Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve had a bunch of neuro/psycho classes and this was always well understood. This stuff is complicated. People are going to get it wrong. That sucks. But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself, don’t judge it by how a third party misrepresents it.
If the DSM merely described sets of symptoms and gave them names, I'd buy that. But by also mentioning (e.g. suggesting) specific treatments, the book is used as a prescription tool, not just a diagnostic tool. > But if you’re going to judge the book, judge it by how it presents itself Quite so. I just as we judge people by their actions, not their words, I judge the DSM by how it's actual content is structured, not…
There’s a well-known concept of “diagnosis by treatment” because unfortunately that’s often the best we can do in practice. It sounds backwards, and yeah, it is backwards, but oftentimes it’s the best we’ve got.
At the same time you want treatments and clinical presentations to be somewhat coherent, and you don’t want practitioners going totally rogue and deviating from the standard of care in a way that could harm people, so yeah the conditions and their potential treatments are associated.
Most discussion of treatments in the DSM are various forms of therapy. Most pharmaceutical treatments that are mentioned are about broad classes of medications, and they’re all old drugs with generics on the market. It’s not a book you consult for pharma info.