Maybe You've Been Gaslit Too?

And why isn't "Wealth Accumulation Disorder" in the DSM?

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The billionaires need our help. They’re sick. And while it’s not the typical kind of illness, it goes deep. Hear me out…

My father is a practicing psychologist, soon to fiiiiiiiinally retire. I remember as a little girl assisting him with billing and picking up on various elements of the field, though I was too young to really comprehend much of what was swirling around me. While I’ve flirted with formal studies in psychology, I intentionally did not go that route because I saw the mental and emotional toll this profession had on my father. I did however absorb a fair amount of psychology and nomenclature, and know a bit more about psychology than the average bear.

I was in my mid-twenties, still figuring out my sexuality, and I remember my father and I were arguing in the kitchen. He said to me “they only took homosexuality out of the DSM for political reasons”. I’ve reflected on how challenging this was for me, as it’s a sort of textbook example of “gas-lighting”. Luckily I have a strong sense of self, sanity, and music has been a potent medium for self-medication for most of my life. I’ve also been reflecting on the immense power that is wielded by the people that determine what qualifies as a mental illness or disorder?

Who gets the power to decide what’s considered a mental health condition?

Words Create Worlds

Several months ago a friend of mine shared with me that greed is a “disease of disconnection”. Which made me wonder, why isn’t the obsessive compulsive pursuit of material wealth in the DSM? In case you’re not familiar with the DSM, which stands for “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, it’s essentially the bible for psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health professionals. It gets updated at seemingly random intervals; they’re now up to the fifth edition, with the latest version being called the “DSM-5-TR”.

Pathologies swarm around our economic system. In the vast majority of cases, to amass a substantial amount of wealth one needs to exploit people and/or resources, which often means lacking empathy and exhibiting behaviors linked with sociopaths. I’m actually not the first one to hypothesize that a mental illness might underlie the tendencies for extreme greed. Here are 2 such examples:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence

I recently did a deep dive, curious to learn about how mental health diagnoses are determined, and what are the actual origins of the DSM. Golly, was I in for a rude awakening.

Dr. James Davies is a practicing psychotherapist, an Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology and Psychology at the University of Roehampton, London, and is a co-founder of CEP, The “Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry”. In this lecture linked below, the TL;DW, or “too long; don’t watch”, is that the DSM had diagnoses added arbitrarily by consensus, and no actual scientific research. This was organized by a group of about 9 psychiatrists and psychologists and led by Robert Spitzer, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City. It was the process of agreement and “thrashing it out” at meetings that determined what went into the DSM, and very little scientific or systematic research.

The most stunning of stories from Dr. James Davies’s lecture is at the 21:33 mark in the video below, where Dr. James Davies shares a quote from a 2004 New Yorker article titled “The Dictionary of Disorder”, a biographical account of Robert Spitzer’s influence on modern psychiatry, where Alix Spiegel shares a story that two other psychiatrists tell about meeting with Robert Spitzer, and how he literally just spit-balled the criteria sets for “factitious disorder” and “brief reactive psychosis”.

In 1974, Roger Peele and Paul Luisada, psychiatrists at St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington, D.C., wrote a paper in which they used the term “hysterical psychoses” to describe the behavior of two kinds of patients they had observed: those who suffered from extremely short episodes of delusion and hallucination after a major traumatic event, and those who felt compelled to show up in an emergency room even though they had no genuine physical or psychological problems. Spitzer read the paper and asked Peele and Luisada if he could come to Washington to meet them. During a forty-minute conversation, the three decided that “hysterical psychoses” should really be divided into two disorders. Short episodes of delusion and hallucination would be labelled “brief reactive psychosis,” and the tendency to show up in an emergency room without authentic cause would be called “factitious disorder.” “Then Bob asked for a typewriter,” Peele says. To Peele’s surprise, Spitzer drafted the definitions on the spot. “He banged out criteria sets for factitious disorder and for brief reactive psychosis, and it struck me that this was a productive fellow! He comes in to talk about an issue and walks away with diagnostic criteria for two different mental disorders!” Both factitious disorder and brief reactive psychosis were included in the DSM-III with only minor adjustments.

- Alix Spiegel, New Yorker article “The Dictionary of Disorder”

A screenshot at the 28:30 mark where Dr. James Davies addresses the deeply troubling reality that the DSM is being used in a way that has led to the medicalization of a number of people who really don’t warrant their diagnoses.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a nonprofit mental health watchdog and has produced a fairly edutaining 1 hour and 18 minute documentary that also unpacks some of the trappings of our modern mental healthcare system.

Finding Hope

While our mental health care system might be overrun by pharmaceutical corporate interests and pseudo-scientists who like to make shit up, there are efforts to use more scientific research in psychiatry and psychology. In addition, there’s hope to be found in efforts to “decolonize psychology”, which is the title of a 2023 TED talk by Dr. Thema Bryant, a Minister, Psychologist, Podcaster, Bestselling Author, and the 2023 President of the American Psychological Association.

My Quaker faith guides me to ask questions to seek truth. The right question at the right time can yield transformational results. In Dr. Bryant’s talk she shares some essential questions that light a pathway forward. As is the case with many of the solutions to heal our broken world, there is so much that we in the “modern western world” can learn from Indigenous wisdom and Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

“Indigenous healers around the globe often assess psychology and often assess distress with a variation of these questions:

• When did you lose your connection with your Creator?

• When did you stop honoring your ancestors?

• When did you stop singing?

• When did you stop dancing?

• When did you stop finding yourself in the gift of story?”

There is a largely unexplored correlation between mental health and injustice. I noticed this for the first time when I witnessed a close friend of mine lose touch with reality after sobering up, and repressed trauma surfaced from sexual abuse he had experienced as a child. I wonder…

Why aren’t more people talking about this link between (in)justice and mental health?

“To decolonize psychology is to recognize that justice is therapeutic.

Justice, is healing.

Not just taking deep breaths, not just journaling,

but if we can shift some social systems it would help a lot of us feel a lot better.”

- Dr. Thema Bryant

As many of us grapple with the barrage of insanity being thrown our way with the daily headlines, let us gain clarity around the foundations of what is considered to be socially acceptable behavior. It’s my hope that the next edition of the DSM includes a diagnosis for “excessive greed”, maybe we can call it “Abnormal Avarice Disorder” or something to that effect. The need to hoard unfathomable amounts of wealth, in an economic system that is rigged in favor of the wealthy signifies a mental and emotional impoverishment. I’m actually not the first person to propose this, there’s a psychotherapist out of Ann Arbor, Michigan who wrote on this very topic in 2014 in his post titled “Greed as a Mental-Health Disorder”. He proposes it be called “Great Gatsby Syndrome” or “Wealth Accumulation Disorder.”

In a previous post I touch on how there’s a reinforcing feedback loop- if you’re poor you pay interest, if you’re rich you collect interest. So not only are individuals plagued with this illness, but the system in which we all live is fortified by this unethical, amoral operating system.

But the people are waking up. And I’m beginning to learn the significance of the term “eat the rich” is not as vicious as I initially conceived, especially when one considers how WE, are being eaten. Our lives, our time, the Earth’s blessings that we crudely call “resources” are being gobbled up by sociopaths at breakneck speeds. But the people are waking up. And though waking up is hard to do, it’s never too late to right a wrong, and usher in truth and justice.

With nothing but love,

Lisa Pellegrino

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