Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 23, Number 2, 2021 127 © 2021 Springer Publishing Company http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/EHPP-2021-0003 Liberating People From Psychiatric Diagnoses: Exploring Severe Mental, Behavioral, and Emotional Disturbances Through Biographic Documentaries Stephen E. Wong, PhD Florida International University, Miami, Florida This article posits that the DSM-5 and its psychiatric diagnoses are a monumental artifact of social power rather than a useful system for naming, describing, classifying, or under- standing mental disorders. Two biographic documentaries, Crumb and Jupiter’s Wife, are examined as alternative information about people with severe mental, behavioral, and emotional disturbances, which ordinarily would be diagnosed as schizophrenia or a related psychotic disorder. In contrast to the disease processes implied by psychiatric diagnoses, these detailed documentaries revealed particular social (e.g., lack of positive role models, bullying), environmental (e.g., poverty, homelessness), and historical (e.g., child abuse, failure in school) factors that might have brought about the individual’s personal prob- lems. Seeing people in the actual places where they live and hearing about their struggles frst-hand can evoke sympathy and empathy in viewers, potentially freeing them from the technical abstractions and pathological attributions inherent in psychiatric diagnoses. Keywords: DSM, psychiatric diagnosis, discourse/text analysis, critical psychiatry/ psychology, schizophrenia, psychosocial theories P eople with severe mental, behavioral, and emotional disturbances are commonly referred to with one or more diagnoses from the American Psychiatric Associa- tion’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) (American Psychi- atric Association, 2013), such as “schizophrenia.” Use of these diagnostic labels is not restricted to professional and academic discourse, but instead permeates all forms of com- munication ranging from government announcements, newspaper and magazine articles, TV and radio shows, to casual conversations. The universal acceptance of these terms is a triumph of the psychiatric profession because reliance on this nosological system for the labeling, defning, and organizing of these social problems implies that these disorders are essentially biological in nature and that medical science is the preeminent authority for understanding and treating these problems. It is one of the oddities of our modern, seemingly scientifc society that psychiatric and biomedically-oriented terms dominate discourse about mental functioning and personal distress. It is odd because, hidden in small print or in communications for select audi- ences, psychiatric experts concede that there is no biological test, no pathological lesion,