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Dramatic growth in antipsychotic drug use even targets infants, experts say

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013

Ottawa Citizen
by Sharon Kirkey

Drugs once reserved for the floridly psychotic are now being given to children still in diapers.

Dr. Dina Panagiotopoulos, a pediatric endocrinologist at BC Children’s Hospital, says “second-generation” antipsychotics are being prescribed to two- and three-year-olds for aggression.

Dr. Dina Panagiotopoulos’s investigations into some of the most potent psychiatric drugs on the market began when other doctors started calling for help.

Could she see a child on an antipsychotic drug who had developed a potentially lethal condition that can end in a diabetic coma?

Another child on an antipsychotic was now experiencing uncontrollable twitching and muscle spasms. Still another had returned to her psychiatrist a year after starting a similar drug, 50 pounds heavier and almost unrecognizable.

In a sign of what experts are calling an unprecedented spree in the prescribing of mood-altering pills, drugs once reserved for the floridly psychotic are now being given to children still in diapers.

According to Panagiotopoulos, a pediatric endocrinologist at BC Children’s Hospital, so-called “second-generation” antipsychotics, or SGAs, are being prescribed to two- and three-year-olds for aggression. Doctors have become so used to seeing side effects in children on these drugs — including sudden and massive weight gain and diabetes  — that they no longer bother reporting them to Health Canada.

“A lot of parents come to me as a specialist and say, ‘No one ever told me about the side effects, and I didn’t think to ask,’ ” said Panagiotopoulos, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. “They can’t understand why their kid went from drinking water, to seven litres of Coke every week.”

There appears to be no limit to how much we’re willing to allow doctors to medicate our apparent psychological angst. Last year, more than 74 million prescriptions worth $2.6 billion were filled for psychiatric drugs in Canada — more than 203,000 prescriptions a day, and up from 58 million prescriptions in total in 2008, according to data compiled by prescription drug research firm IMS Brogan for Postmedia News.

The growing embrace of medications to treat “broken” minds is a triumph of drug company marketing, experts say, the selling of new diagnoses and overzealous prescribing of pills for conditions for which they have never been approved.  Read the rest of the article here

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While Feds Fight Over Legitimacy of ‘Mental Disorders’—Millions of Kids Are Still Being Drugged

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013

By Kelly Patricia O’Meara
May 21, 2013

The American Psychiatric Association’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), finally has been outed for the fraud it is.  The National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, has declared that, “the weakness of the manual is its lack of validity.”  That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while the nation’s premier mental health agency has finally admitted the uselessness of psychiatry’s manual, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, is still using the DSM criteria to lend credence to mental illnesses that are not based in science.

Worse still, no one appears to be questioning the implications of this diagnostic fraud on the millions of children who have been, and will continue to be, diagnosed with bogus mental illnesses, like ADHD, and then “treated” with “phunny pharma” stimulants (kiddie cocaine) and other a sundry prescription mind-altering drugs.

This is no small consideration when one understands that the Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA, and the World Health Organization (WHO), more than a decade ago, listed Ritalin and Concerta (Methylphenidate) and Adderall (Amphetamine) along with morphine, heroin, opium and cocaine as Schedule II drugs – which “have the highest abuse potential and dependence profile of all drugs that have medical utility.”

The U.S. DEA classifies ADHD drugs in the same highly addictive category of drugs as cocaine, morphine and opium

Even the author of the DSM-IV, Dr. Allen Frances, has been spearheading a full-frontal attack on the newest version of the DSM, specifically targeting the changes to the alleged ADHD mental illness, stating, “we’re already over diagnosing ADHD. Almost 20 percent of teen boys get the diagnosis of ADHD, and about 10 percent of boys are on stimulant drugs. We don’t need to make it easier to diagnose ADHD.” Frances further explained, “If we decided as a society that the use of stimulants is good, it shouldn’t be done through a fake medical diagnosis.”

