Posts Tagged ‘disease’

« Older Entries

ONE DRUG TO MAKE YOU HAPPY

Monday, November 28th, 2011

NewsWithViews.com – 11/28/2011
by Jonathan Emord, Constitutional Attorney and Author

Psychiatric drugs are big sellers. They are among the best selling drugs made. In 2010, Americans or their insurers doled out some $16.1 billion for anti-psychotics; $11.6 billion for anti-depressants; and $7.2 billion for ADHD treatments.

Within the last two decades the field of psychiatry has mushroomed from a fringe body of Sigmund Freud admirers to a mainstream player in the field of medical pharmacology, largely because of an unseemly union between that profession and the drug industry, leading to the creation of many never before known disease states and profitable ways to exploit those alleged diseases with psychiatric services and drugs.

The field of psychiatry has persistent and well-informed critics who point to the excessive drugging of institutionalized patients, of children commonly misdiagnosed as suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and of the elderly misdiagnosed with treatable dementia, among others. The drugs given these patients have their own side-effects, including increased risk of depression, suicidal thoughts, birth defects, and even death. Because of the movement of psychiatry from the fringe of medicine to its heart, a majority of Americans are likely to come into contact with psychiatric drugs, either recommended for use by their children or for use by them at some point in their lives. Indeed, presently some 1 in 5 adults take anti-depressants, anti-psychotic, or anti-anxiety drugs.

The next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the profession’s so-called diagnostic bible, will soon be published in 2013. It comntinues the trend of identifying as “diseases” conditions that have previously been considered within the normal range. It adds to the list of “disease” states “apathy syndrome” (i.e., not caring enough); “internet addiction disorder” (i.e., liking the web too much); “parental alienation syndrome” (i.e., not liking your parents enough); “mild neurocognitive disorder” (i.e., age-related decline in mental function); “absexual” disorder (i.e., disliking sex); and “sluggish cognitive tempo” (i.e., daydreaming too much). Characteristics that we all used to think within the realm of normal brain function (such as teenage angst at parental rules; parental angst at teenage rebellion; a loss of quick wittedness in the elderly; youthful exuberance or youthful preoccupation with daydreams beyond the confines of academia) are all fast becoming “diseases.” The APA’s overall movement has been one of calling into question characteristics of eccentricity, leading to an unscientific conclusion that anything different may be rightly called a disease and rightly prescribed a treatment.

Every newly identified psychiatric disorder begets a new slate of psychiatric drugs for their treatment, giving leading pharmaceutical companies new opportunities to profit from the expansion of psychiatric diagnoses.

Psychiatric drugs are big sellers. They are among the best selling drugs made.

In 2010, Americans or their insurers doled out some $16.1 billion for anti-psychotics;

$11.6 billion for anti-depressants;

and $7.2 billion for ADHD treatments.

Profit lies in designing drugs for the treatment of these conditions. As the drug industry continues to pump out new elixirs that, in turn, leads to more reliance on psychologists and psychiatrists, which leads them in turn to prefer identifying more conditions as disease. The perverse incentives abound, and the FDA is pleased to approve the drugs at the behest of the drug company sponsors.
Everyone standing to profit from the sale of these agents wins at the expense of patients.

The drugging of America is an enormous problem, having spill-over effects that include drug addiction and destruction of the family, productivity, even national security. With an ever rising population taking these drugs which alter cognitive function, it becomes ever more apparent that the very fabric of our society, its common commitment to stable family life, self-sacrifice for the greater good, and adherence to laws that protect life, liberty, and property are all imperiled. As the drug industry and psychiatric profession profits enormously with each new declared disease state, there is a loss of free agency in the population, a movement that saps self-control from the individual in favor of control by the medical community over basic life-affecting decisions. Patients become dependent, event addicted, to drugs, and ever more dependent on their medical counselors to cope with life.

Whatever may be said for use of psychiatric drugs in those who cannot function in society, the expansion of those drugs to embrace those who can, including those with virtually any characteristic that exceeds the norm, represents a horrific sacrifice of the very promise of life that lies in those eccentricities. It is particularly horrific to watch beautiful, energetic children with all their great promise become addicted to drugs that alter brain chemistry in ways that yield drug dependency and lessen their perception of and enthusiasm for life and their ability to achieve. A majority of children prescribed anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs are wrongly prescribed those drugs, even by accepted psychiatric standards. That misguided course is itself a form of deviant behavior by this profession, calling into question the mental stability of those who would profit off of misdiagnosis and mistreatment.

