Posts Tagged ‘DSM-V’

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How psychiatry invents mental disorders

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Natural News
By Mike Adams
March 2, 2010

The Disease Mongering Engine, which I invented a couple of years ago and posted on NaturalNews, was initially created as a joke to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the fictitious diseases that are constantly created by the psychiatric industry. This hilarious online disease generator (http://www.naturalnews.com/disease-…) allows you to instantly create your own fictitious diseases and disorders such as:

• Repetitive Dysmorphic Nose Picking Disorder With Itching (RDNPDWI)
• Oppositional Disorganized Speaking Disorder With Indigestion (ODSDWI)
• Chronic Bipolar Anticipation Dysfunction With Smelly Feet (CBADWSF)

… and so on.

Here’s the bizarre part: All of a sudden, the new psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-V) appears to have adopted as medical fact many of the disorders that were created by the Disease Mongering Engine!

This new manual, for example, now says that spending a lot of time thinking about sex is a disorder. (That immediately paints every teenage boy as “diseased.”)

Another new disease is “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” (ODD), which includes anyone who disagrees with authority. All those who are skeptical about the safety of vaccines, for example, are about to be diagnosed with ODD.

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/028280_psychiatric_industry_disease_mongering.html

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The biggest Pharma Front Group of all—The American Psychiatric Association—unveil their newest invented mental disorders

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

GoozNews
February 10, 2010

The American Psychiatric Association yesterday gave the press an advance view of its proposed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the reports were highly skeptical. Will Tiger Woods soon be diagnosed with “hypersexual disorder”? He could be if the proposals go into effect. The APA will be accepting comments through April.

The news reports barely noted the fact that dozens of psychiatrists who serve on the DSM-V (it’s the fifth edition) task force and working groups have financial ties to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, as well as to numerous patient advocacy groups, which themselves are often funded by industry. A quick check of the APA website reveals that none of the financial disclosures for committee members have been updated since 2008, when the committees were intially appointed.

The APA promises to “relaunch” the website later today. Hopefully, the update will include new biographies and financial disclosures for all the committee members. It is crucial that the disclosures include all relationships with industry during 2009 and 2010 — the period when the committees were actively engaged in coming up with the proposals.

Read entire article:  http://www.gooznews.com/node/3266

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Like we’ve always said, there’s no science to psychiatric diagnoses/the DSM. Now, even some psychiatrists are agreeing

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Shirah Vollmer, MD
Psychology Today
December 30, 2009

We are about to embark on new psychiatric diagnoses, as there is soon to be a revision of our current Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM). This new reference book is creating quite the stir. In 1999 a DSM V Reserach Planning Conference sponsored jointly by APA and the National Institute of Mental Health was held to set the research priorities. The DSM V task force was established in 2007 and it consists of 27 members. In June, 2009 Allen Frances, head of the DSM IV task force, issued the criticism that that DSM V will cause “false epidemics”. He wrote that “the work on DSM V has displayed the most unhappy combination of soaring ambition and weak methodology”.

Psychiatric diagnoses are made by committee. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. It is used in the United States, and to varying degrees around the world by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and policy makers. It was first published in 1952 and there have been five revisions. The last publication was DSM-IV published in 1994, although there was a text revision produced in 2000. The next edition is scheduled to be released in May, 2013. Another classification systems is the mental disorders section of the International Statistical Classifiction of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). This is used more often in Europe and other parts of the world.

Read entire article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/learning-play/200912/dsm-v-plea-skepticism

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New Scientist – Psychiatry’s bible: Its time has passed – Growing criticism of DSM has Prompted Psychiatry’s Civil War

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist
December 9, 2009

WHEN doctors disagree with each other, they usually couch their criticisms in careful, measured language. In the past few months, however, open conflict has broken out among the upper echelons of US psychiatry. The focus of discord is a volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which psychiatrists turn to when diagnosing the distressed individuals who turn up at their offices seeking help. Regularly referred to as the profession’s bible, the DSM is in the midst of a major rewrite, and feelings are running high.

