The American Psychiatric Association has released the blueprint for the fifth edition of its official handbook of diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Will the proposed revisions, which could place more of the population under pathology, help us to better understand mental disorders?

Why aren't we closer to understanding the relationship between manifest illness and its underlying causes?

There is in fact a powerful reason to scrutinize the psychology field: we are in the midst of a mental illness epidemic. Office visits by children and adolescents treated for the condition jumped forty-fold from 1994 to 2003.

A new rule broadens the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder, allowing non-combat veterans to receive disability benefits for being traumatized by events they did not actually experience.

Over the last hundred years, psychiatry has taken very different perspectives on war stress.

Being human is not a condition in need of a cure.

The Iraqi people have surely suffered terribly, but whether the war has rendered many of them in need of therapy is another matter entirely.