Abstract
Implying as it did a liberation from habitual patterns, the notion of the paradigm shift captivated the Utopian imagination of the 1960s. It was introduced in the same decade, before the outbreak of the student revolt, by Thomas Kuhns landmark study of discontinuities in the theory and practice of the natural sciences, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
A version of this chapter appeared as “The Folly of Systems: The Satiric Tradition and Mental Disorders,” Philosophy and Literature 37 (2013): 472–85.
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Notes
A version of this chapter appeared as “The Folly of Systems: The Satiric Tradition and Mental Disorders,” Philosophy and Literature 37 (2013): 472–85.
John Heizer and Lee Robins, “The Diagnostic Interview Schedule: Its Development, Evolution, and Use,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 23 (1988): 15.
On DSM-III as a paradigm shift, see Hannah Decker, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 309f
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 24.
Mitchell Wilson, “DSM-III and the Transformation of American Psychiatry: A History,” American Journal of Psychiatry 150 (1993): 399–410.
Gerald Rosen, Robert Spitzer, and Paul McHugh, “Problems with the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Diagnosis and Its Future in DSM-VT” British Journal of Psychiatry 192 (2008): 3.
On the universality of trauma, see Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 105: “It is precisely the traumatized self—the traumatized self as the normal, modern self, so to speak—that Freud is beginning to come to terms with.” 9. Tracked by MedPage Today under the heading, ICD-10 Follies.
Esther Fischer-Homberger, “Eighteenth-Century Nosology and Its Survivors,” Medical History 14 (1970): 398.
Robyn Dawes, A House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 67.
Nancy Andreasen, “DSM and the Death of Phenomenology in America: An Example of Unintended Consequences,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 33 (2007): 111.
Robert Aronowitz, “When Do Symptoms Become a Disease?” Annals of Internal Medicine 134 (2001): 803–08.
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See Robert Spitzer, Kurt Kroenke, Janet Williams et al., “Validation and Utility of a Self-Report Version of PRIME-MD,” JAMA 282 (1999): 1737–44.
David Brody, Steven Hahn, and Robert Spitzer, “Identifying Patients with Depression in the Primary Care Setting: A More Efficient Method,” Archives of Internal Medicine 158 (1998): 2469.
T. M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 40.
Allan Frances, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-V, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (New York: William Morrow, 2013), p. 154.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Three vols. in one. (New York: New York Review Press, 2001), I.145–46.
Cf. Harry Stack Sullivan, The Psychiatric Interview (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), p. 185.
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Kaiman Applbaum, “Pharmaceutical Marketing and the Invention of the Medical Consumer,” PLoS Medicine 3 (2006): e189;
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“Whenever one therapy is used to treat many different disorders, it is likely that the therapeutic effects are due to the placebo effect.” Arthur Shapiro and Elaine Shapiro, The Powerful Placebo: From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 104.
See Sydney Walker, A Dose of Sanity: Mind, Medicine, and Misdiagnosis (New York: Wiley, 1996), p. 78.
Fabrizio Benedetti, Placebo Effects: Understanding the Mechanisms in Health and Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 130.
Ramin Mojtabai and Mark Olfson, “Proportion of Antidepressants Prescribed without a Psychiatric Diagnosis Is Growing,” Health Affairs 30 (2011): 1434–42.
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Allen Frances, comment on Robert Spitzer and Janet Williams, “Having a Dream: A Research Strategy for DSM-IVT” in The Validity of Psychiatric Diagnosis, ed. Lee Robins and James Barrett (New York: Raven Press, 1989), p. 301.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 122.
Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 76.
David Healy, Pharmageddon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 182. For an Asperger’s quiz see: http://www.aspergerstestsite.com/75/autism -spectrum-quotient-aq-test/#.UZuZXb8YLJw
Lynn Payer, Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick (New York: John Wiley, 1992), pp. 7–8. We do, though, have the classic joke about the operation that was a success.
Allen Frances, Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis: Responding to the Challenge of DSM-V (New York: Guilford Press, 2013), p. 10.
Pat Bracken, Philip Thomas, Sami Timimi et al., “Psychiatry Beyond the Current Paradigm,” British Journal of Psychiatry 201 (2012): 432.
On the principle and practice of satiric excess, see Stewart Justman, The Springs of Liberty: The Satiric Tradition and Freedom of Speech (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 402.
Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 229.
Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 184.
Raymond La Charité, “The Relationship of Judgment and Experience in the ‘Essais’ of Montaigne,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 37.
Gary Saul Morson, “Prosaic Bakhtin: Landmarks, Anti-Intelligentsialism, and the Russian Counter-Tradition,” Common Knowledge 2 (1993): 60.
Montaigne, “On Experience,” Complete Essays, tr. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 1243.
Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 172.
Payer, Disease-Mongers, p. 24; cf. Robert Aronowitz, “When Do Symptoms Become a Disease?” Annals of Internal Medicine 134 (2001): 803–8.
On the emergence during Tolstoy’s lifetime of the view that different patients might have the same disease, see Nicholas Christakis, Death Foretold: Prophecy and Diagnosis in Medical Care (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 6.
Harold Schefski, “Tolstojs Case against Doctors,” Slavic and East European Journal 22 (1978): 569–73.