Two eminent retired psychiatrists are warning that the revision process is fatally flawed. They say the new manual, to be known as DSM-V, will extend definitions of mental illnesses so broadly that tens of millions of people will be given unnecessary and risky drugs. Leaders of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which publishes the manual, have shot back, accusing the pair of being motivated by their own financial interests – a charge they deny. The row is set to come to a head next month when the proposed changes will be published online. For a profession that exists to soothe human troubles, it’s incendiary stuff.

Psychiatry suffers in comparison with other areas of medicine, as diseases of the mind are on the whole less well understood than those of the body. We have, as yet, only glimpses into the fundamental causes of the common mental illnesses, and there are no biological tests to diagnose them. This means conditions such as depression, schizophrenia and personality disorders remain difficult to diagnose with precision. Doctors can only question people about their state of mind and observe their behaviour, classifying illness according to the most obvious symptoms.

Read entire article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427381.300-psychiatrys-civil-war.html?full=true

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70% of psychiatrists in charge of adding new mental disorders to psych billing bible (DSM) have conflicts/ties to Pharma

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Roger Collier
Canadian Medical Association Journal
November 17, 2009

Former editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have publicly declared their concerns that the ongoing revision process of the influential publication has been cloaked in secrecy. In recent months, debate about the confidentiality agreement that contributors must now sign has been playing out in the pages of the Psychiatric Times. Dr. Allen Frances, editor of DSM-IV, has written several editorials slamming the DSM-V task force for their lack of transparency.

The “real problem now is the almost complete lack of openness about [DSM-V] methods, progress, timelines, and products,” Frances writes in an email.

Dr. Robert Spitzer, editor of DSM-III, has expressed a similar opinion. In 2008, he wrote an open letter criticizing the confidentiality agreement (Psychiatr News 2008; 43:26). In the letter, Spitzer says that he requested the minutes of a DSM-V meeting but was refused. The confidentiality mandate, he wrote, would prohibit the free exchange of information between the DSM task force and outside experts that is essential to effectively revising the manual.

Read entire article: http://www.cmaj.ca/earlyreleases/17nov09-dsm-revision-surrounded-by-controversy.shtml

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Parent Alienation-Another bogus mental disorder: Child is “mentally ill” if one parent has “alienated” him from the other

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Lindsay Lyon
U.S. News & World Report
October 29, 2009

From an early age, Anne was taught by her mother to fear her father. Behind his back, her mom warned that he was an unpredictable and dangerous; any time he’d invite her to do anything—a walk in the woods, a trip to the art store—she would craft an excuse not to go. “I was under the impression that he was crazy, that at any moment he could just pop and do something violent to hurt me,” says Anne, who prefers that only her middle name be used to guard her family’s privacy. Typical of a phenomenon some mental-health experts now label “parental alienation,” her view of him became so negative, she says, that her mother persuaded her to lie during a custody hearing when the couple divorced. Then 14, she told the judge that her dad was physically abusive. Was he? “No,” she says. “But I was convinced that he would [be].” After her mother won custody, Anne all but severed contact with her father for years.

If a growing faction of the mental-health community has its way, Anne’s experience will one day soon be an actual diagnosis. The concept of parental alienation, which is highly controversial, is being described as one in which children strongly attach to one parent and reject the other in the false belief that he or she is bad or dangerous.

Read entire article: http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/childrens-health/2009/10/29/parental-alienation-a-mental-diagnosis.html

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The DSM isn’t about science – its about politics and marketing: An Expanding Universe of Mental Illness

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

Theron Bowers
Spero News
August 2, 2009

James von Brunn, the shooter (do I really need to say “alleged”?) at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was odd, even by the standards of his kooky peers. White supremacist Stan Hess met von Brunn in 2004. Hess recalled that the creepy von Brunn was “very angry about society and the Jewish influence on the Federal Reserve”. At that time, von Brunn “alluded to violence”; he was a frustrated artist, who spent a lot of time peddling racist conspiracy theories on the Internet.

