Invention of Psychiatric Disorders Disorder (IPDD)
IPDD is common, serious, and treatable.
Definition
What is IPDD? It’s an abbreviation for Invention of Psychiatric Disorders Disorder.
Epidemiology
This disorder is prone to afflict orthodox psychiatrists, especially those who write learned papers in scholarly journals, or scholarly papers in learned journals, or who contribute to that great work of fiction, popularly referred to as the ‘bible’ of psychiatry, known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by – where else? – the American Psychiatric Association.
Pathogenesis
The pathogenesis is incompletely understood, but it’s believed to be due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and this has genetic, sociological, and behavioural components.
Clinical features and diagnosis
The clinical features are variable, but a notable one is a tendency to affect incredulous laughter when confronted with evidence that what are called mental illnesses are not due to brain dysfunctions but arise from people’s life experiences.
Incredulous laughter, or at least a pitying smile, may also be evoked in IPDD sufferers when presented with evidence that the claimed apparent success of, say, a depression pill in abolishing unhappiness, is due to a placebo effect or spontaneous recovery.
Another common feature is a tendency to insist on the correctness of circular definitions. For example, IPDD sufferers may assert that an imagined entity they call major depressive disorder disorder is due to dysfunction in the regulation of certain brain chemicals. When asked to explain how people with major depressive disorder disorder are to be recognised, they are apt to reply that they are to be recognised by the fact that they have a dysfunction in the regulation of certain brain chemicals.
Treatment
Treatment is difficult, but success has been claimed for cold baths and outdoor exercise. In severe cases electroshocks to the brain may be tried.
Other modalities are directed towards opening the mind of the sufferer by prescribing a course of study of the appropriate literature. This includes that of the Critical Psychiatry movement, Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness, websites such as Mad in America, and especially the works of the great Swiss psychiatrist, C. G. Jung.
In resistant cases or as a last resort, taking one tablet in any strength of the drugs misleadingly called antipsychotics or antidepressants, every day for two weeks, or preferably for one month, has seldom been known to fail. It should be noted, however, that this treatment may result in serious harms, misleadingly called side effects, including, but as the lawyers like to say, not limited to, the following:
Depressive thoughts including suicidal ideation, movement disorders such as akathisia and tardive dyskinesia, serotonin syndrome, withdrawal symptoms, and sexual dysfunction which may be irreversible.
Prognosis
In many cases IPDD is incurable. It may, therefore, persist for the rest of the person’s life, or at least until retirement.
Conclusion
I shall end on a positive note with a quotation:
Experience has taught me to keep away from therapeutic ‘methods’ as much as from diagnoses. The enormous variation among individuals and their neuroses has set before me the idea of approaching each case with a minimum of prior assumptions. (C. G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, para 543.)
It seems psychiatrists don’t read Jung much these days. Maybe they should.
Text © Gabriel Symonds
Picture credit: Mark König on Unsplash
9 February 2025