag, “Nosologomania: A Disorder of Psychiatry,” World Journal of Biological Psychiatry 1 (2000): 151–58;
Christopher Dowrick, Beyond Depression: A New Approach to Understanding and Management (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Darrel Regier, William Narrow, Emily Kuhl et al., “The Conceptual Development of DSM-V,” American Journal of Psychiatry 166 (2009): 646.
Allen Frances, comment on Robert Spitzer and Janet Williams, “Having a Dream: A Research Strategy for DSM-IV,” in The Validity of Psychiatric Diagnosis, eds. Lee Robins and James Barrett (New York: Raven Press, 1989), p. 301.
David Cohen, Shannon Hughes, and David Jacobs, “The Deficiencies of Drug Treatment Research: The Case of Strattera™,” in Rethinking ADHD: From Brain to Culture, eds. Sami Timimi and Jonathan Leo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 317–18.
Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 204;
Stephen Faraone, Thomas Spencer, C. Brendan Montano et al., “Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Adults: A Survey of Current Practice in Psychiatry and Primary Care,” Archives of Internal Medicine 164(2004): 1221–26.
James McGough, Susan Smalley, James McCracken et al., “Psychiatric Comorbidity in Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Findings from Multiplex Families,” American Journal of Psychiatry 162 (2005): 1621–27.
“Antidepressants are prescribed for a wide range of common mental disorders in primary care settings.” Vivien Hunot, Rob Home, Morven Leese et al., “A Cohort Study of Adherence to Antidepressants in Primary Care: The Influence of Antidepressant Concerns and Treatment Preferences,” Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 9 (2007): 91.
On the use of antidepressants to treat miscellaneous complaints including “abnormal sensations,” see Ramin Mojtabai and Mark Olfson, “Proportion of Antidepressants Prescribed without a Psychiatric Diagnosis Is Growing,” Health Affairs 30 (2011): 1434–42.
On SSRIs as “lifestyle” drugs, see R. Flower, “Pharmacology 2.0, Medicine, Drugs and Human Enhancement,” Quarterly Journal of Medicine 105 (2012): 823–30.
Frances Abbott and Mary Fraser, “Use and Abuse of Over-the-Counter Analgesic Agents,” Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 23 (1998): 26, 25.
Cf. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 118.
Cf. Rick Mayes and Allan Horwitz, “DSM-III and the Revolution in the Classification of Mental Illness,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41 (2005): 258: “In time, the DSM-III created new and enormous incentives for pharmaceutical companies to create new drugs.”
Pat Bracken, Philip Thomas, Sami Timimi et al., “Psychiatry beyond the Current Paradigm,” British Journal of Psychiatry 201 (2012): 431.
Irving Kirsch, The Emperors New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (New York: Basic, 2010). Ironically, according to Kirsch it is only because of their side effects that SSRIs yield positive findings in clinical trials.
The ad is shown in Barbara Mintzes, “Direct to Consumer Advertising Is Medicalising Normal Human Experience,” BMJ 324 (2002): 908–9.
Something very similar appeared on American television; on which see Nikolas Rose, “Becoming Neurochemical Selves” in Biotechnology: Between Commerce and Civil Society, ed. Nico Stehr (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004), p. 116.
Jeremy Greene, Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2104), p. 46.
Cf. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 163–64: “In Europe and North America, notably in countries with a Puritan culture, individual human beings were expected to execute their life projects without letting themselves be carried away’ by their feelings or turning for help to priests or doctors or anyone else& For the generation of the 1960s, that undervaluation of the emotions was at an end& Being in therapy was no longer a mark of weakness: now, it became a mark of true seriousness.”
John Heizer and Lee Robins, “The Diagnostic Interview Schedule: Its Development, Evolution, and Use,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 23 (1988): 6–16.
Robert Spitzer and Jerome Wakefield, “DSM-IV Diagnostic Criterion for Clinical Significance: Does It Help Solve the False Positive Problem?” American Journal of Psychiatry 156 (1999): 1863.