Is James von Brunn mad, or bad? Some say mad. Since Hitler’s infernos, psychoanalysts have argued that anti-Semitism or racism was a mental illness. Analysts have proposed several psychosexual theories explaining Hitler’s “lunacy.” Some speculate that he had an illicit affair with his niece. Others propose that Hitler had one testicle which led to feelings of inferiority. His self hatred was projected on to the Jews.

Today, the analysts are gone but the case for defining bigotry as a mental illness remains in a less bizarre form. Led by Harvard psychiatrist, Alvin Poussaint, many doctors have argued that haters have a mental disorder, pathological bias. Some psychologists are even conducting research on bigotry. James von Brunn is Exhibit A for the new mental disorder.

Extreme racism is only one example of the increasing faith in technology to cure our souls and fix our society. In 2012, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) will publish the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). In May 2008, the APA released the names of the work group members. Last April, the 13 work groups reported on their progress, revealing that organized psychiatry is on the verge of including several ancient vices and new time wasters in this Pandora’s Box. Advocates have lobbied to expand the universe of the mentally disturbed with philanderers (sex addicts), spend thrifts (compulsive shoppers), the gluttonous (binge eaters) and internet gamers.

Read entire article: http://www.speroforum.com/a/20002/An-Expanding-Universe-of-Mental-Illness

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Psychiatry: Redefining everyday problems as psychiatric problems is bad news for us all – and democracy

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Ken McLaughlin
July 28, 2009
Spiked-Online.com

Britain’s newspapers have been full of predictions this week about 2012, when London will host the Olympics. There is a sense both of excitement over potential success and trepidation over potential failure, both on and off the sporting field. It is too early to predict with any confidence whether the London Games will be a success or not, but one thing I can predict, with utmost confidence, is that by 2012 many more of us will be defined as mentally ill.

This will not be related to the Olympics, but because 2012 is when the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (usually referred to by the shorthand DSM-V) is expected to be published. If previous revisions are anything to go by, then many more people will fall within the parameters required for a diagnosis of mental disorder (1).

It does not require a PhD in psychiatric history to be fairly certain that DSM-V will be more extensive than its predecessors. For example, between the first and fourth editions, published in 1952 and 1994, the number of pages grew from 130 to 886 and the number of diagnostic categories more than tripled. This led some sceptics to suggest, tongue only slightly in cheek, that at such a rate of growth we can reasonably expect the fifth edition to contain some 1,256 pages and 1,800 diagnostic criteria (2).

We have a few years to wait before finding out the exact contents. But it has been revealed in the US this week that there are already tortured discussions amongst those preparing DSM-V as to whether such things as overuse of the internet, ‘excessive’ sexual activity, compulsive shopping and apathy should be contained within the parameters of clinically diagnosable mental disorder in the next edition of the manual (3).

Read the entire article:  http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7199/

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Slate Exposes Psychiatry’s Billing Bible; “Bitterness, Compulsive Shopping, and Internet Addiction”

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Christopher Lane
Slate
July 24, 2009

There’s an awful lot of money to be made from compulsive shopping, judging by the career of Madeleine Wickham. Her Shopaholic series, written under the pen name Sophie Kinsella, is required reading for chick-lit enthusiasts, and the romantic comedy Confessions of a Shopaholic, the first of several planned big-screen adaptations, grossed more than $100 million worldwide. While the film, starring Isla Fisher, isn’t terribly funny, it does make the valid point that to enjoy shopping for elegant clothes isn’t a pathology.

It’s a style.The American Psychiatric Association risks losing sight of that distinction by grimly—and rather inexpertly—debating whether avid shopping should be considered a sign of mental illness. The fifth edition of the association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is expected in 2012.

Read entire article: http://www.slate.com/id/2223479/pagenum/all/#p2

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