Mental health professionals say new diagnoses will lead to overmedication

Salon Magazine, December 27, 2011

by Rob Waters

“epidemics of over-diagnosis in child psychiatry” have caused "huge numbers of children to be unnecessarily labeled with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder and treated with medications."

Anyone who’s ever tried to get reimbursed by a health insurance company after seeing a psychiatrist or psychotherapist, or taking a child or teenager to one, has no doubt noticed the incomprehensible numbers that appear on the clinician’s statement, perhaps preceding some slightly less imponderable phrase.

Maybe you are a 296.22 (major depressive disorder, single episode, mild) or a 300.00 (anxiety disorder NOS–not otherwise specified). Hopefully, you are not a 301.83 (borderline personality disorder). Your kid might be a 313.81 (oppositional defiant disorder) or, more likely, a 314.01 (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type).

Since 1952, a tome called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as the DSM, has been reducing to a few digits the psychological malady said to afflict a patient. This bible of mental health treatment, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), provides a list and description of every mental health condition known to—or invented by—psychiatry, from histrionic personality disorder (301.50) to transvestic fetishism (302.3).

Over the decades, the manual, adapted from a guide for mental diseases developed by Army and Navy psychiatrists, has ballooned. The number of listed disorders tripled to nearly 300. A few have been discredited and dumped along the way. Most famous were battles over the inclusion of homosexuality. Successive iterations of the manual listed homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” then modified that to describe a more limited “sexual orientation disturbance” among people who were “in conflict with” their attraction to people of the same sex. That was later replaced by a disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality,” applied to those whose homosexual arousal was a source of distress. That item was dropped in the DSM-III-R, published in 1987.

The great book’s coming edition, the DSM-5, is slated for publication in May 2013. As the task force producing it has posted drafts on its website, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction has exploded into a full-scale revolt by members of U.S. and British psychological and counseling organizations. The chief complaint is that the newest version will lower the criteria needed to diagnose some conditions, creating “subthreshold” disorders, and generally making it easier for healthcare professionals to label a person with a psychiatric disorder and medicate him or her.

The latest rebellion against the DSM-5 began with a salvo from across the Atlantic. In June, a special committee of the British Psychological Society complained in a letter to the APA that “clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences.” The committee criticized the proposed creation of an “attenuated psychosis syndrome”—a sort of poor-man’s psychosis with less severe symptoms—“as an opportunity to stigmatize eccentric people.” They also objected to a proposed reduction in the number of symptoms needed to diagnose adolescents with attention deficit disorder (ADD) because it might increase diagnoses and the use of meds.

Then David Elkins, professor emeritus at Pepperdine University and president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association, formed a committee to discuss similar objections and draft a petition enumerating them. In October, he posted the petition online. “I figured we’d get a couple hundred signatures,’’ Elkins said.

The response stunned him and his colleagues. The petition attracted more than 6,000 signatures in three weeks; as of mid-December it had topped 9,300 signatories and garnered the endorsement of 35 organizations. On Nov. 8, American Counseling Association president Don Locke jumped in with a letter to the APA objecting to the “incomplete or insufficient empirical evidence” underlying the proposed revisions and expressing “uncertainty about the quality and credibility” of the DSM-5.

“This has become a grassroots movement among mental health professionals, who are saying we already have a national problem with overmedication of children and the elderly, and we don’t want to exacerbate that,” says Elkins.

For many critics, Exhibit A is childhood ADD. As the disorder describing fidgety, easily distracted kids morphed from “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood” to the current “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” the number of children given the diagnosis exploded, fueling, by one account, a 700 percent increase in the use of Ritalin and other stimulants in the 1990s. Diagnosis requires checking six of nine boxes from a list of symptoms that include “often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly” and “often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat.” Sound familiar, parents?

Two other newly proposed disorders singled out as problematic in the petition are “mild neurocognitive disorder” in the elderly and “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” in children and adolescents. Both lack a solid basis in research and may fuel the use of powerful antipsychotic medications, which cause weight gain, diabetes and a host of other metabolic problems, the petition says.

“We are gravely concerned that if this is published as is in 2013, it will create false epidemics where hundreds of thousands of children and the elderly who really are normal will be diagnosed with a mental disorder and given powerful psychiatric medications that have dangerous side effects,” Elkins says. “That is not tolerable.”

David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who chairs the task force overseeing the manual’s preparation, says he expects the final number of disorders included in the DSM-5 to be about the same as in the current book. He says he welcomes the criticism and that nothing is final. The task force has been testing proposed new diagnoses in 2,300 patients at seven adult treatment centers and four adolescent centers that are acting as field-test sites, he says.

“There’s a myth that all the decisions have been made, when in fact, all the decisions haven’t been made,” he says. “Just because [things have] been proposed doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll end up in the DSM-5. If they don’t achieve a level of reliability, clinician acceptability, and utility, it’s unlikely they’ll go forward.”

The most surprising critic of the DSM is a one-time pillar of the psychiatric establishment. Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University, chaired the task force that created the DSM-4. Now he’s railing against both the process and proposed content of the new DSM in blogs on the website for Psychology Today that blast the new revision as “untested” and “unscientific.”

