Phobias: So Yesterday!

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So, I'm watching Criminal Minds, and the FBI agents are all atwitter because the "unsub" used the "antiquated" term "phobias": "Now," they tell us, "they're called 'anxiety disorders.'"

Ah, how the field of psychiatry advances: re-label things!

The Last Psychiatrist has a great post on this topic:

"And so if you're thinking that the craziness is that psychiatry is the doing away with the concept of narcissism you have fully missed the point: the issue isn't whether narcissism exists or not, the issue is who gets to decide if narcissism exists or not... Never mind that the new terms have no more validity than the old terms, and are equally invented."

By the way, I once spent a week programming the DSM-IV ailments into a web application -- the most depressing programming job I ever had.

Comments

  1. Silas Barta5:06 PM

    I'm sorry to hear that your programming was inhibited by Web Programmer DSM-Related Depressive Disorder -- but I'm sure they're hard at work on a pill for that ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah8:40 PM

    Jolly good, Silas!

    ReplyDelete

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