One might presume that with Dr. Frances’ stinging admissions, along with NIMH’s public statement that the DSM “lacks validity”—that it lacks science—that some lawmaking body, in an effort to protect children from fraudulent mental health care, would step up to the plate and initiate an inquiry into psychiatry’s bogus diagnosing.

Not only has this not happened but, rather, quite the opposite has occurred. In what can only be deduced as a pathetic attempt to rescue the APA from becoming an utter joke within the medical community, the CDC released a “first-ever” study about the growing epidemic of childhood mental disorders, which (you guessed it) is based on data of people diagnosed with mental disorders derived from the fraudulent DSM.

Perhaps more interesting is that the CDC does not list a single psychiatric diagnosis under its lists of diseases. ADHD, which the CDC reports in the recently released study “was the most prevalent current diagnosis among children aged 3-17 years,” is described on the CDC website as “one of the most common neurobehavioral disorders of childhood.” The CDC continues in its description of ADHD saying, “Scientists are studying the causes…” and “there is no test to diagnose ADHD.”

There is no medical test for ADHD because the disorder was not discovered in a laboratory, it was invented by a committee as a list of behaviors and repacked as “disease.”

Yep, that’s right. Like every other psychiatric diagnosis, there is no test for ADHD and nobody knows the cause of the alleged childhood mental illness. Still, the CDC explains the study is “an important step to better understand children’s mental disorders, identify gaps in data, and develop public health strategies to protect and promote children’s mental health….”

With all due respect to the CDC, what is important to understand about the study is that the data used to come to its conclusions, that “1 in 5 children in the U.S. suffers from a mental disorder,” is not based in science. Those who participated in the study received diagnoses subjectively pulled from a psychiatric diagnosing manual that has been summarily dismissed by NIMH, the nation’s leading mental health agency, and its equivalent in Europe, the British Psychological Society.

Furthermore, one only need review the “CDC Pledge” and its “Core Values” to fully grasp the blatant psychiatric fraud the CDC appears to be promoting. According to the agency’s website, the CDC pledges “to base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data, openly and objectively derived.” And, under its “Core Values” page, the CDC states “we ensure that our research and our services are based on sound science…”

“Highest quality scientific data?” “Research and services based on sound science?” What part of subjective diagnosing is scientific? According to NIMH, the nation’s leading mental health research body, psychiatry’s book of mental disorders “lacks validity” and it will no longer be using the manual.

One can only wonder at the disconnect between federal agencies, which, in itself, screams for an investigation. One also might begin to question what “science” is being used when the agency actually is researching real diseases?

The CDC, for all its good intentions—” to develop public health strategies to protect and promote children’s mental health”—is not living up to its own stated standards, leaving the nation’s children at continued risk of being labeled with fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses and drugged with extremely dangerous mind-altering drugs.

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Kelly Patricia O’Meara is an award winning, former investigative reporter for the Washington Times, Insight Magazine, penning dozens of articles exposing the fraud of psychiatric diagnosis and the dangers of the psychiatric drugs – including her ground-breaking 1999 cover story, Guns & Doses, exposing the link between psychiatric drugs and acts of senseless violence.  She is also the author of the highly acclaimed book, Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills that Kill.  Prior to working as an investigative journalist, O’Meara spent sixteen years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer to four Members of Congress. She holds a B.S. in Political Science from the University of Maryland.

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Psychiatry’s hour of crisis: new diagnostic manual triggers infighting, boycotts, resignations

Monday, May 20th, 2013

Ottawa Citizen – May 17, 2013
By Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News

200 years after psychiatry was recognized as a medical discipline, a stark question persists: Is psychiatry credible?

“Even at its best psychiatric diagnosis is fiction sold to the public as fact,” Gary Greenberg, author of The Book of Woe; The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

In the early 1970s, psychologist David Rosenhan set out to answer a simple question: Can psychiatrists tell the sane from the insane?

