Making Us Crazy: DSM, The Psychiatric Bible And The Creation Of Mental Disorders
by Herb Kutchins & Stuart A. Kirk
Free Press
Ever hear of a little something called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders?
Me either.
Or at least not until I blundered into this gold mine of a book.
Turns out that even if you haven’t ever heard of the Manual (cozily known among the psychiatric trade as DSM, by the way), it’s not only heard of you, but it would just LOVE to include you and your day to day individual wants and desires under one or more of its all encompassing categories of “mental disorder.”
Psych Majors.
We’ve always known the dirty bastards have been blowing smoke up our asses for years, right? After all, who among us hasn’t heard of one or another outrageous war story of common sense thrown out the window by some self-important blowhard of a psych doctor?
Anybody who’s watched more than just a trifling of TV in their life can attest to some of the dingdong stuff that the shrinks have attempted to pull off. Like maybe releasing John Hinckley? Or perhaps the fiasco of The Bell Curve? Or maybe just the damnfool faddishness of the trade, wherein supposedly scientific truths seem to come and go with no more rhyme or reason than what comes and goes with the New York artsy-fartsy crowd?
These guys are dorks and we all know it.
But just how dorky they are turns out to be a nasty surprise.
They are SERIOUSLY fucked up, and have managed to seriously fuck up everybody else.
And the root of all this evil has as its foundation and cornerstone, the good old DSM. As if under a cloak of darkness, the DSM and those who have created it have managed to insinuate themselves into the most fundamental fabric of our existence. Nobody was watching while these assholes managed to set themselves up as final arbiters of what’s normal and what ain’t.
And being the greedy bastards they are, and knowing full well that the more “crazy” people there are out there, the more money there is to be made “treating” them, they cast their net very wide. Very VERY wide.
Making Us Crazy isn’t the easiest book to read. Both authors are by-god college perfessers, and it shows. They make hard hitting points, but manage to do so with a softness of touch that can easily render the points invisible. Why do guys like this have to write this way? Why can’t they just come out and call a spade a fucking spade and be done with it?
Dunno.
But I digress.
Bottom line: The psychiatric emperor well and truly is buck ass naked.
Not a stitch of clothing to be found.
If subatomic physicists and aeronautical engineers arrived at “scientific” truths the same way that the psych majors do it, we wouldn’t know what the fuck an atom was and we’d all still be scratching our heads trying to figure out what the hell keeps birds up in the air.
The psych majors do it by COMMITTEE!
In the best tradition of politicians and backroom wheeler dealers around the world!
The motherfuckers sit around, dream up shit, toss it out among the closed elite of white men that run the trade, and then go with whatever the majority agrees to, or perhaps what the minority can smuggle in via political intrigue or just plain old horse trading.
This isn’t science, it’s bullshit. Pure fucking bullshit contaminated with zero adulterants.
Which wouldn’t matter one little whit except for the fact that judges, lawyers, medical doctors who should know better, and those who hold purse strings open or shut swallow this bilge whole and then meddle in the lives of you and me based on the misinformation concocted up by these motherfuckers.
Making Us Crazy takes a good close look at the whole sordid snakepit, culls out telling examples, and presents its case with unblinking eye and no apologies to nobody for nuthin.
Thanks fellas.
The result is an eye-opening look into a closed society that has managed to arrogate power to itself stunningly out of proportion to it’s actual merit for doing so.
Just another goddamned power grab by a bunch of white guys who don’t deserve it, aided and abetted by other white guys (our friends in the “legal” profession, mostly) and all of `em just as thick as thieves.
Jesus fucking christ, but this stuff sucks and sucks hard.
How long are we all just gonna lay down and keep taking it, anyway?
Making Us Crazy is a heavy, daunting read, and has the ability to spoil just about anybody’s good mood. However, it’s the kind of stuff that needs to be waved around where everybody can see it and then take steps to straighten things out.
Read this book! One final note. Read Chapter 8: Diagnosing the Psychiatric Bible, first. It lays out the whole wazoo in a neat little nutshell, but for some unexplainable reason (except perhaps for the fact that the authors are college perfessers) it’s the very last chapter in the book.
