Correcting the 'GID Is Removed from the DSM' Reports
Filed By Mercedes Allen | December 05, 2012 1:30 PM
http://www.bilerico.com/2012/12/correcting_the_gid_is_removed_from_the_dsm_reports.php (http://www.bilerico.com/2012/12/correcting_the_gid_is_removed_from_the_dsm_reports.php)
Oh god, please make it stop.
Yesterday morning, I woke up to a rash of headlines proclaiming that transexuality was no longer considered "disordered" by the American Psychiatric Association. This morning, it grew worse, with a rash of panicked emails from people who were wondering if their medical access would be jeopardized, after some LGBT and even mainstream news sites and blogs reported this as meaning that "Gender Identity Disorder" (GID) will no longer be considered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), or had been "removed" from the DSM altogether. No, it hasn't. That's not true at all.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but the change that's being heralded is mostly just in name, and "Gender Dysphoria" remains in the DSM -- and in the "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders" category (although that name may change too), if I recall correctly, of a manual that governs mental health. The parallel being drawn to when homosexuality was removed from the DSM wildly overstates this change.
[...]
There is a positive in this, though, in that people are finally paying attention to the problems associated with another DSM category: Transvestic Disorder (formerly Transvestic Fetish). When the alarm was raised about Drs. Ray Blanchard and Ken Zucker having administrative roles in the DSM revision, that protest lost some steam when the APA announced that Zucker would be in an oversight position rather than hands-on, and Blanchard would be working on a separate category not related to GID (Paraphilias). Some of our allies decided we were making much ado about nothing. Now, people are perhaps realizing the problem with that arrangement, in that it gave Blanchard full license to develop Transvestic Disorder (TD / TF).
The whole problems lies in that psychiatric is not really a science-based part of medicine, but much akin to psychology. The whole "mind is not the brain," touchy feeling, elaboration, oecus pocus, blabbering dense unproved hypothesis.
Think about: what revolutionary discovery has been herald by psychiatry? None! Do they really understand say schizophrenia better today than in the 1930's? No
Most if not all the progress in the treatment and understanding of "mental disorders" (read disorders of the brain) have been advanced by the neuroscience (brain function analysis by MRI and PET, post mortem molecular and cellular biology, gentics, embryology, cellular and molecular biology of brain and cognition on animal models, neurobiochemstry, neuropharmaco-toxicology, etc, etc, etc.)