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Those in favor of Psychiatry’s Billing Bible? The American Psychiatric Association. Against it? Just About Everyone else

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Click image to watch video (explaining in simple terms, what the “problem” with psychiatry is….)

Psychology Today – November 1, 2011

by Allen Frances, MD (Psychiatrist and former Chairman of the DSM task force)

So far, opposition to DSM 5 has been expressed by the following organizations: British Psychological Society; American Counseling Association; Society for Humanistic Psychology (APA Division 32); Society for Community Research and Action: Division of Community Psychology (APA Division 27); Society for Group Psychology & Psychotherapy (APA Division 49); Developmental Psychology (APA Division 7); UK Council for Psychotherapy; Association for Women in Psychology; Constructivist Psychology Network; Society for Descriptive Psychology; and the Society of Indian Psychologists.

An editorial by the Society Of Biological Psychiatrywondered whether DSM 5 was necessary at all. The community of personality disordersresearchers is virtually unanimous in its opposition to the DSM 5 personality disorders section. There has also been widespread opposition to the sections on somatic, autistic, gender, paraphilic, and psychotic disorders.

Last week, a petition was posted quietly be several divisions of the American Psychological Association. It demands reform of the DSM 5 process and the elimination of a number of its most risky and ill conceived proposals. The petition is gaining increasing support and has already been signed by almost 3000 people. It can be accessed at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dsm5/ )

Strikingly, there seems to be virtually no support for DSM 5 outside the very narrow circle of the several hundred experts who have created it and the leadership of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) which stands to reap large profits from its publication. There is no group and precious few individuals outside of APA who have anything good to say about DSM 5. And even within the DSM 5 work groups and the APA governance structures, there is widespread discontent with the process and considerable disagreement about the product.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201111/dsm-5-against-everyone-else

 

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Harvard Expert Ties Mental Illness “Epidemic” to Big Pharma’s Agenda

Friday, July 29th, 2011

Minyanville
By Minyanville Staff
July 28, 2011

When the DSM-II was published in 1980, it became “the bible of psychiatry,” writes Angell, who adds, “but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions.”

For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — better known as the DSM — has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there’s the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That’s a label almost everyone can lay claim to.

These codes are used by doctors, psychologists, and regulators to maintain a mutual language; it’s a handy shorthand system for bureaucratic purposes. But over the past few decades, the staggering, ever-expanding influence of the ever-expanding DSM, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, has also played a lead role in building wealth and off-label product uses for the major drug manufacturers. In an insightful essay in this week’s New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, explains how.

The medical director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), Melvin Sabshin, declared in 1977 that “a vigorous effort to remedicalize psychiatry should be strongly supported."

Angell’s essay is based on a review of three current books examining the psychiatric industry: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker, and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry–A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis, by Daniel Carlat. She also cites the DSM-IV, the most recent edition of the manual, while her review traces big pharma’s role in our current mental disorder epidemic to the DSM-III, published in 1980.

To begin, Angell describes the psychiatric profession’s backlash against a developing perception in the 1960s and 1970s that the practice was a “soft” almost pseudo science:

In the late 1970s, the psychiatric profession struck back–hard. As Robert Whitaker tells it in Anatomy of an Epidemic, the medical director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), Melvin Sabshin, declared in 1977 that “a vigorous effort to remedicalize psychiatry should be strongly supported,” and he launched an all-out media and public relations campaign to do exactly that. Psychiatry had a powerful weapon that its competitors lacked. Since psychiatrists must qualify as MDs, they have the legal authority to write prescriptions. By fully embracing the biological model of mental illness and the use of psychoactive drugs to treat it, psychiatry was able to relegate other mental health care providers to ancillary positions and also to identify itself as a scientific discipline along with the rest of the medical profession. Most important, by emphasizing drug treatment, psychiatry became the darling of the pharmaceutical industry, which soon made its gratitude tangible.

Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

These efforts to enhance the status of psychiatry were undertaken deliberately. The APA was then working on the third edition of the DSM, which provides diagnostic criteria for all mental disorders. The president of the APA had appointed Robert Spitzer, a much-admired professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, to head the task force overseeing the project. The first two editions, published in 1952 and 1968, reflected the Freudian view of mental illness and were little known outside the profession. Spitzer set out to make the DSM-III something quite different. He promised that it would be “a defense of the medical model as applied to psychiatric problems,” and the president of the APA in 1977, Jack Weinberg, said it would “clarify to anyone who may be in doubt that we regard psychiatry as a specialty of medicine.”

When the DSM-II was published in 1980, it became “the bible of psychiatry,” writes Angell, who adds, “but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions.”

Despite its lack of citations, that DSM named 265 disorders doctors were meant to identify by matching (or mostly matching) a list of symptoms in the book with symptoms described by a patient. The drug companies were quick to see this radical shift in psychiatry as an opportunity. From the 1980s until now, as Angell demonstrates, the drug makers have supported the move away from talk therapy to the drug therapy, which also benefits practitioners, since doling out drugs and tweaking prescriptions earns a psychiatrist more money for less time spent with a patient.

Here Angell explains how companies influence the DSM itself. The bold typeface is ours.

Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

The drug industry, of course, supports other specialists and professional societies, too, but Carlat asks, “Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.” Unlike the conditions treated in most other branches of medicine, there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness—no lab data or MRI findings—and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that.

Eli Lilly gave $551,000 to NAMI

In addition to the money spent on the psychiatric profession directly, drug companies heavily support many related patient advocacy groups and educational organizations. Whitaker writes that in the first quarter of 2009 alone, “Eli Lilly gave $551,000 to NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness] and its local chapters, $465,000 to the National Mental Health Association, $130,000 to CHADD (an ADHD [attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder] patient-advocacy group), and $69,250 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.”

And that’s just one company in three months; one can imagine what the yearly total would be from all companies that make psychoactive drugs. These groups ostensibly exist to raise public awareness of psychiatric disorders, but they also have the effect of promoting the use of psychoactive drugs and influencing insurers to cover them. Whitaker summarizes the growth of industry influence after the publication of the DSM-III as follows:

“In short, a powerful quartet of voices came together during the 1980’s eager to inform the public that mental disorders were brain diseases. Pharmaceutical companies provided the financial muscle. The APA and psychiatrists at top medical schools conferred intellectual legitimacy upon the enterprise. The NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] put the government’s stamp of approval on the story. NAMI provided a moral authority.”

And now here we are in 2011, with almost everyone we know taking two or three different mood disorder drugs. (This trend is not limited to mental disorder, mind you. See Disease Branding.)

Work started on the DSM-V in 1999, which is due out in 2013. It will contain many new disorders, such as “binge eating” and “restless leg disorder.” It will also expand existing categories by tacking on words like “spectrum” to the end of a known disorder, Angell reports. “It looks as though it will be harder and harder to be normal,” she writes.

But the curtain gets pulled back further still.

In her review of Daniel Carlat’s book, Angell calls attention to the “disillusioned insider’s” frank admission that when he prescribes a drug, his decision process is largely guesswork. Carlat’s view is that although any psychiatrist will acknowledge that he or she has had great success with mental disorder drugs for say, depression or anxiety, no doctor can say with certainty whether the drugs are working or if a placebo effect has taken effect.

[Carlat's] work consists of asking patients a series of questions about their symptoms to see whether they match up with any of the disorders in the DSM. This matching exercise, he writes, provides “the illusion that we understand our patients when all we are doing is assigning them labels.” Often patients meet criteria for more than one diagnosis, because there is overlap in symptoms. For example, difficulty concentrating is a criterion for more than one disorder. One of Carlat’s patients ended up with seven separate diagnoses. “We target discrete symptoms with treatments, and other drugs are piled on top to treat side effects.” A typical patient, he says, might be taking Celexa for depression, Ativan for anxiety, Ambien for insomnia, Provigil for fatigue (a side effect of Celexa), and Viagra for impotence (another side effect of Celexa).

