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by chaffneue 4620 days ago
This article is just purple prose nonsense that takes advantage of their audience's natural distrust of information that surrounds the human mind (see the author's reference to multiple benign conditions to discredit the work) and the author's own hang up about some sad end where "human beings are individuated, sick, and alone." From pioneers like Freud to the modern psychoanalysis spectra we have today, I see much of the body of work around human mental states being about classification/categorization, statistical aggregation, symptom/diagnosis tracking and vocabulary. The article is more or less reading a collection of codified medical anomalies and then attributing a singular, malevolent narrative tone to it instead of just reading it for what it is: a standardized professional manual with a strict written style and many collaborators. There's no narration let alone an "unreliable" narrator, there's minimal subjectivity, there are no actors, there's just some observational information presented in a standard way. While I'm aware the DSM has its critics and naff list of non-disorders, I don't believe that committing to basic research and presenting objective findings is a madness that itself belongs in the DSM. What if the goal to this manual is altruistic? What if even one patient benefits from a faster recovery from some mental malaise because of this manual? I'm inclined to say keep researching!
1 comments

> What if the goal to this manual is altruistic?

That doesn't sound at all out of line with a typical dystopian novel plot. :)

Haha! good point!