Turning Tantrums Into Psychiatric Disorder

Child psychiatrists often dare to go where no one has gone before—and children wind up paying the price.  They keep inventing new ways to wildly over diagnose psychiatric illness in kids.  Perviously I mentioned a study that found 83 percent of kids qualify for mental disorder diagnosis by the time they are twenty-one.  Now the child researchers have taken it a step further—introducing a new DSM-5 diagnosis that may get the number even closer to 100 percent.  First called “temper dysregulation disorder,” then rechristened with the tongue-twisting “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” (DMDD); the idea of turning temper tantrums into a mental disorder is terrible, however named.  We should not have the ambition to label as mental disorder every inconvenient or distressing aspect of childhood.

Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," p.177