The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno.” —Errol Morris
 
Since its debut in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the “official” view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5 has taken fire for encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses—and to prescribe sometimes unnecessary or harmful medications.
Respected author and practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition, and returned with an unsettling tale. Exposing the deeply flawed process behind the DSM-5’s compilation, The Book of Woe reveals how the manual turns suffering into a commodity—and made the APA its own biggest beneficiary.

• Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life
• Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
• Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
• No One Cares About Crazy People: My Family and the Heartbreak of Mental Illness in America
• Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
• Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease
• The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
• The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct
• Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
• Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease