> No one is going to diagnose you as mentally ill because you scratch your arm, but if you repeatedly scratch your arm enough to cause tissue damage and seek psychiatric help with stopping [enphasis added] ...

Yes, but you see, the point of the DSM is to allow psychiatrists and psychologists to proactively label behaviors as abnormal, rather than patiently wait for people to seek out their services. If a "diagnosis" appears in the DSM, then it's official -- schoolchildren can be assigned the diagnosis without the cooperation of the child or his parents, which allows the school to demand additional funds from governments, allows parents an get Social Security payments based on the diagnosis -- basically, the floodgates open up. The child is taken out of the equation, because it's an official diagnosis -- it's in the DSM, the "Bible" of psychiatry and psychology.

If the reasoning was that it allowed people to volunteer for treatment, there would be no need for a DSM, because people who volunteer for treatment don't need a diagnosis -- their willingness to undergo treatment is more than enough justification.

The DSM's purpose is to legitimize diagnoses, make them part of the canon of recognized mental illnesses, require insurance companies to pay for treatments, require the Social Security system to pay up. Unfortunately, because of these pressures, the DSM now includes absurd things like grieving at the passing of a loved one, sibling rivalry, the inability to add a column of figures, and so forth -- obvious abuses of the imagined authority of the field of psychology.

> Lots of things are normal in small quantities and pathological in large quantities.

True about some things, but that's not how medical diseases are defined. One either has measles, or does not have measles. One either has cancer, or does not have canter. One is either pregnant, or is not pregnant. And more importantly, in each of these cases, a doctor can go beyond observing symptoms, and measure a cause.

Not so for mental illnesses -- their diagnosis relies only on symptoms, the causes are unknown (that's the business of neuroscience, not psychology). This is obviously a basis for abuse and exploitation. The DSM covers a spectrum from very serious conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome, both of which are actually biological conditions with mental symptoms, to any number of make-believe diseases, some of which appear and disappear from the canon over time, based on public gullibility and taste, for example Asperger's and homosexuality, both of which have entered, and then left, the DSM based on public pressure and politics, not anything resembling science. The DSM only lists symptoms, not causes, not science, and that's why it's so often abused.

> ... there's a label they can put on it.

Yes, and that was a perfect way to put it. Psychology depends on labels, medicine depends on objective causes. Because psychiatry and psychology rely on the assignment of labels based on observation of symptoms, it's not science and it's not effective.

This is why the director of the NIMH has recently decided to drop support for the DSM, a decision that is not less than earthshaking in the mental health field. The director's reason? The DSM is based only on the observation of symptoms, and it lacks validity. For science, society is now moving in a completely different direction -- away from mind research, toward brain research.

More here: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

And here (a video that makes the same points): http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/updates/2013/mental-disorders-...