Tag: DSM

What the ….? They’re at it again, I hear myself silently saying.

Our system fails because it colludes with social structures that themselves generate harmful ways of being in the world. The sector at best sedates these states while at the same time exonerates harmful social arrangements by over-emphasising the so-called internal and disordered causes of structural distress.  

I always seek to use more ordinary language, bringing the person’s own words and metaphors in. It can be painful to hear a person’s detailed and often very meaningful description of their feelings or distress being reduced to a symptom.

If madness involves a loss or failure of shared reasoning that places the individual outside of the community of immediate and implicit human understanding, does this mean it is without interest or meaning?

‘Call me Crazy’ takes place during the reign of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV and begins with the playwright’s announcement ‘All of the events and stories in this play are true, especially the ones you will think I must have made up.’