Posts Tagged ‘psychiatric diagnoses’

Hickierie Dickory Doc – McGorry Turns Back the Clock

Monday, May 30th, 2011

Seroxat Sufferers – Stand Up and Be Counted
By Bob Fiddaman
May 30, 2011

Patrick McGorry

McGorry’s Delorean continues on it’s trip back to the future in Australia, it’s new passenger, Prof Ian Hickie.

I say new, Hickie has been around for years.

Judging by an article in today’s Australian Telegraph, there seems to be questions being asked regarding the number of Australian children being prescribed antidepressant medication.

Elissa Doherty and Marianne Betts write:

The number of children aged six and under being prescribed anti-depressants has soared by almost 50 per cent since the federal government pledged to investigate the issue, new figures show.

Thing is, just two meetings have been held since Australian Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, ordered an investigation over three years ago!

In the meantime, McGorry’s Delorean [early intervention program] continues to pick up speed…with government backing!

Ian Hickie

Ian Hickie was the inaugural CEO (2000-2003) of ‘beyondblue: the national depression initiative’, which has very successfully sold depression in Australia, with many millions of dollars of government money. This has worked brilliantly for the drug companies, and beyondblue does not accept pharma funding, so the drug companies get the promotion for free. I’ve previously wrote about beyondblue back in November 2008.

Graham “Biff Tannen” Burrows, whom I wrote about here, is now retired but has played a huge role in promoting psychiatric diagnoses and psychotropic drugs in Australia, particularly in the 1990′s.

It would appear that Burrows has been totally in bed with the pharmaceutical companies. More importantly, he influenced government policy in the 1990′s to focus on depression. Without him, it could be suggested that beyondblue would not have come about nor would McGorry’s meteoric rise a decade or so later.

Beyondblue and Hickie paved the way for EPPIC, a psychiatric service aimed at addressing the needs of older adolescents and young adults with emerging psychotic disorders.

Hickie, it would appear, is the Burrows of the 21st century.

McGorry shot to fame last year when he was appointed Australian of the Year. Hickie and McGorry had already been working together for several years, in fact Hickie is a key player in McGorry’s ‘Headspace’).

Anything they say to the Aussie government seems to be taken at face value, this is something that baffles me. We can all make claims about “fixing” mental disorders because they simply cannot be diagnosed. The way forward for Australians is nipping these disorders in the bud by ‘catching them early.’ I cannot believe the Aussie government could fall for this – what evidence has McGorry supplied to back up these claims?

Whatever they say is usually accepted as gospel, and it is very rare for either of them to be criticised, save for a handful of advocates, a few Australian MP’s and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights [CCHR]

SPHERE

The PDF above is a seemingly egregious example of the conflicts of interests that exist: a whole journal supplement based on the SPHERE project clinical audit. The audit was funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb (see p. S54), the manufacturer of Serzone. The publication of the supplement was funded by beyondblue with Commonwealth [Australian] Government money (see title page).

The audit, which used Hickie’s SPHERE questionnaire, found ridiculously high rates of mental disorders. This was reported in the supplement by Hickie, Davenport, Naismith, & Scott (2001, p. 52) as:

‘Sixty-three per cent of people attending general practice have some evidence of mental disorder (including alcohol or other substance misuse) by self-report or GP’s diagnosis of psychological difficulties.’

63%?

That’s some cash cow huh?

Not surprisingly, if you scroll to the bottom of the PDF you will find: Source: Hickie et al. Educational Health Solutions; 2000

McGorry claimed in a recent interview, “…we are trying to do is provide effective treatment for those young people for what they are presenting with and trying to reduce the risks. There are other effective ways of reducing the risk including cognitive behaviour therapy, the use of omega-3 fatty acids and so on.”

With previous involvement of Hickie and the pharmaceutical industry, I’d really love to believe that McGorry would use CBT and omega-3 fatty acids etc to help kids diagnosed with a mental disorder…before they actually get it!

I am left wondering if the Australian government have done their homework on McGorry & Co or if they just like to throw money into projects without first taking a look at the scientific proof – Has the current Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, ever sought to seek evidence about the chemical imbalance myth? Has she taken a good look at the deaths associated with psychiatric drugs?

