One of the more radical views of psychiatry states that psychiatric diseases are not something that “exists” in the real world, or even in the world of the psyche. This point, importantly, is not a call for review of our classification and nomenclature of the human states of mind, but a suggestion that psychiatric diseases and symptoms had not been there in the world before we invented them and classified them and gave them names. After that, according to this theory, people who felt uneasy with the society began to receive diagnoses, and adjust to them, shaping themselves to fit a given disease in a process very similar to that when a Taurus or a Virgin, growing up and reading newspapers, shape themselves to fit the description of their horoscope sign. Read the rest of this entry »