Posts Tagged ‘mental disorders’

« Older Entries

Normal behaviour, or mental illness?

Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

Macleans – March 19, 2013
by Anne Kingston

A look at the new psychiatric guidelines that are pitting doctors against doctors

Jonathan Kirn/Getty Images

Every parent of a preteen has been there: on the receiving end of sullen responses, bursts of frustration or anger, even public tantrums that summon the fear that Children’s Aid is on its way. Come late May, with the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), however, such sustained cranky behaviour could put your child at risk of a diagnosis of “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.” This newly minted condition will afflict children between 6 and 12 who exhibit persistent irritability and “frequent” outbursts, defined as three or more times a week for more than a year. Its original name, “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria,” was nixed after it garnered criticism it pathologized “temper tantrums,” a normal childhood occurrence. Others argue that even with the name change the new definition and diagnosis could do just that.

“Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” isn’t the only new condition under scrutiny in the reference manual owned and produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA)—and lauded as psychiatry’s bible. Even though the final version of DSM-5 remains under embargo, its message is being decried in some quarters as blasphemous. Its various public drafts, the third published last year, have stoked international outrage—and a flurry of op-ed columns, studies, blogs and petitions. In October 2011, for instance, the Society for Humanistic Psychology drafted an open letter to the DSM task force that morphed into an online petition signed by more than 14,000 mental health professionals and 50 organizations, including the American Counseling Association and the British Psychology Society.

Of fundamental concern is a loosening and broadening of categories to the point that everyone potentially stands on the brink of some mental-disorder diagnosis, or sits on some spectrum—a phenomenon the American psychologist Frank Farley has called “the sickening of society.” One change summoning criticism is DSM-5’s reframing of grief, that inescapable fact of life, by removing the “bereavement exclusion” for people who’ve experienced loss. Previously, anyone despairing the death of a loved one wasn’t considered a candidate for “major depression” unless their despondency persisted for more than two months or was accompanied by severe functional impairment, thoughts of suicide or psychotic symptoms. No longer.

Other updates to DSM-5, the first full revision in nearly two decades, have raised red flags. Forgetting where you put your keys or other memory lapses, a fact of aging formerly shrugged off as “a senior moment,” could portend “minor neurocognitive disorder,” a shift destined to also stoke anxiety. Anyone who overeats once a week for three weeks could have a “binge-eating disorder.” Women not turned on sexually by their partners or particularly interested in sex are candidates for “female sexual interest/arousal disorder.” Nail-biters join the ranks of the obsessive-compulsive, alongside those with other “pathological grooming habits” such as “hair-pulling” and “skin-picking.”

The fuzzy boundary between “generalized anxiety disorder” (GAD) and everyday worries has also been blurred. As Allan V. Horowitz, a sociology professor at Rutgers University, points out, changes in this category are potentially the most important because they affect the largest number of people. Under the new “somatic symptom disorder” (SSD), for instance, people who express any anxiety about physical symptoms could also be saddled with a mental illness diagnosis, which could thwart their attempts to have their physical issues taken seriously. To meet the definition one only needs to report a single bodily symptom that’s distressing and/or disruptive to daily life and have just one of the following three reactions for at least six months: “ ‘disproportionate’ thoughts about the seriousness of their symptom(s); a high level of anxiety about their health; devoting excessive time and energy to symptoms or health concerns.”

DSM-5 represents a step back in mental health care, says psychologist Peter Kinderman, head of the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool. Kinderman, who is organizing an international letter of objection to DSM-5 to be posted on dsm5response.org, which launches March 20, believes many new DSM classifications, among them “female orgasmic disorder,” defy common sense. “If you’re not enjoying sex, it’s a problem, but it’s crazy to say it’s a mental illness,” he says. He also questions the new criteria for alcohol and drug “substance-use disorders.” “According to it, 40 to 50 per cent of college students should be considered mentally ill.” Such diagnoses interfere with the human helping response, says Kinderman. “When women get raped, it’s traumatic; when soldiers go to war, they come back emotionally affected. We don’t need the new label, ‘post-traumatic stress disorder,’ ” he says.

Read the rest of the article here

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

Disordering Normal—Here comes the new DSM

Friday, March 1st, 2013

Common Ground
By Alan Cassels
March 1, 2013

Towards the end of May, the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), the iconic bible of psychiatry, is coming off the presses after much revision and delay. It’s bound to keep people asking, “Am I normal or do I have a mental illness?”

If you think most diseases are established with objective criteria and rigorous debate, you’d be somewhat wrong. The DSM has a strong track record of taking clusters of symptoms and wrapping labels around them, which lead to the accelerated use of some of the most toxic medications on the planet. How does this happen?

The DSM is owned and operated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), an organization that many feel is itself owned and operated by the pharmaceutical industry. Seventy percent of the authors of the DSM-V have declared ties to pharmaceutical manufacturers and in some disease categories it’s 100%. This is the bizarre situation we’ve shamelessly come to accept: Big Pharma is allowed to put their own people on the committees to define what is and isn’t illness.

Many people agree that the old DSM-IV has been responsible for widening disease definitions and accelerating the medicalization of many diseases such as autism, ADHD and bipolar disorder. The principle here is that the broader you define a disease, the more people can be defined as having it and the bigger the market for drugs for the condition. The new bible will have more disease labels constructed from personality quirks, mood upheavals, normal bouts with sadness or common signs of aging, inevitably leading to even more prescribing.