Psychiatric diagnoses are loose enough already, Frances  told me, and that laxity has led to “epidemics of over-diagnosis in child psychiatry” causing huge numbers of children to be unnecessarily labeled with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder and treated with medications.

“DSM has to be a safe, reliable and credible guide to current clinical practice,” he says. “It can’t be an untested program for future research.’’

The user revolt against the DSM-5 has emerged as a major challenge to the document, Frances says, and its future is looking unclear. He and Elkins are proposing that an independent committee of experts review the proposed draft and make recommendations.

The fight over the DSM-5 pits some of the greatest minds and biggest egos in the world of psychiatry, but it’s more than a battle among 301.81s (narcissistic personality disorder). For people seeking help for life’s problems who don’t want to be labeled mentally ill or have their treatment limited to medication, and for clinicians who want to help people without reducing them to a category, the stakes are high.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/27/therapists_revolt_against_psychiatrys_bible/singleton/

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The Irish Times, October 11, 2011
by John McCarthy

Click on image to read the Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights

I AM MAD, a proud member of the mad community. Of course, madness exists – it’s normal, it’s as old as mankind, and it’s in every family. But if I have a disease in my brain called “mental illness”, I want the doctors to prove it. The brain is the most complicated organ in the body, yet doctors diagnose mental illness just by looking at you, and then you are labelled for life.

I’ve been diagnosed with unipolar depression, bipolar or manic depression, dysphoric elation – whatever that’s supposed to be – and paranoia. I’ve been told that I have a chemical imbalance in my brain that shows I have a mental illness. Yet not one of these fellows even took my pulse. They did it by sitting looking at me and talking to me.

I had a breakdown as a consequence of my dysfunctional childhood and because my business was collapsing – the banks were hounding me and I owed thousands. I was locked up for a year. I attempted suicide when I was on my heaviest dose of medication – a mixture of 10 different drugs a day.

There’s no such thing as a sudden breakdown: the madness was like the San Andreas Fault within me, lying dormant and buried. It was like an emotional stroke, a stroke of the spirit rather than the brain. But stroke victims can recover and they aren’t permanently labelled as disabled.

Our mental health laws allow two psychiatrists to sign a piece of paper and lock you up for the rest of your life because you’ve been diagnosed with a mental health problem. It’s based on nothing more than opinion, and that’s part of the cruelty of the mental health system in this country. You can be incarcerated and force treated against your will.

Why try to define madness? We should stop defining. We are all individuals with individual lives, and people react differently to different life situations. But the pharmaceutical industry, working with psychiatrists, tries to mass treat the individual, putting everyone in the same box.

Of course, madness has a downside. I hated it, but my hate was for myself really. I lost the ability to receive love. I was a complete pain in the arse, but my wife and family never stopped loving me. Yet you can learn from being mad. In fact, it was one of the most constructive learning experiences of my life.

I learned how to receive love with confidence. I have learned how to be at peace with who I am.

How do you learn to receive love? Well, if someone says you look well today, you say thank you. That’s the first step, but when I was in my negative side, that felt as hard as climbing Everest.

The Murphy and Ryan reports quite clearly showed that when you give power and authority to one section of the community over another abuse is bound to follow.

Mad Pride Ireland brings out the stories of people who have been abused under this system.

Society has bought into this idea that the mad community is dangerous and to be feared. The nuns got away with the same kind of thing for years with “loose women”; they took the problem part of the community away and buried them.

But we need to be free to ask awkward questions, to challenge the ethos of power and control. There is an aura of fear around psychiatric units. If you’re hopeless and helpless, you’ll be embraced and looked after. If you start asking questions, if you speak out with strength, they don’t want to know. When I started questioning things, I was offered more medication and told I was developing paranoia.

With every Mad Pride event we open up a public playground; there are no protests, no speeches. We scan everyone for normality – clowns use rubber chicken “normality detectors” to check people for signs of normality – and no-one has passed that test yet. We had 17,000 people at our event in Cork, all rocking to the music on a beautiful summer’s day.

It’s all about showing that madness is an everyday occurrence that affects everyone, and it can be dealt with in an open, loving way, with no fear. Now key people are beginning to listen to us. It shows what you can do with no money but a bit of goodwill.

Today I am lying here with motor neurone disease. I prefer the old name for it – creeping paralysis. You lose the use of your limbs, the ability to swallow, you end up incontinent. It’s a relentless disease. But there’s an honesty about the way neurology approaches it. Neurologists admit they don’t know the cause or cure for it.

They have done every test under the sun, I’ve undergone the deepest brain scan imaging in the country. But they admit they don’t know where it comes from and there is no fix, no treatment. Yet a psychiatrist can diagnose you just by looking at you.

I am happy for the psychiatric diagnoses I have had to be scientifically tested. I have a suggestion: I will put myself forward for psychiatrists to carry out any test they wish to do, in public, and I will publish the results. I’m dying, so I have nothing to lose.

click image to read more

But no-one is ever going to get a diagnosis of mental illness out of science: you will only ever get a diagnosis based on an assessment of behaviour. There is no science behind this disease, yet we have given the power of law to this guesswork. How are they getting away with this?

