Posts Tagged ‘psychiatric diagnosis’

Psychiatric diagnoses prone to abuse

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Note from CCHR: The below article is short but the point made by author Richard Vatz, Professor of political rhetoric, is all to often overlooked—quite simply that psychiatric diagnoses are completely subjective and there is no known scientific or medical means by which any “psychiatric diagnosis” can be proven.  For more information see video of CCHR Co-founder, Professor Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, of whom Vatz has called,  “the preeminent critic of psychiatry in the world.” http://www.cchrint.org/videos/experts/thomas-szasz/

The Baltimore Sun, November 8, 2010

by Richard  E. Vatz,  Professor of political rhetoric at Towson University.

One of the few issues not thoroughly covered in Scott Calvert’s well-researched, comprehensive articles on Baltimore Behavioral Health (“Hooked on treatment,” Nov. 7 and “Sheltered addicts, strained recovery,” Nov. 8)  is why psychiatric diagnoses are particularly prone to misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis.

The reason is that psychiatric diagnosis is not based on pathological criteria. The closest the article comes to addressing this problem is the statement that “Even in the best clinical scenario, a psychiatric diagnosis is tricky, experts say; doctors have no X-rays to help apply the criteria defining a mental illness.”

In fact a diagnosis can never be indisputably ruled in or ruled out in psychiatry. All we have is testimony by differing psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. In somatic medicine there is an array of pathological tests which often permit much greater diagnostic certainty. A biopsy of a lump in the breast will almost always tell you whether it’s benign or malignant.

The ability of professionals and patients to play the system financially and to exculpate addicts from responsibility will forever be aided by makeshift diagnoses which can neither be confirmed nor ruled out.

Richard E. Vatz

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-11-08/news/bs-ed-pschiatric-diagnoses-letter-20101108_1_psychiatric-diagnoses-criteria-addicts

For more information on psychiatry as a pseudo-science,  visit CCHR’s Thomas Szasz pages http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-szasz/

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Just a great article: The Huffington Post—A Psychiatric Drug Story of Tragedy and Triumph by Dr. Peter Breggin

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

The Huffington Post
By Dr. Peter Breggin
July 7, 2010

Today I am reproducing for my readers a letter that we recently received from a woman I will call “Janice.” My wife Ginger reads and responds to most of the many communications that come to us each day through email and the networking sites she has joined. Several times a week we will get a communication that tells us that our reform work “saved my life.” I have never talked about this before because it seems self-serving, but people need to know how lifesaving it can be when health professionals dare to be honest about the hazards of psychiatric drugs and the value of empathic therapeutic approaches.

This week we received several more such letters but one stood out with its dramatic and heartfelt detail. Janice vividly portrays how she suffered not only from the disabling effects of the drugs, but also from the stigma of psychiatric diagnosis that discouraged her and made her well meaning family insist that she remain on drugs. As it seems to be in Janice’s case, the vast majority of the adults labeled “bipolar” that I see in my practice are suffering from antidepressant-induced mania in addition to whatever original life trauma led them to be diagnosed in the first place. I document several similar stories and provide the background science in Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime.

Notice how much courage and motivation Janice received from a single doctor verifying for her that her problems were due to psychological trauma and not to an alleged psychiatric disease. This should lend inspiration to health care practitioners who choose to speak honestly to their patients about the origins of their emotional problems in the story of their lives.

Janice went off psychiatric drugs cold turkey and suffered greatly as a result. I never recommend this. But unfortunately too few health care providers have any idea about the merits of withdrawing from psychiatric drugs and how to help patients go about tapering off psychiatric drugs in way to minimize the withdrawal effects.

Janice’s story moves from tragedy to triumph. I offer it to you for the inspiration that it provides and I wish to thank Janice for the trust she has shown in sharing her story with us, and in allowing us to publish it anonymously.

Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/a-psychiatric-drug-story_b_634352.html

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Former Head of Psychiatric Billing Bible—Theres no lab test, X-ray or any test that can prove someone has a mental disorder

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Normality is an endangered species.

