None of the DSM editions had ever been scientific lmao.

“our understanding of the biology of mental disorders has been slow in coming.”

There’s no biology in mental disorders; none of them have objective phenomena and they are arbitrarily given and created.

  • Tedesche@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    Neither the diagnoses nor their criteria are arbitrarily created. Researchers look at clinical data and notice that some symptoms of mental illness co-occur at higher rates that cannot be due to random chance, and when they isolate a group of symptoms that co-occur fairly regularly, that becomes the basis for a new diagnosis. It’s far from a perfect system, but it’s the best one we’ve got while the brain remains the mystery it is. And it is scientific, it’s just on the softer side due to a necessary reliance of “soft” data like self-reporting.