Rosenhan and seven other perfectly rational “pseudopatients” went to a dozen U.S. hospitals complaining that they were hearing voices. All but one were diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a psychiatric ward. Each had been warned by Rosenhan that, to get out, they would have to convince the psychiatric staff they weren’t insane. So, immediately after they were admitted, they stopped mimicking symptoms of “abnormality” and behaved as they normally would.

Still, they were kept in the hospital for periods ranging from seven to 52 days, each finally discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, “in remission.”

The Rosenhan experiment sparked a crisis of confidence in psychiatric diagnosis, a crisis that appears to be playing out again today.

This time the catalyst is the newest and fifth edition of the official guidebook of psychiatry: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5. The encyclopedic tome has undergone its first major revision in nearly two decades and makes its official debut Saturday at the annual meeting of its publisher, the American Psychiatric Association.

The rewrite has been rocked by boycotts and the resignations of some of the very experts tapped to give advice, including the former head of the department of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, John Livesley, who says he quit the DSM-5’s personality disorders work group over a “disregard for evidence.”

Thomas Insel, director of the U.S. Institute of Mental Health — essentially the country’s top psychiatrist — has announced that his agency is “re-orienting” its research away from the DSM over the book’s “lack of validity” while it pursues its own alternative diagnostic system, which Insel promises will be more firmly anchored in brain science.

The leaders of the DSM-5, such as Dr. David Kupfer, saying the book reflects the strongest means available today for cataloguing mental illness, and insisting that while genetic and other biological tests would be the ultimate holy grail of diagnosis, there’s no sign that such foolproof methods will be available anytime soon.

The public clash is making psychiatry look like “nonsense,” says Allen Frances, the man who led the task force that created the fourth edition of the DSM in 1994. “It’s bad for patients. This will discourage people who desperately need help from getting it.”

Frances has been the DSM-5’s most dogged and unapologetic critic. He says the book contains untested diagnoses on the “fuzzy boundary of normality” and that it recklessly lowers the thresholds for existing ones.

“I’m a strong believer in the value of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment when done well,” Frances says. “But it’s silly and harmful to be over-treating people who don’t need it, and tragic to be neglecting the needs of those who do.”

Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg is more blunt. “Even at its best … psychiatric diagnosis is fiction sold to the public as fact,” Greenberg writes in his new book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmasking of Psychiatry. “There is a huge disconnect between what psychiatry claims for itself, and what it can actually do.”

Canadian psychiatrist Joel Paris says that “no one really knows what a mental disorder is,” or how to clearly separate normal from abnormal. “It’s all very fuzzy.”

In other words, 200 years after psychiatry was recognized as a medical discipline, a stark question persists: Is psychiatry credible?

There is no doubt about the validity of psychological suffering. Mental illness, in its extreme, is undeniable. “With psychotic people, there’s very little argument,” says Paris, past chair of the psychiatry department at McGill University.

But our mental reactions to the smaller pieces of daily tragedy are more complex, Paris says. When does the sadness from a breakup become depression? When does normal human experience become somehow “sick”?

“You can diagnose almost anybody with the DSM, and unfortunately this is happening, with a lot of over-diagnosis going on clinically,” Paris says. “A lot of people are being given stimulants because they don’t pay attention, and mood stabilizers because they’re moody and antipsychotics for almost everything these days.”

In fact, there are no valid definitions for many of the conditions so neatly laid out in the DSM, Paris and others argue, and no laboratory test exists that can confirm a diagnosis in psychiatry. Despite growing research into the convolutions and folds of the human brain, the science is revealing more about normal brain functioning than any kind of “psychopathology,” or sickness, Frances says.

Still, psychiatry keeps creating new illness categories, new ways the brain and mind can become “disordered.”

Read the rest of the article here

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Marketing Crazy—manual doctors use to diagnose mental illness has critics fearing a bonanza of over-medication

Friday, May 17th, 2013

The Global Mail – May 17, 2013
by Claire Blumer

Dr Allen Frances is a man with regrets.