Here’s an idea for the Aussie PM, ask for scientific proof of McGorry & Co’s time-travelling prediction vehicle, don’t just take it as gospel that it works.

For the record, and so Patrick McGorry and his cronies totally understand, I was raised a Catholic. I denounced myself as one in later years. McGorry & Co can throw the Scientology tag at me if they wish, they have done it in the past when backed into a corner by CCHR. If that is all they have in their armour then I envisage a future of mind altering drugs being prescribed to Australian children on the basis that they may have an illness rather than they actually have an illness. If parents of those children dare question McGorry & co, prepare yourselves for some mud slinging – you may as well sign yourselves up to the Church of Scientology, you’ll be labelled one regardless…and we all know how psychiatrists, such as McGorry, just love to use labels.

How do I know this? Well, like McGorry & Co, I travelled forward in time…in my Tardis – my DeLorean is at the garage in need of a new flux capacitor.

Fid

http://fiddaman.blogspot.com/2011/05/hickierie-dickory-doc-mcgorry-turns.html

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The Illegitimacy of the “Psychiatric Bible” by Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

The Moral Liberal – March 29, 2011

by Thomas Szasz

Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, Dr. Thomas Szasz

“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.”

http://www.themoralliberal.com/2010/12/20/the-illegitimacy-of-the-%E2%80%9Cpsychiatric-bible%E2%80%9D/

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. 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.  Read more here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-szasz/

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Dr. Peter Breggin, psychiatrist—”Join the Empathic Transformation”

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Note from CCHR:  What many may not realize about our organization is that it is called the Citizens  Commission on Human Rights  (CCHR) because we have hundreds of Commissioners (advisors) including educators, medical doctors, attorney’s, psychologists and yes, even psychiatrists that work alongside CCHR—In fact, our co-founder was psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.    And while we don’t all hold the same opinions on everything to do with mental health, what we do hold in common is our goal to eradicate psychiatric abuse and restore human rights to the field of mental health.    There are also a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who work independent of CCHR,  but whose efforts to reform the field of mental health are strongly supported by CCHR.    This is the case with Dr. Peter Breggin.  He is not a Commissioner, and works independently of CCHR, but we fully support his efforts towards creating a mental health system based on empathy, compassion, non-drug and non-harmful solutions, eradicating bogus mental disorder diagnoses,  and above all,  respect for the individual’s  human rights.   Now that,  is something we can all agree upon.

The Huffington Post, March 15, 2011

by Dr. Peter Breggin

Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books

It’s part biological and part psychological and spiritual. But there’s no doubt about the direction that humankind must go in–toward empathic individual relationships and ultimately a more empathic culture. Until human beings truly learn to love and to understand one another, and to adopt empathic attitudes and practices, the world will remain mired in misery and conflict. Until those of us in the healing arts come to this realization we will often do more harm than good, and never fulfill our potential to give and to heal.

Utopia is a long way off. Social utopia is probably beyond human capacity. But in our individual lives, families and communities, we can act from empathy–from a genuine treasuring of each other, and a belief that human nature and the human spirit everywhere in the world long for freedom and more loving community.

Yes, there is evil in the universe; some individuals and some ideologies promote hatred and destruction. At times aggressors will require us to defend ourselves. But our basic thrust must always remain toward spreading empathy.

Every human being is born with a powerful empathic impulse. Except under the direst circumstances, it begins to flower in the first few years of life. Even toddlers feel concern for other toddlers and will seek to comfort each other. Empathy is so inherent in human nature, I have seen it flourish in some of the most abused children I have known in my work as a psychiatrist.

Consider why we have these large frontal lobes that fill the anterior portion of our skulls. They weren’t developed to build technology or even to create art–there was little or none of that at the time 100,000 years ago when we reached our current biological state. Our frontal lobes developed as a part of our becoming sensitive social human beings capable of caring, cooperation and communicating verbally with each other.

