Disease mongering cannot occur in a vacuum—it requires that the drug companies engage the active collaboration of the doctors who write the prescriptions, the patients who ask for them, the researchers who invent the new mental disorders, the consumer groups that advocate for more treatment, and the media and Internet that spread the word.

Because it sets the crucial boundary between normality and mental illness, DSM has gained a huge societal significance and determines all sorts of important things that have an enormous impact on people’s lives—like who is considered well and who is sick; what treatment is offered; who pays for it; who gets disability benefits; who is eligible for

attention deficit/hyperactivity has tripled52; and adult bipolar disorder doubled.

Evidence of diagnostic inflation is everywhere. There have been four explosive epidemics of mental disorder in the past fifteen years. Childhood bipolar disorder increased by a miraculous fortyfold50; autism by a whopping twentyfold51;

research. But they have also had the very harmful unintended consequence of triggering and helping to maintain a runaway diagnostic inflation that threatens normal and results in massive overtreatment with psychiatric medication.

in the remarkable healing powers of time, natural resilience, exercise, family and social support, and psychotherapy—and much less automatic faith in chemical imbalance and pills.

For a significant percentage of people with mild or transient symptoms, SSRIs are nothing more than very expensive, potentially harmful placebos.

The concern arises from a recent study showing that 56 percent of our experts had some financial connection to drug companies.

Almost three fourths of the 11 percent of the U.S. population now taking antidepressant drugs have no current symptoms of depression.