Why The DSM-5 Should Be Banned
The New Age Of Identity Collapse
By Ximena Rodríguez-López
New York, NY - In contemporary society, it has become increasingly common for individuals to casually self-identify with a long list of psychological disorders—ADHD, BPD, CPTSD, OCD, and more. These diagnoses are often self-applied, typically after consuming content on social media platforms or browsing pop psychology blogs. The common denominator underlying this phenomenon is the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Once intended as a professional diagnostic tool, the DSM-5 has evolved into a cultural script that encourages the medicalization of nearly every human emotion and behavior.
Released in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-5 is not a neutral or purely scientific document. It is the product of committee deliberation, economic interests, and institutional politics. The manual has long been criticized for its expansion of diagnostic categories, often without adequate empirical justification. From the outset, its classification system has reflected cultural biases more than universal truths. For example, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until 1973—an egregious error corrected only after sustained political pressure from activists, not a sudden revelation in psychiatric science.
What the DSM-5 has done, particularly in its most recent iteration, is cast ordinary human experiences—grief, anxiety, restlessness, emotional pain—as symptoms of chronic mental illness. If a person mourns for longer than two weeks, they may be diagnosed with major depressive disorder. If someone struggles to focus in a world of constant distraction, they are often labeled with ADHD. The logic is straightforward and deeply problematic: normalize the diagnosis, normalize the treatment, normalize the profit.
This framework is particularly damaging to women. Psychiatric diagnoses have historically been weaponized against women, reinforcing stereotypes rather than offering care. Conditions like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), which are disproportionately assigned to women, read like a list of gendered caricatures—emotional instability, dependency, impulsivity. These labels obscure the structural conditions that contribute to female distress, such as abuse, trauma, and systemic inequality. Rather than asking, “What happened to her?” the DSM-5 asks, “What is wrong with her?”
The public dissemination of these diagnostic criteria has had profound cultural implications. Mental health has been commodified. Influencers and content creators simplify diagnostic checklists into digestible memes and videos, encouraging audiences to identify with a diagnosis based on vague, non-specific symptoms. This is not a democratization of mental health care—it is its distortion. Individuals are being taught to interpret their emotions through the lens of pathology, reducing identity to a clinical category.
This mass pathologization also plays directly into economic interests. Many of the contributors to the DSM-5 have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. These conflicts of interest are not incidental; they are systemic. The broader the diagnostic net, the larger the customer base for psychiatric medications. The result is a feedback loop: more disorders mean more diagnoses, which in turn means greater demand for treatment—much of it pharmacological.
This is not to deny the reality of mental illness or the necessity of psychiatric intervention in some cases. Rather, it is to critique the unchecked expansion of diagnostic categories and the cultural acceptance of pathologized identities. People suffer, and they deserve support. But suffering does not automatically equate to disorder, and care should not be contingent on diagnosis.
Moreover, the DSM-5 reconfigures language itself. It replaces nuanced descriptions of emotional experiences with medicalized terminology. Anger becomes “emotional dysregulation.” Fatigue becomes “low executive function.” Ordinary stress becomes “generalized anxiety disorder.” These shifts in language do not merely reflect changing clinical standards—they shape how individuals understand and narrate their lives. For women, particularly, this reframing can be alienating. Instead of contextualizing distress within societal structures—patriarchy, racism, poverty—the DSM encourages internalization. The problem is not out there; it’s in your brain chemistry. Such narratives disempower and isolate. They discourage political critique and collective solutions in favor of individualized treatment plans.
The DSM-5 is not just a manual; it is a worldview. It redefines what it means to be human in terms that serve industry, not healing. It tells us that we are defective, and that our salvation lies in treatment and management, rather than transformation and justice. This manual should not be revised. It should be abandoned. We need new paradigms of care—models that recognize the political, economic, and social roots of distress. Frameworks that validate pain without labeling it as permanent pathology. Approaches that see humanity as complex, not disordered. Because not every feeling is a disease. Not every response is dysfunction. And not every struggle should become someone else’s profit.