im reading a very interesting book now, haven’t gotten very far but it’s already really good. it’s called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD, and is about how trauma affects the body and mind + treatment of it.
so far, he’s written a lot about his experience working with veterans, and some of his experience working with young people in general psych wards. two main things stand out to me so far.
1. the PTSD criteria we have as of today in the DSM are based straight off of veterans, and do NOT account for traumas that happen over the long term to children that doesn’t meet the criteria for a traumatic event, but still traumatises a child. i knew from before there is some advocacy in psychology for adding a diagnosis of “developmental trauma disorder” to make up for this, but it seems much more likely to get C-PTSD added to the DSM as it has now been added to ICD-11 (which comes into use in 2022). BUT that still does not solve the problem with the traumatic event criteria.
2. in the book, he talks about the development of psychology. it started out as being heavily talk therapy based, with a lot of freudian elements being used. then meds came on. and suddenly there was this shine of hope that they could finally get peoples mental illnesses under control by adjusting the “chemical imbalance”, and as a result, they needed a way to categorise what mental illness had which chemical imbalance and what meds should be used for which illness. this is when they started developing the DSM. HERE’S THE THING THOUGH!!! in the DSM-III, part of the foreword said that it was a “heavily flawed system” and should never be used for research or insurance purposes. what happened to that?????? the DSM is a gatekeeper, and leaves many people lost in the void. it is not an imperfect system. it does not deserve to be considered the “bible of psychiatry”. i have read the entire thing - all 900something pages - and while it is definitely a useful tool, it gets WAY more credit than it should. several criteria are based off of narrow groups from the beginning of the discovery of the given disorder. do not use the DSM as an all-holy book of truth.