The man the New York Times once described as “the most powerful psychiatrist in America” is at the career point where others would retire and board a cruise, to endlessly sail the Caribbean. But Frances can’t stop now. His legacy in the field of mental health is something he’s trying both to destroy and to resurrect.

Twenty years ago he chaired the task force of mental-health clinicians and academics who wrote the fourth version of what’s often called the bible of mental health — that is, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). It’s compiled and distributed by the American Psychiatric Association and it basically determines which symptoms equate to a mental disorder.

Now, with the fifth edition to be released on May 22 — at a mammoth four-day ‘meeting’ keynoted by none other than President Bill Clinton — Frances is doing everything he can to undermine the manual’s contents.

Drafts have been circulated and tested for a a couple of years, but even before the formal launch of DSM-5, Frances had written two books criticising its content: Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis: Responding to the Challenge of DSM-5; and Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life which was released this week). This is despite the fact that DSM-5 still contains the legacy of his own work on DSM-IV. (The publishers dropped the Roman numerals.)

So why such a change of heart?

“Not a change of heart — change of the world,” he says in an interview with The Global Mail. Frances is concerned about the rapid inflation in mental-health diagnoses over the past 35 years. He feels the ups and downs of everyday life are being turned into medical disorders, and he knows from experience that the diagnostic manual can exaggerate that effect, with the result that a disorder label will be attached to more and more people with even mild symptoms.

Read the rest of the article here

Also read, Mental Disorders: The Facts Behind the Marketing Campaign

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Rise in Military Suicides—Look to the quadrupling of drugs prescribed that cause suicide

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

OpEd News— May 16, 2013
by Martha Rosenberg

The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have spent over $4.5 billion on antidepressants, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs over the past decade despite more than 170 warnings issued by international drug regulatory agencies warning of drug induced suicide, violence, mania, psychosis, aggression, hallucinations, death and much more.

Once again the military and mainstream press are searching for all the reasons for troop suicides except for the quadrupling of drugs being prescribed that cause suicide. Before, during and after deployment, today’s military personnel are subject to a stew of drugs—antidepressants, antipsychotics and anticonvulsants—that carry clear suicide warnings.

Why? Because DOD and VA are Big Pharma’s  last unregulated revenue stream and it’s going to get its money’s worth.

At Fort Hood, where 48,000 troops and their families are stationed, 6,000 soldiers were on antidepressants, and 1,400 were on antipsychotic drugs in 2009, reported USA Today. At Fort Bragg, where 50,000 are stationed, 4,994 troops were on antidepressants, and 664 were on antipsychotics in 2010, reported the Fayetteville Observer, adding that “many soldiers take more than one type of medication.”

“Completed suicide rates were approximately twice the base rate following antidepressant starts in VA clinical settings,” says psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has testified at congressional hearings. SSRI antidepressants “can cause or worsen suicidality, aggression and other dangerous mental states.”

Between 2005 and 2009, half of all TRICARE (the military health plan) prescriptions for people between eighteen and thirty-four were for antidepressants and epilepsy drugs like Topamax.  Prescriptions for suicide-linked Neurontin increased 56 percent, reports Military Times. In 2008, according to Military Times, 578,000 epilepsy pills and 89,000 antipsychotics were prescribed to deploying troops. Eighty-nine percent of troops with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are given psychoactive drugs, and 34 percent are given antipsychotics—drugs with clear suicide warnings. A study of 887,859 VA hospital patients recommends “close monitoring” for suicide “after an antidepressant start.”

“At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug,” the Military Timnes site reported in 2010. And “many troops are taking more than one kind, mixing several pills in daily ‘cocktails’ for example, an antidepressant with an antipsychotic to prevent nightmares, plus an anti-epileptic to reduce headaches–despite minimal clinical research testing such combinations.”

One military insider, Dr. Elspeth Ritchie, a fan of SSRI antidepressants,  blames access to loaded weapons and “dear John” letters for the suicides in an Astra-Zeneca funded video.

