This article from 2013 comes from P. Murali Doraiswamy (Professor of Psychiatry, Translational Neuroscience Division, Duke University Health System) and has been published by the Edge. It begins:
“Should we worry about the consequences of exporting America’s view of an unhealthy mind to the rest of the world?
Biologists estimate there may be 1.5-5 million subspecies of fungi, though only 5% are currently categorized. To outsiders, it may appear that America’s classification of mental disorders is not too different. At the turn of the century, psychiatric disorders were mostly categorized into neuroses and psychoses. In 1952, DSM-I, the first version of the psychiatric diagnostic bible, formally expanded this to 106 conditions.
DSM-II in 1968 had 182 conditions, DSM-III in 1980 had 265 conditions, and DSM-IV in 1994 had 297. DSM V is expected to be released later this year and will have many changes including an unknown number of new conditions. Today, somewhere around 40 million Americans are thought to be suffering from a mental illness. In 1975, only about 25% of psychiatric patients received a prescription but today almost 100% do and many receive multiple drugs. The use of these drugs has spread so rapidly that levels of common antidepressants, like Prozac, have been detected in the US public water supply …”
You can read more from here.
