“How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown” by Edward Shorter. Oxford. $29.95, 272 pages. Publication date March 7.
The author is a professor in the history of medicine and the psychiatry departments at the University of Toronto. Here, “he argues that psychiatry’s love affair with the diagnosis of depression has become a death grip.... Urging that the diagnosis of depression be rethought, the book turns a dramatic page in the understanding of psychiatric symptoms that are a common as the common cold.”
When creepy weirdo Adam Lanza shot up a school full of kids, what was obvious to everyone watching NBC hack David Gregory violate Washington, D.C. gun laws because he was doing 'journalism' was that efforts to ban guns were going to be on the docket for social authoritarian progressives once again.
What was less obvious was that those exact same people, who have been labeling everyone and everything using their casual pop psychology diagnostics, was that the party was over for the faddish people claiming their kids have Aspberger's.
It had a great run. Under DSM IV it had the kind of non-specific symptoms you want if you need to explain away your child's behavior and if you attended a Christmas party in 2011, you were sure to hear someone say 'his Asperger's is kicking in' about someone they happen not to like.
http://news.sky.com/story/1027288/us-shooting-doubts-over-lanza-asperger...
