The current symptom-based diagnostic system was developed partly to answer criticism that psychiatry is just social control of undesirable behavior dressed up as medicine. By failing to distinguish adequately normal distress and eccentricity from disorder, the DSM-5’s proposals threaten to increase dramatically the types of abuses that the DSM was designed to prevent.
目前这种以症状为依据的诊断系统的产生，在某种程度上正是为了回应外界的批评：认为精神病学只不过是一种伪医学，只是试图对那些不受社会欢迎的行为进行控制而已。而由于无法有效地将正常沮丧以及反常行为和真正的失调区分开来，第五版手册的修改意见很可能大幅增加乱诊断行为——而这却正是手册所试图避免的。由此可见，下一轮的反精神病学浪潮很快就要席卷而来了。