Whether you believe in Darwinian evolution, Intelligent Design, or a combination of both, these frontal lobes of ours give us the biological capacity to express the highest ethical, psychological and spiritual ideals, including our yearning for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a responsible fashion. Psychiatric drugs suppress that biological capacity, putting a chemical barrier into place that divides us from ourselves and from others. Psychiatric diagnoses which justify these drugs further the alienation from our real selves and from others.

As the recent New York Times story confirms, most psychiatrists don’t even do psychotherapy anymore; they simply diagnose and drug. As I first described in Toxic Psychiatry, medically-oriented mental health professionals have become remote from their patients whom they now seek to manipulate chemically rather than to know personally.

In the field we call mental health, the rampant diagnosing, drugging, and incarcerating of those we seek to help must be replaced by practices that encourage responsibility and freedom rather than compliance and docility. By working directly in the field of ethical human services and sciences, we can become a leading part in the grassroots movement we call the Empathic Transformation.

All over the world, those of us who practice the healing arts–physical, psychological and spiritual–are seeing the need to join together to further humanity’s empathic transformation–to transform the old ways into something better and even grander, into practices embedded in and imbued with empathy.

The world is changing and we need to lead the movement in our fields toward a view of human beings that never demeans and always empowers, that never forces but always encourages, and that recognizes that human beings are not ultimately driven by their instincts and their biochemical but by their ideals and principles.

You do not have to be a professional to join the Empathic Transformation movement. The Empathic Transformation is larger than any one profession; empathy is not the province of professionals alone. Empathy encompasses everything we humans do with each other. That’s why we call our new nonprofit organization The Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education and Living. Especially in the field of mental health and personal growth the real hope for the future lies beyond those of us who are professionals.

There are not enough professionals to address the whole of human emotional and spiritual suffering, and professionals often become too boxed in by their ideology and too self-serving to provide the best solutions. Peer counseling, Twelve Step programs, religious and spiritual alternatives, and a broad array of non-medical retreats and approaches must be encouraged and eventually must flourish. The great numbers of people who desire nontoxic, empathic alternatives must demand them and help to create them.

People are coming from all over the world to our Empathic Therapy Conference in Syracuse, New York, April 8-10. Join them and join us. If you are interested in learning more about empathic human services and empathic living, this conference will provide you information and inspiration. You can find everything you need to know, including how to sign up, at www.empathictherapy.org.

Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books including Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock and Biochemical Theories of the “New” Psychiatry, as well as his newest book, Medication Madness. The Empathic Therapy Conference brings together more than forty presenters and a diverse audience from around the world. Professionals and nonprofessionals are welcome. Learn about the conference at http://www.empathictherapy.org.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/join-the-empathic-transfo_b_834706.html

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Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Note from CCHR:  One of the most common misconceptions about psychiatry is that they help patients navigate through life’s problems with conversation or  dialogue.   While that may make for interesting drama on  The Soprano’s —its a far cry from real life psychiatry.   Psychiatrists are drug pushers.   They diagnose and drug, plain and simple.  And they diagnose patients without the aid of any medical tests  for the simple reason, there aren’t any.  Psychiatry as a profession  must maintain that all life’s problems are the result of brain malfunction, otherwise known as the biological model of mental disorders as “disease” in order to maintain their partnership with Big Pharma that garners billions in government funding and convinces the public to take drugs.   And what a brilliant marketing campaign it has been;  the public, legislators, governments and the press have all been convinced that mental disorders are medical conditions, requiring drugs to “treat” them, despite the fact there is not one chemical imbalance or blood test, MRI or X-ray to prove this theory.  Now that, is what billions of dollars spent on lobbyists, pharmaceutical front groups like the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) and paid psychiatric experts can buy you.    However, it also stands to reason that the psychiatric industry cannot really employ or endorse talk therapy, because they would be admitting that life’s problems are not the result of chemically imbalanced or faulty brains,  that people can get better without the use of mind-altering and life-threatening drugs.     So while the article below has some good points, it misses a big one— the psychiatric industry is the one that sold insurance companies, governments and the general public  on the fraudulent “mental disorders are biological/medical conditions” marketing campaign that is the foundation upon which their $82 billion-dollar-a-year drug industry rests.  For more information watch Dr. Niall McLaren, a practicing psychiatrist for 22 years, explaining how psychiatry’s reliance on the biological model of mental disorder as disease and how the facts could unravel the entire profession

Or read Psychiatric Disorders

Talk Therapy Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy

New York Times
by Gardiner Harris, March 5, 2011

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — Alone with his psychiatrist, the patient confided that his newborn had serious health problems, his distraught wife was screaming at him and he had started drinking again. With his life and second marriage falling apart, the man said he needed help.

