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The order of disorder.

a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/health/18psych.html?partner=permalinkamp;exprod=permalink"The psychiatrists are at it again, defining mental "disorders."/abr /blockquote?This is not cardiology or nephrology, where the basic diseases are well known,? said Edward Shorter, a leading historian of psychiatry whose latest book, ?Before Prozac,? is critical of the manual. ?In psychiatry no one knows the causes of anything, so classification can be driven by all sorts of factors? ? political, social and financial.br /br /?What you have in the end,? Mr. Shorter said, ?is this process of sorting the deck of symptoms into syndromes, and the outcome all depends on how the cards fall.?...br /br /Experts say that some of the most crucial debates are likely to include gender identity, diagnoses of illness involving children, and addictions like shopping and eating.br //blockquotediv class="blogger-post-footer"link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://cache.blogads.com/373245138/feed.css" / script language="javascript" src="http://cache.blogads.com/373245138/feed.js"/scriptbr/a href=http://www.blogads.comblog advertising/a link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://cache.blogads.com/372740391/feed.css" / script language="javascript" src="http://cache.blogads.com/372740391/feed.js"/scriptbr/a href=http://www.blogads.comblog advertising/a/div

Full post as published by Althouse on December 18, 2008 (boomark / email).