As for the medications themselves, Carlat writes that “there are only a handful of umbrella categories of psychotropic drugs,” within which the drugs are not very different from one another. He doesn’t believe there is much basis for choosing among them. “To a remarkable degree, our choice of medications is subjective, even random. Perhaps your psychiatrist is in a Lexapro mood this morning, because he was just visited by an attractive Lexapro drug rep.”

Messy. And, of course, the whole system is now being exported to China and other countries where the middle class is growing and the mental health industry is still in a developing stage.

Angell’s latest book is The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.

Read the rest of her essay, which examines the controversial use of brain chemistry drugs to treat children, here.

http://www.minyanville.com/dailyfeed/2011/07/25/harvard-expert-links-our-mental/

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The Illegitimacy of the “Psychiatric Bible” by Thomas Szasz, M.D.

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

The Freeman,  November 25, 2010

“Mental health experts ask: Will anyone be normal?” So read the title of a July 27 Reuters report. The “experts” warned that the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), scheduled for publication in 2013, “could mean that soon no-one will be classed as normal. . . . [M]any people previously seen as perfectly healthy could in future be told they are ill.”

This is not news. More than 200 hundred years ago Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) warned: “I believe that in the end humanitarianism will triumph, but I fear that, at the same time, the world will become a big hospital, each person acting as the other’s humane nurse.”

Moreover, Goethe foresaw the moral hollowness of the “humanitarian science” on which such therapeutic tyranny would rest: “I could never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.”

The depths to which such men would happily sink when worshiping error brings them fame and fortune became obvious only in the twentieth century.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), the great Brazilian novelist and playwright, advanced the prescient literary satirization of the dark art of psychiatric diagnosis and the engine that drives it: the phony expert’s insatiable vanity and thirst for controlling his fellow man. His short story “O alienista” (1882, “The psychiatrist”) is a fable of a celebrated doctor retiring to a small town to pursue his scientific investigation of the human mind, gradually finding more and more of the townsfolk insane and needing to be incarcerated in his private asylum. Eventually he alone is left at liberty. As soon as modern psychiatry became a legitimate branch of medicine, Machado de Assis recognized and exposed its quintessentially unscientific-sadistic character.

It remained for the French playwright Jules Romains (1885–1972) to call public attention to the corruption of modern medicine by political power. “It’s a matter of principle with me,” declares his protagonist, “Dr. Knock” (1923), “to regard the entire population as our patients. . . . ‘Health’ is a word we could just as well erase from our vocabularies. . . . If you think it over, you’ll be struck by its relation to the admirable concept of the nation in arms, a concept from which our modern states derive their strength.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), too, has played an important part in persuading people that health is an abnormal state. This old joke is illustrative: “If the patient is early for his appointment, he is anxious; if he is on time, he is obsessive-compulsive; if he is late, he is hostile.”

Particular psychiatric diagnoses have not escaped professional criticism. Wishing to make a name for themselves as psychiatrists, “critics” object to one or another diagnosis (homosexuality)—or to “overdiagnosis” (ADHD)—but continue to respect the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a scientific organization and regard the various incarnations of the DSM as respectable legitimating documents. This is dishonest. Confronted with the DSM, the challenge we face is to delegitimize the authenticators, the APA and DSM, not distract attention from their fundamental phoniness by ridiculing one or another “diagnosis” and trying to remove it from the magical list.

