Behavior has meaning …

… Everyone on the Couch by Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The nearly complete exclusion of the meaning of behavior from diagnoses turns psychiatry into a merely bureaucratic process, in that each diagnosis will have its prescribed, reimbursed—though not necessarily effective—treatment. Incoherence often results. To qualify as intermittent explosive disorder, the DSM-5 asserts, an individual’s outbursts should not have tangible ends, among them power and intimidation. Yet if we exclude such ends, it becomes inexplicable as to why outbursts should commonly occur in response to a minor provocation by a close intimate or an associate. To be devoid of tangible ends, the outbursts would have to occur completely at random, and they seldom do, certainly not among 2.5 percent of the population. The editors seem to have reflected little on the meaning of their own work.