Sublime

The referendum was held in 1974 by mail. Of the 17,905 APA members eligible to cast a vote, only 10,555 bothered to send in a ballot. Fifty-eight percent of them voted to uphold the board of trustees’s decision. The seventh printing of the DSM-II, which would be published later that year, would not include “homosexuality per se.”61

“diagnostic inflation”—the slapping-on of more (and more, and more) clinical labels to pathologize everyday sadness and stress.

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

Anger, lust, pride, greed, avarice, and sloth—as well as all the other problems we humans have always struggled to manage—were recast as “disorders” that could be fixed by the administration of appropriate chemicals.

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