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2011/1011/1224305573629.html

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Psychology Today
by Allen Frances, Former Chairman, DSM Task Force

Video: ADHD Labeling Normal Kids "Mentally Ill"

The Child Work Group Fails Again To Learn From Its Experience

Martin Whiteley is an MP who represents Perth in the Australian parliament. He has been actively involved in mental health issues and succeeded in a crusade to curb what had been Perth’s alarming overdiagnosis and overmedication of  Attention Deficit Disorder Disorder (ADD). Mr Whiteley has become expert in the intricacies of ADD and is alarmed that the changes suggested for DSM 5 will greatly exacerbate the ADD fad he worked so hard to tame. Read Mr Whiteley’s careful item by item review and you will be alarmed too:

http://speedupsitstill.com/dsm-5-proposal-adhd-%e2%80%93-making-l…

We are already in the midst of a false epidemic of ADD. Rates in kids that were 3-5% when DSM IV was published in 1994 have now jumped to 10%. In part this came from changes in DSM IV, but most of the inflation was caused by a marketing blitz to practitioners that accompanied new on-patent drugs amplified by new regulations that also allowed direct to consumer advertising to parents and teachers. In a sensible world, DSM 5 would now offer much tighter criteria for ADD and much clearer advice on the steps needed in its differential diagnosis. This would push back ,however feebly, against the skilled and well financed drug company sell. DSM 5 should work hard to improve its text, not play carelessly with the ADD criteria in a way that may unleash a whole set of dreadful unintended consequences- unneeded medication, stigma, lowered expectations, misallocation of resources, and contribution to the illegal secondary market peddling stimulants for recreation or performance enhancement.

The DSM 5 child and adolescent work group has perversely gone just the other way. It proposes to make an already far too easy diagnosis much looser.

How puzzling and troubling. Child mental health has already promoted no fewer than three false epidemics in just 15 years- ADD, childhood bipolar, and autism. Any reasonable group would now be learning from this past experience. For the future, it would be chastened, cautious, and eager to correct the damage it has done- rather than embarking on any reckless new adventures. A prudent DSM 5 would tighten its criteria for ADD and put in a black box warning against the blatant current off-the-DSM-label diagnosis of childhood bipolar. DSM 5 instead does everything wrong it possibly could with ADD and then remarkably takes the mischievous further step of adding yet another new candidate for diagnostic fad (Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder) likely that will increase the already scandalous overprescription of dangerous antipsychotic medication to children. Go figure.

In many circles, the accepted wisdom is that DSM 5 workers are making such unaccountably bad decisions because they want to promote drug sales to kids. To support this accusation, cynics raise the Biederman affair and also APA’s previous excessive financial support from Pharma.

This is one time when the cynics are dead wrong. The DSM 5 work group is making simply disastrous decisions for the purist of reasons. These are not people with close industry ties and their conflict of interest is intellectual, not financial. Experts in child psychiatry are dangerously naïve about the likely misuses of their well meaning suggestions. They are blind, not corrupt.

What is needed is outside supervision to curb child psychiatry’s seemingly endless taste for diagnostic excess. And APA should also realize the grave harm done to its credibility by the appearance that DSM 5 is far too Pharma friendly even if this has not been the real motivation behind the bad DSM 5 proposals.

To make matters worse, the DSM 5 field trial will be completely worthless- providing no information at all about the magnitude of the rate increase in ADD that will occur once DSM 5 opens the floodgates even wider. We did careful field trials before DSM IV to compare the impact on rates of the different possible definitions and predicted a 15% increase for the one finally chosen. Instead, the rates more than doubled- courtesy of pressure from the drug companies. For obscure reasons, DSM 5 is conducting extraordinarily expensive field trials that (again perversely) avoid the only question that really counts- just how high will the rates skyrocket under the even easier to meet new DSM 5 definition.

DSM 5 will be flying completely blind into dangerous territory, unimpeded by adult supervision. The leaders of child psychiatry (who already have the unfortunate track record of producing fads) will now be given a free pass to further feed their blossoming ADD fad. Will they never learn from past mistakes?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201108/dsm-5-will-further-inflate-the-add-bubble

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Scoop News – July 25, 20011

By Martha Rosenberg

"Psychiatry mimics science but is not a real science. The symptoms it treats are subjective and have not been demonstrated and cannot be demonstrated at the cellular level."

Phillip Sinaikin, MD, is a Florida psychiatrist who has been in practice for 25 years. His new book focuses on excesses and industry influence in the field of psychiatry.

Rosenberg: Your new book, Psychiatryland, traces how deception, conflicts of interest, medical enabling and direct-to-consumer advertising have resulted in millions being on psychiatric drugs they don’t need. One patient you describe has legitimate mourning and grief work to do after his wife leaves him for his own cousin. But his grief is pathologized into “bipolar disorder” by the system, including his own mother.