The psychiatric drugging of America is bearing and will continue to bear for generations to come toxic consequences, whether in the form of the destruction of the family, increases in crime, or decreases in productivity and inventiveness. It’s high time for a rebellion against this drugging for the sake of sanity.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Emord/jonathan220.htm

Jonathan W. Emord is an attorney who practices constitutional and administrative law before the federal courts and agencies. Congressman Ron Paul calls Jonathan “a hero of the health freedom revolution” and says “all freedom-loving Americans are in [his] debt . . . for his courtroom [victories] on behalf of health freedom.” He has defeated the FDA in federal court a remarkable eight times, six on First Amendment grounds, and is the author of Amazon bestsellers The Rise of Tyranny, and Global Censorship of Health Information. He is also the American Justice columnist for U.S.A. Today Magazine. For more info visit Emord.com.

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | 1 Comment »

The Depression Drug Gravy Train – Marketing Life’s Problems as a ‘Disease’

Monday, June 6th, 2011
Op-Ed News – June 5, 2011
by Martha Rosenberg
The discovery that many people with life problems or occasional bad moods would willingly dose themselves with antidepressants sailed pharma through the 2000s. A good chunk of pharma’s $4.5 billion direct-to-consumer advertising has been devoted to convincing people they don’t have problems with their job, the economy and their family, they have depression. Especially because depression can’t be diagnosed from a blood test.

Unfortunately, three things dried up the depression gravy train for pharma. Blockbusters went off patent and generics took off, antidepressants were linked with gory and unpredictable violence, especially in young users and…they didn’t even work, according to medical articles!

That’s when pharma began debuting the concept of “treatment resistant depression.” It wasn’t that their drugs didn’t work (or you didn’t have depression in the first place), you had “treatment resistant depression.” Your first expensive and dangerous drug needed to be coupled with more expensive and dangerous drugs because monotherapy, one drug alone, wasn’t doing the trick!

You’ve got to admire pharma’s audacity with this upsell strategy. Adding drugs to your treatment resistant depression triples its take, patients don’t know which drug is working so they’ll take all of them and the defective drugs are exonerated!   (Because the problem is you.)

Now pharma has a new whisper campaign to keep the antidepressant boat afloat. Your depression is “progressive.”

Once upon a time, when depression was neither seasonal, atypical, bipolar or treatment resistant, it was considered to be a self-limiting disease. In fact, just about the only good thing you could say about depression was it wouldn’t last forever.

But now, pharma is giving depression the don’t-wait scare treatment like coronary events (statins), asthma attacks (“controller” drugs) and thinning bones (Sally Field). If you don’t hurry and take medication, your depression will get worse!

“Depressive episodes become more easily triggered over time,” floats an article on the physician web site Medscape (flanked by ads for the antidepressant Pristiq.) “As the number of major depressive episodes increase, the risk for subsequent episodes is predicted more from the number of prior episodes and less from the occurrence of a recent life stress.” The article, unabashedly titled“Neurobiology of Depression: Major Depressive Disorder as a Progressive Illness ,” is written by Vladimir Maletic who happens to have served on Eli Lilly’s Speaker’s Bureau, says the disclosure information, and whose co-authors are each employees and/or Lilly shareholders.

Before direct-to-consumer advertising, the health care system was devoted to preventing over-treatment and assuring patients they were probably okay. Who remembers “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning”?   Now patients are assured they probably aren’t okay but probably have a progressive disease. Luckily their disease can be treated with progressive prescriptions from pharma.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Do-You-Have-Depression-He-by-Martha-Rosenberg-110605-409.html

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

The Death of Mental Illness

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

PsychCentral
By Will Meecham, MD, MA
May 18, 2011

In writing this post, I may be crashing the American Psychological Association’s annual blog party. Naturally, I’m in favor of joining others to increase awareness and reduce stigma around psychiatric problems. But despite the spirit of solidarity, I’m perhaps an outsider, because I no longer believe ‘mental illness’ serves as a helpful concept.

In this era of burgeoning diagnoses, it’s a bit awkward to declare our great emperor, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), naked and unfleshed. Especially at a party.

