Round-up: media coverage following Lancet’s criticism of DSM-5 proposals for grief
February 18, 2012
Round-up: media coverage following Lancet’s criticism of DSM-5 proposals for grief
Post #144 Shortlink: http://wp.me/pKrrB-1V2
Previous Post #143:
Criticism of DSM-5 proposals for grief in this week’s Lancet: Editorial and Essay
Bloggers
Christopher Lane, Ph.D.: Good Grief: The APA Plans to Give the Bereaved Two Weeks to Conclude Their Mourning, Britain’s “Lancet” calls the proposal “dangerously simplistic and flawed.”
Allen Frances, MD: Lancet Rejects Grief As a Mental Disorder, Will DSM 5 Finally Drop This Terrible Idea
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Media
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Libby Purves, columnist and author, lost a son in his late teens to suicide.
Why must grief be a sign of mental illness?
Libby Purves | February 20, 2012
Treating the bereaved for depression after two weeks typifies our urge to medicalise everyday experience…
Content behind sub or paywall
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From Medscape Medical News > Psychiatry
Lancet Weighs in on DSM-5 Bereavement Exclusion
Megan Brooks | February 16, 2012
February 16, 2012 — An editorial that appears in this week’s Lancet expresses concerns about the proposed elimination of the bereavement exclusion to major depression in the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) from the American Psychiatric Association (APA)…
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Lancet urges doctors to treat grief with empathy, not pills
Lauren Paxman | February 17, 2012
‘Grief is not a mental illness that should be treated with pills’: Doctors hit back at creeping medicalisation of life events
Treatment of grief with antidepressants is ‘dangerously simplistic’, experts say
Backlash follows the American Psychiatric Association’s reclassification of grief as a mental illness. In an unsigned editorial in the influential medical journal The Lancet, experts argue that grief does not require psychiatrists and that ‘legitimising’ the treatment of grief with antidepressants ‘is not only dangerously simplistic, but also flawed.’
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February 17, 2012
Grief: Normal, Not A Mental Illness
(NEW YORK) — Grief following the death of a loved one isn’t a mental illness that requires psychiatrists and antidepressants, according to editors of The Lancet, who oppose “medicalizing” an often-healing response to overwhelming loss.
Routinely legitimizing the treatment of grief with antidepressants “is not only dangerously simplistic, but also flawed,” says the unsigned lead editorial appearing in Friday’s edition of the influential international medical journal. “Grief is not an illness; it is more usefully thought of as part of being human and a normal response to the death of a loved one.”
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Individual difference suffers in the neverending explosion of mental illness
Frank Furedi | February 18, 2012
YOU may be suffering from a mental illness that you never realised existed. The American Psychiatric Association has just published a draft version of the updated edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. According to this diagnostic bible, called DSM-5, shyness in children and confusion over gender is likely to be labelled as a mental disorder.
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Depression
Good Grief! Psychiatry’s Struggle to Define Mental Illness Goes Awry
A proposed new definition of depression would include normal bereavement. Why that’s a bad idea.
Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz | February 17, 2012
The editors of the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — psychiatry’s diagnostic handbook — are having a hard time. They’ve been attacked by autism advocacy groups for proposing to eliminate the Asperger’s diagnosis. They’ve been slammed for adding a diagnosis, or “prediagnosis,” for people determined to be “at high risk” of developing schizophrenia. And, now, they’re being pummeled for introducing a provision to diagnose grief as depression…
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Grief is not an illness, warns The Lancet
Stephen Adams Medical Correspondent | February 17, 2012
Bereaved relatives overcome by grief should not be given pills and treated as if they are clinically depressed, a leading medical journal warns today (Fri).
“Grief is not an illness”, say the journal’s editors in an impassioned editorial, which argues that “medicalising” such a normal human emotion is “not only dangerously simplistic, but also flawed”.
Doctors tempted to prescribe pills “would do better to offer time, compassion, remembrance and empathy”, they write.
The editors are worried by moves which appear to categorise extreme emotions as problems that need fixing.
Their fears have been prompted by the publication of a new draft version of the psychiatrists’ ‘bible’, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as DSM-5…
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The Lancet: Grief is not an illness
Sarah Greer | February 17, 2012
A leading medical journal has today warned that bereaved relatives should not be given pills and treated as if they are clinically depressed.
“Grief is not an illness,” the journal’s editors say. They argue that ‘medicalising’ such a normal human emotion is ‘not only dangerously simplistic, but also flawed’, and say doctors who are tempted to prescribe pills ‘would do better to offer time, compassion, remembrance and empathy’.
The editors are worried by moves which appear to categorise extreme emotions as problems that need fixing…
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dx revision watch 