A new category of mental illness known as “mild cognitive impairment” is the first time the label of ‘pre-dementia’ will apply to whole populations. Let me ask (most gently) who among us is not ‘pre-demented? In addition to the worries around our aging tendency to forget names, words and where we put the keys, we now have a name for it. As one ad for Alzheimer’s medications asks, “Is it just forgetfulness? Or maybe it’s “Pre-Alzheimer’s?” What better way to get perfectly healthy people to start shuffling down the cattle ramp towards a good jolt of the yet-to-be-launched pre-dementia medicines that the drug industry will soon be zapping us with? There are none yet, but trust me; those drugs are in the pipeline.

Right now, there is no cure or treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and unfortunately the drugs that do exist are next to useless. They are promoted as “slowing the rate of decline,” but there is little evidence to support that claim and they make many patients miserable with vomiting and severe nausea. Alzheimer’s is devastating for families but no one can explain how much anyone would benefit from adding “pre-dementia” to the burgeoning list of categories of mental illness.

How about grieving? According to a recent medical journal article, about 280,000 Canadians die every year and many of us are deeply affected by the death of loved ones. We experience profound grief and, for some, dealing with loss is very difficult. But here’s the hitch: What used to be considered a normal response to loss is now in the gambit of being considered a mental disorder.

Psychiatrist Dr. Allen Frances, who led the creation of the DSM-IV and lists its many sins, says the new DSM-V is going to be a disaster on the bereavement issue, adding that changing the definition of what is considered depressed (by including bereavement) “inflates estimates of the current incidence of depression in epidemiological studies” and will automatically ramp up even more demands for medical services and antidepressant medication. Should people who experience severe grief be tossed a pill that will, in effect, eclipse the many social and familial ways we have of dealing with loss? The makers of the new DSM-V think so.

Another new definition in the DSM-V suggests that being worried about disease and searching for information about it on the Internet is now worthy of a mental diagnosis. Last December, Dr. Frances blogged on the Psychology Today website about the DSM-V, stating, “One in six people suffering from cancer, heart and other serious diseases risks being saddled with a psychiatric diagnosis just because they are worried about their illness or spending more time on the internet researching their symptoms than the American Psychiatric Association (APA) thinks good for them.”

Add the word ‘Cyberchondria’ to the list of new mental health diagnoses.

Read full article here:  http://commonground.ca/2013/03/disordering-normal-5-0/

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

The DSM—New psychiatry manual adds to the oversupply of invented victims

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

“What the gradual embrace of all human suffering into the DSM does is to create co-dependency and undermine individual resourcefulness, not to mention the arrogant appropriation of the role family and friends should play in each other’s lives in difficult times”

The National Post – Dec 10, 2012
by Barbara Kay

In 1952, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders– the DSM – psychiatrist’s bible for diagnosis of mental problems, was a 132-page booklet. Today, in its fourth incarnation, it is a 886-page doorstop. Controversy is now swirling over the fifth instalment, slated for publication in May 2013.

It seems that every DSM upgrade contains more and more “disorders” that are open to question for their vagueness and open-endedness. In the upcoming edition, for example, the threshold for “generalized anxiety disorder” (GAD) is expected to broaden out to become the most commonly diagnosed mental problem. Originally the disorder was meant to identify anxiety for which there was no apparent source. The new definition would home in on domestic, financial or school problems for which anxiety is perfectly normal and justified.

Such a move would have manifold ramifications for employers, insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, the educational system and our already overburdened healthcare matrix.

According to the U.S. chairman of the task force for the DSM currently in use, the coming manual is bound to further obscure the “already fuzzy boundaries” between GAD and the normal life concerns of average people. Canadian medical historian Edward Shorter also expressed unease with the DSM tendency to therapeutize life, describing the DSM process as a kind of “horse-trading” amongst professionals (“I’ll give you your diagnosis if you’ll give me mine”). Shorter concludes: “The current DSM series is, in my view, a scientific disaster and should be discarded.”

Psychiatrists – like jurists and other revered high priests of our culture – are human beings like the rest of us. They are not mere conduits of law and science. They are, like us, a hodge podge of beliefs, ideals, prejudices, personal vanity and susceptibility to their era’s zeitgeist.

Psychiatry is also an industry like any other, creating stakeholders and turf defenders. For an in-depth appreciation of just how untrustworthy psychiatry is in general as a guide to what ails and what can fix the human condition, I recommend Dr. Tana Dineen’s 1996 book, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People.

In this revelatory, evidence-based indictment of the profession, Dineen describes her sojourn from believer to critic. Early in her career in psychology (the 1960s) she was engaged to establish a system for monitoring and assessing the diagnostic treatment services in the Psychiatric Department of the Toronto General Hospital. Burgeoning disquiet with the personal, “patriarchal” beliefs of the mental health “experts” who were contaminating their work with patients prompted a career-long inquiry into the faults of the profession.

Her conclusions are damning.

Dineen was horrified at the flow of “beliefs disguised as findings” and the consistent tendency of psychologists to “translate all of life into a myriad of abuses, addictions and traumas.” Psychology “has become a big business,” Dineen writes. “It is simply no longer accurate to speak of it as a science and it is unscrupulously misleading to call it a profession.” It is rather, in Dineen’s view, “an industry focused on self-interest and propelled by financial incentives.”

Worse, she says, many psychiatrists are making “social action” part of their mandate. Not surprising, since almost all practising psychiatrists today are products of universities whose mission since the 1960s has been to program students with politically correct thought and inculcate the concept of politically correct proselytism as a noble mission for intellectuals.

Since this book was issued in the 1990s, much of it focuses on that decade’s highly controversial concept of “recovered memory syndrome,” which ruined the lives of so many individuals who were falsely accused of sexual abuse or satanic rituals by (largely) patients whose “recovered” memories were fabrications invented by their therapists. In convicting these hapless innocents, judges abetted the completely unscientific process. As noted, psychiatrists and judges are people, not gods.

