Allen Frances responds to critics of the DSM-5 protesters, saying “The American Psychiatric Association has never once addressed the substantive questions raised about DSM-5. Instead, it has always followed the public relations recommendation to endlessly repeat the same meaningless mantra that many experts worked hard on DSM-5, that it reflects the latest in new science, and that it was the most open process ever.”
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So if I am opposed to the DSM 5, I am “anti-psychiatry?”
So what? What is wrong with being anti-psychiatry?
As psychiatry is practiced today, it is a profession whose main purpose, as far as one can see, is to put as many people as possible on drugs, so that the drug corporations who support the profession and its practitioners make as much profit as possible.
I am amazed that when the DSM critics are accused of being anti-psychiatry, they back away from this characterization as if they are being accused of terrorism. This is an example, I think, of how psychiatry has become a kind of religion, where its most ridiculous pronouncements become a kind of holy word, as self-evident as the infallibility of the pope.
Am I anti-psychiatry? Damn right I am, and I’m proud of it.