Rosenberg: Can you explain the popularity of such drug cocktails? The drugs haven’t been tested together so the patient is a guinea pig. And their total cost can exceed $1000 per month, often shuttled onto taxpayers because the people are considered disabled under federal entitlement programs.

Sinaikin: Psychiatry mimics science but is not a real science. The symptoms it treats are subjective and have not been demonstrated and cannot be demonstrated at the cellular level. That gives psychiatrists free reign to just experiment and symptom chase, often insanely chasing the side effects and negative interactions of the current drug regimen with more and more drugs. Polypharmacy is also a way psychiatrists can distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive market. No one believes you need a specialist for one drug — any primary care physician can give you Zoloft — but for multi-drug therapy you do. If you don’t write a prescription as a psychiatrist, you won’t work these days. It is like being a pacifist and having no choice but working in a bullet factory.

Rosenberg: A lot of this trial-and error polypharmacy is buttressed by the concept of “treatment resistance” and “Prozac poop-out.”

Sinaikin: I write in the book that an antidepressant not working anymore is no different than getting used to anything that used to thrill us. We buy our dream house with two bedrooms and a garage and after a while it doesn’t make us happy anymore and we are eyeing the house with three bedrooms and a pool. Another example, of course, is falling in and out of love.

Rosenberg: You document in Psychiatryland the creation of new diseases to sell drugs including adults now diagnosed with childhood disorders like ADD and children with adult disorders like bipolar and depression.

Sinaikin: One scientific article I read about the new childhood disorders sounds like a satire. Two well-respected “thought leaders” in psychiatry were debating the underlying pathology of a three-year-old girl who ran out in traffic. The first doctor believed her dangerous behavior was indicative of an Oppositional-Defiant disorder. The other doctor argued her impulsive act represented grandiose delusions where this girl believed she was special and cars could not harm her. She was, therefore, bipolar.

Rosenberg: Another shocker in your book is how everyday drug and alcohol addicts were recast as having psychiatric conditions for money.

Sinaikin: The insurance companies told the rehabs they would no longer pay for inpatient rehab for heroin, cocaine or alcohol unless there was also another Axis 1 psychiatric disorder like bipolar disorder or major depression. I was working in a drug treatment facility when the change happened. Since addicts typically complain of anxiety and depression, a completely understandable emotional response to their toxic lifestyles, it was “no problem” to add a new label and throw a few psychiatric drugs at their now relabeled “dual diagnosis.” Of course the central tenet of recovery, taking personal responsibility, was buried by the new victim narrative of self-medicating a previously undiagnosed mental illness.

Rosenberg: Treating addiction with psychiatric drugs before or instead of seeking a higher power is antithetical to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Sinaikin: As I say throughout my book, human beings are indescribably complex. There are times when the dual-diagnosis concept is necessary and helpful but clearly not applicable to 100% of the cases of addiction as it is now applied. I believe that the 12 Step model is an ideal model of recovery. Patients can have the help whenever they are truly ready, not just when someone decides to foist it on them. Most importantly, the addicts helping other addicts are doing it to facilitate their own recovery and not for ulterior motives such as money. Amazingly, in a world gone profit crazy 12 Step recovery programs are still free. I conceptualize the 12 Steps as a distillation of the spiritual principles world’s great religions but no one is forced to believe in anything including God.

Rosenberg: Given conflicts of interest at the American Psychiatric Association, which drives psychiatric diagnoses, in the FDA drug approval process itself and the legions of doctors willing to huckster for pharma as thought leaders or Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), do you see any hope of rescuing people from Psychiatryland?

Sinaikin: The system is unbelievably bad and even worse than it looks. But, I think a goal that could be achieved would be a repeal of direct-to-consumer advertising. Patients now come into my office asking me if they have ADD or bipolar disorder or if they can have Cymbalta. When I began practicing psychiatry, long before direct-to-consumer advertising, this would never have happened.

Psychiatryland

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Natural News, May 10,2011
by Monica G. Young

People who obediently follow the herd, never markedly sad, angry or excited; children who play quietly and never annoy or talk out of turn – this is the object of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industries. And when anyone steps out of line, the answer is simple: stamp them “abnormal” and give them a pill.

Human sorrow could soon be more easily diagnosed and medicated as a mental disorder. Psychiatrists creating the next edition of the psychiatric bible – the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-5, due out in 2013) – are recommending to eliminate the time clause for major depressive disorder. So instead of grieving for two months to qualify, if you mourn the loss of a loved one for only two weeks doctors could label you mentally ill and prescribe a drug.

The first DSM published in 1952 was a 132-page volume listing 128 mental disorders. With nearly 900 pages, the current edition (DSM-IV, published in 1994) lists 357 disorders – an over 300% increase. Since its release, DSM-IV has generated a 256% increase in psychiatric drug sales and billions of dollars in government funding.

Drug companies are notorious for downplaying disabling effects of psychotropic drugs. Additionally, medical journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Whitaker reports that many psychiatric drug users acquire a more severe form of mental illness than they started with. For instance, antidepressant users tend to spiral down into long-term depression – yielding even greater profit for psychiatrists and drugmakers.