Right.

With similar denial, the VA’s Iraq War Clinician Guide says, “We recommend SSRIs as first line medications for PTSD pharmacotherapy in men and women with military-related PTSD,” and “Findings from subsequent large-scale trials with paroxetine [Paxil] have demonstrated that SSRI treatment is clearly effective both for men in general and for combat veterans suffering with PTSD.” Clearly, there is a different kind of “service” going on here–service to Big Pharma’s marketing plans.

Martha Rosenberg is a health reporter and commentator whose work has appeared in Consumers Digest, the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Los Angeles Times, Providence Journal and Newsday.

Also read, Psychiatric Drugs & War: A Suicide Mission

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Shrink wrapping—A single book has come to dominate psychiatry. That is dangerous

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

The Economist—May 16, 2013


THE human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. It contains 100 billion nerve cells. Considering how complex that is, it goes wrong remarkably rarely.

But go wrong it sometimes does. Which is why, since 1952, the American Psychiatric Association has published its “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, the DSM. This book, the newest version of which will hit the shops on May 22nd (see article), contains the association’s thinking on what constitutes a disorder of the mind. It is consulted not only by psychiatrists, but also by insurance firms, drug companies and anxious patients and parents—not only in America, but around the world. It has become the industry standard for defining what is and is not a mental illness, and thus who gets treated, and who pays for treatment.

No other major branch of medicine has such a single text, with so much power over people’s lives. And that is worrying. Because in no other branch of medicine is the scientific reality underpinning the pronouncements of doctors so uncertain.

The categorical imperative

This uncertainty flows from a profound ignorance about how brains actually work. Neuroscientists understand how nerve cells work. They also know which bits of the brain deal with vision, locomotion, language, memory and suchlike. But between these two anatomical levels all is darkness. Psychiatrists have thus had to use behaviour patterns as proxies for underlying problems. And what constitutes a pattern is too often a matter of opinion rather than a statistically rigorous fact.

It is this desire to find and classify patterns which gives the DSM its power. By naming things it gives shape to the fledgling science. That is not a bad thing in principle. But in practice it has gone too far. The main criticisms are that it medicalises normal behaviour and that the strict categories of mental illness it creates are increasingly at odds with what research suggests is actually going on in the brain.

Read the rest of the article here

 

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Health Canada—Growing Reports of Deaths For Kids Prescribed Antipsychotics

Monday, May 13th, 2013
The Vancouver Sun- May 13, 2013
by Sharon Kirkey

Deaths reported in children prescribed ‘newer generation’ antipsychotics

Health Canada is receiving growing numbers of reports of serious complications in children taking powerful antipsychotics, including deaths.Once reserved for schizophrenia and mania in adults, the drugs are increasingly being prescribed to children as young as preschoolers.
As of Dec. 31, 2012, Health Canada had received 17 fatal reports in children related to so-called “second generation antipsychotics,” or SGAs, Postmedia News has learned.Four of the reports concerned deaths in babies who were exposed to antipsychotics in the womb.

The government has also received 73 reports of “cardio-metabolic” reactions in children taking the drugs, including dramatic weight gain, high blood pressure and blood sugar abnormalities.

Use of the drugs in children has increased substantially in the last decade. Overall, from 2005 to 2009, antipsychotic drug prescriptions for children and youth in Canada increased by 114 per cent, despite limited evidence about their safety in children.

The drugs are being used for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, “conduct” disorders, mood disorders, aggression and other behavioural problems.

Read the rest of the story here
Search Antipsychotic drug side effects including adverse rections reported to the US FDA, international studies and warnings – here

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Psychiatrists Under Fire— British Psychological Society Attacks Biomedical Model of Mental illness

Monday, May 13th, 2013

The Guardian – May 11, 2013
by Jamie Doward

British psychologists are to say that current psychiatric diagnoses such as bipolar disorder are useless.