Dineen’s final chapter, “Taking back our private lives,” makes for poignant reading. For Dineen knows what a real victim is and expresses compassion for them: victims of war, earthquakes, car accidents, toxic gas leaks and famines. Just as there are real victims, there are Fabricated Victims: and if she were writing today, the “victims” of GAD would be amongst them.

What the gradual embrace of all human suffering into the DSM does is to create co-dependency and undermine individual resourcefulness, not to mention the arrogant appropriation of the role family and friends should play in each other’s lives in difficult times. It inculcates the absurd idea that one can only recover one’s emotional equilibrium and achieve happiness through therapy. Once psychiatry was described as “the purchase of friendship.” Today it is the purchase of (the illusion of) insulation from unhappiness of any kind. In the creation of the DSM-V, we must ask, since it affects everyone eventually: Cui bono (to whose advantage?), not to mention Quis custodiet…(Who is monitoring the stakeholders)?

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/10/barbara-kay-new-psychiatry-manual-adds-to-the-oversupply-of-invented-victims/

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

Medical Cartel’s Open Secret—There are No Definitive Lab Tests for Any So-Called Mental Disorder

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

America’s Leading Psychiatrist Convicts Himself of Crimes Against Humanity

Natural News—September 3. 2012

by Jon Rappoport

The medical cartel, one of a handful of evolving super-cartels that strive for more power every day, is rife with so much fraud it’s astounding. In the psychiatric arena, for example, an open secret has been bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” —Dr. Allen Frances, Psychiatrist, former Chairman, DSM task force

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”

BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:

“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”

Translation: People need to hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because people will then believe there is hope for them; they’ll believe it because we place a name on their problems…

If this is medical science, a duck is a rocket ship.

If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s. but it’s still important,” I think I’d make room on the front page.

If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear more room above the fold.

If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.

I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.

I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.

And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.

Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.

And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.

Keep in mind that Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.

Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

  • Acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;

 

  • life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;

 

  • brain damage.

 

  • Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

 

  • intercranial pressure leading to blindness;

 

  • peripheral circulatory collapse;

 

  • stupor and coma.

 

  • Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:

 

  • serious impairment of cognitive function;

 

  • fainting;

 

  • restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).

Dr. Frances self-admitted label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.

So what about Ritalin?

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

  • Paranoid delusions
  • Paranoid psychosis
  • Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
  • Activation of psychotic symptoms
  • Toxic psychosis
  • Visual hallucinations
  • Auditory hallucinations
  • Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
  • Effects pathological thought processes
  • Extreme withdrawal
  • Terrified affect
  • Started screaming
  • Aggressiveness
  • Insomnia
  • Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
  • Psychic dependence
  • High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
  • Decreased REM sleep
  • When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
  • Convulsions
  • Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.” Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern – and then comes the diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.

In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.

Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.

And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic – when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.” I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the medical apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health—as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave. The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders, which he learns to wear like badges of honor.

Thank you, Dr. Frances.

Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.
www.nomorefakenews.com

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

Critics Blast Big Psychiatry for Invented & Redefined Mental Illnesses—13,000 Professionals Petition the APA

Monday, May 14th, 2012

The New American —May 14, 2012

by Alex Newman

Unlike in conventional medicine where objective diagnoses and treatments are made based on observable biological evidence, psychiatrists get together every so often to decide what should or should not be considered a “mental illness.”

And they do not always agree, as evidenced by the more than 13,000 professionals from around the world who recently signed an open letter demanding that the upcoming edition of the psychiatry industry’s “diagnostic manual” be put on hold and reconsidered.

As the elite of the nation’s psychiatric establishment work in the shadows to fully revise the highly controversial handbook labeling various behaviors and emotional states as “illnesses,” experts across the board are crying foul. A handful of new potential mental disorders and the revised definitions for others have caused a particularly fierce uproar among some psychiatrists and mental health professionals. At least 25,000 comments have already been submitted about the proposals.

The debate and its resolutions, of course, will have serious repercussions. Depending on the outcome of the ongoing conflict, millions of people may suddenly find out that they are afflicted with newly created “diseases,” while others — especially certain individuals diagnosed with forms of autism — may no longer qualify under the new definitions. Tens of millions more may soon be officially considered “addicts” under the revised definition for addiction, too.

The proposed changes would have broad implications affecting everything from treatment regimens to welfare programs, criminal law, and even education. But around the world, psychiatrists and mental health professionals are fighting back hard, urging the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to hold off on the revisions until more discussion and research can take place.

Known as the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM), the controversial handbook is widely used around the globe by the mental health industry, governments, insurance companies, and more. If all goes as planned, the fifth edition of the so-called “Bible” of psychiatry is set to be distributed in May of next year after the first major revision in over a decade.

However, if some of the more controversial proposed changes are not reconsidered — and the controversies addressed in an adequate manner — the manual’s influence is expected to wane significantly. And even as it stands today, not all experts are convinced about its usefulness or reliability in the field.

“[The DSM] is wrong in principle, based as it is on redefining a whole range of understandable reactions to life circumstances as ‘illnesses,’ which then become a target for toxic medications heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry,” clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone with a Health Board in Wales told Reuters. “The DSM project cannot be justified, in principle or in practice. It must be abandoned so that we can find more humane and effective ways of responding to mental distress.”