I have consistently rejected this piecemeal approach. In my essay “The Myth of Mental Illness,” published in 1960, and in my book with the same title that appeared a year later, I stated my view forthrightly. I proposed that we view the phenomena conventionally called “mental diseases” as behaviors that disturb others (or sometimes the self), reject the image of “mental patients” as helpless victims of patho-biological events outside their control, and refuse to participate in coercive psychiatric practices as incompatible with the foundational moral ideals of free societies. In short, I rejected the authority of the APA as a legitimating organization and of the DSM as a legitimating document. I believe nothing less can undo the mischief wrought by the successive editions of the “psychiatric bible.”

Settled by Political Power

But times have changed. Fifty years ago it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases. It makes no sense to do so today. Professional debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by political-judicial decree. The controversy about the nature of so-called mental diseases/disorders has been settled by the holders of political power: They have decreed that “mental illness is a disease like any other.” Political power and professional self-interest have united in turning false beliefs into lying facts: “Mental illness can be accurately diagnosed, successfully treated, just as physical illness” (President William Clinton, 1999). “Just as things go wrong with the heart and kidneys and liver, so things go wrong with the brain” (Surgeon General David Satcher, 1999).

The claim that “mental illnesses are diagnosable disorders of the brain” is not based on scientific research; it is a deception and perhaps self-deception. My claim that mental illnesses are fictitious illnesses is also not based on scientific research; it rests on the pathologist’s materialist-scientific definition of illness as the structural or functional alteration of cells, tissues, and organs. If we accept this definition of disease, then it follows that mental illness is a metaphor, and asserting that view is stating an analytic truth not subject to empirical falsification.

For centuries the theocratic State exercised authority and used force in the name of God. The Founders sought to protect the American people from the religious tyranny of the State. They did not anticipate, and could not have anticipated, that one day medicine would become a religion and that the alliance between medicine and the State would then threaten personal liberty and responsibility exactly as they had been threatened by the alliance between church and State.

The Founders faced the challenge of separating the cure of souls by priests from the control of people by politicians. Today the therapeutic State exercises authority and uses force in the name of health. We face the challenge of separating the consensual treatment of patients by medical doctors from the coercive control of persons by agents of the State pretending to be healers.

When psychiatry was in its infancy the belief that all human “dysfunctions” are manifestations of brain diseases was a naive error. In its maturity the mistake was treated as a valid scientific theory and the justification for a powerful ideology and the powerful institutions based on it. Today, in its senescence, psychiatry is deceit and self-deceit—coercion concealed as objective science (“medical diagnosis”) and benevolent help (“medical treatment”). As a result, paraphrasing Orwell, telling the truth becomes “a revolutionary act.”

Dr. Thomas Szasz is a Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute and a Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is also the co-founder of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.  Considered by many scholars and academics to be psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, Szasz has authored more than 35 books on the subject, the first being The Myth of Mental Illness, a book which rocked the foundations of psychiatry upon its release more than 50 years ago.  Find out more: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-szasz/

The Freeman Online article http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-therapeutic-state/the-illegitimacy-of-the-%E2%80%9Cpsychiatric-bible%E2%80%9D/?utm_source=The+Freeman&utm_campaign=c353b7523c-Freeman_Jan2010_Issue&utm_medium=email

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Is Free Thinking A Mental Illness?

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

PrisonPlanet.com

Off the Grid
Oct 14, 2010

Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness?  According to the newest addition of the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), it certainly is.  The manual identifies a new mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD.  Defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.

The DSM-IV is the manual used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illnesses and, with each new edition, there are scores of new mental illnesses.  Are we becoming sicker?  Is it getting harder to be mentally healthy?  Authors of the DSM-IV say that it’s because they’re better able to identify these illnesses today.  Critics charge that it’s because they have too much time on their hands.

New mental illnesses identified by the DSM-IV include arrogance, narcissism, above-average creativity, cynicism, and antisocial behavior.  In the past, these were called “personality traits,” but now they’re diseases.

And there are treatments available.

