By Gary Greenberg
Blue Rider Press / Penguin, May 2013
While the life sciences escaped “physics envy” via molecular biology, psychiatry still languishes in “pathology envy”—a longing for discrete, organic disease entities that can be tracked down to cellular drug targets. As long as the brain resists such decoding, what mind medics have instead is the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Even before DSM-5 was released last month, The Book of Woe was waiting to ambush it.
Gary Greenberg, a self-described “lunchbucket therapist,” uses DSM codes to get paid for helping people grapple with life and self. He has written both an inside history of the tome’s scientific aspirations—how III exorcised Freud and IV defined disorders empirically, by their symptoms—and ...
