Ronson: Chapters 10 & 11! The End!

In Chapter 10, "The Avoidable Death of Rebecca Riley," Ronson finally becomes aware of the riskiness of misdiagnosing mental disorders. The chapter starts with Ronson discussing the growth of the DSM and basically that it has turned into a joke because every possible behavior can diagnose some kind of mental disorder. With the popularity of the DSM on the rise, so many people were buying it and trying to diagnose themselves, which essentially benefited the drug companies. Although Spitzer, the creator of the DSM, believed in these disorders, Ronson makes it pretty clear that many of the so called "disorders" are a joke. This is seen in the case of Rebecca Riley. Many kids are being misdiagnosed with diseases like bipolar disorder just for being hyper children. The use of drugs just to keep kids from being annoying eventually leads to the death of Rebecca, and her parents are convicted of her murder for overdosing their daughter. 

After finishing the book, it has left me questioning the job of psychiatrist. It seems to me that they more or less guess as to whether a child, or anyone for that matter, has a mental disorder. With the DSM basically providing the means for anyone to be diagnosed, it is easy for them to find evidence for their diagnosis whether or not the evidence seems logical. Essentially, psychiatrists will never really know what one's "beetle" looks like, and it makes me upset that as a society we have done nothing to stop the labeling of people and the feeding of drugs as if they are candy. I'm shocked that this issue has never been brought up, and that the ambiguity of these "checklists" has never been seriously discussed. The idea of grey areas really brought me to question the world of psychiatry. At what point are psychologists guessing, because if I had to guess how many people fall into the grey areas, I would say pretty much the whole population. At the beginning of this book, I couldn't quite figure out the meaning or what Ronson was trying to say, but for me the last two chapters really validated his point and were my favorite to read.