Christopher Dowrick and Allen Frances, “Medicalising Unhappiness: New Classification of Depression Risks More Patients Being Put on Drug Treatment from Which They Will Not Benefit,” BMJ 347 (2013): f7410.
Michael Klinkman, James Coyne, Susan Gallo et al., “False Positives, False Negatives, and the Validity of the Diagnosis of Major Depression in Primary Care,” Archives of Family Medicine 7 (1998): 451–61.
Cf. Katharina Trede, Paola Salvatore, Christopher Baethge et al., “Manic-Depressive Illness: Evolution in Kraepelin’s Textbook, 1883–1926,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 13 (2005): 162: “It& appears that his case sampling was strongly biased toward limited contacts with the relatively poor patients with severe disorders found in public institutions of the era.”
Cited in David Healy, Pharmageddon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 177.
Walter Cassidy, Norris Flanagan, Marie Spellman, and Mandel Cohen, “Clinical Observations in [sic] Manic-Depressive Disease,” JAMA 164(1957): 1535–46.
David Brody, Steven Hahn, and Robert Spitzer, “Identifying Patients with Depression in the Primary Care Setting: A More Efficient Method,” Archives of Internal Medicine 158 (1998): 2469.
For an example of a crude test for depression that yielded a positive rate of over 50 percent, see David Kessler, Keith Lloyd, Glyn Lewis et al., “Cross Sectional Study of Symptom Attribution and Recognition of Depression and Anxiety in Primary Care,” BMJ 318; 7181 (1999): 436–40.
Also see the commentary immediately following by Iona Heath, “There Must Be Limits to the Medicalisation of Human Distress.” In a 1978 survey of 242 teachers that defined depression as “a significant lowering of mood, with or without feelings of guilt, hopelessness and helplessness, or a drop in one’s self-esteem or self-regard,” fully 95 percent reported such episodes, “with a mean of six & per year.” See Gordon Parker, “Is Depression Overdiagnosed? Yes,” BMJ 335 (Aug. 18, 2007): 328.
Marcus Reidenberg and David Lowenthal, “Adverse Nondrug Reactions,” New England Journal of Medicine 279 (1968): 678–79.
Considering that placebo groups in clinical trials regularly report adverse effects, some might say the adverse effects leading patients to discontinue SSRIs are not necessarily owing to the drugs themselves. See, e.g., Winfried Rief, Stefan Hofmann, and Yvonne Nestoriuc, “The Power of Expectation— Understanding the Placebo and Nocebo Phenomenon,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/4 (2008): 1624–37. Nevertheless, the most cogent explanation of the results of antidepressant clinical trials, including those buried by their sponsors, is that members of the treatment group break the blind by identifying the unpleasant effects of the drug. See Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs, esp. p. 128: “If placebos can induce side effects, antidepressants produce significantly more of them.” Moreover, if placebo takers report side effects, it’s probably (as Rief et al. propose) because they ascribe to the studied drug the sort of ills common in a healthy population—ills made more salient by the conditions of the study. If we err to take such reports as information about the drug, why is it correct to interpret similar ills as evidence of clinical depression in a primary-care patient who doesn’t claim to be depressed?
David Healy, “Shaping the Intimate: Influences on the Experience of Everyday Nerves,” Social Studies of Science 34 (2009): 219–45.
C. V. R. Blacker and A. W. Clare, “The Prevalence and Treatment of Depression in General Practice,” Psychopharmacology 95 (1988): S16.
On depression as both symptom and diagnosis, see M. Drury, The Danger of Words (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 3. The author advises, “Let us beware lest from this unsystematic nomenclature suppositions are drawn, which then become presumptions and only too easily pass over into established truths” (ibid.). DSM-IV lists fatigue, disordered sleep, and depression as symptoms of Postconcussion Syndrome.
On the nonspecific nature of the diagnosis, see Erica Wang and Felise Zollman, “Postconcussion Syndrome: Diagnostic Characteristics and Clinical Manifestations,” in Manual of Traumatic Brain Injury, ed. Felise Zollman (New York: Demos Medical, 2011), pp. 113–18.
