Ph.D.Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D. is a Visiting Scholar at the Pembroke Center for Women, Brown University, Providence, RI. Previously she was full professor of psychology, assistant professor of psychiatry, and lecturer in Womens Studies at the University of Toronto, and was chosen by the American Psychological Association as an "eminent woman psychologist".
She is the author of "The Myth of Women's Masochism" and "Don't Blame Mother", plus a number of other books. A clinical and research psychologist, she was formerly a consultant to those who construct the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Interview by Douglas Eby
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There are other psychiatric labels and diagnoses that may be misused with
respect to gifted women, Dr. Caplan finds. "'Hysterical' is a big one, and
'borderline' because any woman who is very emotional and doesn't give the
therapist what he wants - if it's a guy - is in danger of being diagnosed as
histrionic or hysterical. ......"This whole diagnosis
of Borderline Personality Disorder is made up anyway, and is usually applied to
someone who had been terribly abused. ......there are
all kinds of non-pathological reasons for any person to be showing what are then
called the symptoms of 'borderline personality'....... Cynthia Veldhuis gave a psychology class of hers [in the
Dept. of Psychology, University of Oregon] a checklist of symptoms for different
disorders, and 75% of the students fit the criteria for having Borderline
Personality Disorder, and guess what - 100% of the men fit the criteria for
Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder!
"The current DSM4 [the latest edition] has 374 categories of alleged mental
disorder, including things like 'Stuttering', and 'Caffeine-induced Sleep
Disorder', and 'Major Depressive Disorder' - if someone close to you died two
weeks ago and you're still grieving. In other words, every conceivable form of
human behavior is in there; 'Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder': if you don't
have as much sexual activity, or as many sexual fantasies as your therapist
thinks you should, then you have that." With such a large number of categories, she points out, anybody "who walks
into a therapist's office is going to fit probably a very large number of those
descriptions. And this is all the more true because so many of the criteria for
these labels use terms like 'marked' or 'deficient', so there's this huge scope
for subjectivity on the part of therapists.
Interview by Douglas Eby