Can Psychiatric Diagnoses Be Snap Judgments?

Key points

Two men started fighting on a crowded plane. What happened next illustrates how complicated we really are.

Temporary mental states have become life-long diagnoses.

Social context explains a lot of behavior.

An extraordinary thing happened recently, when I flew across the country. Or, more accurately, one extraordinary thing started to happen, then didn’t, and another extraordinary thing did.

At the time I was doing talks and answering questions about psychiatric diagnosis, including the way mental health practitioners once considered conditions like depression , anxiety , and even psychosis likely to be temporary.

A shift to long-term thinking happened toward the end of the last century. In the late 1960s, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used to diagn