Creating drugged and docile youth

Psychiatry’s worst social meltdown concerns our youngest. The threat of ADHD, bipolar, autism and other alleged childhood diseases – which duped teachers, counselors and parents are on constant lookout for – presses children into a “socially acceptable” mold.

Several ADHD websites even boast that medication benefits include: “the child is no longer distinguishable from classmates” – their words!

A Medco Health Solutions Report in 2009 revealed children to be the pharmaceutical industry’s most expanding market. Child prescriptions have increased at four times the rate of the general population.

Every new disorder equals more prescriptions and more profit. With changes planned for DSM-5, toddlers with recurring tantrums could be drugged for “temper dysregulation disorder”, upset six-year-olds could be drugged for “Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder” and kids with “overly familiar behavior (verbal or physical violation of culturally sanctioned social boundaries)” could be drugged for “Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder.”

Social totalitarians

DSM officials admit that everyone has instances of sadness and anger, and assert that diagnoses depend on the severity and frequency of symptoms.

And who decides when a child or adult has crossed from normality into abnormality? Psychiatrists – a field financially joined at the hip with Big Pharma.

Per the current DSM, social no-nos deserving an abnormal imprint (and likely to lead to a prescription drug) include:

* Heightened self-esteem (“manic episode”)
* Very sensitive to criticism (“avoidant personality disorder”)
* Defying and disobeying authority figures (“oppositional defiant disorder”)
* Behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture (“personality disorder”)

The Soviet Union also used psychiatric labels for social control. People who defied communism were diagnosed as mentally ill, isolated and forcefully medicated.

Ahead of his time, Aldous Huxley anticipated psychiatric totalitarianism in his classic novel, Brave New World: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma* to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are.” [*In this fictional novel, soma is a hallucinogenic drug used by those in power to subdue the citizens.]

Sources include:

http://www.montrealgazette.com/heal…

http://communities.washingtontimes….

http://www.cchrint.org/cchr-issues/…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOcJ…

About the author:
Monica G. Young is a human rights investigator and educational writer with a purpose to expose the truth about the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries and safeguard human liberty. She encourages non-drug alternative approaches based on healthy lifestyles and human decency. She supports the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and like-minded groups.

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The Epoch Times – April 11, 2011

by Martha Rosenberg

AstraZeneca has already settled nearly 25,000 personal-injury lawsuits pertaining to its antipsychotic drug Seroquel

Google the word “depression” and the first search result you’ll get will be for the antipsychotic drug Seroquel XR.

Visit WebMD and you’ll find the home page hosts similar ads for Seroquel XR, above and adjacent to the lead news story.

Who would know that AstraZeneca inked the largest multi-state consumer-protection settlement on record relating to deceptive Seroquel marketing on March 14 for $68.5 million? And only a year after inking a similar settlement related to burying side effect and safety information for $520 million with the government!

Who would know AstraZeneca has already settled nearly 25,000 personal-injury lawsuits pertaining to Seroquel, with more to come, says ABC News?

First approved in 1997, Seroquel has enjoyed the camel-nose-under-the-tent phenomenon known as indications creep. First approved for schizophrenia, it was later approved for bipolar disorder and psychiatric conditions in children.

But it was Seroquel’s 2009 approval as a drug for depression that helped it reach its spectacular sales of $5.3 billion in 2010 thanks to the United States’ walloping depression “market” of 20 million depression sufferers.

Seroquel’s blood sugar, weight gain, and heart side effects are well-known. That’s why FDA regulators opposed its use as a first-choice, stand-alone treatment for the 10 percent of the U.S. population with depression when safer drugs exist.

“I saw no clear advantage demonstrated in efficacy,” said Dr. Wayne Goodman, who chaired the FDA panel considering the depression indication. “There were side effects, and I would expect unintended consequences associated with wide-scale use of the drug.”

The drug also can cause increased mortality in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis, suicide, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, cataracts, seizures, increase in blood pressure, and movement disorders in neonates when their mothers take it.

Seroquel’s fraud trail is also well-known, with more than six conflict-of-interest scandals swirling around Seroquel researchers and promoters. Psychiatrist Richard Borison was sentenced to a 15-year prison sentence in 1998 for a pay-to-play Seroquel research scheme, which helped establish Seroquel’s original perception as being safe.

But how many realize Seroquel’s cost to the individual taxpayer and health insurance consumers at a red-book price of almost $500 per month per person?

Auditors with the Michigan Corrections Department say the state could save $350,000 a month by switching just half of its Seroquel prescriptions to another pill. North Carolina spends $29.4 million per year on Seroquel prescriptions. Who knows how much more states and taxpayers are paying to control the metabolic side effects that emerge from taking Seroquel?

Reports are also starting to surface about the effects $6,000-a-year Seroquel prescriptions are having on rising insurance premiums for private insurance holders.

In fact, the public is really paying twice for irrepressible Seroquel marketing: first, for drug purchases by state and private plans, and, second, in suffering the drug’s side effects.