Countless other experts agree, according to recent news reports, with many questioning whether a private group of individuals who stand to benefit by creating more diseases should really be writing the manual in the first place. Among the most vocal critics of the new proposals is Duke University psychiatry Prof. Allen Frances, who told the New York Times that the overly broad and vague definitions would create more “false epidemics” and increase the “medicalization of everyday behavior.”

“The DSM is distinct from all other diagnostic manuals because it has an enormous, perhaps too large, impact on society and millions of people’s lives,” explained Dr. Frances, who oversaw the writing of the current version of the diagnostic handbook and also worked on previous editions. “Unlike many other fields, psychiatric illnesses have no clear biological gold standard for diagnosing them.”

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/11370-critics-blast-big-psychiatry-for-invented-and-redefined-mental-illnesses

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

Fox News—The American Psychiatric Association Scam

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

Fox News – February 21, 2012
By Dr. Keith Ablow

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is in danger of losing the little credibility it still enjoys.

The organization is chasing medical insurance company reimbursement money by empowering “working groups” to invent whole new diagnoses by committee.

This is bad form for an association of professionals whose life work is supposed to be pursuit of the truth.  And it comes at the worst time:  When Americans have about had it with ploys to pump up revenues and profit from the public till.

According to sources familiar with the content of the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V—under development by the APA and slated for publication this year—people who are grieving and people who are shy will be labeled with “disorders.”  So, too, will some people who rape children or adults.  Hoarders—who, heretofore, might have qualified for obsessive-compulsive disorder—may get their own special diagnosis, too.

Hey, why not?  There’s a reality TV show about that.  Why not a diagnostic code, too?

Meanwhile, conditions which psychiatrists are used to diagnosing—like schizoaffective disorder and gender identity disorder, may be phased out.  Those seem to have been unpopular, I guess.  Bipolar disorder, which has been considered a mood disorder, could be reclassified as a psychotic disorder.

All in all, more human beings struggling with their emotions will be classified as sick, leading to more diagnostic codes that fit their supposed “disorders” and more money billed to Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers.

This unhealthy contamination of science by economics has a long tradition at the American Psychiatric Association.  The whole idea of promulgating more and more diagnoses, with codes like 300.23 and 309.81 and 307.44, Recurrent, was always partly a scheme to wrench the rich tradition of understanding and healing people’s psyches into the dictates of medical model billing.  It also fits neatly with the Continuing Medical Education monies routed to the APA by pharmaceutical companies whose medicines get FDA indications for particular diagnoses.

The more diagnoses, the better.  Everyone gets one.  Everyone gets billed.  Everyone leaves with a prescription.

The only trouble is that, under this system, the high art of empathy and life story analysis has been left to wither from disuse, like a beggar outside a bazaar.

What other medical specialty arrives at an official list of diagnoses by committee, then creates a bestselling book with the resulting codes (that nets the APA untold millions)?  Can you imagine groups of endocrinologists getting together to coin terms like “Excessive Urination Disorder of High Blood Sugar, With Attendant Social Disruption?”  How about cardiologists coming up with “Pain Over Sternum Associated with High Fat Diet, Despite Adequate Exercise?”

Not only does the APA translate science into the nomenclature of medical billing, but it also plays political/cultural favorites with its diagnostic manual.  When it became unfashionable and politically risky to offer help to people who were unhappy with their sexual impulses and wanted to change them, the APA yanked ego-dystonic homosexuality from its manual.  That meant that people who were drawn to same-gender partners and didn’t want to be didn’t have a place in the official healing tent of psychiatry, anymore.

I object to a medical specialty playing it so loose with both science and the human spirit.  And since it happens to be my medical specialty, I take special offense.

I am reminded of one of my mentors, the great psychiatrist Dr. Edward Shapiro.  One day, when my fellow residents and I were chatting with one another, letting Shapiro sit there and wait for us to quiet down, we noticed that his eyes were filling up.  Slowly, the room grew utterly silent.  Shapiro took off his glasses, looked at each of us, in turn, then said, “In case you miss it, I love this work.  And when people show it no respect, it tears me apart.”

The thought of such a man as this being made to conform to a fictional manual of mental disorders should be enough to make the President of the APA delay publication of the DSM V and rethink where the organization is headed—and why.

Dr. Ablow is the author of “Inside the Mind of  Casey Anthony.” He is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/02/21/american-psychiatric-association-scam/#ixzz1n2gC4dUx

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in News | 2 Comments »

Psychiatry’s Flawed Tool: A book full of subjective checklists—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

First Things – December 29, 2011
by Joe Carter

Photo: Garry Mcleod; Origami: Robert Lang

Someday our grandchildren’s grandchildren are going to sitting in college classroom learning about the early 21st century and wonder how a society so seemingly advanced could have such primitive ideas about mental health.They will no doubt be shocked and appalled that our major diagnostic tool for psychiatry is a book full of subjective checklists—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM versions I-IV).

I became all too familiar with the DSM in my college days, first as a psychology major and then as a behavioral science major (I switched because I believed behavioral science would be more scientifically rigorous. It wasn’t.) I was constantly shocked that such an utterly absurd book could be considered our primary mental health tool. The diagnostic criteria is often so vague that it is virtually impossible to determine if a patient truly has a mental disorder. Yet almost every diagnosis in America is made based on comparing a patient against the DSM’s checklist of “symptoms.”

Part of the reason the DSM is so flawed is because it is highly politicized. For example, homosexuality was classified in DSM as a sexual disorder until the 1970s. And until 1987, “ego-dystonic homosexuality” was still classified as a pathology. These “mental disorders” were later removed, not because of a change in empirical data (since there is none) but because of the protest of gay rights groups. I agree with the gay rights activists on this one: homosexuality should have never been classified as a mental disorder. But this example shows that the judgments made by psychiatrists are often highly subjective and are rooted more in speculative theories than in scientific fact. (Keep in mind that this is the same profession that, for almost a century, believed the Freudian idea that holding your feces in as an infant affected your personality as an adult.)

