People — even many psychotherapists — often assume that psychiatric diagnosis is a science. The fact is, however, that very little solid science goes into the creation of categories of psychiatric diagnosis or the application of them to patients. (For more about this, click on Further Reading button below) And when science is absent, every conceivable kind of bias can enter in to decisions about who is diagnosed as mentally ill and which label they are given.

The impetus for this website is the project of issuing a public call for Congressional hearings about psychiatric diagnosis. Since psychiatric diagnosis is unregulated, since many people are harmed because of getting a diagnosis, and since the extent of harm needs to be documented and ways to minimize such harm need to be found and implemented, Congressional hearings are one of six important steps that can be taken to reduce the harm. Hearings would put psychiatric diagnosis in the public eye and on the national agenda.

The concerns about psychiatric diagnosis apply not only to those diagnostic labels found in any official diagnostic manual but also to other diagnoses, since the latter are constantly being invented and used.

Read original letter ››
Personal Stories of Harm

These 53 stories were sent in response to a request for true stories about people who had been harmed directly by being given a psychiatric diagnosis. Nearly every story is no longer than one page, and many are much shorter.

Read Stories ››

Further Reading

Two books contain extensive lists of descriptions of problems with psychiatric diagnosis.

In Paula J. Caplan's They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal, in the bibliography, books and articles that include at least some element of critical, questioning perspective are marked with asterisks (*).

The various chapters in the book Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis include a wide variety of descriptions of specific forms of bias.
Acknowledgments

Pulling together the list of endorsers for this call for Congressional hearings would not have been possible without the volunteered assistance of Katie Novick and Alisha Ali, and it would probably have taken me far longer to complete the extensive work on the collection of stories, were it not for the enormous amount of work, thoughtfulness, and patience offered by Maura, whom I know only through email and who simply said she thought this was important work and that she wanted to help. Jim Gottstein kindly got the website started for us. Will Hall and David Taveras were so generously helpful in getting us switched to a different
server when necessary and in updating the site. And thanks to the wonderful, new volunteer Ezrena for help with updating this site.I also am deeply grateful for the messages of moral support that so many people kindly sent – those have meant more than you know.
— Paula J. Caplan




On this website you will find:

 A brief summary of the reasons for concern about psychiatric diagnosis. Caplan's original letter

 A list of endorsers of a recently-issued call for Congressional hearings about psychiatric diagnosis

 An extensive collection of stories describing how people were harmed by being diagnosed

 Brief descriptions of six possible solutions (see below).
Working Toward Solutions

In order to reduce the kinds and amount of harm done by psychiatric diagnosis, six approaches may be helpful. Please click on the links below:
Critiquing Psychiatric Diagnosis

The late Dr. George W. Albee, a
very early pioneer in the critique of psychiatric diagnosis, was fearless in this work. The following is the text of a talk he gave about that topic when in Scotland to celebrate the life of Fr. Ignacio Martin-Baro, psychology professor and Vice-Rector of the Central American University in San Salvador.

Read article ››