But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.

Medicine is rapidly changing in the United States from a cottage industry to one dominated by large hospital groups and corporations, but the new efficiencies can be accompanied by a telling loss of intimacy between doctors and patients. And no specialty has suffered this loss more profoundly than psychiatry.

Trained as a traditional psychiatrist at Michael Reese Hospital, a sprawling Chicago medical center that has since closed, Dr. Levin, 68, first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its heyday.

Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjustments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Then, his goal was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled; now, it is just to keep them functional.

Dr. Levin has found the transition difficult. He now resists helping patients to manage their lives better. “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems,” he said, “and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.”

Brief consultations have become common in psychiatry, said Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association and the president and chief executive of Sheppard Pratt Health System, Maryland’s largest behavioral health system.

“It’s a practice that’s very reminiscent of primary care,” Dr. Sharfstein said. “They check up on people; they pull out the prescription pad; they order tests.”

With thinning hair, a gray beard and rimless glasses, Dr. Levin looks every bit the psychiatrist pictured for decades in New Yorker cartoons. His office, just above Dog Daze Canine Hair Designs in this suburb of Philadelphia, has matching leather chairs, and African masks and a moose head on the wall. But there is no couch or daybed; Dr. Levin has neither the time nor the space for patients to lie down anymore.

On a recent day, a 50-year-old man visited Dr. Levin to get his prescriptions renewed, an encounter that took about 12 minutes.

Two years ago, the man developed rheumatoid arthritis and became severely depressed. His family doctor prescribed an antidepressant, to no effect. He went on medical leave from his job at an insurance company, withdrew to his basement and rarely ventured out.

“I became like a bear hibernating,” he said.

Missing the Intrigue

He looked for a psychiatrist who would provide talk therapy, write prescriptions if needed and accept his insurance. He found none. He settled on Dr. Levin, who persuaded him to get talk therapy from a psychologist and spent months adjusting a mix of medications that now includes different antidepressants and an antipsychotic. The man eventually returned to work and now goes out to movies and friends’ houses.

The man’s recovery has been gratifying for Dr. Levin, but the brevity of his appointments — like those of all of his patients — leaves him unfulfilled.

“I miss the mystery and intrigue of psychotherapy,” he said. “Now I feel like a good Volkswagen mechanic.”

“I’m good at it,” Dr. Levin went on, “but there’s not a lot to master in medications. It’s like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ where you had Hal the supercomputer juxtaposed with the ape with the bone. I feel like I’m the ape with the bone now.”

The switch from talk therapy to medications has swept psychiatric practices and hospitals, leaving many older psychiatrists feeling unhappy and inadequate. A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients, a share that had been falling for years and has most likely fallen more since. Psychiatric hospitals that once offered patients months of talk therapy now discharge them within days with only pills.

Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago. Insurance company reimbursement rates and policies that discourage talk therapy are part of the reason. A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session.

Competition from psychologists and social workers — who unlike psychiatrists do not attend medical school, so they can often afford to charge less — is the reason that talk therapy is priced at a lower rate. There is no evidence that psychiatrists provide higher quality talk therapy than psychologists or social workers.

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The New Child Abuse: The Psychiatric Diagnosing and Drugging of Our Children

Friday, December 17th, 2010

The Huffington Post—Dec 17, 2010

by Peter Breggin

Every society has found its own methods to abuse its most vulnerable members: children; women; the elderly; ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the poor; the mentally distressed or distressing; the physically disabled; those with unconventional lifestyles. All of these have been widely abused and all remain victims of abuse to varying degrees in societies throughout the world.