Martha Rosenberg is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/health/seroquel-marketing-undeterred-by-deceptive-marketing-settlement-54506.html

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Business Day – March 17, 2011

by Marika Sboros

At the heart of this matter is a nasty predilection some psychiatrists have for medicalising normality

Diagnosis is a slippery slope. It involves concepts that are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries

SOME psychiatrists — the ones who don’t believe they are godlike creatures — are in a bit of a tizz these days. They are worried about all the damage they might have unwittingly done by misdiagnosing mental illness.

Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi could help to ease their furrowed brows.

Some background, before I explain that apparent non-sequitur: In a soul-searching analysis of his profession in Wired magazine recently, US psychiatrist Dr Allen Frances declares that mental disorders “can’t be defined”, and it’s “bull—-” to suggest otherwise.

Frances is lead editor of the DSM-IV, the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It’s a publication that has been described as “the bible” and “the imperial doctrine” of psychiatrists.

It’s what shrinks use, in their godlike wisdom, to decide whether or not you are mentally ill — and then to prescribe powerful, dangerous drugs, and other treatments that can turn you into a shadow of your former self.

In the gut-wrenching Wired article, Frances says: “We psychiatrists have made mistakes that had terrible consequences.”

In particular, he believes the manual has inadvertently facilitated the massive increase in recent years of diagnoses of autism, attention deficit disorders and bipolar depression — that used to be called manic depression, because of the manic swings in mood that characterise the condition.

He believes psychiatrists largely bear the responsibility for a massive increase in child bipolar diagnoses, and an epidemic of prescriptions for dangerous, antipsychotic drugs for very young children — below the age of five.

At the heart of this matter is a nasty predilection some psychiatrists have for medicalising normality, or as Wired writer Gary Greenberg says of the DSM, “to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness, and then treat them with psychiatric drugs”.

After all, it’s one thing to be thought of as having the blues after a protracted period of difficulty in your life. It’s quite another to be diagnosed as nuts. Mental illness is a serious diagnosis, aggravated by the burden of stigma that weighs down those deemed to have it. It wreaks havoc on lives, families, reputations and careers.

Yet diagnosis is a slippery slope. It involves concepts that “are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries”, says Frances.

He has accused colleagues “not just of bad science, but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies”, as Greenberg so eloquently puts it.

Frances has joined forces with Dr Robert Spitzer, editor of the previous edition DSM-III, to prevent the current DSM-V from bulldozing its way down the same damaging path.

That’s a battle they look unlikely to win, given the power of the vested interests involved. And while this may all seem a little in-medical-house, it has implications for the many at the mercy of psychiatrists.

Frances fears the DSM will continue the “wholesale imperial medicalisation of normality”. It may create yet another bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry with a proposed, new “pre-psychotic disorder” — as if the manual doesn’t contain enough disorders from which pharmaceutical companies can make massive profits.

Of course, there’s nothing new about the idea that psychiatry is unscientific. The most famous proponent of that is US psychiatrist Dr Thomas Szaz, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Centre since 1990.

Szaz put his iconoclastic views forward in his books, The Myth of Mental Illness, published in 1960, and 10 years later in The Manufacture of Madness: A comparative study of the inquisition and the mental health movement.

These are damning critiques from a fine mind on psychiatry’s moral and scientific foundations — and mania for social control.

But what, you might ask, has this to do with Gaddafi?

Well, the Libyan leader is nothing if not a fascinating specimen, psychiatrically speaking, and an argument for the existence of mental illness. After all, if something looks like a duck, acts like a duck, walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, it’s a duck.

Gaddafi looks, acts, sounds and struts around like a madman. He provides a veritable smorgasbord of disorders guaranteed to titillate the mental tastebuds of orthodox psychiatrists, and have them reaching for their prescription pads in a flash.

Gaddafi, according to DSM specifications, could be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder — psychobabble psychiatrists have dreamt up to pigeonhole people who don’t or won’t do as others expect them to do.

He’s more likely to be diagnosed with into-the-abyss megalomania, paranoia, psychopathy, with a hint of schizophrenia.

Szaz might argue that Gaddafi’s madness is manufactured, a product of the toxic environment he created over the 42 years of his rule, wallowing in the absolute power that corrupts body and mind absolutely.

His bloated, puffy, sallow complexion suggests bad diet, and other unhealthy lifestyle habits that may contribute to the misfiring of neurons in his grey matter. Yet I doubt even the humane and holistic treatment methods Szaz advocates could bring Gaddafi back from the mad brink to anything resembling rational, normal, decent behaviour.

Marika Sboros is Health News editor.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=137544

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There’s a reason psychiatrists prescribe drugs rather than talking therapy: the latter makes no money for pharmaceutical firms

The Guardian
By Harriet Fraad
March 15, 2011

More than one in ten Americans takes Prozac; the US comprises 5% of the world's population, yet consumes two thirds of psychological medications. Photograph: Stone/Jonathan Nourok/Getty

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It took the discovery of guns and grenades to suspend the license of a psychiatrist who some say should have come under scrutiny years earlier

Chicago Tribune
By Megan Twohey
February 24, 2011

One night a Crestwood police sergeant doing a routine building check noticed an open door to the office of psychiatrist Joel Carroll. Stepping inside the cluttered office, he discovered roaming cats, a Colt AR-15 assault rifle and other guns, ammunition, military-grade smoke grenades, sex toys, and pornography.