All of this is a symptom of our over-diagnosing and overmedicating culture.  In the last 50 years, the DSM-IV has gone from 130 to 357 mental illnesses.  A majority of these illnesses afflict children.  Although the manual is an important diagnostic tool for the psychiatric industry, it has also been responsible for social changes.  The rise in ADD, bipolar disorder, and depression in children has been largely because of the manual’s identifying certain behaviors as symptoms.  A Washington Post article observed that, if Mozart were born today, he would be diagnosed with ADD and “medicated into barren normality.”

According to the DSM-IV, the diagnosis guidelines for identifying oppositional defiant disorder are for children, but adults can just as easily suffer from the disease.  This should give any freethinking American reason for worry.

The Soviet Union used new “mental illnesses” for political repression.  People who didn’t accept the beliefs of the Communist Party developed a new type of schizophrenia.  They suffered from the delusion of believing communism was wrong.  They were isolated, forcefully medicated, and put through repressive “therapy” to bring them back to sanity.

When the last edition of the DSM-IV was published, identifying the symptoms of various mental illnesses in children, there was a jump in the diagnosis and medication of children.  Some states have laws that allow protective agencies to forcibly medicate, and even make it a punishable crime to withhold medication.  This paints a chilling picture for those of us who are nonconformists.

Although the authors of the manual claim no ulterior motives but simply better diagnostic practices, the labeling of freethinking and nonconformity as mental illnesses has a lot of potential for abuse.  It can easily become a weapon in the arsenal of a repressive state.

Read the article here:  http://www.prisonplanet.com/is-free-thinking-a-mental-illness.html

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The Irish Times—All in our heads: Have we taken psychiatry too far?

Friday, August 13th, 2010

by Jason Walsh

Saturday, August 14th

With drafts of the latest edition of the world’s leading psychiatry manual emerging, critics question the growing medicalisation of life’s problems

OVER THE past three decades, unhappiness has been redefined as depression, shyness has been reclassified as social anxiety disorder – even trivial complaints such as fussy eating are now being viewed through a psychiatric prism. Some of this is due to a single book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , which critics claim is contributing to the ever-expanding empire of mental health. The next official edition of the DSM will be published in May 2013, but draft versions are currently doing the rounds.

Books abound on the creeping medicalisation of everyday life, television shows like In Treatment and The Sopranos revolve around endless therapy sessions, as do films by the likes of Woody Allen. According to clinical psychotherapist Áine Tubridy: “Many people’s problems have sociological causes, not medical ones. They are problems of living. Society needs to recognise that for many people life is bloody hard,” she says.

But there is growing criticism of the DSM itself and the entire model of diagnoses from within the psychiatric establishment.

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Pat Bracken, clinical director of mental health services in west Cork, is unrelenting in his criticism of over-reliance on the DSM .

“Despite being a primarily American book, the DSM is used universally. The alternative is the International Classification of Diseases published by the World Health Organisation,” he says.

“The DSM really took off in the 1980s, introducing what are called ‘operationalised definitions’. That seemed more scientific – a psychiatrist could say: ‘This person fits these diagnostic criteria.’ It introduced a new way of thinking and a focus on diagnosis.”

The criticism boils down to this: reliance on the DSM reduces psychiatry to little more than a consensus on what kind of behaviour or thoughts are abnormal, not an evidence-based analysis of what is wrong in people’s lives.

Bracken says along with the DSM ’s rise there was a corresponding demise in the use of psychotherapy within the medical profession, even if there was an expansion of private use of therapies and counselling, many of which are of dubious efficacy. For Bracken though, the medicalisation of life’s problems creates the worry that “expert” intervention in private life is often disempowering and misses the point.
“The DSM reflects a growing trend to seek ‘experts’ for problems that once wouldn’t have been the domain of the expert: gambling, social anxiety, marriage problems and so on,” says Bracken. “These were once seen as the vicissitudes of life. The demise of organised religion has also contributed to the growing social demand. The DSM legitimises that process and contributes to it,” he says.

