“Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM–5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: ‘repetitive behavior, the goal of which is […] to prevent some dreaded event or situation.’ Our narrator seems to believe that by compiling an exhaustive list of everything that might go askew in the human mind, this wrong state might somehow be overcome or averted.”
-Sam Kriss offers a “review” of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, reimagined as a dystopian novel (via The New Inquiry).
***
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.
Get the Longreads Weekly Email