So, regarding psychological diagnostic methods, they are very much subject to change. Our current system really rose into being in the 1970s, with DSM-III. The previous ones still depended a lot on Freudian, Jungian, and Positive psychology. A lot of people currently think that the DSMs since then have pathologized normal behaviors and unnecessarily medicated them. I would agree. I also would want to call for reform in the system when it comes to treating individual people because it can be very difficult to tell what really needs to be treated simply from intake forms and interviews. I really like the DBT method of verbal therapeutic treatment because it allows for more ambiguity in the first phases of treatment, which means the therapist is less in charge and the patient is left with the task of prioritizing. I think CBT is a good method for people with more obvious addictions, such as alcoholism and drug dependency. As far as diagnostic terminology, anxiety and depression are way overused when often these are totally normal reactions to environmental issues. Yes, I'm ok with people being medicated when they're overworked, abused, or grieving, but the diagnostic name and description should make allowances for the fact that these are not scientific, biomedical conditions. That is the fall of psychology: to claim that it is scientific at the cost of making real, qualitative, case-study-based investigation into what is going on. As much as psychology as a discipline has tried to claim (since its 1870s German-university founding in labs that measured reaction time) (before this, the physical part was subsumed by medicine and the mental part by philosophy and religion) that it is a totally objective science, its obsession with categorizing nomenclatures and taking authority over everyday areas of life has proved the opposite.