This argument links the medical critique of the DSM back to its social implications. The repercussions of privatised social lives driven by the breakup of traditional sources of solidarity outside the family unit – organised religion, trade unions, political parties and other communal organisations – has left individuals confused, lonely and often frightened and encouraged to seek therapy when in fact the problem is a socio-political one.

What, though, is to be done when a patient arrives at their GP’s surgery in despair?

Niall Crumlish, deputy external affairs and policy director of the College of Psychiatry of Ireland, is a locum consultant psychiatrist at St James’s Hospital in Dublin. While he recognises the limitations of psychiatric diagnosis, a patient who asks for help must be given it, he says.

“There are cases for arguing that we are both over-medicalised and under-medicalised,” he says. “There is a huge number of people presenting to primary care providers [seeking psychiatric help] but there are also many not presenting, people with major depression who are functioning but at a much lower level than they might.

“Without the DSM we’d be losing a basic foundation for what we are doing. There is some validity to diagnosis. There is such a thing as a depressive syndrome that you could produce biologically if you were so minded,” he says.

An article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this July by two of the DSM ’s authors argued the forthcoming fifth edition should be of interest to all health providers, not just psychiatrists.

The DSM is in part a product of the US psychiatric establishment being rocked in the 1960s. David Rosenhan, a follower of the controversial Scottish “anti-psychiatrist” Dr RD Laing, virtually smashed psychoanalysis as it was practised in America almost single handedly.

Rosenhan and some colleagues presented themselves at several mental hospitals claiming to have a sole auditory hallucination – a voice in their heads saying “thud” – and then behaved normally. They were all diagnosed with a variety of mental illnesses: schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis. They were eventually released, months later, when they “admitted” they were mentally ill and pretended to get better, demonstrating – they said – that psychiatrists were unable to distinguish between the sane and the insane.

The experiment’s objective wasn’t to prove the obvious point that it is possible to pretend to be mentally ill. Instead it demonstrated that, once admitted, all behaviour by patients is pathologised and ordinary actions were taken as evidence of illness. This rocked the establishment and one hospital challenged Rosenhan to do it again. He agreed and the hospital soon declared it had discovered 41 fakes. Rosenhan then announced he had sent no one for the second experiment.

According to Bracken, this body blow coincided with the increasing use of drug treatment for illnesses: “In the 1950s and 1960s, psychoanalysis was very dominant. Then you had a rejection of that and a move toward the DSM and the psychopharmacology revolution. “Today, the efficacy of the drugs is being called into question,” he says.

By moving away from endless psychoanalysis the diagnostic model favoured by the DSM , particularly from the 1980 third edition onwards, seemed to offer an answer to the problem. Patients symptoms were analysed on a more or less statistical basis and those who fit a specified pattern were declared to have the relevant condition.

Although it has since spread worldwide, the American bias of the DSM is clear: given that unhappiness is not covered by health insurance policies but major depression is, a massive expansion of diagnoses of depression and related illnesses is unsurprising. However, DSM critics argue the book is part of a wider reshaping of our understanding of what it is to be human, not simply a licence to malinger but pathologising everyday experiences.

Read the rest of this article here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/0814/1224276782556.html

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Seriously great article: “New Psychiatry Manual Defines Almost Anyone as Insane”

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Loewak
By Martijn Benders
June 27, 2010

What is wrong with a psychiatric industry that is financed by drug companies? Well isn’t that very obvious: they will try and try to classify more and more mental conditions as ‘diseases’ simply because their financers want them to do so. Nowadays children can’t behave like children anymore or they are ‘hyperactive’ or diagnosed as ‘ADHD’ and pumped full of drugs of which no one knows what the long term consequences of their use are.

At the same time, digg this, there was a recent research into which jobs have the highest suicide rates. Guess what? Yes, doctors and Psychiatrists rank amongst the highest, the most number of suicides take place in that job catagory.

