Current Issue Vox
Death in Amsterdam
By Margaretta Pos
One spring day in Hobart, I was having dinner with my son and Goshwin, my Dutch half-brother, who was visiting us, when the telephone rang. My son answered it. “Grandpa!” he exclaimed, as he always did whenever my father called. Yes, we were together, and he passed the handset to Goshwin, who listened, then stiffened. “I’m coming back,” he said and gave me the ph
Current Issue Modern madness
DSM-5 and the mental illness make-over
By Nick Haslam
Over the past century psychiatry has described conditions that would have once been medicalised, moralised, criminalised or perhaps dismissed as harmless eccentricity. The concept of “mental disorder” now contains a centrifugal assortment of ills that number in the hundreds. This expansion has been accompanied by equally significant cultural change. Increasingly, we view suffering