Let me be clear: people sometimes behave in ways that look incomprehensible or even insane. Suicidal behavior, profoundly delusional speech, and irresistible compulsions represent severe behavioral problems for individuals and society. No doubt they stem from cognitive activity and emotional tones that differ from average day-to-day awareness. These sorts of disordered conduct do indeed derive from ‘mental’ processes, but do they qualify as ‘illnesses?’

It seems to me that to define something as a disease implies that we can also recognize its absence. But this isn’t always easy with mental conditions. Take the example of suicide. Frank attempts on one’s own life lie at the extreme end of a spectrum of self-destructive thoughts and actions. Some of these get labeled as mental illness, and some don’t, but the distinction is rather arbitrary.

I suspect a majority of the population would have to admit to moments of wondering if life is worth the effort, and to brief thoughts of ending it. We aren’t mentally ill just because we have moments of doubt. How frequently or how seriously does a person have to question life’s value in order to be deemed sick? Or consider that a man with advanced emphysema who continues to smoke kills himself just as surely as a woman who takes an overdose of pills. But our culture doesn’t define the dying smoker’s senseless behavior as mental illness. What’s the difference? Does the fact that a man doesn’t admit to wanting to end his life relieve him of responsibility for doing so? The honestly suicidal woman is arguably more rational and clear than the smoker clouded in denial who works toward the same end.

Or consider delusions. If a man believes the CIA has implanted thought control devices in his brain, everyone agrees he is out of touch with reality; we call this paranoid schizophrenia. But if a political leader proclaims that environmental exploitation isn’t a problem, even as the ecosystem destabilizes, no one considers her delusion a sign of mental illness. Director Tom Shadyac’s delightful documentary, I Am, makes a similar point about how many of the values our culture promotes are actually insane.

What about obsessions? Someone who won’t leave the house without checking the doors and windows two dozen times earns a diagnosis of OCD. But a billionaire obsessed with accumulating ever more money gets worshiped like a modern deity.

Furthermore, psychiatrists dismiss highly positive spiritual experiences as delusional and hallucinatory simply because such states hint at phenomena that aren’t endorsed by materialist science. When for a time I entered what seemed like profoundly awakened consciousness back in 2000, I wasn’t congratulated. The psychiatrists labelled my experience a ‘manic psychosis’ and started me on Haldol. I was too trusting to doubt them at the time, but now I wish they’d referred me to a spiritual leader rather than the psychiatric ward.

Obviously, people spiral into all kinds of behavioral crises and need help. Sometimes they recognize their need for assistance, and sometimes not. But whether a particular maladaptive conduct gets labelled as mental illness or not has to do with cultural values, not medical science. If there weren’t so much stigma, and so much risk of over-medication, it wouldn’t matter. But a life may be derailed for years (or forever) after the hammer of a major psychiatric diagnosis shatters a person’s reputation and self-image.

Tradition tells us that the seventh century Korean Zen Buddhist Wonhyo achieved enlightenment when following an exhausting journey without water he collapsed at night in a deep cavern. He found an ivory bowl while groping in the dark, and relished the sweet water it contained with a rush of relief. But when he arose the next morning he realized he had reclined in a tomb. The ‘bowl’ was the cap of a human skull, and he saw that he had not drunk clean water but a putrified soup of decay. At first nauseated and repulsed, he spiritually ‘awoke’ shortly afterward when he recognized how what he thought about reality (and not reality itself) so decisively determined his experience.

The conditions we label mental illness are a bit like that, only in reverse. In my case a lifetime of profound sadness, plus the ministrations of countless therapists and doctors, convinced me that I suffered from a major psychological disease caused by my upbringing (which included early bereavement and severe child abuse) and genetic endowment (my depressed mother committed suicide). This view of myself had a major impact on my self esteem for much of my life, but I don’t believe it anymore. Now I understand that my sadness was a natural grieving reaction that may have been prolonged because no one validated my understandable sorrow after such a childhood.

No longer do I see my melancholy as the psychiatric equivalent of a decomposing skullcap. I now appreciate that life dealt me hardship early on, and I reacted normally. With time I overcame my grief, so that the traumatic past now stands as one of my most important teachers. Despite its ordeals, it led me to how I feel today: contented and more than a little knowledgeable about misfortune and its transcendence. The skullcap has transformed into the ivory bowl. Of course, neither perspective is necessarily ‘correct’ in any objective sense. But which picture I hold in mind has a powerful impact on how I feel.

