The new diagnostic manual being prepared by the American Psychiatric Association, known as the DSM-5, has been the subject of enormous controversy. See this chronicle of the controversy from Psychology Today a couple of years ago, and this from The Huffington Post just a few weeks ago. A Google search will bury you in stories.
So the American Psychiatric Association, which is preparing the manual for publication in May, 2013, should be accustomed to criticism. And isn’t that the way scientific progress is made? Galileo was sentenced to prison for proposing that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Apparently, the APA would like to send its critics to jail, too. With that remedy unavailable, it has resorted to a legal threat that has effectively silenced the author of a critical blog.
In an enlightening and thorough post Monday for Reporting on Health, William Heisel recounts the sad–and disturbing–tale of the British blogger Suzy Chapman, who has been charting the diagnostic changes proposed for the DSM-5 (or, formally, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
Heisel reports that she had a loyal following of patients and practitioners until, over Christmas, 2011, she received two cease-and-desist letters from American Psychiatric Publishing, the publishing arm of the psychiatric association. It demanded that she remove “dsm5” from her URL, which was dsm5watch.wordpress.com. Chapman changed the URL to http://dxrevisionwatch.wordpress.com/ and promptly lost many of her followers, who couldn’t find her.
For those followers, Chapman was effectively silenced by the APA.
Heisel says it’s important to note that Chapman doesn’t make money from her blog, but I’m not so sure that’s important. Even if she were making money, the APA was, in my view, in violation of normal scientific practice, which prizes public discussion and debate. It was also a bully. And it was foolish: Attempts to silence critics always backfire, and the end result of this scrap is likely to be more criticism of the APA and less confidence in its decisions.
And is this really copyright infringement? I’d like to hear from a lawyer. Does the APA’s protection for the name of its manual extend to all variations of that name, such as “dsm5watch”? How about “dsmfivewatch”? Or “dsmfivegossip”? Heisel notes that sites such as Starbucks Gossip and Making Change at Wal-Mart were able to establish themselves as critics of their respective targets without being shut down. What constitutes fair use in these situations?
We’re not concerned here with the damage this does to the APA. We’re concerned with the damage it does to a free press. Bloggers are especially vulnerable to legal intimidation. Large news organizations can dispatch their lawyers to fight back; bloggers can’t.
This isn’t the first such legal attempt to shut down a blog, by any means, and it won’t be the last. But a cease-and-desist order from the nation’s psychiatrists? That’s hardly reassuring, coming, as it does, from the people who expect you to share with them your deepest secrets.
Beware.
– Paul Raeburn
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