What Is Mental Illness?
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
According to a major health survey, nearly half of all Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives—more than a quarter in the last year. Can this be true? What exactly does it mean, anyway? What’s a disorder, and what’s just a struggle with real life?
This lucid and incisive book cuts through both professional jargon and polemical hot air, to describe the intense political and intellectual struggles over what counts as a “real” disorder, and what goes into the “DSM,” the psychiatric bible. Is schizophrenia a disorder? Absolutely. Is homosexuality? It was—till gay rights activists drove it out of the DSM a generation ago. What about new and controversial diagnoses? Is “social anxiety disorder” a way of saying that it’s sick to be shy, or “female sexual arousal disorder” that it’s sick to be tired?
An advisor to the DSM, but also a fierce critic of exaggerated overuse, McNally defends the careful approach of describing disorders by patterns of symptoms that can be seen, and illustrates how often the system medicalizes everyday emotional life.
Neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology may illuminate the biological bases of mental illness, but at this point, McNally argues, no science can draw a bright line between disorder and distress. In a pragmatic and humane conclusion, he offers questions for patients and professionals alike to help understand, and cope with, the sorrows and psychopathologies of everyday life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The boundary between mental distress and mental illness will never be neat and clean," says Harvard professor McNally (Remembering Trauma) in this dense and well-researched scholarly work. He explores changes in society and science that influence how we distinguish disorder from distress. Though McNally serves as an advisor to the DSM (psychiatry's diagnostic bible), he warns against its over application and asks if we should look at mental illness as a spectrum, as we do physical illness; mild expressions would count (and, perhaps, their treatment would be reimbursed for by insurance companies) as much as severe cases. Alternately, the expansion of a disorder's definition, which would include more and more people, does a disservice to patients as well. McNally explores the genetic components of mental illness and looks to evolutionary psychology to explain its persistence. A standout chapter examines the social construction of mental disorders, comparing, for example, the ways that depression sufferers in China and the United States describe their symptoms. This is no pop psychology handbook and will not appeal to the casual reader, but those involved or interested in the field will find it useful.