I’ve already sketched how psychiatrists diagnosed as mania an experience that in another time and place would have been viewed as a divinely granted spiritual awakening. My epiphany landed battered and defamed in the charnel grounds of mental illness, when it could have been an elegant container of grace.

How experiences are framed determines how we feel about ourselves and how others view us. Does the frame of mental illness serve the majority of patients? Or does it more often sap vitality and confidence? I read in many blogs of the relief people feel when doctors finally define their problems as diagnosable mental diseases. I remember reacting similarly myself when a lifetime of moodiness finally earned me the ‘bipolar’ label. It felt so comforting to have my condition named and seemingly validated. But instead of decisively helpful treatments, the mental health system strung me along with decades of therapy and thousands of little pills, none of which improved my mood or outlook very much. It seems to me that if psychiatric diagnoses were truly valuable, they would guide clinicians to life-changing therapeutic choices. But how often do people diagnosed with ‘major mental illness’ leave the Psychiatry Department with an effective cure? Although they may feel transiently relieved, they and their family now must endure the burden of ‘knowing’ their minds are sick.

Read entire article here:  http://blogs.psychcentral.com/happiness/2011/05/the-death-of-mental-illness/

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

Children Exploited for Profit Using Fictitious Mental Disorders

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

"For over two decades drug and psychiatric industries have bombarded schools, parents, doctors, the media and government with propaganda that ADHD is a medical condition that must be managed with drugs."

NaturalNews.com— April 7, 2011

By Monica G. Young

We’re ashamed that exploitation of children for profit was once tolerated in America: such as children as young as five shackled to machines while working 16-hour days in factories, or black children auctioned and sold as slaves. Yet future generations will look back on our era too with shame: a time when labeling kids with fictitious mental disorders and hooking them on drugs was a multi-billion dollar business.

About 10 percent of U.S children – over five million – are said to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a mental illness treated with drugs. A recent study blows a wide hole in that myth.

A team of Dutch researchers took 100 unmedicated children diagnosed with ADHD and fed half of them a diet free of processed foods and allergens. The other half served as a control group. Within five weeks, 64 percent of those in the test group saw remarkable changes. “After the diet, they were just normal children with normal behavior,” lead researcher Dr. Lidy Pelsser tells NPR. “They were no longer more easily distracted, they were no more forgetful, there were no more temper-tantrums.”

Dr. Pelsser explains, “ADHD, it’s just a couple of symptoms — it’s not a disease. There is a paradigm shift needed. If a child is diagnosed ADHD, we should say, ‘OK, we have got those symptoms, now let’s start looking for a cause.’… With all children, we should start with diet research. But now we are giving them all drugs, and I think that’s a huge mistake.”

Most ADHD-diagnosed kids are prescribed powerful stimulants which can cause nausea, insomnia, liver damage, heart failure, hallucinations, convulsions, violent behavior, suicidal thoughts and sudden death. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration categorizes these as Schedule II drugs – the same class as cocaine and opium.

For over two decades drug and psychiatric industries have bombarded schools, parents, doctors, the media and government with propaganda that ADHD is a medical condition that must be managed with drugs. But let’s dissect this:

* Pharmaceutical and psychiatric literature, ads and advocates typically claim ADHD kids have brain dysfunctions or brain chemical imbalances and that it’s genetically based, while also stating the cause is unknown and no lab tests can detect it.

Huh? As no lab tests can detect it and its cause is unknown, how can they scientifically link it to brain malfunction, chemical imbalances or genetic influence? They can’t.

* They say a doctor’s diagnosis relies on the child’s response to questions, the family’s description of behavior problems and a school assessment.

Hello? Can you imagine a doctor diagnosing cancer without lab tests? Or diagnosing diabetes and prescribing insulin injections based on a family member’s report? Or putting a boy’s leg in a cast due to a teacher’s assessment? We would call such a doctor a fraud.

* They say symptoms include impulsivity, dashing around, difficulty focusing on one thing, avoiding activities that are boring, squirming and bouncing a lot, talking excessively and finding it difficult to play quietly. And these symptoms must have been present before the age of seven.