Just as it is certain that these abuses can never be fully eliminated, it is also certain that these same abuses will expand to the degree that individual citizens justify or ignore them and fail to take a stand.

In the past, the most rampant abuses have been justified on moral, religious, patriotic or ethnic grounds. But increasingly we will see the worst abuses rationalized on scientific and medical grounds. It’s the modern way.

Science and medicine have so successfully rationalized and justified our society’s most devastating and pervasive form of child abuse that it remains almost wholly unacknowledged, though it is known to every sentient adult and to most children. Probably every adult and half-grown child in America knows and can identify at least one child who is the victim of this abuse. Those who teach, coach, minister to or otherwise serve children may know dozens or even hundreds of children who are victims of the new child abuse.

Our society’s particular form of child abuse is the psychiatric diagnosing and drugging of our children.

The diagnoses are becoming almost innumerable including LD, ADHD, OCD, oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, and Asperger’s and autistic spectrum disorders. Increasingly children also fall victim to psychological tests that allegedly identify frontal lobe dysfunctions characterized by inattention or flawed executive functions.

Like the diagnoses, the drugs administered to children have mushroomed to involve every class of psychiatric medication, including stimulants, antidepressants, tranquilizers, mood stabilizers and anti psychotic agents. The FDA has increasingly given official approval for giving children especially deadly anti-psychotics such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, Geodon and Seroquel. Meanwhile, anything that can sedate the child’s growing brain from anti-hypertension drugs to anti-seizure drugs are routinely dispensed with callous disregard for their harmful impact.

It’s not uncommon to find children subdued and crushed by multiple psychiatric drugs. Probably 10 to 20 percent of our children will at some time be diagnosed or drugged. This number includes nearly every child in special education classes, foster care or on SSI/SSDI. Any child singled out by child services and educational or psychiatric authorities is likely to fall victim to psychiatric drugs.

The Psychopharmaceutical Complex is the source of these abuses: the pharmaceutical industry, organized psychiatry and medicine, NIMH, insurance companies and various other groups supported by the drug companies. Few parents are abusers; they are misled and intimidated by the “authorities” and often medicate their children against their better judgment.

Two principles are self-evident: First, convincing children that they have “something wrong” in their heads such as genetically crossed wires or biochemical imbalances is the surest way to rob them of self-esteem, personal responsibility, self-mastery and the hope of an unlimited future. Second, convincing children that they have a psychiatric diagnosis or treating them as if they have one and teaching them to rely on psychiatric drugs is a prescription for their becoming lifelong mental patients.

Two other principles require a little more thought or scientific evidence: First, all psychoactive substances from alcohol and marijuana to psychiatric drugs reduce and compromise the function of brain and mind, and none improve it. Whether or not we like the feelings we get from them, all psychoactive substances impact us precisely by producing a partial disability of our highest mental and spiritual life. More concretely most are poisonous to brain cells. I call this “the brain-disabling principle” of psychiatric treatment and have described and documented it in a lengthy medical text book with more than 1,000 scientific references.

Second, all psychiatric drugs have potentially horrendous and even lethal adverse effects from chronic depression and growth stunting caused by stimulants to diabetes, severe obesity, disfiguring neurological disorders and shortened lifespan caused by “antipsychotic” agents. You can confirm and expand on these observations by googling antipsychotic drugs or reading my various books on the subject, especially “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition.” The names of the diagnoses will change. The chemical structures of the drugs will change. The promotional strategies will change. But, in my opinion, it will always be abusive to psychiatrically diagnose and drug children.

Now comes the challenge. Put yourself into the emotional and spiritual life of a child who has been diagnosed and will soon be drugged. Be empathic, but not in a disheartening way. Be empathic by connecting with love to the child’s inherent desire to love and be loved, to benefit from rational discipline, to play and to have fun, to grow up and to take responsibility, to learn, and to reach to his or her self-determined stars.

Are you able to put yourself in that child’s place? How does it feel to be told you’re not normal, that you have a disorder, that you’re special but not in a good or hopeful way? How does it feel to be different, let alone mentally impaired? And what impact will it have on you when the expectations of your parents and teachers are tailored to your limitations?

