Skip to content

Is Psychiatry Out of Touch with Science?

In an excerpt from Gary Greenberg’s book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, the author argues that psychiatry is out of touch with today’s science.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

In an excerpt from Gary Greenberg’s book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, the author argues that psychiatry is out of touch with today’s science. He writes:

In the four revision of the [American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.)] since 1980, diagnoses have appeared and disappeared, and symptom lists have been tweaked and rejiggered with troubling regularity, generally after debate that seems more suited to the floors of Congress than the halls of science. The inevitable and public chaos—diagnostic epidemics, prescription-drug fads, patients labelled and relabelled—has only deepened psychiatry’s inferiority complex. But it’s not entirely clear that psychiatrists want a solution to the problem…

What do you think ? . . .

Is Psychiatry out of touch with science?

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Related
A bearded man wearing glasses and a plaid shirt speaks with a microphone clipped to his collar in front of a purple background with white dots.
The Well
How Rainn Wilson discovered sacredness
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
▸
13 min
—
with
Rainn Wilson
Up Next