DSM

I bought a book of curses

All cataloged and tagged

To help me learn the words

To reverse the curse I had

It had curses born of fear

Of misery and woe

Curses of obsession

Curses of control

Curses of dark visions

Of sleeping and food

Curses of focus

Curses of mood

Yet to my growing horror

Not a single note was had

On how to end a curse

Once you’ve been branded mad

But I learned to speak in curses

And I realized as I spoke

Although the world may curse you

It can’t erase the words for hope

*A quick ode after finishing my first grad course in Intro to Psychopathology! Gosh the DSM-5-TR is a scary book - and no, there are no actual treatments in the entire tome. Only diagnostic criteria. And if like me you wonder how any medical science could train its practitioners on how to diagnose a problem without a clearly linked treatment for it - then I would challenge you to define what the real problem we are diagnosing might be.