CAPITALISM IS GOOD I JUST NEED A PILL

"Where exactly does the difference lie between extreme human behaviour and a psychiatric illness? The question is being asked because as a US encyclopedia of psychiatry is rewritten for the first time in more than a decade, controversy is already raging about what goes into it, and what gets thrown out. Critics say that the revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM, as it is commonly known) will lead to an explosion of healthy Americans being prescribed powerful drugs. Patients' rights groups are angry that it will lead to more people being stigmatised as mentally ill. "The conditions that we grew up thinking were in the normal spectrum of human behaviour " sadness, disappointment, anger" are now considered a psychiatric or psychological disorder. It has become part of a national epidemic," said Alex Beam, a newspaper columnist and author of Gracefully Insane, a book about the history of McLean psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts." (Independent, 13 April) RD