Fact Checking Psychiatry
by Chuck Ruby, PhDI'd like to coin a new term, diffunction, as part of our efforts to demedicalize our language about so-called mental disorder. This term reflects the incredible variation of our world perspectives, our value systems, and our choices as we navigate throughout life. In short, it refers to our different and individualized forms of functioning. This presents us with the difficult challenges of negotiating the conflicts among us that are generated by those differences. In contrast to diffunction, the conventional construct of mental disorder is an arcane and constantly shifting groupthink about good and bad ways of living. Moreover, the bad ways are deemed matters of objective illnesses to be assessed and treated with a medical approach "just like heart disease or diabetes."1 This is how the mental health orthodoxy deals with the differences -- by claiming some are illnesses and others are healthy. As such, the DSM...