Peddling Mental Disorder: The Crisis in Modern Psychiatry

Psychiatry is in a mess. Patients who urgently need help go untreated, and perfectly normal people get over-diagnosed with serious mental disorder and receive unnecessary medical treatment. The root of the problem lies with money - pharmaceutical money, and with a diagnostic system in psychiatry - the DSM - that is vulnerable to being exploited. The pharmaceutical companies have fostered the expansion of this flawed diagnostic system, thereby pushing psychiatry to over-extend it's domain so that more and more normal people can be diagnosed with mental disorder and treated with drugs. Peddling Mental Disorder takes a number of examples - major depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, social anxiety disorder, attention deficit disorder, and bipolar disorder, to illustrate the steady expansion of DSM and the over-medication of society.