Allan Horwitz, Creating Mental Illness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 45. Built into the history of the term “neurosis” was a presumption that presenting symptoms were of psychic origin. See Drury, The Danger of Words, p. 4.
On the quest for underlying explanations, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), para. 471: “It often happens that we only become aware of the important facts, if we suppress the question ‘why?’; and then in the course of our investigations these facts lead us to an answer.” Cf. para. 109: “We must do away with all explanation, and description must take its place.” On the overemphasis on psychological explanations in American medicine, see Kawanishi, “Somatization of Asians.”
Michael Ross and James Olson, “An Expectancy-Attribution Model of the Effects of Placebos,” Psychological Review 88 (1981): 409–10. Cf.
Carol Lowery, Douglas Denney, and Michael Storms, “Insomnia: A Comparison of the Effects of Pill Attributions and Nonpejorative Self-Attributions,” Cognitive Therapy and Research 3 (1979): 161–64.
Kerr White, “The Ecology of Medical Care: Origins and Implications for Population-Based Healthcare Research,” HSR: Health Services Research 32 (1997): 18. White cites a UK report from 1966.
Julie Suhr and John Gunstad, “Postconcussive Symptoms Report: The Relative Influence of Head Injury and Depression,” Journal of Clinical and Experimental ‘Neuropsychology 24 (2002): 981–93.
On the similarity between symptoms of concussion and those common in the general population, see Rodney Vanderploeg and Heather Belanger, “Screening for a Remote History of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: When a Good Idea Is Bad,” journal of Head Trauma and Rehabilitation 28 (2013): 214.
Traolach Brugha, Paul Bebbington, Nicola Singleton et al., “Trends in Service Use and Treatment for Mental Disorders in Adults Throughout Great Britain,” British Journal of Psychiatry 185 (2004): 383.
Robert Kaplan, Theodore Gamiats, and Dominick Frosch, “Diagnostic and Treatment Decisions in US Healthcare,” Journal of Health Psychology 9 (2004): 32. Cf.
Jerome Hoffman and Richelle Cooper, “Overdiagnosis of Disease: A Modern Epidemic,” Archives of Internal Medicine 172 (2012): 1123–24.
Steven Woolf and Russell Harris, “The Harms of Screening: New Attention to an Old Concern,” JAMA 307 (2012): 565.
In Britain, leaflets advertising breast-cancer screening often don’t mention harms, either. Fiona Godlee, “Less Medicine Is More,” BMJ 338 (2009): b2561. Cf.
Stewart Justman, “How Did the PSA System Arise?” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 103 (2010): 309–12.
Howard Stoate, “Can Health Screening Damage Your Health?” Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners 39 (1989): 193–95.
Tanner Caverly, Brandon Combs, Christopher Moriates et al., “Too Much Medicine Happens Too Often,” JAMA Internal Medicine 174 (2014): 8.
John Ioannidis and Joseph Lau, “Completeness of Safety Reporting in Randomized Trials,” JAMA 285 (2001): 437–43.
Panagiotis Papanikolaou, Rachel Churchill, Kristian Wahlbeck et al., “Safety Reporting in Randomized Trials of Mental Health Interventions,” American Journal of Psychiatry 161 (2004): 1695.
Gordon Schiff and William Galanter, “Promoting More Conservative Prescribing,” JAMA 301 (2009): 866.
Remarkably, though, drug trials with children aged four have been run. David Healy, “The Latest Mania: Selling Bipolar Disorder,” PLoS Medicine 3 (4) (2006): e185.
See “Children and Psychiatric Drugs,” editorial in The Lancet 372 (2008): 1632. On the slender benefits of antidepressants for children, see, e.g., Matthew Miller, Sonja Swanson, Deborah Azrael et al., “Antidepressant Dose, Age, and the Risk of Deliberate Self-harm,” JAMA Internal Medicine published online April 28, 2014; doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.1053. On the prescription of psychoactive drugs to children in advance of safety data, see Mark Riddle, Elizabeth Kastelic, and Emily Frosch, “Pediatric Psychopharmacology,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42 (2001): 73–90.
