I've been listening to the book "The Body Keeps Score." It talks about how the diagnosis PTSD was created as a result of a few people lobbying a psychiatric association.
It made me wonder: are there any other conditions that don't have names, that could be highly impactful to lobby for getting a condition name?
The benefit of having a name for a condition and particularly for getting into the DSM seems to mean that then insurance companies cover treatments, and researchers and drug companies invest heavily into discovering potential treatments.
It seems plausible that the lobbying could be a high leverage intervention.
Perhaps the ordinary human unhappiness that Freud and Michael Plant have written about could be lobbied into creation of a separate diagnosis? What other symptoms could potentially be impactful to be grouped together and turned into a medical diagnosis?
Grief was previously considered different from depression, but with the DSM-5 it's no longer a reason to rule out a depression diagnosis. It's unclear how much antidepressants help with grief (and people have mixed feelings about whether medical treatment for grief is appropriate).