Wait a second. When are kids generally the most spontaneous, energetic, rambunctious and have the lowest attention span? Before the age of seven!

* They say that in a child with ADHD, the above symptoms are more pronounced than in other kids the same age. In other words, this isn’t medical science – it’s OPINION. Plus they omit or enormously downplay the factor of diet.

*And here’s the clincher. They say ADHD cannot be cured but its symptoms can be managed with medication.

So there you have it – it’s clearly a marketing scheme to target children and create lifelong customers for the psychiatric drug industry.

Dr. Fred Baughman, neurologist and author who has testified before Congress, says it like this, “They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children; those which bother teachers and parents most, and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive — termed them a ‘disease.’ Twenty five years of research, not deserving of the term ‘research,’ has failed to validate ADD/ADHD as a disease. Tragically – the ‘epidemic’ having grown from 500 thousand in 1985 to between five and seven million today – this remains the state of the ‘science’ of ADHD.”

One of the world’s most influential child psychiatrists and “expert” proponents of ADHD for years has been Harvard’s Dr. Joseph Biederman. He has published hundreds of papers on ADHD and ADHD drug treatment, and is one of the most-cited researchers on the subject. In 2009 a Congressional inquiry revealed that between 2000-2007, Biederman earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers. It appears Dr. Biederman has an acute case of Greed Disorder.

Just as our country has defeated and outlawed child exploitation in the past, psychiatric labeling and drugging of children must too be abolished.

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

The Huffington Post— Creating Disease: Big Pharma and Disease Mongering

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

The Huffington Post
by Dr. Larry Dossey
June 18, 2010

You may think there is enough disease in the world already, and that no one would want to add to the diseases that we humans must deal with. But there is a powerful industry in our society that is working overtime to invent illnesses and to convince us we are suffering from them.

This effort is known as “disease mongering,” a term introduced by health-science writer Lynn Payer in her 1992 book Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick. Payer defined disease mongering as “trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill.” This strategy has also been called “the corporate construction of disease” by Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath and David Henry in the British Medical Journal. “There’s a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they’re sick,” they say. “Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and consumers.”

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/big-pharma-health-care-cr_b_613311.html

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | 1 Comment »

The Globe and Mail — “Is Depression a Disease? Big Pharma says yes, but others aren’t so sure”

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Big Pharma says yes, but others aren’t so sure

The Globe and Mail
By Leah McLaren
June 18, 2010

“It’s all in your head” isn’t something a chronically depressed person likes to hear. In the age of Prozac, when adjusting your serotonin level is as normal as checking the oil in your car, it seems unhelpful to suggest that someone might think their way into – or out of – a disease of the mind.

And yet depression is all in our heads. Where else would it be? The real question, still hotly debated in the scientific community, is whether its cause is chemical and ultimately curable (good news for Big Pharma) or something far more complex (good news for poets and pot-smoking students of existential philosophy).

There is no doubt that depression exists. Inexplicable sadness – or “melancholia,” as it was historically known – has been with us since Hippocrates conceived his famous oath. But a groundbreaking new study has found that not only is depression affected by the way we think about it, so too is its cure.

Last week Irving Kirsch, a professor at the University of Hull in the U.K., presented a study that found Prozac and its ilk are no more effective than placebos in treating depression. In his view, there is no substantial link between serotonin – the brain chemical that antidepressants are supposed to regulate – and chronic depression.

It’s a controversial study – one that many members of the psychiatric community reject out of hand – but it also raises a nagging question about depression: How did it come to be recognized as a disease in the first place?

Like Hirsch, psychologist and writer Gary Greenberg is part of a growing number of psychiatric professionals who have begun to publicly question the underpinnings of popular thinking on depression.

Read entire article:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/style/is-depression-a-disease/article1609422/

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | 1 Comment »

AstraZeneca Denied Antipsychotic Drug’s Link to Diabetes for Years After Admitting Link to Japanese Physicians

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Natural News
By David Gutierrez
June 17, 2010

Drug giant AstraZeneca attempted to obscure the connection between one of its blockbuster drugs and diabetes risk for years after it knew of the problem, according to documents recently unsealed as part of lawsuits against the company.

More than 15,000 patients have sought damages from the company, alleging that they were harmed by side effects from its atypical antipsychotic Seroquel. According to the plaintiffs, AstraZeneca deliberately hid information linking the drug to an increased risk of weight gain and diabetes. The lawsuits have been consolidated into a single case for the purpose of pre-trial proceedings.