On professional membership and special duties, see Stephen Toulmin, “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 25 (1982): 736–50.
Russell Barkley, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment, Third Edition (New York: Guilford Press, 2006), p. 9.
On nearly 90 percent of ADHD cases in the mild to moderate range, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Nov. 12, 2010, pp. 1440–43. Official UK estimates of the prevalence of “severe” ADHD in children appear consistent with the American numbers. See Iain McClure, “Prescribing Methylphenidate for Moderate ADHD,” BMJ 347 (2013): f6216.
On ADHD outcomes, see Rachel Klein, Salvatore Mannuzza, María Ramos Olazagasti et al., “Clinical and Functional Outcomes of Childhood Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder 33 Years Later,” Archives of General Psychiatry 69 (2012): 1295–1303;
also Russell Barkley, Mariellen Fischer, Lori Smallish et al., “Young Adult Follow-Up of Hyperactive Children: Antisocial Activities and Drug Use,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45 (2004): 195–211. Measured against long-term data, the results of ADHD-drug trials running 10 or 21 days recede into triviality.
On the preponderance on mild ADHD, see Rick Mayes, Catherine Bagwell, and Jennifer Erkulwater, “ADHD and the Rise in Stimulant Use Among Children,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 16 (2008): 161.
Ilina Singh, “Beyond Polemics: Science and Ethics of ADHD,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 9 (2008): 960.
“Expectancies can directly alter our subjective experience of internal states. In addition, when we expect a particular outcome, we sometimes unwittingly behave so as to produce that outcome.” Robert Michael, Maryanne Garry, and Irving Kirsch, “Suggestion, Cognition, and Behavior,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 2 (2012): 153.
Julie Suhr and John Gunstad, “‘Diagnosis Threat’: The Effect of Negative Expectations on Cognitive Performance in Head Injury,” Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 24 (2002): 448–57.
There is some evidence that children with ADHD overestimate their abilities. See Julie Sarno Owens, Matthew Goldfine, Nicole Evangelista et al., “A Critical Review of Self-perception and the Positive Illusory Bias in Children with ADHD,” Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 10 (2007): 335–51. I am unaware of evidence that children with ADHD have a higher-than-warranted opinion of their ability to control themselves.
Chris Travell and John Visser, “‘ADHD Does Bad Stuff to You’: Young People’s and Parents’ Experiences and Perceptions of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),” Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 11 (2006): 212.
On pill-taking and self-regulation, cf. Duncan Double, “The Limits of Psychiatry,” BMJ 324 (2002): 900–4.
Allen Frances, Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis: Respondingto the Challenge of DSM-V (New York: Guilford Press, 2013), p. 9.
Linda Baumann, Linda Cameron, Rich Zimmerman et al., “Illness Representations and Matching Labels with Symptoms,” Health Psychology 8 (1989): 453.
Laura Batstra and Allen Frances, “Diagnostic Inflation: Causes and a Suggested Cure,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 200 (2012): 474.
Jerome Frank and Julia Frank, Persuasion as Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; orig. pub. 1961). Wittgenstein saw psychoanalysis as a mode of persuasion and called attention to its power to mislead patients into thinking they have actually made discoveries about themselves. L. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor; ed. Cyril Barret (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 27, 51–52. The same is arguably true of other psychotherapies.
Robert Hahn, “Expectations of Sickness: Concept and Evidence of the Nocebo Phenomenon,” in How Expectancies Shape Experience, ed. Irving Kirsch (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1999), p. 340.
Sian Lewis, “A Search for Meaning: Making Sense of Depression,” Journal of Mental Health 4 (1995): 369–82; unpaginated.
Derek Summerfield, “Proposals for Massive Expansion of Psychological Therapies Would Be Counterproductive Across Society,” British Journal of Psychiatry 192 (2008): 327.