Be genuinely empathic. Children will say almost anything to adults to cover up their shame or to appease them. Beyond that, the medication spellbinding effects of psychiatric drugs impair the individual’s ability to perceive or evaluate the emotional and cognitive disruption that the psychoactive substances are causing. Put yourself in the child’s place and know what he or she must feel about being stigmatized and marginalized by psychiatric diagnoses.

Now imagine yourself inside the head of the child being drugged. The drug makes you feel different and you don’t like it, but everyone says you need it. You don’t want to have to take a drug to make you normal. But you’re a kid and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Gradually your brain and mind struggle to adapt to the brain-disabling chemical that’s crossed your blood brain barrier and disrupted your normal biochemical functions. As an aspect of medication spellbinding, you become so accustomed to your more flattened emotions and reduced mental acuity that you hardly notice the difference anymore.

And now consider this: All these children will grow up with brains drenched in toxic substances, literally polluted in the extreme. Think about the known adverse effects and dare to imagine the even more subtle changes in the function of the brains of each child, brains forever chemically altered.

These children will never know what evolution or God really intended them to become before these toxic intrusions.

Do not be misled that the medical and scientific authorities, and the weight of the universities and government, wholly support this rampant abuse of children. From the systematic abuse of women, children and minorities throughout the ages to the institution of slavery and the Holocaust, those in authority have condoned and benefited from these abuses. Authority at the top of society always justifies these widespread abuses, otherwise the abuses would never get started, nor would they persist.

Reject the authorities. Rely on common sense, sound ethics and real science. Allow yourself to become empathic toward these abused children. Then become angry, energized, motivated and engaged. Educate yourself. My books and those of many others will introduce you to a new world of science, education and philosophy about childhood and children. Find your own way to protest and to make a difference. Join us at empathictherapy.com in our efforts to protect our nation’s children from psychiatric abuse and to offer them genuine love, inspiration, service and education.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/the-new-child-abuse-psych_b_788900.html

Peter R. Breggin, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books. His two most recent books are  Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime and Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex. Dr. Breggin’s professional website is www.breggin.com. Dr. Breggin and his wife Ginger have founded a new organization, The Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education and Living (www.empathictherapy.com). It will hold an international conference in Syracuse, New York, April 8-10, 2011.

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Biological Psychiatry—Following the Money

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

The New American
By Beverly Eakman
July 28, 2010

Despite the public relations campaign aimed at “de-stigmatizing mental illness,” scores of permanent, stereotyping labels are assigned to what are basically annoying habits: clicking a pen repeatedly (anxiety), talking fast (hysteria), repeating a favorite song over and over (obsessive-compulsive disorder), wiggling in a chair (hyperactive). Even crazes like text-messaging are not immune from diagnosis. Attitudes that may be in bad taste or out-of-fashion, but certainly not “dangerous” or “wrong,” are also viewed with suspicion and sometimes criminalized.

Another sleight-of-hand explains why the public doesn’t come down harder on legislators, schools and other agencies that play hardball with their mental-health extremism. It’s called the private-public partnership. This has become a way to muddy the waters so that parents and other taxpayers have to spend weeks or months figuring out exactly who paid for what. For example, the UNC’s schizophrenia study was paid for by researchers from Columbia University, which merely “contributed” to it. Federally funded grants form the National Institute of Mental Health paid the lion’s share, with a large influx from the privately funded Foundation of Hope — a public-private partnership in and of itself that supports mental-health causes.

The Foundation’s website gives a fairly representative look at how the public-private process works: “The Foundation of Hope has given over $2 million to fund local [mental health] research projects and treatment programs. This ‘seed money’ has leveraged an additional $89 million in federal grants at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Dorothea Dix Hospitals.” [Emphasis added]

Thus, it is seed money from established, private entities that helps spread legitimacy. That legitimacy leads the federal government and other well-endowed groups (charities, universities, and even political think tanks) to commit resources to the same cause and in the end institutionalizes it.