There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists.

In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood.

The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out “reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems”, used by psychiatry.

Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP’s statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes.

“On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,” Johnstone said. The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders. For example, the fifth edition of the book, the first for two decades, will classify manifestations of grief, temper tantrums and worrying about physical ill-health as the mental illnesses of major depressive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and somatic symptom disorder, respectively.

Some of the manual’s omissions are just as controversial as the manual’s inclusions. The term “Asperger’s disorder” will not appear in the new manual, and instead its symptoms will come under the newly added “autism spectrum disorder”.

The DSM is used in a number of countries to varying degrees. Britain uses an alternative manual, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) published by the World Health Organisation, but the DSM is still hugely influential – and controversial.

The writer Oliver James, who trained as a clinical psychologist, welcomed the DCP’s decision to speak out against psychiatric diagnosis and stressed the need to move away from a biomedical model of mental distress to one that examined societal and personal factors.

read the rest of the article here

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Should We Dump the DSM? Author exposes DSM’s arbitrary & totalitarian influence in treatment of mental/emotional distress

Friday, May 10th, 2013

Gary Greenberg’s new book skewers the inner workings of the DSM just three weeks before the latest version is scheduled to be released.

The Pacific Standard, May 10, 2013

Editor’s Note: The post originally appeared on The Fix, a Pacific Standard partner site.

“I don’t think psychiatric diagnosis is necessary, at least not until psychiatry has the knowledge to render diagnoses on the same basis as other medical specialties.”

On May 22, the American Psychiatric Association will release the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the DSM-5. The last version, the DSM IV, was published in 1994 and has provided the clinical terms for diagnoses that allow for insurance payments, treatment costs, and public support for such afflictions as Asperger’s and grief—all of which, among a host of established disorders, are set to be altered by the new version.

Last week, Blue Rider Press published Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, a powerful critique of the entire DSM methodology. Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist who also authored Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of an American Disease and The Noble Lie. He has been referred to as “The Dante of our Psychiatric age,” by Errol Morris, and blogs about the DSM for the New Yorker.

With The Book of Woe, written during and after his own participation in the revision process of the DSM-5, Greenberg doesn’t just paint the DSM as irrelevant, but as an arbitrary and totalitarian influence in the treatment of mental and emotional distress. Greenberg makes an unsparing case against the DSM’s hold on the naming rights to our psychic suffering.

What is the most disturbing aspect of the DSM-5 to you?

The most disturbing aspect is not unique to the DSM-5, but intrinsic to any DSM: that a private guild—the American Psychiatric Association (APA)—owns such an important public trust. The DSM plays a significant role in determining who gets treatment, what drugs get approved, what research gets funded, who gets special education services, and the disposition of criminal cases. The APA represents only one of many mental health professions, is rife with conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry, has its own, scientifically questionable approach to treatment, it also stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars from the manual and associated products. That’s unseemly. But even worse, it leaves the public at the mercy of people who are not accountable to anyone except their own organization. It’s the worst kind of privatization.

What effect do you see the DSM-5 having on treatment for drug and alcohol addiction?

I’m not sure the DSM-5 will have any direct effect on treatment; the DSM-5 is not a treatment manual. But any DSM has a major indirect effect on treatment: It provides the diagnoses that are the tickets to treatment resources. To put it more concisely: money. The DSM-5 will most likely eliminate the categories of Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence in favor of a new super-category of Substance Use Disorder. Qualifying for this diagnosis may be easier than for the DSM-IV diagnoses, largely because the number of criteria a patient has to meet has been reduced. Some studies indicate that this will result in a large increase in prevalence. If General Motors comes out with a new car, that doesn’t change the number of drivers, and if the APA comes out with a new diagnosis, that doesn’t change the number of people who will qualify for a mental disorder diagnosis. Whether this happens, and if it does, whether it’s a bad thing (treatment resources are overburdened by an influx of new patients) or a good thing (more people get treatment), or whether it will have any effect at all, remains to be seen.

