The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: New Philosophical and Scientific Developments

Like many other diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, the criteria are descriptive and somewhat arbitrary, representing professional opinion and consensus. Describing disorders through checklists of symptoms can distort the complexity of clinical realities and comorbidities. From a theoret

So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviants. Diagnosis coupled with statistics is the disease; yet diagnosis coupled with statistics is the very name—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (or DSM)—of the universall

Dr Breggin summarises his own approach to depression in Toxic Psychiatry, in which he states that, “Despite all of this biopsychiatric propaganda ...depression is a readily understandable expression of human despair that is frequently responsive to psychosocial help.”