The Chief Peril Is Not a DSM Diagnosis but the Polarized Mind

This article calls on organized psychiatry and psychology to wake up and address a major underappreciated discrepancy. This is the discrepancy between diagnostic nomenclature for therapy clients and the nonpathologizing or even glorifying nomenclature for many throughout history who are abusive, degrading, and massively destructive. While the former, typically clinical population, may be referred to as the “diagnosed” and the latter, typically nonclinical population, as the “undiagnosed,” I show how the compartmentalization of our current psychiatric diagnostic system prevents us from seeing the larger problems with mental health in our country and beyond and show that these problems require an alternative framework. Such a framework would address both that which we conventionally term mental disorder as well as the disorder of cultures, which so often forms the basis for that which we term mental disorders. I propose that the phenomenologically based framework that I call “the polarized mind” is one such alternative that might help us more equitably treat suffering, whether individual or collective