Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis
By P. Caplan, Lisa Cosgrove. 2004
90 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The public has a right to know that when they go to a therapist, they are almost certain to be given a psychiatric diagnosis, no matter how mild or normal their problems might be. It is unlikely that they will be told that a diagnosis will be written forever in their chart and that alarming consequences can result solely from having any psychiatric diagnosis. It would be disturbing enough if diagnosis was a thoroughly scientific process, but it is not, and its unscientific nature creates a vacuum into which biases of all kinds can rush. Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosisis the first book ever published about how gender, race, social class, age, physical disability, and sexual orientation affect the classification of human beings into categories of psychiatric diagnosis. It is surprising that this kind of book is not yet on the market, because it is such a hot topic, and the negative consequences of psychiatric diagnosis range from loss of custody of a child to denial of health insurance and employment to removal of one's right to make decisions about one's legal affairs. It is an unusually compelling book because of its real-life relevance for millions of people. Virtually everyone these days has been a therapy patient or has a loved one who has been. In addition, psychiatric diagnosis and biases in diagnosis are increasingly crucial portions of, or the main subject of, legal proceedings. This book should sit next to every doctor's PDR, especially given the skyrocketing use of psychoactive drugs in toddlers, children, and adolescents, as well as in adults, and especially because receiving a psychiatric label vastly increases the chances of being prescribed one or more of these drugs.A Jason Aronson Book
Subfields: Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Psychiatry and Mental health, Philosophy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e587ea1756f07715ff67cd2c17265ca053ef330e
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In Philosophy
Citations in the corpus
- Microaggressions and Women in Short-Term Psychotherapy: Initial Evidence (2010, background): “…several analogue studies have shown that therapists are more likely to diagnose women with depression, histrionic, dependent, and borderline personality disorders when compared to men with similar symptoms (Becker & Lamb, 1994; Caplan & Cosgrove, 2004; Kaplan, 1983; Potts, Burnam, & Wells, 1991).”
- The DSM and its lure of legitimacy (2013, background): “Moreover, these texts have ‘almost or entirely ignore(d) the extensive critiques of bias that have been published for years about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’ (Caplan and Cosgrove, 2004: xx).”
- The Psychiatrization of Poverty: Rethinking the Mental Health–Poverty Nexus (2015, unknown): “These intersect with hegemonic systems of capitalism, ableism, (neo)colonialism, patriarchy (and more) and produce different effects among differently oppressed groups (Caplan and Cosgrove, 2004; Diamond, 2014).”