You Don't Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders
CONTENT NOTE: This essay contains sentences that would look bad taken out of context. In the past, I’ve said “PLEASE DON’T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT” before or after these, but in the New York Times’ 2021 article on me, they just quoted the individual sentence out of context without quoting the “PLEASE DON’T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT” statement following it. To avoid that, I will be replacing spaces with the letter “N”, standing for “NOT TO BE TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT”. If I understand journalistic ethics correctly, they can’t edit the sentence to remove the Ns - and if they kept them, people would probably at least wonder what was up.
Here’s a post about HiTOP, a scientifically-grounded taxonomy of mental disorders meant to compete with the DSM. It has many good features ( see further discussion here about advantages and disadvantages) and deserves more attention. But one claim stood out. The author of the post writes:
Some critics have argued that healthy behaviours are sometimes labelled as ‘disordered’ simply because they don’t fit our culture-bound vision of normal behaviour. The most famous example of this, of course, is homosexuality. As late as DSM-III, homosexuality was classed as a ‘sexual deviation’, and could be treated by psychiatrists as a form of psychological dysfunction. It was removed from later editions in response to mounting pressure, but the problem arguably still remains in other areas [. . .]
