The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM?Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is a text compiled and supervised by a number of researchers that categorizes descriptions and symptoms into different categories, creating a wide classification of pathologies that afflict the human mind. The No. 5 is its latest version.
Does this data provide unified technical language so that all professionals, primarily physicians, psychiatrists, and clinical psychologists, who work with mental disorders can provide information?
- This is also important for researchers in health and mental health sciences.
- As it promotes the establishment of clear criteria for categorization and ensures a consistent diagnosis.
On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of the international system called ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases).
These organizations (or do not agree with the diagnostic labeling of the patient or addressed to the symptomatic patient, leaving aside the context or system to which they belong) were born in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
French, English and Italian doctors created symptom classifications and at the same time had to create assistance programs, hospitals, medical-psychological theories, etc. to address the problem of madness. It was at this time that the most representative figure of German psychiatry was born: Emil Kraepelin.
Kraepelin (1855-1926) was mainly engaged in the investigation of the physiological aspects of mental illnesses: fevers, head injuries, etc. , for him a person with mental illness was a simple set of symptoms, that is, he was deeply interested in humanity and little in the individual.
Kraepelin’s tendency as a psychiatrist, now considered a bad practice, is the characteristic that helped him create his nosology, analyzed numerous clinical cases that not only discriminated against the occurrence of the disease, but also the history before the disease and post-disease. response to hospitalization.
Therefore, this classification was the beginning of the development of textbooks that allowed to group various mental disorders by their signs and symptoms.
The company misunderstands many of the disorders classified in these manuals, i. e. distorts the meaning, characteristics or distinctive signs of pathologies of a certain magnitude, leading to misinterpretation.
Let’s look at an example of the risk posed by these misinterpretations:
When you label someone with a certain disorder, it is like putting a piece of paper on your forehead and saying, “Have I?” Pathology monitoring.
Is it possible for this tagged person to create in the categorization you assigned to them, look for information?Have everything available on the Internet today? And identify yourself. This will be reinforced by the vision of your nearby circle, in which you will also identify with the sign that was “suspended” on your forehead.
All this contributes to the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, making the classification assumption with which the person was labeled a reality. In addition, the categorical label is usually reassuring; it’s like finding the source of the disease and saying, “Ahhhh, now I know what I have!?
Self-diagnosis contributes to distorting the meaning and characteristics of disorders and, therefore, their banalization.
So far, there are 5 disorders that are generally more trivialized, with their true distorted meanings.
These disorders include: depression, stress, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and bipolar disorder.
Depressive disorders are serious conditions. In them, feelings of anxiety and anxiety permeate the person, feelings of uncertainty and lack of perspective on the future arise, feelings of helplessness, lack of energy and motivation in almost every area of life, as well as low self-esteem, deterioration of the many psychic functions and feelings of failure and frustration.
Depressed patients often become so discouraged that they can’t cope with the day, have trouble waking up, bathing, eating, making love, and can even express that they no longer want to live.
You should remember that anxiety and sadness are natural emotions that can occur reactively in a person due to death, problem, change or crisis in life, and can lead to introspection, reflection and growth.
What happens is that when a person is distressed or sad, there are those who say without thinking that they are depressed, however, this is not always the right term.
Stress is one of the most serious pathologies of our time. It is a trigger that can initiate and maintain a pathology, both organic and mental, from the common cold to cancer; that is, the spectrum is vast.
Stress is general adaptation syndrome, these are our body’s attempts to stay balanced in a context full of disruptive stimuli.
The problem occurs when the person is permanently affected by one or more stimuli that tend to unbalance them; your body demands too much of itself to continue to endure this threat to stability.
Enduring a systematic crisis in your life generates symptomatic effects that seek to disrupt a number of typical stress behaviors, such as irritability, destructive ideas, intolerance, anxiety, anxiety, aggression, nausea, palpitations, bruxism, compulsive feeding, negative thoughts, etc.
Due to the amount of symptoms (organic, cognitive, emotional) that it implies, stress has become too broad a term, in which isolated symptoms or behaviors are placed without the corresponding analysis of the existence of stressors in the person’s life, Without assessing whether they exist, they are systematic situations of crisis determination. It is very easy to put the stress label on what we do not know.
Anxiety disorders, generally panic attacks and agoraphobia, have increased in the last 10 years, it is as if these symptoms, from a psychosocial point of view, were trying to pathologically slow down the hyperdynamic rhythm to which society subjects us.
Thirty years ago, the person had a variety of symptoms such as as suffocation, dizziness, nausea, tachycardia, sweating and tingling in the limbs, as well as a great fear of dying, and there was no category for this type of disorder, which involved the patient in great uncertainty Today, the opposite is true.
Today, a person may experience isolated symptoms and identify them as panic attacks. Then she said, “Did I have a panic attack?” when she didn’t actually experience it.
A panic attack can only be diagnosed when at least 4 of the 13 symptoms that characterize this psychopathological condition occur.
ODO is a disorder characterized by high anxiety and compulsive behaviors, the person who has it cannot avoid performing certain acts that he has repeated many times.
To combat them, we can develop rituals imbued with magical thought. You can adopt these behaviors to inhibit situations that you think may arise if you do not develop these rituals. In addition, it can exhibit detailed and extremely hygienic behaviors for fear of disease, pollution, contagion, etc.
He has intrusive thoughts and cannot control when they occur, in addition to the mental cavilations he tries to interrupt with rituals or hygiene behaviors, in short, there is a whole network of behaviors and ideas that despair you, further increase your anxiety and generate deep suffering and anguish.
However, there are those who believe that when a person exhibits isolated behaviors of cleanliness or extreme prolity, has ODO or is obsessive, this is because sometimes the rituals that all human beings have in some respects are confused with ritual behaviors. characteristic of the disorder.
Bipolar disorder is a serious illness. People who have it experience unusual mood swings, i. e. they can be very happy, dynamic and active, but suddenly they feel extremely sad and without perspective; clearly depressive, it is a cyclic condition in which the person passes through these states several times.
There may be normal moods between cycles. However, in the most severe cases, you go in and out, cycle by cycle. Periods of euphoria are called “maniacs” and periods of sadness are “depressive. “
Therefore, care must be taken not to diagnose lightly and without any scientific approval someone as “bipolar” by a simple change of mood.
Humans are not linear. We are subject to a changing environment to which we must constantly adapt. It involves mood swings, sometimes gradual and sometimes sudden. Having said that, isn’t a person bipolar just because he suffered a sudden change of mood.
Only health professionals are required to make diagnoses. Those who do not have scientific training or experience should abstain. Behaviors should not be labeled and classified as mental disorders.
Labels don’t work well because they destabilize the individual and end up building personality as a self-fulfilling prophecy; in addition, they ignore serious pathologies attributing them to people when their characteristics do not form the complete picture.
It’s not in your hands to label or label other people’s behavior if you’re not an expert in the field.