Will you be attending the funeral of the biggest scam in medical history? The announcement that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) plans to overhaul, redesign and rename the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been framed in much of the media as progress. I don’t think so. I think this is the slow death of the DSM - and the APA desperately trying to rebrand themselves like a failing boyband. Announcing that they think trauma ‘causes mental illnesses’ and that they will try to find biomarkers… YAWN. Haven’t they been promising the world these magical biomarkers for decades now? According to reporting by NPR, and the APA’s carefully worded press releases, this is psychiatry modernising, catching up with science, and responding to long-standing critiques. But that framing completely misses what is actually happening here. This isn’t progress and this isn’t borne out of new discoveries or evidence. It is a tactical U-turn made under pressure. It is psychiatry as a discipline realising that the tide has turned against it, that public faith in diagnostic labelling is eroding, and that people are leaving in droves because the DSM has failed to explain, predict, or meaningfully alleviate human suffering. I have just under half a million followers - and according to my statistics, 95% of them are women from around the world. From what I can see from my trends, it is women who are looking for better understandings of their mental health, their trauma, their experiences of abuse and pathologisation. I get thousands upon thousands of letters, emails, messages, and DMs - from everyone from teenage girls realising that they don’t really have bipolar disorder to women in their 70s writing to me to say that they have been forced into decades of medication and ECT by their abusive husbands and families. People are waking up, and realising that trauma, abuse, oppression and violence are causing their suffering - not some vague chemical imbalance or misogynistic personality disorder. Professionals are moving in their thousands to trauma-informed, anti-pathology, anti-oppressive practice all over the world - and rightly so. But the APA will need to try to pull trauma back under their control if they will survive. The broader discussion of psychiatry has repeatedly shown it to be a sham - and now, the APA are scrambling to rebrand the DSM (again). We should all watch with interest how they attempt to shapeshift into something with an evidence base - whilst trying to cling on to their sponsors, insurers, and most importantly - their pharma ties. My new article exploring the announcements from the APA and what they really mean.