Allen Frances

Excellent.

For people struggling with depression... or mood disorders, I would recommend Saving Normal, Alan Francis.

Alan Francis was the chair of the DSM-5 manual.

He has a lot to say on inflammation.

Oh, no.

Perhaps more alarming is that a third of the country doesn't seem to notice or care that Trump is destroying America and since the man-child is increasingly having tantrums, he could try to destroy the world.

Joining us is Dr. Alan Francis, a professor emeritus and former chair of psychiatry and behavioral science at Duke University.

He's the author of the award-winning international bestseller, Saving Normal, and the reference work, Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis.

And his latest book is Twilight of American Sanity, A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, now out in an updated paperback version.

or at backgroundbriefing.org slash donate.

And thank you.

And joining us now, Dr. Alan Francis, Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University.

He's the author of the award-winning international bestseller, Saving Normal.

But in the event, it turned out they couldn't do that.

By about 2008, they had thrown up their hands and said, "No, we're going to have to continue to refine but rely upon the same basic approach that we developed in 1980." And when that document came out, and there'd been a lot of criticism, some of it from Robert Spitzer, who had been largely in control of DSM-III and DSM-III-R, and then, uh, his successor, Allen Frances, who'd run DSM-IV, they both were fiercely critical about what was going on and said it was being done in the dark and it was done in secrecy and it wasn't scientific.

And when it was about to come out, Thomas Insel and Steven Hyman, the two then existing and the preceding director of the National Institute of Mental Health, denounced the document as unscientific and useless.

So if you're talking about a crisis, that's a crisis for the field-

And perhaps the sharpest skepticism of all this came from the guy who built the criteria in the first place.

His name is Alan Francis.

In 1994, he chaired the task force behind the previous edition of that same DSM manual.

He spent years since warning that he and his colleagues blew it.