Gary Greenberg > Quotes

“[O]ur inner lives are too important to leave in the hands of doctors [,] because they don't know as much about us as they claim, because a full account of human nature is beyond their ken.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“But we all know that the DSM is at its best a clumsy and imperfect field guide to our foibles and at its worst a compendium of expert opinions masquerading as scientific truths, a book whose credibility surpasses its integrity, whose usefulness is primarily commercial, and whose most ardent defenders are reduced to arguing that it should be taken less seriously even as all of us - clinicians, researchers, and copyright holders alike - cash in on the fact that it is not.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“Descriptive psychiatry can't determine whether or not a person's story [...] is a true one. More important, it can't tell us whether the list of symptoms, no matter how reliable, constitutes a disease. It can gather scattered particles into a category [...], but it can't say whether those amount to the natural formation known as disease.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“Or maybe you're like me - a mental health professional who has been faithfully filling out insurance forms for thirty years, jotting down those five-digit codes from the DSM that open the money taps, rendering diagnoses even though you are pretty sure you're not treating medical conditions, and for just a moment you hesitate, contemplating the bad faith of pouring a lie into the foundation of a relationship whose main and perhaps only value is that it provides an opportunity to look someone in the eye, and, without fear of judgment or the necessity to manipulate, speak the truth.
And, having contemplated it, you tell yourself whatever story you have to and you sign the paper, and the best you can do is to curse the DSM in a kind of incantation against your own bad faith.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry