Experts speculate that the rapid sales increase comes from an increased public interest in mental illness and increase of depression and anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic, reported by the CDC.
However, this uptick in sales isn’t solely based on public interest and curiosity.
“There’s a growing tendency to over-diagnose and ‘medicalize’ normal anxieties and run-of-the-mill neuroses,” Ralph Lewis, MD, a psychiatrist in Toronto, wrote in Psychology Today.
The manual’s popularity has grown among medical professionals of other disciplines too.
“I’ve had friends who are surgeons, internists, all of a sudden saying to me, ‘So, I bought the book,'” Saul Levin, MD, CEO of the American Psychiatric Association, told Axios.
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