We've written a fair amount here at Reason about the new edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But Sam Kriss at The New Inquiry has found an angle we missed: to review it as though it's an experimental dystopian novel. An excerpt:
The scene this prologue sets is one of a profoundly bleak view of human beings; one in which we hobble across an empty field, crippled by blind and mechanical forces whose workings are entirely beyond any understanding. This vision of humanity's predicament has echoes of Samuel Beckett at some of his more nihilistic moments—except that Beckett allows his tramps to speak for themselves, and when they do they're often quite cheerful. The sufferers of DSM-5, meanwhile, have no voice; they're only interrogated by a pitiless system of categorizations with no ability to speak back. As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book's real object of fascination isn't the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.
Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM-5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: "repetitive behavior, the goal of which is[…]to prevent some dreaded event or situation." Our narrator seems to believe that by compiling an exhaustive list of everything that might go askew in the human mind, this wrong state might somehow be overcome or averted. References to compulsive behavior throughout the book repeatedly refer to the "fear of dirt in someone with an obsession about contamination." The tragic clincher comes when we're told, "the individual does not recognize that the obsessions or compulsions are excessive or unreasonable." This mad project is so overwhelming that its originator can't even tell that they've subsumed themselves within its matrix…[T]he entire story is a portrait of the narrator's own particular madness.
