I agree with you about depression also being a biologically dubious category. Lynn Waterhouse's publications focus on criticising ASD (and its predecessor diagn

I agree with you about depression also being a biologically dubious category. Lynn Waterhouse's publications focus on criticising ASD (and its predecessor diagnoses) in particular, but I very much doubt she thinks the rest of the DSM-5 is all fine–it is simply that autism/ASD is one of her core areas of professional/academic specialisation, in which she's spent much of her career, so that's where she focuses her criticisms. Discontent with the DSM is very widespread, in significant subsections of both research and clinical communities – however, attempts to dethrone it in practice are met with opposition from that other current of professional opinion ("it obviously is far from perfect but we need something and nobody's convinced us there is anything better"), and that other current seems to thus far be winning in the money/power/mindshare stakes. > The wastebasket diagnosis means that no new medication can be found to have any useful effect, because it only treats a small fraction of patients in a trial, and worsens others. New pharmacotherapies for depressive disorders do get approved – in 2019, the FDA approved brexanolone for post-partum depression and esketamine for treatment-resistant depression; before that, the FDA approved vortioxetine in 2013. Agometaline was approved in the EU in 2009 and and Australia in 2010, although its manufacturer gave up trying to get it approved by the FDA. And there are further new drugs in various stages of the approval pipeline. Brexanolone is particularly interesting as a drug to treat a rather specific form of depression rather than just "vanilla depression". No denying it could be better, but depression is a much better situation than autism/ASD – although risperidone and aripiprazole are both approved to treat behavioural issues (irritability and aggression) in children with ASD, neither has any impact on core autistic traits (social cognition, obsessiveness, etc). At least for depressive disorders, we have approved pharmacotherapies to treat their core symptoms, even if they only work for some patients some of the time.