In Memoriam: Paula Joan Caplan
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Paula Caplan, a prolific writer, playwright, and social activist, who for decades was one of the most prominent critics of psychiatry and its diagnoses, died on Wednesday from cancer. She was 74.
In 1996, Paula Caplan published a withering critique of the creation of DSM IV,
They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal. She had been a consultant to the DSM IV task force in the earlier stages of its work, and with this insider’s experience informing the book, she described a process for defining “normalcy” by the American Psychiatric Association that lacked scientific grounding and was, in many ways, an arbitrary drawing of boundary lines between the normal and abnormal. Her book, together with
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