Stephen Diamond, in his Psychology Today bloghas been writing for some time about anger and his support for inclusion in the upcoming DSM V a new diagnostic category for embitterment:
Posttraumatic Embitterment Disorder (PTED) was first proposed by German psychiatrist Dr. Michael Linden in 2003, based on his clinical work with troubled immigrants from East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall. That profound cultural change proved to be quite traumatic for those whose lives were directly affected by it, and the repercussions of this life-changing event--seen almost universally by the rest of the world as a positive development--was felt for years. We in this country are going through some significant social changes of our own. As Linden (2003) observes, some of the debilitating emotional symptoms of those patients meeting his proposed diagnostic criteria for PTED include chronic feelings of injustice, victimhood, helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness, self-recrimination, aggression, anger, rage, resentment and, of course, embitterment. Such individuals feel they have lost control of their lives and their destiny. The values and structure that once provided a stable sense of self, meaning, purpose and personal or professional identity have been lost or eroded. The old life has been altered irrevocably. The new life has not yet been established, leaving the person in a state of existential limbo.
And he relates the eruptions of anger and hatred surrounding the debates now occurring around health care reform and other changes which some are protesting. Now I agree that the level of rage and bitterness being expressed and the potential for violence concerns me greatly; in fact to me this situation feels volatile and potentially dangerous on a level I have not felt since tremendous summer tensions in the 60's and early 70's. But I have reservations about applying a psychiatric label to reactions to societal changes. As a Jungian I am drawn more to considering meaning here -- what does it mean that these mobs have appeared? What is the meaning in this response to a message that one side sees as holding promise, the other as threatening loss?
When how you view the response to change depends on a political viewpoint, then tagging one side as psychiatrically disordered becomes as much a political response as a clinical one. I support the change in our health insurance program and reform in health care delivery. So, to me, the rage and bitterness being expressed by those who do not seems "disordered." But so was the so-called "Brooks Brothers mob" of the the election of 2000. And that mob was a created one, created to disrupt the efforts to recount the vote. It was created to support a particular political position.
It has long been a tool in the political toolkit to enflame the passions of people who feel embittered, left behind, not listened to. The Bolsheviks used it as did Hitler, Mussolini, Huey Long, George Wallace, Lewis Farrakhan. It is a tool being used today as well by a group of politicians and groups on the right who are attempting to gain political advantage. And they are successfully promoting "change" as a threat to the way of life that their constituents desire.
But if I were on the other side in this debate, I might well see the responses of these mobs as a sane and sensible response to conditions that threaten my way of life. Where I stand on the issue determines my view of the responses. Identification of a disorder should not, it seems to me, be so susceptible to political point of view.
And if we looked at more of the categories in the current DSM and those being proposed, might we not find others that also seem more about a particular point of view than on the existence of a disorder? That was the case with homosexuality after all.