问答题
A college student becomes so compulsive about
cleaning his dorm room that his grades begin to slip. An executive living
in New York has a mortal fear of snakes but lives in Manhattan and rarely goes
outside the city where he might encounter one. t computer technician,
deeply anxious around strangers, avoids social and company gatherings and is
passed over for promotion. Are these people mentally
iii? (46) {{U}}In a report released last week, researchers
estimated that more than half of Americans would develop mental disorders in
their lives, raising questions about where mental health ends and illness
begins.{{/U}} (47) {{U}}In fact, psychiatrists have no good answer,
and the boundary between mental illness and normal mental struggle has become a
battle line dividing the profession into two viscerally opposed
camps{{/U}}. On one side are doctors who say that the definition
of mental illness should be broad enough to include mild conditions, which can
make people miserable and often lead to more severe problems later.
(48) {{U}}On the other are experts who say that the current definitions
should be tightened to ensure that limited resources go to those who need them
the most and to preserve the profession's credibility with a public that often
scoffs at claims that large numbers of Americans have mental
disorders.{{/U}} The question is not just philosophical, where
psychiatrists draw the line may determine not only the willingness of insurers
to pay for services, but the future of research on moderate and mild mental
disorders. (49) {{U}}Directly and indirectly, it will also shape the
decisions of millions of people who agonize over whether they or their loved
ones are in need of help, merely eccentric or dealing with ordinary life
struggles.{{/U}} "This argument is heating up right now," said
Dr. Darrel Regier, director 0f research at the American Psychiatric Association,
"because we're in the process of revising the diagnostic manual," the catalog of
mental disorders on which research, treatment and the profession itself are
based. The next edition of the manual is expected to appear in
2010 or 2011, "and there's going continued debate in the scientific community
about what the cut-points of clinical disease are," Dr. Regier said.
Psychiatrists have been searching for more than a century for some
biological marker for mental disease, to little avail. (50) {{U}}Although
there is promising work in genetics and brain imaging, researchers are not
likely to have anything resembling a blood test for a mental illness soon,
leaving them with what they have always had.- observations o{ behavior, and
patients' answers to questions about how they feel and how severe their
condition is.{{/U}}