The recently unsealed documents include notes from a meeting between salesperson Nancy White and a doctor in July 2006, during which the doctor said that his patients were expressing concern about Seroquel’s links to diabetes. White reported telling the doctor that “there has been no causative effect” proven between the drug and the disease.

Yet in November 2002, AstraZeneca had issued a warning to doctors in Japan that due to dozens of reports linking Seroquel to diabetes, “causality with the drug could not be ruled out.” The company cautioned doctors not to prescribe the drugs to diabetics and to encourage all Seroquel patients to monitor their blood sugar. Just over a year later, the company issued a similar warning to doctors in the United States.

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/029012_AstraZeneca_diabetes_drug.html

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

“ADHD is a total 100% fraud. The millions of schoolchildren around the world being drugged have no disease” – Neurologist

Monday, May 31st, 2010

ArticlesRoad.com
May 29, 2010

The term “ADHD” is simply a label used to categorise a list of psychosocial traits that Psychiatry considers to be improper or abnormal in society. Psychiatry defines these traits as a “mental illness”, and promotes it as a “disease” that requires “treatment”.

It is not a “disease”, despite claims or implications made by certain psychiatric or pharmaceutical organisations. There is NO credible scientific evidence that shows the existence of what constitutes “ADHD” as a biological/neurological disorder, brain abnormality or “chemical imbalance”.

“For a disease to exist there must be a tangible, objective physical abnormality that can be determined by a test such as, but not limited to, blood or urine test, X-Ray, brain scan or biopsy. All reputable doctors would agree: No physical abnormality, no disease. In psychiatry, no test or brain scan exists to prove that a ‘mental disorder’ is a physical disease. Disingenuous comparisons between physical and mental illness and medicine are simply part of psychiatry’s orchestrated but fraudulent public relations and marketing campaign.” Fred Baughman, MD., Neurologist & Pediatric Neurologist.

“Chemical imbalance” it’s a shorthand term really, it’s probably drug industry derived “We don’t have tests because to do it, you’d probably have to take a chunk of brain out of someone – not a good idea.” Dr. Mark Graff, Chair of the Committee of Public Affairs for the American Psychiatric Association. July, 2005.

Such behavioural characteristics that Psychiatry created this unscientific “disease” from are, and always have been, generally considered “normal”. Now, it seems, inattention or “hyperactivity” (Hyperactivity means ‘excessively active’* — what is excessive? On whose authority?? It’s ridiculous!!) is abnormal, a “mental illness”.

Read entire article:  http://articlesroad.com/adhd/what-is-the-defination-of-addadhd-according-to-the-dsm_iv.html

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | 4 Comments »

50 Years Ago Thomas Szasz Rocked The World of Psychiatry: The Difference Between A Disease and a Disorder

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

By Dr. Jeffrey Schaler
Assistant Professor of Justice, Law & Society
March, 2010

The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas SzaszIt is fifty years now since Thomas Szasz rocked the world of psychiatry by writing The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. His work continues to have a profound impact on how we think about disease, behavior, liberty, justice, responsibility, and most important of all, what it means to be human.  Szasz has shown us how the idea of mental illness is used by the state to deprive innocent people of freedom, and guilty persons of justice.  Without the state involved, the medicalization of behavior means nothing.

He has shown us how the idea of mental illness functions as legal fiction within our legal system. In this sense, the idea of mental illness has been used much as the idea that African American slaves were considered three-fifths of a person. Persons labeled as mentally ill are now considered three-fifths of a person. It is as if there was a postscript at the bottom of the Bill of Rights that reads: “PS: For mentally healthy people only.”

The courts will not allow the idea of mental illness to be disproved, in much the same way that the idea that slaves could be three-fifths person was not allowed to be disproved. Today, mental illness as legal fiction maintains the institution of psychiatric slavery.

The Theraputic State by Thomas SzaszMental illness diagnoses have more to do with politics and science fiction, than medicine and science. Take for example the idea that people with a homosexual orientation are mentally ill. The category was excluded from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – our contemporary “Malleus Maleficorum,” or “Hammer of Witches” – the same way it was included, for political reasons, not scientific reasons. No one discovered that homosexuality was a disease, and no one discovered that it isn’t a disease. They pronounced it as such, in each case, because of political pressure.

