The Road Map For Loonie Liberation

Loony Saints - Margaret of Cortona Edition

Every once in a while, Prozac Monologues reaches into my Roman Catholic childhood's fascination with saints, especially the ones who today might be assigned a diagnostic code in the DSM. Twice, Lent Madness has introduced me to new ones that I share with you.

A few years ago it was Christina the Astonishing.

Today it's Margaret of Cortona. If you're a Lent Madness regular, you'd expect Margaret to be a shoe in for the first round of voting, where her competition is a stuffy old bishop/theologian, because Margaret became a Franciscan and, more significantly, her story features a dog. Lent Madness voters are suckers for dogs.

Mood Charts Revisited

Mood chart is one of the top search terms that bring people to Prozac Monologues. I wrote about mood charts in July, 2010, first as a recovery tool and later as a way to illustrate the differences between various mood disorders. Both posts promised sequels, promises that remained unfulfillable until now that I have spent several months doing cognitive remediation at Lumosity.com. Maybe cognitive remediation is worth another post -- later.

Following last week's tale of misdiagnosis and mistreatment, this week's long delayed return to mood charts seems timely.

What is a Mood Chart

Introducing Allen Frances

Allen Frances was the editor of the DSM-IV, first published in 1990. He is now the fiercest critic of its next major revision, the DSM-5. For over three years, he has been blogging weekly to this end at Psychology Today. This week I will summarize his steady drumbeat. I hope soon to publish an open letter to him.

Frances' complaint in a nutshell is that the DSM-5 creates fad diagnoses and changes criteria of older diagnoses to medicalize a whole range of normal behavior and miseries. The link lists these problem diagnoses and a number of the following points, in an article published all over town last December.

These issues have been discussed widely, in public and private circles. I am not qualified to address each point, though I did give a series over to one of them, the bereavement exclusion. The best of the batch, if I do say so myself, is Grief/Depression III - Telling the Difference, which got quoted in correspondence among the big boys.

Prozac Monologues

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