The Book of Woe

Zusatztext 91213297 Informationen zum Autor Gary Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist and author of Manufacturing Depression and The Noble Lie . He has written about the intersection of science, politics, and ethics for many publications, including The New Yorker, Wired, Discover, and Rolling Stone . He is a contributor at Mother Jones , and a contributing editor at Harper's, as well as the recipient of the Erik Erikson Award for mental health reporting. Dr. Greenberg lives with his family in Connecticut. Klappentext "Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age! and the DSM-5 is his Inferno. Errol Morris Since its debut in 1952! the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the "official view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality! for instance! was a mental illness until 1973. Each revision has created controversy! but the DSM-5 has taken fire for encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnessesand to prescribe sometimes unnecessary or harmful medications. Respected author and practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition! and returned with an unsettling tale. Exposing the deeply flawed process behind the DSM-5's compilation! The Book of Woe reveals how the manual turns suffering into a commodityand made the APA its own biggest beneficiary. Chapter 1 Shortly after New Orleans physician Samuel Cartwright discovered a new disease in 1850, he realized that like all medical pioneers he faced a special burden. In noticing a disease not heretofore classed among the long list of maladies that man is subject to, he told a gathering of the Medical Association of Louisiana, it was necessary to have a new term to express it. Cartwright could have followed the example of many of his peers and named the malady for himself, but he decided instead to exercise the ancient Greek he'd learned while being educated in Philadelphia. He took two words drapetes , meaning runaway slave, and the more familiar mania and fashioned drapetomania , the disease causing Negroes to run away. The new disease, Cartwright reported in The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal , had one diagnostic symptomabsconding from serviceand a few secondary ones, including a sulkiness and dissatisfaction that appeared just prior to the slaves' flight. Through careful observations made when he practiced in Maryland, he developed a crude epidemiology and concluded that environmental factors could play a role in the onset of drapetomania. Two classes of persons were apt to lose their Negroes: those who made themselves too familiar with them, treating them as equals; and on the other hand those who treated them cruelly, denied them the common necessaries of life, neglected to protect them, or frightened them by a blustering manner of approach. But the most evenhanded treatment would not prevent all cases, and for those whose illness was without cause, Cartwright had a prescription: whipping the devil out of them. Lest anyone doubt that drapetomania was a real diseaseand, evidently, some Northern doctors didCartwright offered proof. First of all, he said, we know that Negroes are descended from the people of Canaan, a name that means submissive knee-bender, so it's clear what God had in mind for the race. And in case a reader subscribed to the notion, taught in the northern hornbooks in Medicine, that the Negro is only a lampblacked white man . . . requiring nothing but liberty and equalitysocial and politicalto wash him white, Cartwright called as witnesses the prominent European doctors who had demonstrated, by dissection, so great a difference between the Negro and the white man as to induce the majority of naturalists to refer him to a diff...

“[I]ndustrious and perfervid... Mr. Greenberg [argues] that the [DSM] and its authors, the American Psychiatric Association, wield their power arbitrarily and often unwisely, encouraging the diagnosis of too many bogus mental illnesses in patients (binge eating disorder, for example) and too much medication to treat them....Mr. Greenberg argues that psychiatry needs to become more humble, not more certain and aggressive....Greenberg is a fresher, funnier writer. He paces the psychiatric stage as if he were part George Carlin, part Gregory House.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
 
“Greenberg’s documentation of the DSM-5 revision process is an essential read for practicing and in-training psychotherapists and psychiatrists and is an important contribution to the history of psychiatry.”
—*Library Journal*

“The rewriting of the bible of psychiatry shakes the field to its foundations in this savvy, searching exposé.  Deploying wised-up, droll reportage from the trenches of psychiatric policy-making and caustic profiles of the discipline’s luminaries, Greenberg subjects the practices of the mental health industry—his own included—to a withering critique. The result is a compelling insider’s challenge to psychiatry’s scientific pretensions—and a plea to return it to its humanistic roots.”—Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

“Greenberg is an entertaining guide through the treacheries and valuable instances of the DSM, interviewing members on both sides of the divide and keeping the proceedings conversational even when discussing the manual’s pretensions toward epistemic iteration. He also brings his own practice into [The Book of Woe], with examples of the DSM falling woefully short in capturing the complexity of personality. Bright, humorous and seriously thoroughgoing, Greenberg takes all the DSMs for a spin as revealing as the emperor’s new clothes.”—*Kirkus Reviews*

“[A] brilliant look at the making of DSM-5...entertaining, biting and essential...Greenberg builds a splendid and horrifying read....[he] shows us vividly that psychiatry’s biggest problem may be a stubborn reluctance to admit its immaturity.”
—David Dobbs, Nature.com

“Gary Greenberg is a thoughtful comedian and a cranky philosopher and a humble pest of a reporter, equal parts Woody Allen, Kierkegaard, and Columbo. The Book of Woe is a profound, and profoundly entertaining, riff on malady, power, and truth. This book is for those of us (i.e., all of us) who've ever wondered what it means, and what's at stake, when we try to distinguish the suffering of the ill from the suffering of the human.”
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction

“This could be titled The Book of ... Whoa! An eye-popping look at the unnerving, often tawdry politics of psychiatry.”
—Gene Weingarten, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Fiddler in the Subway

“Bringing the full force of his wit, warmth, and tenacity to this accessible inside account of the latest revision of psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, Gary Greenberg has written a book to rival the importance of its subject. Keenly researched and vividly reported, The Book of Woe is frank, impassioned, on fire for the truth—and best of all, vigorously, beautifully alive to its story’s human stakes.”
—Michelle Orange, author of This Is Running for Your Life
 
“Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno. He guides us through the not-so-divine comedy that results when psychiatrists attempt to reduce our hopelessly complex inner worlds to an arbitrary taxonomy that provides a disorder for everybody. Greenberg leads us into depths that Dante never dreamed of. The Book of Woe is a mad chronicle of so-called…