Such criticisms against the DSM have been made for decades (mostly by cranks like me) but they are gaining a new hearing because of who is now making them: Allen Frances, lead editor of the DSV-IV. As Frances says, “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s [BS]. I mean, you just can’t define it.” As Wired magazine notes:

Some of this disputatiousness is the hazard of any professional specialty. But when psychiatrists say, as they have during each of these fights, that the success or failure of their efforts could sink the whole profession, they aren’t just scoring rhetorical points. The authority of any doctor depends on their ability to name a patient’s suffering. For patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering. This is why, as one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, “there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.”

Since 1980, when the DSM-III was published, psychiatrists have tried to solve this problem by using what is called descriptive diagnosis: a checklist approach, whereby illnesses are defined wholly by the symptoms patients present. The main virtue of descriptive psychiatry is that it doesn’t rely on unprovable notions about the nature and causes of mental illness, as the Freudian theories behind all those “neuroses” had done. Two doctors who observe a patient carefully and consult the DSM’s criteria lists usually won’t disagree on the diagnosis—something that was embarrassingly common before 1980. But descriptive psychiatry also has a major problem: Its diagnoses are nothing more than groupings of symptoms. If, during a two-week period, you have five of the nine symptoms of depression listed in the DSM, then you have “major depression,” no matter your circumstances or your own perception of your troubles. “No one should be proud that we have a descriptive system,” Frances tells me. “The fact that we do only reveals our limitations.” Instead of curing the profession’s own malady, descriptive psychiatry has just covered it up.

Read more . . .

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/12/29/psychiatrys-flawed-tool/

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

Is the American Psychiatric Association in Bed with Big Pharma? Answer: Yes

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Note from CCHR Int:  We’re happy to see more and more press running stories containing the facts about psychiatric diagnoses, that mental disorders are not diseases on par with real medical diseases as the psychiatric/pharmaceutical marketing teams would have you believe, but lists of behaviors and emotions repackaged as disease in order to sell billions of dollars worth of pharmaceutical ‘solutions.’   CCHR was the first organization to point out that psychiatric disorders were not medical conditions discovered in labs, but disorders invented in committee by pharmaceutically funded psychiatrists.  We’re very pleased we’re no longer the only ones reporting the facts about psychiatry and its marketing campaigns.  Get the facts here

Do we really need more mental disorder diagnoses creating the need for more drugs in a society that some would say is already over-medicated?

The Fog City Journal – 11/29/2011
by Ralph E. Stone

“The critics — and the public too — have a stake in the proposed DSM-V. More mental disorders may mean just more drugs in our over-medicated society.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders, which is used in the United States and to some extent internationally, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and policy makers. The DSM is produced by a panel of psychiatrists, many of whom have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. It is considered the “bible” of American psychiatry. The latest edition — DSM-IV — was published in 1994.

In 1952, the DSM was a small, spiral-bound handbook (DSM-I), but the latest edition (DSM-IV), is a 943-page magnum opus. Over time, psychiatric diagnoses have increased in the American population and in turn, drugs that affect mental states are then used to treat them. The theory that psychiatric conditions are caused by a biochemical imbalance is often used as a justification for their widespread use, even though the theory in unproven. Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and what is normal and abnormal is often unclear, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones.

Medications are widely used to treat the symptoms of mental disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. Sometimes medications are used with other treatments such as psychotherapy.

While I am sure research in mental disorders account for some of this increase, I cannot help but believe that there is a certain amount of disease-peddling going on. That is, instead of promoting drugs to treat diseases, diseases are promoted to fit the drugs. For example, shyness as a psychiatric illness made its debut as “social phobia” in DSM-III in 1980, but was said to be rare. By 1994, when DSM-IV was published, it had become “social anxiety disorder,” now said to be extremely common, thus, boosting sales of antidepressants. Now, social anxiety disorder is “a severe medical condition.” In 1999, the FDA approved a drug for social anxiety disorder. After a successful marketing campaign, the sales of Paxil soared.

Presently, a revised version of the DSM is set for publication in 2013. The proposed revision has proven quite controversial. A group of psychologists with the Society for Humanistic Psychology, for examle, has filed a petition objecting to many of the revisions, arguing that they broaden the definition of mental health disorders, which, in turn, could lead to over treatment with drugs. Some, but not all, of the objections of the Society — along with the British Psychological Society and the American Counseling Association — to the proposed DSM-V include:

- The proposed DSM “fails to explicitly state that deviant behavior and primary conflicts between the individual and society are not mental disorders. Given lack of consensus as to the ‘primary’ causes of mental distress, this proposed change may result in the labeling of sociopolitical deviance as mental disorder.”

- “Several new proposals with little empirical basis also warrant hesitation: For example, ‘Apathy Syndrome,’ ‘Internet Addiction Disorder,’ and ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ have virtually no basis in the empirical literature.”

- “…clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalization of their natural and normal responses to their experiences; responses which undoubtedly have distressing consequences which demand helping responses, but which do not reflect illnesses so much as normal individual variation.”

Do we really need more mental disorder diagnoses creating the need for more drugs in a society that some would say is already over-medicated? Let’s look at some statistics. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the percentage of Americans who took at least one prescription drug in the past month increased from 44 percent to 48 percent over the past ten years. The use of two or more drugs increased from 25 percent to 31 percent. The use of five or more drugs increased from 6 percent to 11 percent. And in 2007-2008, 1 out of every 5 children and 9 out of 10 older Americans reported using at least one prescription drug in the past month.