This round-about method of securing funds is not peculiar to the United States, nor is it limited to causes like mental illness. Candidates for public office, professional agitators for or against certain hot-button issues, and even some government agencies seeking to garner support for oddball legislation use the same game, which is not in the least affected by laws that purport to limit how much individuals or groups can give to a cause or candidate. Small, unorganized bands of “concerned citizens” who don’t know the ropes are often left to locate the money trails — only to discover they have too few resources with which to challenge entities that can afford hire scores of attorneys.

Another financial bonanza lies within the legislative process itself. Example: For every child diagnosed with an ongoing physical or mental illness, a school district – or even individual families — become eligible for various government greenbacks — Medicaid, Special Education and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), for instance.

Let’s take SSI, for example. SSI is yet another program aimed at low-income parents with a child categorized as having a “disability.” These include classifications for mental illnesses found in that official bible of the psychiatric profession, the DSM. The school will get Medicaid or additional Special Education funds. So, there is every incentive for parents — and school districts — to get as many kids as possible diagnosed.

As always, there’s a catch: If a child is referred to a psychiatrist, it is rare for the youngster to walk out without a treatment entailing psychotherapy and/or psychiatric drugs. If a parent later has second thoughts and suspends drug treatment or psychotherapy, he or she can be cited for “medical neglect,” which carries significant penalties, including the child’s removal from the home. Thus any parent who seeks to profit from SSI benefits may regret it.

Intimidation of whistleblowers and dissenting experts are a problem as well. One such professional recently wrote to Dr. Fred A. Baughman, the retired pediatric neurologist cited in Parts I and II of this series, to complain that his refusal to go along with the “chemical imbalances of the brain” theory was rebuffed with the prospect of a suspended license.

Dr. Baughman responded to the gentleman by citing a response he himself had received in 2002 to a letter on that very topic from Bernard Alpert, M.D., President of the Medical Board of California (MBC):  “As you outline in your letter,” wrote Dr. Alpert, “there is tremendous professional support for categorizing emotional and psychological conditions as diseases of the brain.  In published materials, some quoted in your letter, you will find that support from chairs of psychiatry departments, the American Psychiatric Association and professors of major medical schools.  It is clear that the psychiatric community has set their standard, and while one might disagree with it, that standard becomes the legal standard upon which the Board (CMB) must base its actions.”

Citing Dr. Alpert’s response, Dr. Baughman had this to say to his beleaguered colleague:

Unbelievably, what Alpert, speaking for the Medical Board of the State of California, appears to be saying here is that whatever the majority do, including … knowing[ly] violating a patient’s right to informed consent, that that becomes the unassailable, legal ‘standard of practice’. This puts any physician who purveys the truth [as determined through the scientific method], in legal jeopardy….

Separately, antipsychotics have been implicated in a number of deaths, particularly in veterans. The story got little play, but in what coverage it did get, Lt. General Eric B. Schoomaker described “a series, a sequence of deaths” in the “warrior transition units.” In a press release, Dr. Fred A. Baughman said the deaths were “not suicides or ‘overdoses,’ but sudden cardiac deaths due to prescription antipsychotics and antidepressants.” Again, the story got little attention while parents buried their sons and daughters who didn’t have to die.

Read the rest of this article here: http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/health-care/4161-biological-psychiatry-following-the-money

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Truly a must-read article by psychiatrist Peter Breggin: The Huffington Post— The Hazards of Psychiatric Diagnosis

Monday, June 21st, 2010

The Huffington Post
By Dr. Peter Breggin
June 21, 2010

“I have a biochemical imbalance.”
“My kid is ADD.”
“I’m Bipolar.”
“I suffer from Clinical Depression.”
“I have Panic Disorder.”

Is there anything wrong with diagnosing ourselves or even accepting the mental health diagnoses of psychiatrists, family doctors, psychotherapists and other health professionals?

Psychiatric diagnoses are seductive. They seem to give us important information about ourselves and our emotional ills. They provide a key to what psychiatric drug we may need. It seems rational and scientific. In reality, psychiatric diagnosing is a kind of spiritual profiling that can destroy lives and frequently does.

