Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Hello, my name is Bob Whitaker, and I'm joined today by two guests, Alan Horwitz and Sarah Fay,

for a discussion about the American

Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and its impact on our society and

our personal lives. Alan Horwitz is an emeritus professor of sociology at Rutgers University,

and he is the author or co-author of 11 books, a number of which have focused on the DSM and how the successive

iterations of that manual have shaped societal thinking about mental disorders. His most

recent book is DSM, A History of Psychiatry's Bible. Sarah Fay is a writer whose essays and articles

and articles and essays have been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and numerous

other national publications. And her articles and essays have been nominated for a number of awards, national

awards. Her memoir, Pathological, the True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, was published in March.

She's also the founder of Pathological, the Movement, a public awareness campaign, and I quote here,

devoted to making people aware of the unreliability and invalidity of DSM diagnoses and the dangers

of identifying with an unproven mental illness. Welcome, Alan and Sarah. It's such a pleasure

to have you here today. Oh, well, it's certainly a pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much. Well, we'll have, I think, an interesting discussion here. Alan, I'm going to start with you.

And one of the reasons is because you can provide us a big picture of how the DSM has shaped societal thinking about mental disorders and even our sense of self.

Because, of course, when you start defining mental disorders, even our sense of self because of course

when you start defining mental disorders it becomes sort of a philosophy of being that is presented

to society so my first question is this you're a sociologist and can you tell me why you became

so interested in the dsm why did you think it was a subject of such importance to

investigate and research and write about? You know, I sort of entered the field of mental

...