I read this piece as using the "what if the DSM was a novel" part mostly as a jumping-off point to satirize how we treat the idea of happiness and normality, ra

I read this piece as using the "what if the DSM was a novel" part mostly as a jumping-off point to satirize how we treat the idea of happiness and normality, rather than being explicitly a criticism of the manual itself as a diagnostic tool. A "weak interpretation" of the DSM where it's a collection of clustered symptoms, together with some advice about what treatments appear to have worked or not worked in the past for them, wouldn't really run into that. But some people do seem to have a stronger interpretation where the manual acquires a normative/definitional component, in which it's supposed to define the line between "mentally ill" and "normal psyche". Then you get into a huge amount of uncertainty that we still have over the etiology of any of these conditions, plus political battles over what counts as normal in the first place, the long fight over whether homosexuality should be included being probably the most famous example. Occasionally legal status can even be tied to being diagnosed as "mentally ill", which is where it starts coming closest to the dystopian-novel feel, although that may be the fault of legislators more than psychiatrists. I guess the part of this article that's most explicitly a critique is this: > DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. ...but that only really applies to certain ways of using the DSM, the weak pragmatic one not being among them, since it would recognize that treating acute suffering is only a small component of human psychology in the more general sense.