I can't really tell if your position is "there's no such thing as mental illness" or that you just think that the current system gives anyone who wants one a label they can use (though to be honest I haven't met a psychiatrist yet who used the DSM as a reference for diagnostics). Care to elaborate?

what do they use then? intuition?

a bit of both maybe, everything around mental illness and disorders is full of blind spots.

There's big money involved, there's big holes in the reasonings, history shows it's been misguided/abused more than once... how can it be trusted?

a lot of living beings in the world have brains, they've come a long way of evolution to get to where they are here...how come all of a sudden, ours started breaking in every possible way since like 20 years ago? and it also so complex that although it sounds like bullshit it's not and you introduce brain-shrinking toxins(that brains would never produce themselves) to get them fixed.

There's too much bs smell IMO

It's not like the DSM is the be all and end all of psychiatric diagnosing, they spend years (just like any other doctor) at university and in residency etc.

None of this has happened in the last 20 years really, before then people with serious mental illnesses were living on the streets, in prison (well, many still are in these two categories) and in psychiatric institutions (that have since be deinstitutionalised), away from the general populace.

Maybe what you're seeing is that instead of being hidden away and falling through the cracks in society people are now actually able to receive treatment and (a lot of the time) able to function properly in society, so it seems like mental illness is more prevalent.

Yeah the treatment sucks (and from what I've heard it's ridiculously expensive, though I'm in the UK so that's not really an issue), but it's very rare for people to actually be forced to take it, so I think it's safe to say that it's a net gain for a lot of people.

To be honest I think it's pretty unfair on a massive segment of society (on both sides of the fence) for you to dismiss them based on what seem to be fairly weak arguments.

Maybe the problem's that for a lot of mentally ill people you can't actually see what's wrong (compared to a physical ailment), so unless you see/experience it for yourself it's hard to be convinced that it's real?

  >DSM and mental disorders have 0 science in them
  >pure bullshit

Line 1, meet line 4.

Because you do not see it, nor experience it, it does not exist. Okay then.

If you ever sunk into a deep depression and then got out with perfectly working medication you would see for yourself very clearly. But such is life.

I'm not arguing against the emotional spins you're trying to put in. I believe medication can be helpful to help people get up, in the case of depression, but it's absurd to tell people, without providing any real proof, that they need to be on medication forever and that their brains "just malfunctions"(and there's 300 'illnesses' in DSM)

and yes I've already experienced it, seen it, I assure you, and got out without medication.

If a chemical solution needs to be introduced to fix the problem, then the nature of the problem needs to be chemical related. What's the malfunction in the brain of someone with ADHD or Oppositional Defiant Disorder? I'd bet anything these brains are perfectly healthy and if there's any problem whatsoever with them the origin is environmental-psychological, not biological.