Get the latest tech news

The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

Allen Frances is worried that the next edition of psychiatry's manual for diagnosing mental illness will take the field "off a cliff."

Although most of the dissenters are squeamish about making their concerns public—especially because of a surprisingly restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign—they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will "take psychiatry off a cliff." Among the numerous alarms the piece sounded, Frances warned that the new DSM, with its emphasis on early intervention, would cause a "wholesale imperial medicalization of normality" and "a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry," for which patients would pay the "high price [of] adverse effects, dollars, and stigma." He's a large, ruddy-faced man with a shock of white hair, and when he leans forward, his monogrammed cuffs perched on his knees, to deliver his assessment of Frances, even though it's only two words—"he's wrong"—you can hear his rising gorge and the sense of betrayal that seems to be swelling behind it.

Get the Android app