from Social Issues

Savodnik believes that American Psychiatric Association is guilty of creating mental illnesses and diseases based upon behaviors society doesn't like. "Unlike the rest of medicine, psychiatry diagnoses behavior that society doesn't like. Yesterday it was homosexuality. Tomorrow it will be homophobia."

He believes that such diagnoses are confusing because they're based upon political, social, or aesthetic values. "Behavior cannot be pathological (or healthy, for that matter). It can simply comport with, or not comport with, our non-medical expectations of how people should behave," said Savodnik.

"The erosion of personal responsibility is, arguably, the most pernicious effect of the expansive role psychiatry has come to play in American life. It has successfully replaced huge chunks of individual accountability with diagnoses, clinical histories and what turn out to be pseudoscientific explanations for deviant behavior."

Savodnik says the APA should scrutinize itself more deeply and stop "turning the good and bad into the healthy and the sick. The last thing the United States needs is more self-indulgent, pseudo-insightful, over self-conscious babble about people who can't help themselves."