Valeria Sobol, “Reading the Invisible: The Mind, the Body, and the Medical Examiner in Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,” Studies in Slavic Cultures 2 (2001): 17.
Among the presumed causes of tuberculosis around the time Tolstoy wrote War and Peace were “depressive emotions.” See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1989), p. 54.
The antituberculosis drug iproniazid was in fact the first antidepressant; see Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 121–24.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 615, 617.
Lee Robins, “Diagnostic Grammar and Assessment: Translating Criteria into Questions,” Psychological Medicine 19 (1989): 67.
Gary Saul Morson, “The Prosaics of Process,” Literary Imagination 2 (2000): 387.
Leslie Aaron and Dedra Buchwald, “A Review of the Evidence for Overlap among Unexplained Clinical Conditions,” Annals of Internal Medicine 134 (2001): 877.
John Talbott, “An In-Depth Look at DSM-III: An Interview with Robert Spitzer,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 31 (1980): 28. Cf.
William James, Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1988), p. 138: “Most cases are mixed cases, and we should not treat our classifications with too much respect.”
A turgid analysis of the difficulty of fitting things into categories is to be found in Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
Allan Horwitz, Creating Mental Illness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 116.
James Ferguson, “SSRI Antidepressant Medications: Adverse Effects and Tolerability,” Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 3 (2001): 22–27.
David Baldwin and Thomas Foong, “Antidepressant Drugs and Sexual Dysfunction,” British Journal of Psychiatry 202 (2013): 397. The authors continue, “The presence of antidepressant treatment-emergent sexual dysfunction can significantly reduce quality of life and self-esteem, and impose burdens on interpersonal relationships, over and above those associated with depression.”
Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1992).
Simon Wessely, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Neurasthenia and ‘ME,’” Psychological Medicine 20 (1990): 47.
John Feighner, Eli Robins, and Samuel Guze, “Diagnostic Criteria for Use in Psychiatric Research,” Archives of General Psychiatry 26 (1972): 62.
A brilliant 1983 review of Ann Beattie’s fiction sets its tone as “cool sorrow” and “listless despair.” “Her parched, exhausted stories themselves seem numb. She reads them herself in a plain, flat, utterly toneless voice that suggests deadened feelings or, on occasion, a determined effort to fight back tears.” Here then is a world depressed. The characters take Valium. See Pico Iyer, “The World According to Beattie,” Partisan Review 50 (1983): 548–53.
So popular was Valium that by the mid-1970s it was used generically for drugs of its kind. See Nikolas Rose, “Neurochemical Selves,” Society 41 (2003): 49.
David Healy, “The Dilemmas Posed by New and Fashionable Treatments,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 7 (2001): 324.
Edward Shorter, How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 110, 119; cf.
Christopher Dowrick, Beyond Depression: A New Approach to Understanding and Management (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 67–68,
and David Pilgrim and Richard Bentall, “The Medicalisation of Misery: A Critical Realist Analysis of the Concept of Depression,” Journal of Mental Health 8 (1999): 261–74.
Bernd Löwe, Robert Spitzer, Janet Williams et al., “Depression, Anxiety and Somatization in Primary Care: Syndrome Overlap and Functional Impairment,” General Hospital Psychiatry 30 (2008): 191–92.
David Lodge, Therapy (London: Penguin, 1995). See pp. 4, 218, 107, etc.
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B. C. Douglas, “Dickens’ Characters on the Couch: An Example of Teaching Psychiatry Using Literature,” Medical Humanities 34 (2008): 64–69.
Horace Dobeli, Lectures on the Germs and Vestiges of Disease, and on the Prevention of the Invasion and Fatality of Disease by Periodical Examinations (London: John Churchill, 1861), p. 150.
Jennifer Croswell, David Ransohoff, and Barnett Kramer, “Principles of Cancer Screening: Lessons from History and Study Design Issues,” Seminars in Oncology 37 (2010): 202.
Nortin Hadler, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 135.
Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders (New York: Free Press, 2003), p. x.
Michael King, Victoria Holt, and Irwin Nazareth, “Women’s Views of Their Sexual Difficulties: Agreement and Disagreement with Clinical Diagnoses,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 36 (2007): 281–88.
Nancy Andreasen, “Acute and Delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorders: A History and Some Issues,” American journal of Psychiatry 161 (2004): 1321–23.
Jonathan Shay, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (New York: Scribner, 2002), p. 141. If Odysseus really suffered from PTSD, the wound he receives in Book 11 of the Iliad would be mentioned somewhere in the Odyssey. It isn’t.
Richard McNally, “Progress and Controversy in the Study of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” Annual Reviews in Psychology 54 (2003): 230.
W. H. M. Castro, M. Schilgen, S. Meyer et al., “Do ‘Whiplash Injuries’ Occur in Low-Speed Rear Impacts?” European Spine journal 6 (1997): 374.
Paul Lees-Haley, J. Randall Price, and Christopher Williams, “Use of the Impact of Events Scale in the Assessment of Emotional Distress and PTSD May Produce Misleading Results,” journal of Forensic Neuropsychology 2 (2001): 49.
Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 83.
David Healy, “Mandel Cohen and Origins of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition: DSM-III,” History of Psychiatry 13 (2002): 210–11.
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Justman, S. (2015). The Folly of Systems: The Satiric Tradition and Mental Disorders. In: The Nocebo Effect. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523297_7
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