Psychiatry by Numbers

"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle." -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World In reply to Yet Another Harrowing Tale of White Collar Addiction , a friend and fellow journalist wrote me a letter detailing her personal history with psychiatric diagnosis and some of her thoughts on the process, which she has graciously allowed me to share here. In my post, I suggested that the problems with psychiatric diagnosis are not specific to ADHD. Camille's case illustrates this well. [More]