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DSM – easier to see its biasses.

Labeling is problematic, some more than others.  The DSM leads to over medicalisation.

American Psychiatry Is Facing “Civil War” over Its Diagnostic Manual | Psychology Today:

“Given the embarrassing evidence in the New Scientist article, whose associated editorial is called “Time’s Up for Psychiatry’s Bible,” the timing of the APA announcement raises significant flags. As the New Scientist put it in a rider that appeared on its website yesterday, “Since [the] article was first posted [last week], the American Psychiatric Association has announced that the publication of DSM-V will be delayed until May 2013.”

“Undoubtedly, the most reckless suggestion for DSM-V is that it include many new categories to capture the milder subthreshold versions of the existing more severe official disorders. The . . . DSM-V Task Force has failed to adequately consider the potentially disastrous unintended consequence that DSM-V may flood the world with new false positives. . . . The result would be a wholesale imperial medicalization of normality that will trivialize mental disorder and lead to a deluge of unneeded medication treatments—a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry but at a huge cost to the new false positive ‘patients’ caught in the excessively wide DSM-V net.”

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RBD – Robert Thurman

Another item from the Red Book Dialogues.

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Talk to Me: Robert Thurman | WNYC Culture:

Talk to Me: Robert Thurman By WNYC Culture | Fri, Oct 30, 2009 Lecture Podcast Folio163Thurman300x393 In this dialogue Tibetan scholar, Robert Thurman was paired with the psychoanalyst Jane Selinske. Professor Thurman turned out to be more interested in analyzing Jung than in analyzing himself, but Selinske was able to ferret a few confessions out of the sly and playful professor.

MP3

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Red Book Dialogues – Charlie Kaufman

Charile Kaufman Bares His Unconscious – WNYC Culture

later:
I’ve listened to it now, and thoroughly enjoyed this.

Charile Kaufman Bares His Unconscious Monday, November 30, 2009 * Email * Share * Print * Like This Filmmaker Charlie Kaufman and Jungian analyst John Beebe plumbed the depths of the writer’s famously complex mind during a Jungian chat last month at the Rubin Museum. [From The Red Book by C.G. Jung] From The Red Book by C.G. Jung (Rubin Museum)

 Kaufman and Beebe’s conversation was part of the museum’s Red Book Dialogues, which pairs analysts and artists in conversation about the godfather of the unconscious, Carl Jung. Kaufman interpreted an image of a person-shaped figure (pictured to the left), arched in pain or ecstasy, and outlined by a sea of blue wavy figures. Kaufman spent a lot of time arguing against imposing borders on life in general. The “notion of being protected from the outside world,” Kaufman said, is “false and ego driven.” They also explored Kaufman’s fear of running over someone while driving. “If I killed a bug, I could go on. If I [accidentally] killed a person, I don’t know how I could go on,” Kaufman said.

 stream m3u

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Alice Walker

Alice Walker on Faith, Nature and Social Activism – WNYC Culture

I have not listened to it yet, but have the mp3 on my iPod.

Audio – Alice Walker

Alice Walker is known for her fierce, poetic writing and her politically charged ideas. She opened up to a Jungian analyst in front of a live audience at the Rubin Museum of Art, one of our partners in the Talk to Me series.

Walker and the Jungian analyst, Harry Fogarty took part in “The Red Book Dialogues,” a series of conversations devoted to an exploration of Carl Jung’s work. Both Walker and Fogarty were serene and thoughtful, fitting for a museum filled with Buddhist art. They talked about faith and politics, as well as the solace Walker finds in nature.

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The Return of the Repressed

Not sure if I’ve linked to this essay before? I like his style. Interesting topic! What a culture psychotherapy creates around itself. This particular paragraph is interesting on countertransference.

http://bostonreview.net/BR27.6/boynton.html

Since Freud, there have been three main attitudes towards countertransference, explains Robert Young, a Texas-born, London-based analyst who was formerly the publisher of Free Association Books and a Cambridge don. He sums up the history of countertransference for me, citing several papers he has written on the subject. “An analyst can get rid of his countertransference through analysis and concentrate on the patient’s transference. He can try to exploit it in a controlled way, as Freud says when he advocates using the therapist’s unconscious as an instrument for fathoming the patient’s unconscious. Or he can, more or less, just ‘go with it,’ and treat this unconscious-to-unconscious communication as the only authentical communication between analyst and patient,” he tells me.

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Psy War

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427381.300-psychiatrys-civil-war.html

This war is interesting as in New Zealand ACC is trying to make a DSM diagnosis madatory for treatment.

Two eminent retired psychiatrists are warning that the revision process is fatally flawed. They say the new manual, to be known as DSM-V, will extend definitions of mental illnesses so broadly that tens of millions of people will be given unnecessary and risky drugs. Leaders of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which publishes the manual, have shot back, accusing the pair of being motivated by their own financial interests – a charge they deny. The row is set to come to a head next month when the proposed changes will be published online. For a profession that exists to soothe human troubles, it’s incendiary stuff.

Psychiatry suffers in comparison with other areas of medicine, as diseases of the mind are on the whole less well understood than those of the body. We have, as yet, only glimpses into the fundamental causes of the common mental illnesses, and there are no biological tests to diagnose them. This means conditions such as depression, schizophrenia and personality disorders remain difficult to diagnose with precision. Doctors can only question people about their state of mind and observe their behaviour, classifying illness according to the most obvious symptoms.

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