Chapter 10 Summary

Chapter 10 brought to light the false labels of certain disorders in the DSM checklists and how drug companies are making money based on those disorders in hopes of 'curing' them. In this chapter Ronson interviews both Robert Spitzer and Allen Frances who were involved in creating the DSM checklists. They both seem to agree to the fact that some of their disorders seem to be more normal and in fact may actually be normal instead of an disorder. Being so, they don't want to think of the possibility that they may have gotten more then one disorder wrong. An example that was given which research showed that the disorder was more commonly found in adolescents as bipolar disorder. By using the checklists young children were diagnosed with the disorder when in reality they could have just been overly hyper. With the discovery of many new disorders, drug companies began making drugs that would be able to 'fix' them. They made a lot of profit from their sales and their were instances where it seemed as if clinics were prescribing certain medication more frequently due to funding from drug companies in order to make money. Overall chapter 10 goes into detail of how disorders were thought up and how some of them were not real disorders.