And Americans are spending more on drugs. According to the CDC, spending for prescription drugs in the U.S. was $234.1 billion in 2008, which was more than double what was spent in 1999.

And the pharmaceutical industry is profiting. According to Fortune 500 (May 3, 2010 issue date), the profits for the twelve largest pharmaceutical companies was almost $64 billion in 2010. Clearly, Pharma has a financial interest in a DSM with more mental disorders because it will mean a demand for more drugs to treat them.

The critics — and the public too — have a stake in the proposed DSM-V. More mental disorders may mean just more drugs in our over-medicated society.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once quipped, “If all the drugs were thrown in the ocean, everyone would be better-off . . . except for the fish.” While this is a an overstatement, it does contain a grain of truth.

http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/3217/is-the-american-psychiatric-association-in-bed-with-big-pharma/

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

Psychiatry’s Diagnosis Manual Under Fire – will feed culture of overdrugging/overdiagnosing

Saturday, November 26th, 2011

San Francisco Chronicle – 11/26/2011
by Erin Allday

"Another diagnosis, dysphoric mood dysregulation disorder, is basically temper tantrums," Robbins said. "Next thing you know, you could have 2-year-olds on psychotropic medications."

The “bible” of American psychiatry – a manual of mental health used around the world by doctors, consumers and insurance providers – has come under fire from a growing group of psychologists who worry that proposed revisions will feed into a culture of overdiagnosing, and overtreating, otherwise healthy people.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, is undergoing its fifth major revision in the more than 60 years since it was first published by the American Psychiatric Association. The last update was in 1994, and the new manual is expected to be released in spring 2013.

Revisions to the DSM are often hotly debated, but after two decades of major, and frequently controversial, shifts in how mental health problems are diagnosed and treated in the United States, this latest update has become especially contentious, many mental health providers say.

Last month a group of psychologists with the Society for Humanistic Psychology posted a petition against many of the suggested DSM revisions, citing what they see as a broadening of the definition of mental health disorders, which, in turn, would lead to overtreatment with drugs.

7,000 signatures

The petition now has more than 7,000 signatures, and last week it won the support of San Francisco’s Saybrook University, with roughly 60 faculty members who emphasize a holistic approach to treating mental illnesses.

“There’s this propensity to push pills instead of looking at what’s really going on with the person,” said Saybrook President Mark Schulman. “When we saw in the DSM-5 that there was going to be a push in the direction of a more medical, less holistic way of doing things, we felt we should take a stand.”

A work in progress

The American Psychiatric Association has posted an online response to the petition, welcoming critiques to and comments on the proposed revisions. Their response notes that the manual is still a work in progress and, as more scientific evidence becomes available, some of the changes may become more palatable to critics.

Since the last diagnostic manual update, research has increasingly pointed to biological causes for a wide variety of mental health conditions and, in response, treatment has turned toward pharmacological answers, some psychologists say. Drugs are being used to solve mental health problems that aren’t problems at all, they add.

In 2010, 1 in 5 American adults was using some type of mental health medication, a 22 percent increase over the past decade, according to a report released last week by Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy-benefits management company.

Therapy is still popular, but part of the problem is that there simply aren’t enough trained counselors to fill the mental health need. Patients are turning to primary care doctors for medical relief from symptoms for everything from depression and anxiety to attention deficit disorder, many mental health providers say.

Because many primary care doctors rely on the DSM to help them understand and diagnose mental health problems, it’s critical that the manual be as accurate and science-based as possible, say psychologists who have signed the petition.

While trained psychiatrists might be able to distinguish between a mental health disorder that needs medical intervention and a so-called normal human response to a difficult time or situation, primary care doctors may struggle.

Critics’ concerns

Critics of the DSM update say that the task force assigned to make the revisions has suggested broadening the definitions of too many mental health problems, opening the door to even more diagnoses and treatments.

Grief after the death of a loved one, for example, may be included under the diagnosis of major depressive disorder. That means a person’s grief could be labeled a pathological disorder, and not a normal human experience, said psychologist Brent Robbins, a professor at Point Park University in Pittsburgh and an author of the petition.

2-year-olds on meds

“Another diagnosis, dysphoric mood dysregulation disorder, is basically temper tantrums,” Robbins said. “Next thing you know, you could have 2-year-olds on psychotropic medications.”

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

How PTSD took over America

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Salon Magazine- November 15, 2011 by Alice Karekezi

The diagnosis is now being applied to everything from muggings to childbirth. An expert explains why it’s bad news

We’re not saying that people don’t have difficult emotional experiences and aren’t suffering. What we’re saying is this is not necessarily a disorder that people are experiencing, and if people think like that, it can be very disempowering to them. ( Photo Credit: David Royal Hanson via Shutterstock)

In the past 30 years, post-traumatic stress disorder has gone from exotic rarity to omnipresent. Once chiefly applied to wartime veterans returning from combat, it is now a much more common diagnosis, still linked to traumatic events but now including those occurring outside the battle zone: the death of a loved one on a hospital bed, a car crash on the highway, an assault in the neighborhood park. Many would argue that this is a good thing: greater recognition of psychologically distressing events will lead to more people seeking treatment and a decrease in the preponderance of PTSD – a win-win.

