That industry should be taken with a grain of salt, IMHO, because I'm pretty sure you can diagnose literally every person on Earth with _something_ in the DSM.
Exactly, people forget that the critical criteria for diagnosis is whether the cognitive features prevent the individual from achieving his personal goals in life, or cause problems from those around him. And indeed, as the article says, schizoid individuals have significantly reduced quality of life and some of the lowest scores of life success among personality disorders. Without this, there would be no basis for diagnosis.
Yes, exactly. Those questions are determined by interactions between the patient and the provider, which is inherently subjective and therefore flawed.
Not a great argument - I'm pretty sure you can diagnose literally every person on Earth with _something_ in the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) as well (kind of cheating because mental health stuff is in there too, but still, even if you exclude that section).
More seriously, I think you need to restrict your argument to a subset of medicine, otherwise your argument is actually just "there are other area(s) of medicine that also exhibit the same issue" which is not really a counterpoint to my original comment but instead an addition to it.
So we can discount psychology as a whole but need to pick and choose medicine? Why don't we consider the various areas of psychology as well instead of just throwing out the whole book?
I'm not sure, I just don't think that a textbook that can be used to diagnose everybody with a disease is very trustworthy. Kind of like how passing a law that can be used to arrest anybody is generally not a good idea, or something like that.
Why would that be a reason not to trust this field? I could understand this argument more if you were talking about a specific disorder being diagnosable in every person on earth--because how is that a disorder if it's the norm?--but you're very much not saying that.
As an example, would you consider dentistry untrustworthy as a whole just because dentists would diagnose almost every person with a cavity or some form of tooth or gum damage at some point in their lives?
But are those symptoms long-lasting? Are they severe? Do they impede day-to-day life? Professional diagnosis isn’t like WebMD.