It’s so special and it has a lot of really important messages. Everyone has parts of their lives you don’t see, it’s okay to laugh at yourself, and we’re all in this together.

They did such a good job with S02E01, I wish we got a chance to see how they’d portray the pandemic.

High Maintenance on HBO. It’s an anthology show (different characters every episode) that centers on a guy who bikes around NYC selling weed. It manages to be hilarious while focusing on some very sad and strange experiences. It feels very grounding to me and I always feel a sense of “we’re going to get through this.”

Those people perform at such a high level. And they do it every night without missing. I can’t wrap my head around it.

Sorry, you said insurance and I missed it somehow. I agree that laymen and insurance companies treat it as a bible, but I also think that’s how the APA presents it. If the goal is to compile “symptoms that tend to present together” the DSM does a poor job of making that clear.

I have several problems with the DSM. This isn’t an exhaustive list but off the top of my head:

-It’s based on the idea that there’s a clear line between “normal” and “disordered” mental functioning, and that we can quantify all of a person’s experiences to land on either side of that line. There are a handful of diagnoses that are discrete enough for me to say “you either have it or you don’t” but the majority of them are so arbitrary that they’re not useful. Mood disorders are especially vague.

-Inter-rater reliability is notoriously poor. I can diagnose anyone with a disorder to argue medical necessity for therapy.

-It includes conditions that cannot and should not be diagnosed by mental health professionals, like narcolepsy. It’s good for providers to know what narcolepsy is, but unless they’re going to include every other medical condition, I don’t know why they include the ones they do.

-DSM-5 broadened the criteria for several disorders, possibly to increase access to insurance coverage, but it’s edging ever closer to categorizing every human experience as a disorder. According to DSM-5, if you’re having depressive symptoms for more than 2 weeks after a loved one dies, it’s no longer grief and it’s considered a major depressive episode. When people criticized that bereavement clause, DSM-5-TR included “prolonged grief disorder” which extends the time you can grieve the loss without a MDD diagnosis. But grief is absolutely a normal response to loss, and sometimes it can be really disruptive and long-lasting. Why are we pretending that’s disordered?

-The majority of every DSM task force has been older white men, and we should be very skeptical of what they consider normal or not.

I mean… insurance companies also treat it like the bible, as do many psychologists. It would be useful to have guidance like “these are symptoms that tend to present together” but that’s not how the DSM is written.

Yes. They project the text from an angle so it reflects towards the speaker. Just like windows are transparent but can still reflect images in the right lighting.