Stephen Joseph disagrees. In his new book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” the professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham (in the U.K.) warns that our culture’s acceptance of PTSD has become excessive and has led to an over-medicalization of experiences that should be considered part of ordinary, normal, human experience. This has kept us from proactively working through our grief and anxiety: We’ve become too quick to go to the shrink expecting him to fix us, rather than allowing ourselves the opportunity to grow and find new meaning in our lives as a result of painful, but common, events. Joseph advocates for a push toward post-traumatic growth as therapy to treat the stress of trauma, which he distinguishes as being different from the hokey, blue skies and rainbows, pop psychology that he claims has exploded in our culture in the past decade.

Joseph spoke to Salon over the phone to discuss our misunderstanding of the disorders, the meaning and usefulness of suffering, and if some cultures are more prone to PTSD than others.

How would you define a traumatic event? Is it subjective or are there some basic requirements that must be met?

I see trauma as a psychological rupturing. It’s when something happens to us that ruptures our psychological skin. Or, something which shatters our assumptions about ourselves in the world. That’s what I think of as traumatic, and in a way that can be many things. So, that can include a wider range of experience, and I can understand trauma in that broader way. There are lots of different experiences, such as being in a road traffic collision, or experiencing an illness – those sorts of things can be traumatic to people. It can be experienced as psychologically traumatic. But whether it’s necessary to create a psychiatric diagnostic category to capture those experiences is perhaps not necessary.

Do you believe that PTSD is over-diagnosed?

Well, that’s a really, really tricky question to answer because in a way it’s diagnosed pretty much exactly as it’s described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). So whether the definition of PTSD is too broad is a different question, if you see what I mean. When PTSD was first introduced in 1980, it was defined much more tightly. The gatekeeper criterion to the diagnosis was: Have you experienced a traumatic event? In 1980, it was defined in such a way that only people who had experienced an event that was really outside the range of usual human experience, [like] Vietnam or the Holocaust, had experienced the sorts of experiences that were thought to elicit PTSD. So if you experienced something like a car accident or a traumatic birth, then you couldn’t get a diagnosis of PTSD, because, by definition, you hadn’t experienced a traumatic event.

In 1994, the definition changed in such a way as to include other, broader experiences. Equally persistent was the person’s subjective experiences of what they thought was traumatic. When that happened, people who had experienced car accidents, traumatic births, what we would have otherwise thought of as more ordinary life events, insofar as they are not statistically unusual, could then be diagnosed as a having PTSD. So now we are in a position where lots of people are able to receive the diagnosis of PTSD. So it’s not that it’s being over-diagnosed in that sense. The difficulty or problem, if there is one, is whether, generally speaking – PTSD would be part of this – the DSM over-medicalizes human experience. Things which are relatively common, relatively normal, are turned into psychiatric disorders.

Can you describe some of the typical symptoms of PTSD?

When people experience trauma, when their assumptions about themselves and the world come crashing down, there’s often a period of avoidance. People just try to block out what happened. Switch off. Turn their attention to other things. That’s quite understandable. Then, over time, that gives rise to memories and emotions that come flooding in as the person sort of begins to try to make sense of what happened, and that can become so powerful and distressing that they have to push that away again and go back into a period of avoidance. So sometimes people go through that, periods of avoidance and intrusion. That seems to me as a healthy and adaptive way of working through something painful, emotionally painful, that has happened to us. So those are the experiences. PTSD is when those experiences become so overwhelming that the person can’t function anymore – at work, or school, or in their social life. It takes over so much. But otherwise the symptoms of PTSD are fairly normal, natural ways of dealing with adaptation.

It’s important to see those experiences as quite normal and natural. They are not symptoms of a disorder by themselves. They’re just the way that people deal with an upsetting event in order to be able to make sense of things and to move on. It’s only when they become so overwhelmingly intense that they might be considered a disorder. I think that’s where we get into the problem with what PTSD is: when people are going through that normal experience, but they see it as having a disorder rather than a normal process of adaptation.

That will diminish over time?

Exactly.

Is the emotional pain overblown in such cases?

The suffering is very real. We’re not saying that people don’t have difficult emotional experiences and aren’t suffering. What we’re saying is this is not necessarily a disorder that people are experiencing, and if people think like that, it can be very disempowering to them.

What is the detrimental effect of over-medicalizing these more common human experiences of grief and pain?

When we think of ourselves as suffering from a disorder in a medical sense, well we go to the doctor and we expect the doctor to prescribe whatever the medical treatment is. We’re not in the driver’s seat. We go along – we tell them [our] symptoms, they listen to us, they diagnose what the problem is, and then they work out what the appropriate treatment is. That’s the mind-set when we’re working within a medical framework and we think of ourselves as suffering from a disorder. We sit down in front of the therapist and we expect the therapist to be like a doctor – to be looking out for what the symptoms are so that they can make the correct diagnosis and prescribe us the right treatment. The language of PTSD invokes those ideas, and I think it’s those ideas that can be quite unhelpful at times. For what we’re talking about here, if it’s a normal, natural process, what’s really important is for the person to be in the driver’s seat for themselves – to make their own choices, their own decisions, because we’re dealing not with a disorder, but a battle within the person to find new meanings and new ways of understanding the world. That’s what they have to do. Nobody else can do that for them.

What is “post-traumatic growth”?

Post-traumatic growth is when people come out of trauma having learned new things about themselves and about the world and about their relationship with the world. People develop new philosophies of life. They develop new priorities in life. People learn an awful lot about themselves: their strengths; what they’re good at; having new respect for themselves. They sort of see their lives as divided into two halves: before the event happened and after the event happened. There is a clear demarcation. And they recognize that something happened to them that sliced their world in half in that way, and things for them are now completely different. How they lead their lives has been transformed – their priorities about life, their relationships.