You say that psychiatry should not have a monopoly on the diagnoses and treatment of human suffering, such as addiction. Who else should be involved? Based on what “expertise” or “interests”?

Diagnosis and treatment are really two separate issues. I don’t think psychiatry claims to have a monopoly on treatment, although it does have (mostly) a monopoly among mental health providers on drug treatments. On this, I think I agree with the psychiatrists. I’m not sure that anyone else besides people who have been to medical school should be prescribing drugs. As for diagnosis, I don’t think psychiatric diagnosis is necessary, at least not until psychiatry has the knowledge to render diagnoses on the same basis as other medical specialties. Psychiatrists don’t treat mental disorders. They treat symptoms. So they don’t really need diagnoses to do their job. But if there has to be psychiatric diagnosis, then it should be in the hands of a public agency, one that doesn’t have a profit motive in fashioning a manual, one that is not wedded to its own professional interests, and one that is not fooling around with the drug industry.

Addiction is increasingly being recognized as a brain disease. One aim of the DSM-5 is said to be to bring diagnoses of substance use disorders into line with the burgeoning neuroscience about addiction. Does the DSM-5 meet its goal?

The only way in which DSM-5‘s addictive disorders section reflects neuroscience is in its reliance on “craving” as one of the two diagnostic criteria for substance use disorder. This change reflects the belief that craving is a single phenomenon with a particular brain chemistry. While there are some indications that this is the case, it is far from proven. 50 or 100 years from now, I am sure our understanding of the brain will seem as laughable as phrenology seems to us. So for the moment, popping people into PET scanners or MRI machines strikes me as wishful thinking multiplied by greed. The fact that addiction is increasingly being recognized as a brain disease does not mean that addiction is—or is best understood as—a brain disease. I don’t doubt that is the direction in which research is moving, but I’m not sure this means we are approaching the truth about addiction, or about the brain and its relationship to the mind.

What is your opinion on the effect of 12-step based programs on recovery—the spiritual solution rather than the medical?

I think the 12-step program is useful for many people, and I have both friends and patients who benefit from it. I also think it is only one of many ways that people can stop using the drugs they are addicted to, and is surely not the only “spiritual” approach. Nor is it necessarily correct to think of it in contradistinction to the medical approach. After all, the 12-step program owes much of its success to a concerted effort on the part of doctors, including psychiatrists, to popularize the disease model of addiction, which Alcoholics Anonymous in many respects originated.

The DSM-5 includes the first “behavioral disorder”—compulsive gambling—in the Addiction section. Proponents say that compulsive behaviors have very similar effects on the brain as substances do. Critics say this is opening the door to the medicalization of more and more of everyday life. What do you think?

I think that long before the behavioral disorders opened the door to medicalization of daily life, that goal had been accomplished. The struggle of psychiatry since 1980 has not been to fashion more and more illnesses, but rather to convince us that when we are unhappy, anxious, compulsive, etc., we have a mental illness. In this they have been successful, at least to judge from the vast increase in numbers of people seeking treatment. It’s a predictable outcome of the DSM approach to mental suffering.

Read the rest of the article here

 

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The New DSM is DOA—Psychiatry’s Billing Bible Takes a Major Hit from Federal Agency

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

By Kelly Patricia O’Meara
May 7, 2013

It’s already old news that the National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, the mother ship of mental health research in the world, has officially diagnosed psychiatry’s billing bible—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5—as suffering from extreme lack of science, proclaiming it dead on arrival.  What isn’t known are the implications of NIMH’s announcement.

Yes, the NIMH director, Dr. Thomas Insel, is another in a long line of well-regarded experts who have publicly criticized the validity of the DSM, stating “patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

In itself, Insel’s announcement is big news, if not decades late, but it is the Director’s explanation for the abrupt withdrawal of support for the manual that finally reveals the great divide between psychiatric opinion and science, and raises questions that, so far, remain unanswered.