Ask yourself this: why do these rather suicidally depressed people want to drug everyone? Because that’s basically what the new ‘Psychiatric Manual’ named ‘the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

“With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs,” Professor Shorter of the University of Toronto writes in the Wall Street Journal.

New diseases in the thick manual include the ‘Psychosis Risk Syndrome’ which is a particular type of ‘disease’ that can be streched to encompass half the world population. Twitch your eye? Behave a little weird? Have a stutter? Well, those might be signs of you having PSR which basically means you have the potential to become psychotic and, according to the manual, must be treated with drugs.

Symptoms of “psychosis risk syndrome” include vague descriptors as “disorganized speech.”

“Minor neurocognitive disorder” describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

The psychiatric industry has become a drugdealer culture. All these drugs do not just effect the people that take them but dissapear and mix with the environment. So ALL OF US are effected by these billions of tuns of chemical drugs that are pumped into the various water systems.

Read entire article:  http://www.loewak.nl/2010/06/27/new-psychiatry-manual-defines-almost-anyone-as-insane/

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The Total Failure of Modern Psychiatry

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Natural News
By David Gutierrez
June 27, 2010

Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine.

Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These “disorders” are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo.

“Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications,” he writes.

Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on “psychopathology” and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic “Bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course.

“With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs,” Shorter writes.

U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as “nerves,” “melancholia” or “manic-depressive illness.” These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed.

“Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms,” Shorter said. “A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has ‘social anxiety disorder’ or ‘seasonal affective disorder.’ … The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis — perceiving it as focusing excessively on “unconscious psychic conflicts” — and toward a more “scientific” model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of “major depression” and “bipolar disorder,” even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, “major depression” absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, “neurotic depression” and “melancholia.”

“This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases,” he writes.

DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: “To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline’s floundering writ large.”

For example, the new disorder of “psychosis risk syndrome” associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that “even if you aren’t floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic.” The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics.

Symptoms of “psychosis risk syndrome” include such vague descriptors as “disorganized speech.”

Other new “disorders” include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. “Minor neurocognitive disorder” describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

“DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases,” Shorter says, “turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity.”

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/029088_psychiatry_failure.htmll

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Psychiatry & the United States of Affliction: Are You Normal or Finally Diagnosed?

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a list that can be abused to the detriment of patients and benefit of drug companies.

Miller-McCune
By Arnie Cooper
June 8, 2010

“My dear Sir, take any road, you can’t go amiss. The whole state is one vast insane asylum.” — James L. Petigru

Spend just a few minutes watching prime time television with its endless pageant of commercials for antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds and you start to wonder if USA really means the United States of Affliction.

Such “direct to consumer” drug advertising ties into one of the most far-reaching criticisms in revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the potential to transform normal human behavior into a mental disorder.

This issue didn’t arise with the ongoing revision of the DMS-V. It’s long been a concern for psychiatry, which must exist uneasily alongside pharmaceutical companies’ hopes of expanding their markets and Americans’ desire for take-a-pill quick fixes. But past experiences suggest new diagnoses will reap a harvest of not fully intended consequences of patients larded with labels — and prescriptions.

Christopher Lane, an intellectual historian who has written extensively on psychiatry and culture, detailed the inclusion of “social anxiety disorder” in the DSM-III in his 2007 book, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

Lane revealed how the 15-member DSM-III task force, in its quest to establish psychiatry as a legitimate science (and riding the wave of drug companies looking to expand their markets for anti-psychotics and tranquilizers), spit out “almost over night” various new disorders, including one for those uncomfortable with social situations.

No longer need shyness be a variant of normal. Now it can be a neurochemical disorder addressable with GlaxoSmithKline’s multibillion-dollar marvel Paxil. Before safety concerns and patent expirations raised their ugly heads, antidepressants had become the second-largest selling class of drugs in the United States.