I think one of the things that captures that the most [starts with] the idea that, sometimes, people lead their lives in a way that is dictated by external forces of status and wealth, which are very much big drivers in our capitalist society. We often, in our everyday lives, forget about the small things that are quite important – our relationships: remembering to nurture them, to look after the people around us, to be giving, to be compassionate. When traumatic events happen, people are often shaken back to reality, and remember what really matters to them. Often it is those other things – remembering somebody’s birthday; nurturing our friendships; looking after our parents, the people around us; really embracing our relationships; and letting go of a more materialistic outlook. People often describe it as getting back to who they really are, or feeling more true to themselves, or being more genuine or more authentic. Somehow the idea of the false self that people create around them is shattered, like Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall. The essence of who they are emerges.

Yes, becoming truer to oneself captures the idea very well. Realizing that life is short and sometimes there isn’t as much time left as we thought to put up facades.

This kind of makes trauma sound like a blessing (you even mention people describing it as a “gift”). Is finding meaning the same thing as condoning the traumatic event? And doesn’t this talk of growth all sound very “kumbaya-ish” and unrealistic?

One of the reasons, sometimes, that post-traumatic growth can be seen unfavorably is that it seems like saying that trauma can lead to greater happiness; that for people who have been through trauma, it’s a good for them – they’re happier. That’s just so not the message. It’s not saying that trauma leads to happiness, in terms of smiling and feeling good and laughing and joy – not that type of happiness. What we’re talking about is how trauma can lead to a deeper, more existentially meaningful and fulfilling life, and that in turn may lead to greater happiness further down the road. But, post-traumatic growth is not about happiness in the sort of yellow, smiley face sense.

In essence, post-traumatic growth is a very simple idea, but it has been overshadowed by this mass of psychiatric literature over the past 30 or 40 years about the overwhelming destructive side of trauma, and about how these lead to medical problems. It’s a very simple idea, but [post-traumatic growth] sits, on the one hand, very uncomfortably within mainstream culture of the world of psychology and psychiatry, and on the other hand it seems to sit very comfortably with some other parts of Western culture, such as positive thinking, but it also clashes with some of that literature which is quite superficial, and not grounded in scientific research, and makes unsupported claims.

So, no, post-traumatic growth] doesn’t mean that [people] value or cherish the bad thing that has happened to them. They just accept that it has happened to them. People will often say they wish it hadn’t happened, or they wish they could go back, but there is a realism that they know they can’t. So it’s accepting that they can’t go back; they can’t change things. The only way forward is to go forward. It’s when people can’t accept that something has happened, and they [try] to go back to how they were before, is when they struggle. Acceptance is just being realistic – not seeing it as a good thing.

And someone not experiencing growth — or experiencing PTSD — is that person always trying to go back?

I think that often that’s what gets people stuck – trying to go back, trying to rebuild their lives exactly as it was before. That can lead people to get very stuck because it just isn’t possible when traumatic events happen and we’re presented with new information about the world, or with losses. It just isn’t possible to go back and make things as they were. We have to somehow accept what has happened to us and move on.

Is post-traumatic growth something completely in opposition to PTSD or post-traumatic stress? Either you have one or the other?

They can sit together. The way I see it, post-traumatic growth mostly arises out of post-traumatic stress. So it’s how people deal with the post-traumatic stress; how they manage to deal with the intrusive thoughts that are plaguing them; and the new sense they make of their experiences. So it’s through the post-traumatic stress, through the struggle of post-traumatic stress that post-traumatic growth arises. So often there’s a period of time in which people will begin to talk about post-traumatic growth but they will still be suffering from post-traumatic stress. They’re not in opposition. In a way, they are opposite sides of a coin.

You make a claim that true happiness is something that in and of itself cannot be pursued, and one is doomed to fail if one tries. How is that?

Well, that’s an idea that some philosophers have put forward. Some of the research seems to suggest that what’s really important to finding happiness is meaning and purpose in life. If we think our road to happiness is through seeking hedonistic pleasures night after night, then that’s not likely to lead to a deep, fulfilling level of happiness. But, if we find ways of finding meaning and purpose, wherever that might be, then we’re not setting out directly aiming for happiness but that’s what we’re going to get. We’re going to find a more fulfilling life. Happiness is a byproduct, but in a sense it’s more guaranteed.

When we think of psychological therapies, and the helping professions in general, they often have been about helping people feel better. [For] people with various problems of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress, therapy is about getting the person to have a more positive emotional state. That’s been, really, what the therapy world has been about for 50 years, and yet that’s only half the picture. The other half is about the meaning we put on things, our purpose in life, our sense of ourselves, our sense of autonomy, our relationships. Psychology can also be about those things. I’m not saying that therapists have ignored them altogether; for sure, they haven’t, but those more existential ideas have been overshadowed by trying to feel good. This is the idea between what psychologists call subjective well-being, which is about feeling good, and psychological well-being, which is what you could call “meaning-good,” and it’s just about getting the balance between those two things right.

Are there some cultures that are more prone to post-traumatic growth?

That’s a really good question. I don’t think the research has really documented that yet as to whether it may be more common. What the research has shown, however, is that post-traumatic growth is something observed in pretty much all cultures that have been investigated, though differently defined in slight ways. “Post-traumatic growth” sounds like a very Western idea, but [it’s one that] gets back into history and into all sorts of cultures. It’s an idea that’s very resonant with Buddhist and some Chinese philosophy ideas, as well as ideas in Western religion.

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/how_ptsd_took_over_america/singleton/

« Return to news items

RSS News Feed

Share

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

« Older Entries