from Hacker News

The DSM is not medical science – it's a social control manual

by stagas on 5/30/25, 7:19 AM with 13 comments

• by KingMob on 5/30/25, 10:33 AM

  Looking at the overall contents of that repo, it looks like some rando just chose Github over Dropbox to store their notes. Not sure why HN should care.

• by Simulacra on 5/30/25, 3:08 PM

  The DSM had always been interesting to me because most of it is so broad, that you could apply it to just about anyone. I really believe the pharmaceutical industry has pushed to expanded the DSM beyond relevancy to sell more pills.

• by lurk2 on 5/30/25, 11:20 AM

  Interesting notes. I’ve made a few of these observations on my own and came to largely the same conclusion; clinical psychiatry is inherently normative. Viewing behavior as disordered in particular requires a frame of reference for what constitutes desirable behavior.

  Humans being made to conform to the requirements of (industrial) society, rather than the other way around, is one of many cart-driving-the-horse norms that emerged around the turn of the 20th century; the invention of jaywalking, mills waking up entire towns with steam whistles, leisure time being sacrificed to purchase consumer goods, etc.

  There is a balance to be struck. It’s entirely natural that the behavior of every individual will need to be regulated to the extent that coordination is possible (else, it becomes impossible for us to even engage in a conversation mediated by language); even so, there is a tendency to assume that it is the duty of the individual to radically change himself, or else to be blamed and categorized as a good-for-nothing in the event that he fails to so change himself. This can appear sensible until it is considered that small accommodations here or there will not inconvenience us much, but will make a world of difference to the person being accommodated.

  Where this gets complicated is when we get into issues of affirming delusion or being asked to make accommodations for behavior one considers to be immoral, but I suspect that the world would be a substantially more pleasant place to live in if people gave more consideration to the different manners in which we could all potentially be living in it.

• by mschuster91 on 5/30/25, 10:13 AM

  > The DSM is not medical science - it's a social control manual disguised as healthcare. It transforms human suffering into profitable disorders while ignoring the social conditions that create distress. It's time to abandon this harmful system and embrace approaches that actually help people heal.

  We'd need to abandon a lot of things... not just our economic system but also how we live, i.e. urbanization. Just like you can't just coop tens of thousands of chickens into a mega shed without having to deal with psychological (ever saw chicken peck each other half dead?) and physiological (bird flu!) issues, you can't coop millions of humans into megalopolises with no greenery and barely any space...