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Photo by Reed Hutchinson
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Social Welfare Professor Stuart Kirk has criticized what he sees as a disturbing trend: diagnosing ever more Americans as mentally ill. To maintain his own sanity, he motorcycles to work. |
Challenging the insanity diagnosis
BY Ajay Singh
Today Staff Writer
Ever since he moved from New York City to Los Angeles 12 years ago, Stuart Kirk has been commuting to campus on a 600-pound BMW motorcycle — one of the world’s most highly engineered bikes. Kirk, a professor of social welfare, doesn’t ride in from Westwood or Bel Air. He motorcycles from his home in Ojai three times a week, 150 miles roundtrip.
“To stay alive in L.A. traffic, you must keep focused on what’s going on,” said Kirk. He drives a car “maybe six days a year, when it’s raining,” and often motorcycles to other states on vacation. “I love to ride,” he explained. “It’s therapeutic and keeps me sane.”
It’s no coincidence that Kirk also knows a thing or two about sanity. For the past 20 years, in books and articles, he has relentlessly challenged and criticized what he sees as a questionable trend: the practice of diagnosing and overmedicating ever more Americans as mentally ill.
The issue is rooted in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which contains a checklist of behaviors deemed symptoms of mental disorders. Over the years, Kirk said, the APA has added to the manual hundreds of seemingly normal behaviors as symptoms of disorders, from nightmares and rumination to lack of empathy and obsession with details. New disorders are proposed and added regularly.
Although the DSM acknowledges there are no known causes of the vast majority of mental disorders, explained Kirk, “the manual creates the illusion” that there are clear boundaries be-
tween the “normal” and the “sick.” While the DSM criteria are “a reasonable step in the right direction,” said Kirk, they are flawed in that they offer few or no guidelines about the social context in which behaviors occur.
For a proper diagnosis, context is everything. For example, many people could meet the criteria for depression after losing their homes, belongings and jobs during Hurricane Katrina. “But wouldn’t their sadness and distress indicate that they’re just reacting normally to a terrible loss?” Kirk said.
Kirk argues that the DSM is “making us crazy.” He cites recent research suggesting that 50% of Americans have had or will have a mental disorder at some point in their lives. “Everybody has a stake in this expansion — the professionals, insurance and drug companies,” he said. “It’s more convenient for the public, too, to see their problems as a result of some disorder that might be fixed by a pill than to acknowledge life’s full of troubles.”
The medicalization of human foibles isn’t the only problem. “There is also this cult of perfectibility, and you certainly see it in Los Angeles: whether you weigh too much, your face is not right,” said Kirk, pointing out that medicine was once used only to treat illness. “Now it’s also used to seek perfection,” he said. “Normality is no longer good enough.”
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