“In this desire to biologize and medicalize, with the idea that every personal crisis or problem is due to a disorder of the brain, we’ve lost sight of the vast complexity of behavioral responses to external stresses,” Lane says. Add to that some possibly dangerous side effects. Along with Prozac and Zoloft, Paxil was found to increase thoughts of suicide, especially among teens, prompting an FDA warning in 2004.

Read entire article:  http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/are-you-normal-or-finally-diagnosed-17073/

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“Desperate to sell drugs, psychiatrists use their ‘scientific’ manual…an ever-broadening panoply of absurd new syndromes”

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Boston Globe
By Alex Beam
March 16, 2010

The irresistible, plus-size piñata for on-the-case journalists is the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now undergoing revision. The DSM famously includes snoring and jet lag as mental disorders. I took a whack last year, calling the 880-page doorstop “a naked land grab by a profession threatened with marginalization by biomedical research.’’

Last month historian Edward Shorter accused the DSM of accelerating “the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases: turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity.’’ Just a week ago in The New Yorker, Harvard professor Louis Menand called out the shrinks for the “blatant pathologization of a common personality trait’’ — shyness — “for the financial benefit of the psychiatric profession and the pharmaceutical industry.’’

We all agree on one thing: Desperate to sell drugs, psychiatrists use their “scientific’’ manual to identify an ever-broadening panoply of absurd new syndromes amenable to pharmaceutical cure. But what if we are all wrong? Suppose the opposite is true? Perhaps the psychiatric profession has been far too conservative about proclaiming new, treatable disorders. Here is my own modest list of psychological problems that I hope to see addressed when the new DSM-V is published, three years from now:

Dysphoric iPhobia, or single cell anomia: the counterintuitive feeling that somehow I can survive in the 21st century without owning an iPhone, and its impossible-to-resist “apps.’’ Or the forthcoming iPad, another, pointless $500 geegaw. My junky Verizon cellphone serves me fine.

Read entire article:  http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2010/03/16/alex_beam_a_new_diagnostic_psych_manual_calls_for_some_new_disorders/

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The Australian: Psychiatry’s alarming medicalization of human behavior for their “bible of mental disorders” the DSM

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

The Australian
By Janet Albrechtsen
March 3, 2010

MEDICAL advances can take your breath away. Over the past decade, medical experts have started decoding the human genome to provide genetically-personalised medicine.

The experts behind these advances are geniuses. Perhaps in the same vein, the psychiatric profession imagines that their new bible of mental disorders — more than 10 years in the making — will be hailed as milestone of medical achievement. If so, they’d be wrong.

Released last month as a draft, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a depressing testament to the medicalisation of modern society where every deviation from what is deemed normal behaviour is labelled as a mental disorder.

Known colloquially as DSM 5, the manual routinely used worldwide as the diagnostic tool for mental disorders is proposing to add a range of new mental disorders to the mushrooming list of existing ones. Your house is getting cluttered because you can’t bring yourself to throw anything away? Perhaps you have hoarding disorder. Having trouble with maths? Maybe you have mathematics disorder or discalculia as the experts call it. You’re approaching 70 and not remembering things like you used to? We call it ageing. The American Psychiatric Association wants to call it minor neurocognitive disorder. Your seven-year-old child is having frequent temper tantrums? Put it down to temper dysfunctional disorder with dysphoria.

Do you spend a “great deal of time” consumed by sexual fantasies? Using sex to deal with a stressful life? Having too much sex? We might say good luck to you. What is too much sex anyway? The experts know and they call it hypersexual disorder. Hence Tiger Woods was in a medical clinic apparently being cured of his sexual attraction to strippers.

When you lost someone you loved, did you grieve for longer than deemed normal? DSM 5 wants to medicalise that, too. How does society decide what is normal grieving and what is not? How can experts measure the depth of a love that may explain the intensity of the grief? Death and grief — like life and love — are deeply personal experiences beyond the realm of something called normal behaviour.

Read entire article:  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/not-sick-just-behaving-badly/story-e6frg6zo-1225836275463

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