Opinion Progress in understanding functional somatic symptoms and syndromes in light of the ICD-11 and DSM-5, 2023, Creed

It is over a decade since the new diagnosis of Somatic Symptom Disorder (SSD) was introduced in the DSM-5, and Bodily Distress Disorder was proposed for inclusion in the ICD-11. These new diagnoses were introduced to move away from the terms “somatoform” and “somatization”, which were thought to be unhelpful to patients and doctors.

It was also thought necessary to define these disorders in a positive way rather than as “medically unexplained” symptoms, an unsatisfactory term as doctors frequently disagree about whether or not a symptom is explained by a medical disorder. The new classifications aimed to rely more on the presence of definite psychological and behavioral features.

Open access, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.21118

 

This describes no progress whatsoever. It's the same old garbage that has been argued for well over a century. By their own admission, they only rebranded the labels, while changing nothing of the underlying constructs. Again. And again. And yet again!

Obviously this does not lead to progress, but they never needed progress anyway so why change a losing formula? They're just pretending that they're doing stuff, while being stuck in mental loops. Who is really mentally ill here?

Having recently moved from working on those subgroups, widening to fully generic constructs like "medically unexplained symptoms", they are looping back again to pretending to work on specific syndromes, even as those efforts have become an obvious failure. Even as the broadening is becoming even more generic with the recent creation of "functional overlays", a magical "I'm right and you're wrong" card.

It's actually not, and there's literally nothing productive out of this pseudoscience. It hasn't made any progress in a century and a half, is always the same, and will never make any actual progress because this is all made-up BS that only ever fails upward, through political wrangling and a weak profession that is incapable of speaking truth to power, is terrified of pointing out how the emperor's naked ass was always completely and obviously naked.

Quacks and their quackery will keep quacking until they're made to stop.