According to Insel, “The weakness of the manual is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS,” says Insel, “the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.” In short, there is no objective, confirmable, abnormality for any alleged psychiatric disorder.

While it is an encouraging first step to have the premier mental health research institute reject 60 years of psychiatric opinion, it does not address the coming fallout. For example, given that the NIMH has, for all intent and purposes, made the DSM irrelevant, how will that affect insurance payments for not only billing of DSM diagnoses, but also reimbursements for psychiatric drugs recommended as “treatment” for the diagnosis?

More importantly, since the world’s premier mental health research body has so blatantly admitted the uselessness of the DSM, when will the government, which spends hundreds-of-billions of dollars on mental health, end its funding of the mental illness programs that are based on the DSM, which Dr. Insel says “lack validity.”

Federal funding (taxpayer dollars) for mental health care is skyrocketing.  For example, in 2012, $140 billion was spent on mental health services in the U.S. and treatment of psychiatric disorders, derived from the DSM, costs 200 percent more than general medical care.

When will the government, which spends hundreds-of-billions of dollars on mental health, end its funding of the mental illness programs that are based on the DSM, which Dr. Insel says “lack validity.”

Furthermore, due to the diagnostic criteria of the DSM, in the last 20 years, the rates of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have tripled, while “autistic disorder” and “childhood bipolar disorder” each increased by an astounding 40-fold. Will federal and state governments continue to reimburse for mental disorders that have been proclaimed to “lack validity?”

For that matter, one must wonder how pharmaceutical companies will handle the abrupt reversal? After all, psychiatric drugsare alleged to “treat” specific areas of the brain – to increase naturally occurring chemicals because of that oft-stated imbalance – and Dr. Insel has most demonstrably stated that the alleged disorders are not based in science.

Even Columbia University psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Spitzer, the Chairman of the DSM-III, has stated that “no biological markers have been identified” for any alleged psychiatric disorder.  So, if there are no “biological markers” and no validity to the diagnosis, does it not also raise serious questions about the use of pharmaceutical psychiatric drugs?

Psychiatric drug sales is a nearly hundred billion dollar a year business

Given that psychiatric drug sales is a nearly hundred billion dollar a year business, one can only wonder what is being said around pharmaceutical board rooms at this moment. Perhaps something along the lines of Insel’s got some “splainin” to do.

However, while there is little chance of crocodile tears being spilled for the pharmaceutical companies possible revenue loss, it does leave one to question how governmental bodies can continue to reimburse for psychiatric drug treatments when its premier mental health agency has declared there is no evidence to support any biological efficacy. After all, if there is no biological abnormality, what is being “treated?”

Taking it to its extreme, one also might wonder if the U.S. Department of Justice might have a few questions for not only the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities, but maybe even the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for approving the drugs that “treat” the alleged psychiatric disorders. At some point, opinion, guesses, assumptions and wishful thinking may have crossed the line of fraud.

Ultimately, though, the biggest question is how the people who have been diagnosed with these alleged psychiatric disorders, and “treated” with extremely dangerous mind-altering drugs, will respond to the news that there is no validity to the diagnosis.

Only time will tell what the answers are to these questions, but one thing is certain…the people most certainly “deserve better.”

Read more from psychiatrists and MD’s who have exposed psychiatry’s unscientific basis for diagnosing mental disorders

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Kelly Patricia O’Meara is an award winning, former investigative reporter for the Washington Times, Insight Magazine, penning dozens of articles exposing the fraud of psychiatric diagnosis and the dangers of the psychiatric drugs – including her ground-breaking 1999 cover story, Guns & Doses, exposing the link between psychiatric drugs and acts of senseless violence.  She is also the author of the highly acclaimed book, Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills that Kill.  Prior to working as an investigative journalist, O’Meara spent sixteen years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer to four Members of Congress. She holds a B.S. in Political Science from the University of Maryland.

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