“Well, for the lack of better terminology, we considered it a pigsty,” Sgt. Thomas Kaniewski testified about his April 2009 discovery. “It looked in complete disarray. We couldn’t believe that someone could actually conduct business in an office like that because of the conditions it was in.”

When state regulators determined that Carroll had engaged in sexual misconduct and committed other violations of the state Medical Practice Act, they suspended his license, proclaiming him “a danger to his patients,” according to state records.

But the psychiatrist’s practice could have been shut down years earlier, after the Illinois Department of Corrections in 2007 found that Carroll — as a state contractor — committed inappropriate conduct with a female inmate and barred him from working in a prison, a Tribune investigation showed.

Critics say the case raises questions about a crucial part of the medical disciplinary system.

State agencies, county prosecutors, insurance companies, and health care employers and associations are mandatory reporters — they’re required to report potentially dangerous and unprofessional doctors to medical regulators, who can bar the doctors from practicing and keep patients out of harm’s way.

But the mandatory reporters sound few alarms, and when they do, regulators rarely take action, the Tribune found. There were 348 mandatory reports filed with the state in 2009. That’s out of nearly 46,000 physicians statewide. In only one case did the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation respond by suspending the physician’s license, records show.

Sue Hofer, a department spokeswoman, said it can take longer than a year to discipline a doctor following a mandatory report. She said regulators frequently learn of a dangerous doctor from members of the public before being told about the doctor from a mandatory reporter. If they are already investigating, she said, the regulators don’t make a separate record of the notification.

But in the case of Carroll, the corrections department provided no notification that the psychiatrist had breached security during a visit to the inmate and allegedly made a sexual advance toward her, even though state agencies must report any potential violation of the Medical Practice Act. Carroll’s actions might have amounted to “dishonorable, unethical or unprofessional conduct” — a violation under the act that can lead to suspension — but regulators were robbed of the opportunity to seek disciplinary action, said John Goldberg, a former medical prosecutor.

“The Department of Corrections should have reported, but these agencies hardly ever do,” Goldberg said. “If they had, the regulators could have opened an investigation that at the very least asked: What’s the explanation for your actions against this inmate? What else is this doctor doing?”

Regulators also were not contacted at the time by Wexford Health Sources, the contracting agency that fired him after his administrative lockout from the prison system. Health care employers must report terminating or restricting a doctor’s privileges based on actions that may directly threaten patient care. Elaine Gedman, a spokeswoman for the Pittsburgh-based company, said that in 2007 the “Department of Corrections did not necessarily disclose their rationale for revoking an employee’s clearance.”

“When we look at this, we realize there are places where dangerous doctors get caught, where they’re identified, but no one reports it, or the state doesn’t take action,” said Gary Schoener, a Minneapolis psychologist who has consulted on thousands of medical misconduct cases across the country.

Sharyn Elman, a corrections spokeswoman, said prison officials believe they did not have to report Carroll to regulators because they could confirm only that he breached security during a visit to the female inmate, not that he engaged in sexual misconduct as alleged.

But after police stumbled on the office, regulators received documentation from the Department of Corrections indicating “the doctor had told that inmate that he would take her to Mexico, and hugged her and kissed her,” a medical investigator said during a 2009 disciplinary hearing.

Carroll, who could not be reached for comment, said in the hearing that the inmate made a pass at him, not vice versa.

The psychiatrist maintained his practice while he worked in the prison system from September 2006 to February 2007 and during several months in 2009 while he worked at medical centers for veterans in Danville and Marion.

His personal appearance was concerning to patients and other observers, as was his office, according to testimony.

One former patient said the psychiatrist went shoeless with holes in his socks. A pharmacist questioned whether he was really a doctor.

“He looked messy, unkempt,” the pharmacist testified in a disciplinary hearing. “I was surprised at his appearance. He did not look, to me, like any physician I had ever met before. … He was wearing a T-shirt. It did not appear to be clean. It was very wrinkled. He was unshaven.”

Carroll’s former secretary said the presence of pornography and guns in the office was disturbing.

“The point is, putting myself aside, why does a doctor — a psychiatrist — have guns in the office with psychiatric patients?” she said during a hearing. “That’s the problem.”

When asked about the weapons in his office, Carroll said he collected them for fun and protection. He told authorities he had close to 100 guns stored in the walls of a Skokie home, state records show. Carroll had a firearms license.

The police never arrested Carroll. During the disciplinary hearing, Kaniewski said he did not know whether Carroll’s assault rifle was a type that is illegal for him to own, only that he thought it was cause for concern. (Crestwood police Chief Theresa Neubauer did not respond to written questions or calls seeking comment.)

While law enforcement did not pursue charges against Carroll, state regulators determined that having these weapons at his office amounted to dishonorable, unethical or unprofessional conduct.

The former secretary, who first had been a patient of Carroll’s, said she was surprised when he visited her behind bars and then offered her a job immediately after she finished serving time for a drug conviction.

