Psychiatry is a mess. Patients who urgently need help go untreated, while perfectly healthy people are over-diagnosed with serious mental disorders and receive unnecessary medical treatment. The roots of the problem are the vast pharmaceutical industry profits and a diagnostic system--the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)--vulnerable to exploitation.

Drug companies have fostered the development of this system, pushing psychiatry to over-extend its domain so that more people can be diagnosed with mental disorders and treated with drugs.

This book describes the steady expansion of the DSM--both the manual itself and its application--and the resulting over-medication of society. The author discusses revisions and additions to the DSM (now in its fifth edition) that have only deepened the epidemics of major depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, social anxiety disorder, attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder.