Can Psychiatric Diagnoses Be Snap Judgments?

"A shift to long-term thinking happened toward the end of the last century. In the late 1960s, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used to diagnose psychiatric distress in this country went from using the label "reaction" to the label "disorder." A "depressive reaction" became a "disorder," and "temporary" hardened into "permanent." And gradually, with that shift, came the concept of disease "management," generally defined as a lifetime of medication, rather than "cure"-though clinicians from Hippocrates in 400 BC to Sigmund Freud to those in the U.S. for most of the 20th century considered cure the correct goal in mind care."

"As we boarded, two men on this flight from Seattle to Atlanta got into a fight. One was seated to my left, one directly behind me, so at one point a hand was flying through my hair. Flight attendants busied themselves elsewhere. The man to my left had been rummaging around in the overhead bin, and apparently, he shifted the backpack of the man behind me to make room for his own and moved several coats."

A traveler witnessed a violent altercation on a flight after one passenger rummaged in an overhead bin and shifted another passenger's backpack, provoking shouting and physical grabbing while flight attendants were occupied elsewhere. The traveler had been speaking about psychiatric diagnosis and historical changes in mental-health thinking. In the late 1960s the DSM relabeled many forms of distress from "reaction" to "disorder," turning temporary experiences into more permanent diagnoses. That change encouraged a model of disease "management" defined largely as lifelong medication. Historically, clinicians from Hippocrates through Freud and many 20th-century U.S. practitioners prioritized cure in mind care.

Read at Psychology Today