James Pennebaker, The Psychology of Physical Symptoms (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982), p. 38.
Robert Ferrari, “The Biopsychosocial Model—A Tool for Rheumatologists,” Best Practice and Research Clinical Rheumatology 14 (2000): 790.
In the happy phrase of Robert Hahn, such syndromes might be thought of as communicable diseases. See Hahn, Sickness and Healing: An Anthropological Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 89.
See, e.g., David Goldberg, Martin Privett, Bedirhan Ustun et al., “The Effects of Detection and Treatment on the Outcome of Major Depression in Primary Care: A Naturalistic Study in 15 Cities,” British Journal of General Practice 48 (1998): 1840–44.
On the risks of diagnosis and treatment of depression, see, e.g., Dowrick, Beyond Depression, pp. 85–86. On drugs that work some fraction of the time, see Nicholas Christakis, “Does This Work for You?” BMJ 337 (2008): 1025.
“Medical practice expropriates the potential of people to deal with their human condition in an autonomous way and becomes the source of a new kind of un-health.” Ivan Illich, “Medical Nemesis,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 57 (2003): 919. Originally published in 1974.
Derek Summerfield, “The Invention of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Social Usefulness of a Psychiatric Category,” BMJ322 (2001): 95.
Robert Spitzer, Michael First, and Jerome Wakefield, “Saving PTSD from Itself in DSM-V,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 21 (2007): 233–41.
Paul McHugh and Glenn Treisman, “PTSD: A Problematic Diagnostic Category,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 21 (2007): 219.
On unrecognized risk, cf. Lawrence Tierney, “Iatrogenic Illness,” Western Journal of Medicine 151 (1989): 538, 540.
Raine Sihvonen, Mika Paavola, Antti Malmivaara et al., “Arthroscopic Partial Meniscectomy versus Sham Surgery for a Degenerative Miniscal Tear,” New England Journal of Medicine 369 (2013): 2517.
F. Benedetti, M. Lanotte, L. Lopiano et al., “When Words Are Painful: Unraveling the Mechanisms of the Nocebo Effect,” Neuroscience 147 (2007): 269. Cf.
Fabrizio Benedetti, Placebo Effects: Understanding the Mechanisms in Health and Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 83: “Negative warnings sent out by the mass media may have an important impact on the perceived symptoms of many people.”
Eugene Epstein, Manfred Wiesner, and Lothar Duda, “DSM and the Diagnosis-MacGuffin: Implications for the Self and Society,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 34 (2013): 156–57.
Certainly those who receive misleading diagnoses of cancer and then consider themselves survivors have come to believe them. “Overdiagnosis gives the screenee a false diagnosis of cancer for life.” William Black, “Overdiagnosis: An Underrecognized Cause of Confusion and Harm in Cancer Screening,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 92 (2000): 1281.
David Healy, “Mandel Cohen and Origins of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition: DSM-III,” History of Psychiatry 13 (2002): 219.
Howard Brody and David Waters, “Diagnosis Is Treatment,” Journal of Family Practice 10 (1980): 447. Cf.
Howard Spiro, The Power of Hope: A Doctor’s Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 45.
Herbert Spiegel and David Spiegel, Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis (Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2004), p. 11.
In this connection cf. a patient quoted in David Karp, Is It Me or My Meds? Living with Antidepressants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 85: “The medication only works & because of the doctor who is giving it to me and the way we work together.” Elsewhere the same patient says, “I don’t know, I think that it’s important to think about the way society & is constructing these diseases” (p. 79).
The literature is vast, but see Arthur Shapiro and Elaine Shapiro, The Powerful Placebo: From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
K. B. Thomas, “General Practice Consultations: Is There Any Point in Being Positive?” BMJ 294 (1987): 1200–2.
Jessica Bury and J. Michael Bostwick, “Iatrogenic Delusional Parasitosis: A Case of Physician-Patient Folie a Deux,” General Hospital Psychiatry 32 (2010): 212.
