Did nine out of ten college students really develop a psychiatric disorder during COVID lockdown?

In our final interview with Alan Francis, we try to restore some diagnostic boundaries.

Welcome to the Carlet Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry on us since 2003.

I'm Chris Sagan, the editor-in-chief of the Carlatte Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

On a good day, psychiatry follows the laws of science.

But most of the time, it follows the law of unintended consequences.

You give Benadryl, and it makes the patient stay wide awake. You give medaphano, and they fall asleep.

Or, like the time I advised a depressed patient to try smiling more often in social encounters.

He came back and said that was the worst advice anyone had ever given him.

When you're as depressed as I am and you try to smile, you just look like a freak.

It scares people.

One such unintended consequence happened in the 1990s.

When the APA launched DSM-4, just as a

pharmaceutical industry was launching the largest crop of new psychiatric medications this world

has ever seen.

Alan Francis helped birth that baby, and he came to regret some of its effects.

Where people once turned to community, faith, therapy, and poetry, they now turn to a

clinical manual of mental disorders to understand the problems of everyday life. And there they found

them, from overeating to social isolation, all with FDA-approved medications to pave over the suffering

road. The best psychiatrists pivot when the law of unintended consequences strikes, when their

patient calls with acute dysphoria and agitation after starting an antidepressant,

...