First, there’s the obvious cookie cutter problem. People can’t be easily fit into the prefabricated labels contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from whence all official diagnoses emanate. Diagnoses frequently change, often in an effort to justify this or that drug. It’s not realistic, enlightening or empowering to reduce yourself or your child to one of these diagnoses. Psychiatric diagnoses are simplistic.

Consider this: Psychiatric diagnoses are always negative. There are no such diagnoses as “Exceptionally Able to Face Stress” or “Remarkably Resilient” or “Courageously Independent in the Face of Abuse.” That’s how I like to think about the people that I try to help–as heroes or potential heroes in their own life stories. I never want them to sum up, categorize or symbolize their lives in such a demeaning fashion as a psychiatric diagnosis.

But that’s only the beginning of the problem. These diagnoses imply that you or your children have a disease, especially an underlying biochemical imbalance. This can be discouraging and disempowering. Having a psychiatric diagnosis tends to make us feel helpless to transform our lives or the lives of our children for the better. It makes us feel less responsible for our own psychological and spiritual recovery and for that of our young and dependent children.

Medical diagnoses are real. When you learn you have pneumonia, diabetes or even cancer, you quickly discover that there are potential remedies. There are scientific tests and studies to diagnose the disease and to evaluate its treatment. Medical diagnoses don’t demean your mind and your soul, they describe your bodily impairments.

Psychiatric diagnoses are not genuinely medical; they are not based on biological defects or disorders. There are no objective tests. They are not about the body; they are about the mind and spirit. The medical aura that surrounds psychiatric diagnoses give them a false validity. Psychiatric diagnoses are not rooted in science but in opinion.

Psychiatric diagnoses take power and authority over your life, and the lives of your children, out of your hands. They place that power and authority in the hands of health professionals. Often it takes but a few minutes in an office to transform you or your child from a complex human being into a product on the psychiatric assembly line–and endless assembly line that can lead to a ruinous lifetime.

Perhaps worst of all, these diagnoses almost inevitably lead to the prescription of psychiatric medication to you or your child. Psychiatric drugs are toxins to the brain; they work by disabling the brain. None of them cure biochemical imbalances and all of them, every single one of them, cause severe biochemical imbalances in the brain. The adverse effects of these drugs on the brain and mind are stunning. In my recent scientific books and articles, including Medication Madness, I have demonstrated they cause medication spellbinding. Spellbound by psychoactive drugs we cannot adequately judge the impairments they create in our brain and too often we mistakenly feel “improved” when in fact our feelings have been dulled or artificially jacked up, and our judgment about ourselves and our lives have been impaired.

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/mental-health-the-hazards_b_618507.html

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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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Jet Lag Disorder joins host of ailments cooked up to sell drugs – p.s. No joke – jet lag is a mental disorder in the DSM

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Zeke Turner
BlackBook.com
January 7, 2010

Who has time for jet lag anymore? And why go through all the trouble of sleeping yourself into normalcy and maybe catching up on some late-night television when you could just stim yourself out and power through to the next time zone? These are the questions being asked by the drug-maker Cephalon as it seeks to market its newest stimulant, Nuvigil, for the treatment of jet lag and other causes of sleepiness, like working the graveyard shift. Meanwhile its anti-narcoleptic billion-dollar cashcow Provigil (aka trucker coke) inches closer to generic competition in 2012. The first step to marketing new stims is, of course, thinking of something that makes people tired normally and then turning it into a medical condition. Enter jet lag disorder.

The New York Times says,

A jet-lag antidote might seem to be the latest lifestyle drug, a further step in the “medicalization” of something that is not an illness. But sleep specialists, who call the affliction “jet lag disorder,” say that while not exactly a disease, it is a condition that can be dangerous — as when someone tries to drive a car right after arriving in a distant time zone … Some studies suggest that disruption of the daily rhythms can contribute to obesity, mental illness and other ailments.

Jet lag disorder joins a whole host of ailments that have been cooked up to sell drugs.

Read entire article: http://www.blackbookmag.com/article/drug-company-invents-jet-lag-disorder-sells-cure/14813

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