On the case of a patient who so invests in the diagnosis of lupus that she resists giving it up even though it’s false, see Lisa Rosenbaum, “Living Unlabeled—Diagnosis and Disorder,” New England Journal of Medicine 359 (2008): 1652.
Robert Croyle and John Jemmott III, “Psychological Reactions to Risk Factor Testing” in Mental Representation in Health and Illness, eds. J. A. Skelton and Robert Croyle (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991), p. 88.
Joan Bloom and Susan Monterossa, “Hypertension Labeling and Sense of Well-Being,” American Journal of Public Health 71 (1981): 1228–32.
Gerald Rosen, Robert Spitzer, and Paul McHugh, “Problems with the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Diagnosis and Its Future in DSM-V,” British Journal of Psychiatry 192 (2008): 4.
Luana Colloca, “The Influence of the Nocebo Effect in Clinical Trials,” Open Access Journal of Clinical Trials 4 (2012): 65.
“All practitioners who evaluate and care for children with ADHD have encountered children given that label who do not in fact have ADHD.” Ruth Stein, “Measurement of ADHD Outcomes: Implications for the Future,” Journal of Pediatric Psychology 32 (2007): 728.
“People, including children, are agents, they act, as the philosophers say, under descriptions. The courses of action they choose, and indeed their ways of being, are by no means independent of the available descriptions under which they may act& We are especially concerned with classifications that, when known by people or by those around them, and put to work in institutions, change the ways in which individuals experience themselves—and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified.” Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 103–4. The context is a discussion of ADHD.
D. L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Science 179 (1973): 254.
Brian Draper, Cannelle Peisah, John Snowdon et al., “Early Dementia Diagnosis and the Risk of Suicide and Euthansia,” Alzheimer’s and Dementia 6 (2010): 75–82. How can Smith express his anger and confusion over such an act of diagnostic hubris without seeming demented, or reject it without seeming to be “in denial”?
Peter Parry, “Biologism in Psychiatry: A Young Man’s Experience of Being Diagnosed with ‘Pediatric Bipolar Disorder,’” journal of Clinical Medicine 3 (2014): 337–38.
In actuality, “validity has been sacrificed to achieve reliability.” Nancy Andreasen, “DSM and the Death of Phenomenology in America: An Example of Unintended Consequences,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 33 (2007): 111. The author was a key player in the making of DSM-III.
Richard Smith, “In Search of Non-Disease,” BMJ 324 (2002): 884.
Bruce Rollman, Marian Block, and Herbert Schulberg, “Symptoms of Major Depression and Tricyclic Side Effects in Primary Care Patients,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 12 (1997): 284–91.
Cf. Kelly McKinney and Brian Greenfield, “Self-compliance at ‘Prozac Campus,’“ Anthropology and Medicine 17 (2010): 181.
See also Kaitlin Bell Barnett, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up (Boston: Beacon, 2012), p. 66: “At the time, she and her parents assumed the drowsiness was a residual symptom of depression; it wasn’t until many years later that they realized that the medication [Prozac] might have caused or exacerbated her sleepiness.”
Jeffrey Stepnisky, “The Biomedical Self: Hermeneutic Considerations,” Social Theory and Health 5 (2007): 201.
Frederik Feys, Geertruida Bekkering, Kavita Singh et al., “Do Randomized Clinical Trials with Inadequate Blinding Report Enhanced Placebo Effects for Intervention Groups and Nocebo Effects for Placebo Groups?” Systematic Reviews 3 (2014): 54.
The MTA Cooperative Group, “A 14-Month Randomized Clinical Trial of Treatment Strategies for Attention-Dencit/Hyperactivity Disorder,” Archives of General Psychiatry 56 (1999): 1073–86.
Robert Croyle and Gerald Sande, “Denial and Confirmatory Search: Paradoxical Consequences of Medical Diagnosis,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 18 (1988): 473–90.
