Psychiatry is biased agains Indigent Culture: Evidenced by the DSM codes

 

Turning the DSM Against Itself: Diagnosing the Disorders of Western Psychology

A new paper satirically reworks psychiatric nosology, diagnosing colonial behaviors—greed, amnesia, and entitlement—as the true psychological disorders.

By Justin Karter -

February 7, 2025

What if the DSM diagnosed the cultural pathologies of capitalism and colonialism rather than the individuals afflicted by them? A forthcoming article in American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association (APA), does just that—turning what scholars call psychiatry’s diagnostic bible against itself.

Rather than categorizing distress within individuals, scholars Kaori Wada and Karlee D. Fellner use the DSM’s own language to diagnose the systemic disorders of power—reframing greed as an addiction, land accumulation as pathological hoarding, and historical amnesia as a dissociative disorder.

Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s concept of socio diagnostics, Wada and Fellner situate psychiatric diagnosis as a cultural product of coloniality, perpetuating what they call psycholonization—the psychological subjugation of Indigenous peoples through Western mental health frameworks.

“The DSM and psychologizing discourses are cultural products born out of coloniality, which continue to serve as tools for the subjugation of iyiniwak (Indigenous peoples). By using the very language of the DSM, we diagnose the colonial logics and ideologies inherent in these categories,” write Wada and Fellner.

This article thus serves as both a critique of psychiatry’s complicity in colonialism and a radical re-imagination of what healing and diagnosis could look like from an Indigenous relational framework.

“‘Symptoms’ are our relations’ way of calling us to needed medicines, wisdoms, and collective wellness,” they add.

If psychiatric diagnosis is, as Wada and Fellner argue, a colonial artifact, then mental health care itself may be a tool of social control rather than healing. This has profound implications—not just for Indigenous communities but for anyone whose suffering has been medicalized rather than understood in historical and political context.