About two years after The Myth of Mental Illness was first published, Szasz published another book that has had an equally profound impact on freedom and responsibility. In Law, Liberty and Psychiatry he predicted the following:

“Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.”

Thomas Szasz wrote that in 1963.

We live in a Therapeutic State today. Moral management now masquerades as medicine. The state dictates a “duty to be healthy.”

Seventy years ago another state, Nazi Germany, dictated a “duty to be healthy.” Back then, murder masqueraded as medicine. I think you all know what I’m referring to. We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Today, good health practices have become a social responsibility. Bad health practices are viewed as socially irresponsible behavior. When health and illness are applied to the mind and behavior, this means that people must think and speak and act the right way. Otherwise, they may end up in a prison called a mental hospital.

I am one of the few college professors in the United States, if not in the world, who teaches Szasz’s ideas on a regular basis in college. And in every course, my students have always said at least two things to me: This stuff by Szasz is changing my life. And why hasn’t anyone ever taught his work in class before?

Because professors are punished for teaching Szasz; they can lose their jobs if they do so. I know. I have the scars to prove it. If you read my book, Szasz Under Fire, you will see how the same thing almost happened to Thomas Szasz. He came a hair away from being fired for teaching Thomas Szasz!

The Myth of Mental Illness and the subsequent Law, Liberty and Psychiatry are not so unsophisticated as to deny the existence of behaviors that people find disturbing. Quite to the contrary, Szasz’s writings clarify the difference between behavior and disease, description and explanations for behavior, and the consequences of labeling behavior as a disease within the arenas of law, medicine, social and public policy.

Szasz has simply pointed out what pathologists have always known: A disease refers to cellular pathology. Period. A behavior cannot be a disease. And he has also fought endlessly for the rights of persons labeled mentally ill. He will be ninety years old on April 15. He is still writing one book after another. He writes books faster than I can read them!

He has also shown us how behavior is strategic, the expression of what philosophers call moral agency. Today’s neuroscientists, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have attempted to reduce man to the category of things. They deny the existence of moral agency. Let me give you one simple example of how this is so.

Conventional wisdom, particularly as it appears in the media, leads people to believe that brains cause behavior, as if the brain could act. Psychiatrists and the neuroscientists they aspire emulate, regard man as a machine, an incredibly complicated machine, but a machine nevertheless. Everything that is human is ultimately reducible to electrical and chemical interactions.

This is especially so when it comes to socially unacceptable, abnormal, disturbing and criminal behavior. Bad brains are said to cause bad behavior. Bad brains, in this, sense refers to problems in the structure and function of the brain.

Now if bad brains cause bad behavior, it only follows that good brains must cause good behavior. In other words, brains that work correctly, brains that are structurally and functionally healthy, cause good and admirable behaviors.

While psychiatrists try to excuse bad behaviors by ultimately blaming bad brains, they inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) are removing personal responsibility for the good things that people do. When someone commits a heroic deed, for example, shows courage, compassion, and care for others at great personal expense and with great risk of danger, the person is then not choosing to do what is clearly important to do.

The brain, according to this way of thinking, is causing the person to do this good thing, in the same way that a bad brain causes someone to prey on others. There is no need to praise someone for his altruism, heroism, and courage, his brain made him do it.

Some psychiatrists have equated human behavior with seizure activity: An alcoholic reaching for that drink too many is having an epileptic seizure. So is the mother sacrificing her own life for the life of her child.

What is left of the person, if this is so? What is left of the person if brains cause bad and good behavior? What is that represented by the pronoun “I?” What happens to moral agency?

Nothing. From this way of thinking, human beings are reduced to the category of things. Things do not choose, they are caused. Things do not feel. Things are not alive. Things have no conscience, no values, no morality, no ethics. And most important, things do not care, for self or others.

This is the legacy of psychiatry and neuroscience today, when it comes to entertaining biological explanations for behavior. Mind is equated with brain, behavior with disease, good with bad, morality with medicine, and ethics with mechanics. In other words, there is no soul. That which we consider uniquely human is destroyed by psychiatry and neuroscience.

How does this fit into law? Through a simple equation. Liberty and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. If we increase one, we increase the other. If we decrease one, we decrease the other. The more free man is, the more responsible he must be. The more responsible man is, the more he is captain of his own ship.

