A disturbing piece on grief by Allen Frances

Allen Frances is a psychiatrist spearheading the challenge against
DSM-V. He was the chairperson of the DSM-IV task force or one of the
senior members.

Allen Frances (August 14, 2010). "Good Grief". The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/opinion/15frances.html

This piece gives an insight into what people should be concerned about
with the medicalisation of the human condition. It is done with good
intentions but the effect may marr the human race for generations until
psychiatry as it is ceases to exist. By "as it stands" I mean enforcing
social norms using the paradigm of illness, a misappropriation of the
beautiful science of medicine.

It is clear that different people react to death in different ways. From
the Wikpeida page and the previous link to the New York Times article it
seems clear that there is a long way to go to understanding grief.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grief

My fear is that psychiatry will seek easy and bad solutions to things
which it does not understand, and in so doing it may significantly
inhibit the advancement of human civilisation. This is all done in with
their short term goal of good intentions and quasi-compassion but they
lack the wisdom to know what is the true answer to human grief.

As Allen Frances mentions I belive time is the greatest healer. This is
perhaps not a compassionate answer and, as the article points out, some
people have negative life outcomes - including suicide - because their
grief does not heal as others would hope.

Seeking to standardise grief without the true science nor wisdom to do
it safely is a poor practice. Standardisation of human reaction to death
is perhaps one of the most frightening trends in modern psychiatry. The
reasons always sound altruistic. It is fear for life outcomes which
drives psychiatrist to label human difference as an illness and attempt
to 'treat' behaviour so the human race are made evermore into robot-like
beings capable of being productive in a construct sense.

These altruistic arguments may, in fact, do more damage to the advance
of human civilisation than the entire nuclear weapons industry. The
patholgisation of suffering may be the greatest modern ill, an ill which
those in the future will look back upon with great sadness.

These doctors do not know about the human heart, that ephemeral thing
which drives people to be not like robots. The evolution of our hearts
is what separates us from lower forms of life but psychiatry doesn't
have the wisdom to understand this. It is their conditioning. The
process which leads a person to become a psychiatrist usually involves
little life learning and therefore little wisdom. The process of
becoming a doctor can blacken their hearts because those that suffer
mental illness (those who I feel have great big fucking hearts) so very
rarely survive the ardours of medical training.

Without life experience, without experience of the diversity of human
life and without the true science of the human condition they may be
doing more damage to humankind, out of altruism, than any nuclear
device. They may be killing our souls.