How zealous psychiatrists are diagnosing quirks as mental illnesses

Today it seems that almost everyone is certifiably mad. According to critics, amateur and professional psychiatrists are routinely guilty of "diagnostic inflation": turning normal people into mental patients with alphabet soup diagnoses. In a new book, America's Obsessives, author Joshua Kendall argues that many great people have been shaped by obsessive compulsive personality disorder.

Other widely applied questionable labels include disruptive mood disregulation disorder, which may mean nothing more than children's temper tantrums, and social anxiety disorder, which may be shyness. Thanks to psychiatric overreach, every quirk is judged a mental disease, especially if the US$300-billion-a-year pharmaceutical sector has a pill for it, the theory goes.

Meet florist Caren Ragan, who says she has taken every psychiatric test under the sun. Much mental health diagnosis is subjective, Ragan says.

Her mental health ordeal stemmed from declaring her intention to divorce her ex-husband who, at the start of a 10-year court battle, branded her "paranoid-delusional", she says. Six times during her ordeal, Ragan took one of the most commonly used personality tests in mental health: the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.

Her answers were consistent, she says, but the diagnosis depended on the examiner. The verdict varied from "normal" to severe psychosis with paranoid delusions. "Which was pretty strange considering I worked, raised a family and volunteered at school and not one single person ever noticed this severe mental disorder," she says.

Ragan adds that she was prescribed several kinds of anti-depressants for real, related depression; all worked briefly before she decided she had no time to indulge in emotional problems, which are a luxury of rich countries, she says.