There's some (really, a great deal) of utility to it, but it gets misused and misiterpreted- just like any other labelling system. I have a problem with people "taking it too seriously," and I feel the same way about other popular psychometric measures- IQ and/or intelligence is my other pet hate in that regard.
The problem with the DSM-IV is that it only describes symptoms, and alorythyms for diagnosing the different disorders. It's essentially a cookbook for all the different labels out there. They don't describe the etiology of them , treatment or prognosis. Just a demeaning way to categorize people. My therapist doesn't believe in the DSM-IV.
Well, it talks about the typical courses of individuals with certain clusters of symptoms. It could be dangerous for the DSM to discuss treatment, because if you think of what happens when a diagnostic system gets minunderstood and casually used, think what woud happen if that same diagnostic system came with reccommended treatments right in the same goddamn place, lol. I think that could go wonky prety fast. plus, the diagnostic categories are more stable than reccommended treatments, seeing as the categories are more for convenience/communication/to work with the health care and insurance system (ideally, though not in use); whereas treatments are more based actually on science and constantly ongoing research, so new information in terms of treatment is constantly being added (and scrutinized- andother reason why listeing treatments would be dangerous).
In terms of not listing suspected etiology- that's a good thing too IMO, because, for the most part,
we don't know what causes things. We get ideas, sure, but as it is, if no specific cause is assumed, it gives the labelling system
less power. For example, a specific etiology isn't mapped out for scizophrenia, and, to my understanding, it's not even certain that what is labelelled under the broad category of "sciziophrenia" is even one disorder, or rather a cluster of disorders that have similar symptoms (there seems to be more evidence for the latter). Besides, knowing the "underlying cause" for a disorder doesn't necessarily tell you anywhere near all you need to know about it- genetically speaking, the inherited risk for depression or anxiety are pretty much identical/they have the same shared heritability, which might mean that there's the same underlying vulnerabilty in both cases but with different manifestations.
I'd say yes, to a point.
A lot of the problem is that I think a lot of "problems" are culture-specific in many cases.
...like the culture-specific syndromes? XD