Carroll gave her presigned prescriptions to use when he was out of the office, she said. The woman, a recovering drug addict who had no medical training and suffered from bipolar disease, would pen prescriptions for patients — a violation of drug laws, a Drug Enforcement Administration official testified.

“The medications would range from antidepressants all the way up to controlled substances such as Methadone,” the woman explained during the hearing.

Carroll took the woman to New Mexico when he attended a conference and they shared a hotel room, according to the secretary’s testimony. Carroll denied it, but she testified he walked around in his underwear and made an unwelcome sexual advance toward her.

When the secretary quit after the state launched its investigation, Carroll showed up at her home more than once, prompting her to call Chicago Ridge police, records show.

“Because after the investigation started, he went and he bought more guns and he just … I don’t trust him today,” she said in a hearing.

Carroll admitted he spent numerous nights at the home of a patient who suffered from anxiety and panic disorder, state records show. Regulators alleged he took nude pictures of her while she was asleep, threatened to have her committed, masturbated in front of her and attempted to climb through her bedroom window while she was in bed with her boyfriend — all of which he denied.

Another former patient who had turned to Carroll for treatment of severe anxiety said she was confused when he showed up unannounced at her family’s Crestwood home. He allegedly tried to kiss her as he was leaving, which prompted her to cry to her mother.

The psychiatrist allegedly returned to the house more than 20 times, records show. The woman and her mother testified he would lay his body against the doorbell and throw rocks at her window.

“It upset me. I was crying. … I did call his telephone and asked him to please don’t come to my house,” the former patient said in a medical disciplinary hearing.

Carroll said he only threw rocks at the woman’s window once. He denied he tried to kiss her.

When she realized the Department of Corrections and Wexford Health Services had taken action against Carroll in 2007 but had not informed regulators, she was outraged.

“This guy should have been out years ago,” the woman said. “This should never have happened to any of us.”

Withdrawal from the drugs wasn’t the only hard part, she said. Her anxiety, already debilitating, worsened.

She is afraid to leave her home, she said, for fear that Carroll will be outside.

Read the article here:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-doctor-guns-smoke-grenades-20110224,0,5943165,full.story

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The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, (CCHR) has launched a new video to expose the hypocracy of the pharmaceutically driven campaign to “Stop the Stigma” of mental illness.    With its seemingly altruistic sounding agenda to eliminate “stigma”  the fact is the real  “stigmatization” is coming from those behind this campaign—pharma, psychiatry and pharma-funded front groups such as  NAMI and CHADD to name but a few.    There are currently 20 million kids & adolescents labeled with mental “disorders” that are based solely on a checklist of behaviors, no brain scans, x-rays, genetic or blood tests can prove they are “mentally ill”,  yet they are being stigmatized with psychiatric labels, which will be part of their permanent medical record,  and prescribed dangerous, life-threatening psychiatric drugs.

Child drugging is a $4.8 billion-a-year industry, and the industry knows where to put its funding to get the most bang for its buck.    For example, take NAMI’s campaign to stop the “stigma” and “end discrimination” against the mentally ill—the “Founding Sponsors” were Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, SmithKline Beecham and Wyeth-Ayerst Labs. (For an in-depth look at what else Pharma funds and how this funding not only helps set mental health policies but campaigns such as this, read Pharmaceutical Industry Agenda Setting in Mental Health Policies at the bottom of this post)

The real stigmatization is coming from those that benefit from labeling behaviors as diseases to be “cured” or “treated” despite the complete lack of  medical/biological evidence to support them.  George Orwell coined the term Doublespeak, meaning words redefined to mislead, distort and disguise, and no better example exists than psychiatry’s pathologizing and redefining behaviors into mental “illness”.      For example,  If an adolescent is strong willed,  this is redefined as  “oppositional defiant disorder.” If a kid acts like a kid,   sometimes losing pencils or toys, or acting “on the go” then this has been pathologized into  “ADHD.” If a teenager has normal adolescent mood swings, then this has been repackaged as “bi-polar disorder.” And shyness?  Doesn’t exist.  It is now called  “social anxiety disorder.” Moreover, once labeled, these kids are stigmatized for life.

Psychiatric labels are the stigma.

Various canned press releases and “studies” circulated by the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry profess,  “more people now believe that illnesses like schizophrenia and depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain.”  This is marketing at its best—say people believe in a chemical imbalance so you don’t have to bother pointing out the fact that there is no chemical imbalance .  How can the layperson be sure of this? It’s simple. Find one person who has a lab test showing their chemical imbalance.  Not one of the millions of people taking drugs to cure their “chemical imbalance” has a lab test showing they have an imbalance.

So when it comes to “stigmatization” one need look no further than those who benefit from labels which are simply based on opinion—not science, and not medicine. Now it really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out… does it?

Watch video: Psychiatry—Stigmatizing Kids with Bogus ‘Mental Disorders’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv49RFo1ckQ

For more information  about pharmaceutical front groups see this:  http://www.cchrint.org/psycho-pharmaceutical-front-groups/

For an in-depth look at this topic, read Pharmaceutical Industry Agenda Setting in Mental Health Policies

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