A review of the DSM-5 as a dystopian novel.

Nothing to do with music, but this review of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition pushed my Ballard buttons. “If the novel has an overbearing literary influence, it’s undoubtedly Jorge Luis Borges. The American Psychiatric Association takes his technique of lifting quotes from or writing faux-serious reviews for entirely imagined books and pushes it to the limit: Here, we have an entire book, something that purports to be a kind of encyclopedia of madness, a Library of Babel for the mind, containing everything that can possibly be wrong with a human being. “

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