What institutional psychiatry as an extension of the state would have us believe is this: The more we decrease responsibility, the more we increase freedom. In other words, the more you allow us to be in charge of your life, the more you abdicate responsibility, the more you embrace the paternalism we say is good for you, the more you will be free. For obedience to authority is the greatest political virtue.

What then must we do? Szasz has done his job, what is ours? I believe our job is this: We get psychiatry out of the courthouse. We do not need to destroy psychiatry. It will destroy itself if we sever its invisible umbilical cord to the mother-state. Once psychiatry is available to people by choice only, it will die a natural death. Very few people will seek out psychiatrists if they cannot hire and fire them at will.

Psychiatrists know this. That is why they are so afraid of Thomas Szasz.

And that is why they are so afraid of those who understand what I am saying here. As I tell my students every semester, “don’t believe a word I say. Just think about it and come to your own conclusion.” That kind of independence and autonomy scares institutional psychiatrists and those who run the therapeutic state.

It should.

Jeffrey A. Schaler is an assistant professor of justice, law, and society at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. Professor Schaler’s work is focused on the “therapeutic state”—the union of medicine and state. He completed his doctoral and master’s degrees in human development at the University of Maryland College Park, where the major emphasis of his research was addiction and social policy. Dr. Schaler is particularly interested in how research in the behavioral sciences is interpreted and applied in public, social, and legal policy arenas. He writes and speaks extensively on the relationship between liberty and responsibility.

Dr. Thomas Szasz is a Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, State University of New York. He is a well known critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry and has authored more than 30 books on the subject including the Manufacture of Madness, The Myth of Mental Illness and The Therapeutic State. He is the co-founder of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) and has said of the organization, “We should all honor CCHR because it is really the organization that for the first time in human history has organized a politically, socially, internationally significant voice to combat psychiatry. This has never been done in human history before.”

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

RSS Blog Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog | 12 Comments »

Psychosurgery as Psychiatric “Disease” Propaganda

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Fred A. Baughman, Jr.
Board Certified Neurologist,
Fellow, American Academy of Neurology
November 30, 2009

As suggested in the New York Times November 27th article, “Brain Power–Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk”, being unable to brush ones teeth and the act of showering for seven hours at a time are not medical or surgical diseases.  Even psychiatrists, having gone to medical school, know that a disease is an abnormality–gross (a lump), microscopic (cancer cells), or chemical (elevated blood sugar in diabetes).  But in the wonderland of psychiatric diagnosis, they would have us believe that each of their labels is a physical abnormality/disease /disorder, when, instead, each is a lie—devoid of science and truth.

Carey cites Ross, 21 years of age, who swears “It (psychosurgery) saved my life…I really believe that.”  Whether or not a patient believes he has a disease, and whether or not they believe a treatment’ has helped is subjective, proving nothing.  Carey persists: “ the first real application of advanced brain science …is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery…”  Because there are no diseases in psychiatry, psychosurgery is performed upon brains with no defined abnormalities—normal brains—powerful imagery to perpetuate the ‘disease’ lie—psychosurgery as ‘disease’ propaganda!.  In 1948 the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology made psychiatry and neurology separate specialties–neurology to deal with the diagnosis and treatment of physical/organic diseases of the nervous system, psychiatry with all problems emotional and behavioral, none of them diseases.

Nor does an article such as this, represented to be news, science and the truth, appearing on the front page of the New York Times, confirm or validate psychiatric diagnoses as brain or body abnormalities/disorders/diseases.

On Nov 10, 2008, Supriya Sharma, MD, MPH, FRCPC, Director General of Health Canada wrote   “For mental/psychiatric disorders in general, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and ADHD, there are no confirmatory gross, microscopic or chemical abnormalities that have been validated for objective physical diagnosis.  On March 12, 2009  Donald Dobbs of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, US Food & Drug Administration, wrote: “I consulted with the FDA new drug review division responsible for approving psychiatric drug products and they concurred with the response you enclosed from Health Canada.”

In psychiatry today, there is no regard for the brain, our #1 organ of learning, adaptation, and mental health, or for the truth that more persons recover from psychiatric ills to return to their homes and jobs absent drugs, shock, and psychosurgery than with any combination of such ongoing “treatments.”

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

« Older Entries