"All I wanted was a Pepsi!" (Ian Hacking on the new DSM)

The London Review of books couldn't have picked a better person for the review (HERE).

It's an excellent piece, but a little weird to me that (given his other work) he only went after the DSM for the ways that mental illnesses as descriptive phenomena are not like Linnaean natural kinds. He basically argues that the massive vagueness of the underlying phenomena forces the DSM writers to:  (1)  overuse "not otherwise specified" (NOS) as a catchall after listing various subtypes of a disorder, basically allowing anyone to be diagnosed with anything (e.g. diagnosed as "schizophrenic: NOS") and (2) the infinite regress of co-morbidity listings, where the disorders overlap so much that it becomes unclear who has what to what degree.

But he writes nothing about how "disorder" is not a statistical but rather a normative notion, and what a bash clinical psychology makes of this fact.

This is very odd because to me the new DSM's defining of mental health as the ability to function in one's society shows how vulgar the whole business is.* There's a strong intellectual pedigree for seeing through this kind of thing that leads right up to Hacking too. In France Canguilhem initially appealed to the normativity of health to critique the Linnaean model of mental health, and later read his own student Simondon to articulate this in Nietzschean terms. This account was picked up and worked on by Foucault, whose own writings in part prompted Hacking's own wonderful thoughts about the metaphysics of mental disorders and much else.

[Notes:

*I was talking about this at a neighbor's crowded pool party last Sunday with a colleage in Clinical Psychology. Weirdly, none of our LSU colleagues engaged with my criticisms until I brought up the example of the Nazis** and the Good German as a paradigm of mental health via the DSM's definition of health. I really did try to use more subtle examples.

[WARNING: F word mentioned (not used) after jump.]

**Classic bit of angry review ever from the yourbandsucks webpage, where the reviewer works himself into a rage about various bands he hates.

Eleven and a half minutes in, there’s some marvelously annoying distorted hissing. Thank you for that, Mars Volta, you’ve won me over with your “textures” and your “structures.” You know what else has textures? An iguana, and those motherfuckers will whip the shit out of you with their tails. And you know what else has structure? A nazi death camp, you anti-semites.

I would not have mentioned that had it not been the case that I once heard essentially this same monologue, minus iguanas but complete with f bomb, in the Q&A during a philosophy panel about vegetarianism. After that I swore I would never use the Nazis again in any philosophical context. Sadly, this didn't last very long.]