Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life

poppers. One out of every five U.S. adults uses at least one drug for a psychiatric problem; 11 percent of all adults took an antidepressant in 2010;1 nearly 4 percent of our children are on a stimulant2 and 4 percent of our teenagers are taking an antidepressant;3 25 percent of nursing home residents are given antipsychotics.4 In Canada between 20

In the early 1980s, about a third of Americans qualified for a lifetime diagnosis of mental disorder.45 Now about half do.46 And Europe is catching up fast at well over 40 percent.47 Some people think these are underestimates—more carefully done prospective studies actually double the lifetime prevalence. If you believe the results, our population

Because it sets the crucial boundary between normality and mental illness, DSM has gained a huge societal significance and determines all sorts of important things that have an enormous impact on people’s lives—like who is considered well and who is sick; what treatment is offered; who pays for it; who gets disability benefits; who is eligible for

But DSM-5 seemed to be moving in just the wrong direction, adding new diagnoses that would turn everyday anxiety, eccentricity, forgetting, and bad eating habits into mental disorders.

Disease mongering cannot occur in a vacuum—it requires that the drug companies engage the active collaboration of the doctors who write the prescriptions, the patients who ask for them, the researchers who invent the new mental disorders, the consumer groups that advocate for more treatment, and the media and Internet that spread the word.

in the remarkable healing powers of time, natural resilience, exercise, family and social support, and psychotherapy—and much less automatic faith in chemical imbalance and pills.

For a significant percentage of people with mild or transient symptoms, SSRIs are nothing more than very expensive, potentially harmful placebos.

Evidence of diagnostic inflation is everywhere. There have been four explosive epidemics of mental disorder in the past fifteen years. Childhood bipolar disorder increased by a miraculous fortyfold50; autism by a whopping twentyfold51;

research. But they have also had the very harmful unintended consequence of triggering and helping to maintain a runaway diagnostic inflation that threatens normal and results in massive overtreatment with psychiatric medication.