What I'm pointing at is that the GAD criteria, as with the criteria for many diseases, is not, "Hey patient, is this a problem for you?" It's a judgment by the clinician over whether the impairment is significant. That's generally fine with wise clinical judgment and clear signals of illness. (E.g., there's little dispute over whether a broken leg is a problem.) But I think there are issues when things are only a problem for other people, or only a problem because other people are different. There I think applying the disease model can be mixed, both helpful (when it allows addicts to get the support they need) and harmful (when different people are treated as broken).
See, for example, the literature on medicalization of deviance: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=deviance+and+medicaliza...
This is especially problematic in the US because medicalization is not just socially convenient, but frequently profitable.
I also agree that people casually using diagnostic language is a problem. Indeed, I think it's closely related to the problem that concerns me, where people take traits that are helpful in some contexts and harmful in others and declare them to be diseases.
> E. The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
I get what you're saying. We used to lock people up for many years just because they had an abortion at 17 and liked wearing yellow tights. But "Does this interfere with your day to day life? What do you want to change?" is an important part of diagnosis.
I think the problem I have with what you're saying is that I see, very often, people (mis)using psychiatric language to describe behaviour they don't like in other people.
Asshole boss? Sociopath.
Asshole employee? Asperger's.
Asshole with a gun? Psychopath. (Or, worse, psychotic.)
> A teacher friend once substituted in a classroom where every single child was on medication. Given that the disease prominence is circa 10% and not all kids are on medication, either she should have bought a lottery ticket or there was some other factor than strict medical necessity going on there.
Over-diagnosis is probably a problem, especially in the US. I don't know how diagnosis works over there. Over here it's probably too hard to get a diagnosis. But I'd be interested to know what a statistician would say about a class of pupils who were all on medication. We'd expect some clumpiness. And unless you know that 10% is evenly distributed (is there any reason to believe it is) you'd expect even more clumpiness.