sychiatry at New England Medical Center in Boston sums up their perspective in this statement: "The burgeoning growth of biological psychiatryà [testifies] to how anxious we are to translate what we know about the human mind into something resembling objective science" (p. 9 qtd. in Vatz & Weinberg, 1994, p. 12).
The fundamental difficulty of the biomedical conception of mental illness lies in the fact that unlike physical illnesses, no objective diagnostic tests have been formulated to determine the presence of mental illnesses in patients (Luhrmann, 2000, p. 10). The diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses are often so vague that patients who perceive their sadness as a mental illness can convince psychiatrists of their "clinical depression." For example, the two primary diagnostic criteria for Major Depression includes: 1) "Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated either by subjective account or observation by others;" and 2) "Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day as indicated either by subjective account or observation by others" (in Siegel, 1999, pp. 3-4). From this quoted passage, it is evident that the psychiatrist is dependent on the subjective perceptions of the patients.
Furthermore, the difficult of offering a consistent definition of a complex mental condition such as schizophrenia has also triggered widespread criticisms of the biomedical model of mental illness. In Dr. Torrey's (1988) book, Surviving Schizophrenia, the diagnostic categories of schizophrenia with various personality types often contradict one another. While paranoid schizophrenics supposedly suffer from "delusions and/or hallucinations," hebephrenic schizophrenics are identified by the fact that "well-developed delusions are usually absent" (p. 77 in Stevens, 2000b, p. 4). Catatonic schizophrenics exhibit the characteristics of "posturing, rigidity, stupor...