I think that a lot of it stems from an ignorance in the general population of what mental disease is. Practising psychiatrists don't use the words psychopath or sociopath when describing people, at least not in my experience (a relatively new internal medicine doctor), and I'm going to disagree that psychiatry is "highly subjective", although there is definite a large component of subjectivity, since it mostly deals with things that are difficult to objectively measure (although there are examples such as the PHQ-9 score for depression).
I agree with you that psychiatry has a history of being soft, but modern psychiatrists are medical doctors and there are very few living one's that I know who use aspects of Freud or Jungian theories in the way they treat psychiatric diseases. Nowadays, just like the bulk of medicine, the focus on is on evidence based therapeutics. Unfortunately, how the brain works is still much of a black box and for many of the medications we use we have no idea how they work. We have some inkling of what they do in general, but on a directly mechanistic level it's still at a point where we try things based on what we think might work, and then if it's shown to work in a large population better (or maybe as well as, with less side effects) then we keep it.
I do think that you could apply some subsets of various aspects of the DSM to anybody, but if you read it, these diagnosis have time courses, and based on the current way they are diagnosed (which is soon to change when DSM V comes out), you have to have symptoms present for a specific amount of time before you can be labelled.
Anyways, the feeling I get from your post is a concern about psychiatric diagnosis being applied too liberally. In my experience I see so many people with the really big psychiatric issues, such as people who have just had a luckily unsuccessful suicide attempt or are actively hallucinating from schizophrenia. The psychiatrists I work with are overwhelmed (especially in child psychiatry) with these kinds of patients and aren't out to change abnormal behaviors into pathologies.
But, I see your point about people dropping psychiatric diagnosis on things they don't agree with which is wrong. I'm just defending the field of psychiatry, which I don't think has any interest in redefining what is normal/abnormal.
I agree with you that psychiatry has a history of being soft, but modern psychiatrists are medical doctors and there are very few living one's that I know who use aspects of Freud or Jungian theories in the way they treat psychiatric diseases. Nowadays, just like the bulk of medicine, the focus on is on evidence based therapeutics. Unfortunately, how the brain works is still much of a black box and for many of the medications we use we have no idea how they work. We have some inkling of what they do in general, but on a directly mechanistic level it's still at a point where we try things based on what we think might work, and then if it's shown to work in a large population better (or maybe as well as, with less side effects) then we keep it.
I do think that you could apply some subsets of various aspects of the DSM to anybody, but if you read it, these diagnosis have time courses, and based on the current way they are diagnosed (which is soon to change when DSM V comes out), you have to have symptoms present for a specific amount of time before you can be labelled.
Anyways, the feeling I get from your post is a concern about psychiatric diagnosis being applied too liberally. In my experience I see so many people with the really big psychiatric issues, such as people who have just had a luckily unsuccessful suicide attempt or are actively hallucinating from schizophrenia. The psychiatrists I work with are overwhelmed (especially in child psychiatry) with these kinds of patients and aren't out to change abnormal behaviors into pathologies.
But, I see your point about people dropping psychiatric diagnosis on things they don't agree with which is wrong. I'm just defending the field of psychiatry, which I don't think has any interest in redefining what is normal/abnormal.