Ronald Kessler, Patricia Berglund, Olga Demier et al., “Lifetime Prevalence and Age-of-Onset Distributions of DSM-IV Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication,” Archives of General Psychiatry 62 (2005): 593–602.
Frances, Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis, p. 9. Cf. John Mirowsky and Catherine Ross, “Psychiatric Diagnosis as Reified Measurement,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30 (1989): 1–25. “Major Depression” and similar categories “are linguistic pigeonholes into which some people are placed and other are not” (22).
On the artificiality of clinical trials, see Russell Glasgow, Thomas Vogt, and Shawn Boles, “Evaluating the Public Health Impact of Health Promotion Interventions: The RE-AIM Framework,” American journal of Public Health 89 (1999): 1322–27.
Montaigne, “On the Power of the Imagination,” p. 109. On latter-day miracle cures, see, e.g., Sami Timimi, Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2002), p. 85: “Some years ago I attended a conference organized by a pro-Ritalin® and pro-ADHD group & I heard about Ritalin® and other psychostimulants spoken of [sic] in terms of miracles and complete transformations & Non-believers were spoken about in a derogatory manner as if their concerns amounted to blasphemy.”
See on this Raymond La Charité, “The Relationship of Judgment and Experience in the ‘Essais’ of Montaigne,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 31–40.
Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” pp. 547–49. On the undermining of people’s confidence in their own health as a result of medicalization, see Marcel Verweij, “Medicalization as a Moral Problem for Preventive Medicine,” Bioethics 13 (1999): 89–113. Cf.
Joseph Dumit, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 2: “The more we know, the more we fear.” The principle that health is unconscious of itself became literally proverbial;
according to Poor Richard, “We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.” See Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1978), p. 1241.
Nicola Mondaini, Paolo Contero, Gianluca Giubilei et al., “Finasteride 5 mg and Sexual Side Effects: How Many of These Are Related to a Nocebo Phenomenon?” Journal of Sexual Medicine 4 (2007): 1711.
Toulmin, “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics”: 741–42. I find it suggestive that Toulmin’s teacher Wittgenstein, who changed philosophy, and Chekhov and Joyce, who changed literature, all had an eye for particulars and an attraction to medicine: Chekhov being a doctor, Joyce at one time intending to study medicine, and Wittgenstein haunted with the wish to abandon philosophy in favor of medicine. For an eloquent defense of the particularity of cases, see George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 435.
Winfried Schleiner, Medical Ethics in the Renaissance (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995), p. 20.
Peter Ditto and Robert Croyle, “Understanding the Impact of Risk Factor Test Results: Insights from a Basic Research Program,” in Psychosocial Effects of Screening for Disease Prevention and Detection, ed. Robert Croyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 144–81.
A. Sandler and J. Bodfish, “Open-Label Use of Placebos in Treatment of ADHD: A Pilot Study,” Child: Care, Health and Development 34 (2008): 104–10. Cf.
Henrikje Klasen, “A Name, What’s in a Name? The Medicalization of Hyperactivity, Revisited,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 7 (2000): 334.
Sara Garfield, Felicity Smith, and Sally-Anne Francis, “The Paradoxical Role of Antidepressant Medication—Returning to Normal Functioning While Losing the Sense of Being Normal,” Journal of Mental Health 12 (2003): 534. Such disclaimers are common in the literature.
John Heizer and Lee Robins, “The Diagnostic Interview Schedule: Its Development, Evolution, and Use,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 23(1988): 15.
Paul Chodoff, “The Medicalization of the Human Condition,” Psychiatric Services 53 (2002): 627.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 631, 702.
Tolstoy, “A Confession” in The Portable Tolstoy, ed. John Bayley, tr. Aylmer Maude (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 679.
Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 173.
Clin Bennett, “Shakespeare and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” British Journal of Psychiatry 198 (2011): 255.
Copyright information
© 2015 Stewart Justman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Justman, S. (2015). DSM and the Shaping of Depression. In: The Nocebo Effect. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523297_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523297_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57677-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52329-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)