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This article reminds me of the ties between our local physicians and pharmaceutical representatives. Every time I visit my various doctors, I see drug company reps coming in with a suitcase of samples.

The broader the criteria for a disorder, the more people might be candidates for treatment

This is why the medical establishment is lowering the levels at which patients are told they have (fill in the blanks: diabetes, high cholesterol, etc.)

I contributed to the DSM IV as a Clinical Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Funding sources there are ubiquitious and are managed by bean counters. Scientists and physicians (with the notable exception of adminstrators) at Hopkins are simply out of the fray of (alleged) bias caused by a funding source.

Science is a public event and our Committee (on our section of the DSM) published the proceedings all our meetings for all the world to read.

Having said that, the DSM is, unlike the US Constitution, a living, breathing document and as such subject to continuous revision. The forces driving revision lately have focused mostly in the Psycho-Sexual Disorders Section. These forces have been quite successful: Transseuxalism is no longer a body image psychosis, contrary to signficant expert opinion, and homosexuality is not aberrant unless dystonic.

The DSM is not perfection and clearly its goals of clarity in mental health are subject to political influence. But, it just so happens, of its many flaws, funding sources are not the bugaboo of the DSM.

This article makes the DSM sound like it might be pushing drugs. But the DSM doesn't prescribe treatments, I didn't think; it's DIAGNOSTIC.

I can certainly see how bad science can result in unnecessary treatments would certainly benefit the drug companies, but, seriously, it would also equally benefit psychotherapists. Should be now complain that the people writing the psychotherapist's bible are now duplicitous because they make money as psychotherapists?

Besides, it's not like the DSM is being widely read by millions of mental-health hypochondriacs (you talk about your self fulfilling prophecies!)... It's read by doctors, not patients. If you wanna have hissy fits, look at the way doctors began to be heavily lobbied during the Clinton administration, or the inexcusably advertisements trying to push PRESCRIPTION drugs all the time on TV!