The tendency people have to assume the DSM has unerring authority is so so troubling to me.

The tendency people have to assume the DSM has unerring authority is so so troubling to me. It was originally a loose handbook of statistical trends and symptoms that tend to cluster together, and that's what it is to this very day, it just has a lot more pomp associated with it because interpreting it and divining wisdom from it has become a cottage industry and because insurers have decided to take it as gospel. We can't even safely assume that a named disorder in the DSM is a real thing, so much as reflection of the prevailing biases of the time in which it was written.