Lake County Ohio Weal

  n March 2022, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced a revision to its widely influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The revised manual, known as DSM-5-TR, included a new diagnostic category: prolonged grief disorder (PGD). The announcement ignited a firestorm of controversy. “Pathologising grief is an insult to the dignity of loving relationships—it proclaims grievers as mentally ill and will too often result in the careless prescription of antidepressants or other drugs to treat enduring symptoms, without consideration of the context.” So wrote the authors of a short and scathing article in the medical journal The Lancet Psychiatry, published not long after the DSM-5-TR was released. The outrage and debate were not confined to psychiatrists and psychologists. The controversy over recognizing PGD as a mental disorder took many forms. Studies followed that questioned whether the empirical evidence justified introducing a new diagnostic ca...

  Childlessness and Therapy Culture I: They Mess You Up I turned 14 in 2010, right when self-harm rates for U.S. girls began ticking up. I was part of a generation of teenage girls who came of age with the internet — with Tumblr, blogs, Snapchat and YouTube. With smartphones. With the compelling urge to self-punish or annihilate. My teenage and young adult years were not bad, exactly, but they were tumultuous. I had been an emotional, moody child, and I became an emotional, moody teenager and then an emotional, moody young adult. I kept a handle on things, mostly, but there were intermittent crises: An eating disorder when I was 14, abetted by the angsty anorexics of Tumblr. A period of depression in my early 20s. There was nothing special about my suffering. Nine percent of Americans, at one point in their lives, suffer from an eating disorder. Nearly 30 percent of American adults experience a period of depression. And there was also nothing special about the way I came to underst...