Psychology Today
By Allen Frances, Former Chairman, DSM-IV Task Force
June 2, 2010

Fads in psychiatric diagnosis come and go and have been with us as long as there has been a psychiatry. The fads meet a deeply felt need to explain, or at least to label, what would otherwise be unexplainable human suffering and deviance. In recent years the pace has picked up and false “epidemics” have come in bunches involving an ever increasing proportion of the population. We are now in the midst of at least three such epidemics- of autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar disorder.  And unless it comes to its senses, DSM5 threatens to provoke several more  (hypersexuality, binge eating, mixed anxiety depression, minor neurocognitive, and others).

Fads punctuate what has become a basic background of overdiagnosis. Normality is an endangered species. The NIMH estimates that, in any given year, twenty five percent of the population (that’s almost sixty million people) has a diagnosable mental disorder. A prospective study found that, by age thirty two, fifty percent of the general population had qualified for an anxiety disorder, forty percent for a depression, and thirty percent for alcohol abuse or dependence. Imagine what the rates will be like by the time these people hit fifty, or sixty five, or eighty.  In this brave new world of psychiatric overdiagnosis, will anyone get through life without a mental disorder?

What accounts for the recent upsurge in diagnosis? I feel quite confident we can’t blame it on our brains. Human physiology and human nature change slowly if at all.  Could it be that the surge in mental disorders is caused by our stressful society? I think not.  There is no particular reason to believe that life is any harder now than it has always been-more likely we are the most pampered and protected generation  ever to face its inevitable challenges. It is also tempting to find environmental (eg toxins) or iatrogenic causes(eg vaccinations), but there is no credible evidence supporting either of these. There is really only one viable environmental candidate to explain the growth of mental disorder – the widespread recreational use of psychotropic substances.  But this cannot account for the extent of the “epidemics”, particularly since most have centered on children.

No. The “epidemics” in psychiatry are caused by changing diagnostic fashions – the  people don’t change, the labels do. There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.  What is diagnosed as mental disorder is very sensitive to professional and social contextual forces. Rates of disorder rise easily  because mental disorder has such fluid boundaries with normality.

Read entire article:  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201006/psychiatric-fads-and-overdiagnosis

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An exceptional article from psychiatrist Peter Breggin: Huffington Post – Our Psychiatric Civilization

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

The Huffington Post
By Dr. Peter Breggin
May 23, 2010

It has been a routine week in my clinical and forensic practice. I evaluated a malpractice case involving a woman on the West Coast whose family doctor from a decade earlier kept prescribing Prozac to her for ten years without ever seeing her again. When she ran into emotional difficulty, she called this doctor who simply raised the dose and added a new drug, still without seeing her for a decade. This woman, a respected professional and parent in her community, then landed in a hospital where her adverse drug reaction was mistaken for a mental illness, more psychiatric drugs were added, and she soon killed herself in a most horrendous fashion.

In this same past week of routine events, one of my own patients came to the office for an emergency session. He had sought my help to come off a cocktail of psychiatric drugs that had been prescribed for him during a personal crisis. We had recently cut back on his tranquilizers and he had become unable to sleep all night. He was feeling anxious and scared. “Am I going crazy, or is it drug withdrawal?” It turned out to be a withdrawal reaction that was easily handled by a slower taper of his medication. A very bright, creative young man, he had a series of traumatic events in his background. He needed counseling and encouragement, not a psychiatric diagnosis and drugs.

Meanwhile, my wife Ginger has been handling the flood of mail we get from our books, websites, and public appearances. People email and call the office identifying themselves as “bipolar” or “clinically depressed.” Or they describe their children in the same terms, as well as “ADHD.” By the time they contact our office, their lives or those of their children have been deeply complicated, compromised and sometimes ruined by psychiatric drugs. They can no longer separate their original emotional problems from their complex array of drug side effects. They devote themselves to adjusting their diagnoses and their drugs instead of addressing their lives. After yet another week like this, Ginger tells me, “You’ve got to write about our Psychiatric Civilization.”

The culture is so imbued with biological psychiatry — which is to say, modern psychiatry — that self-defined patients diagnose themselves, sometimes with the help of a one-minute TV ad. They visit their family doc, give him the diagnosis, “I think I have an anxiety disorder,” and get the appropriate drug. If they arrive a few minutes early, or the doctor is a few minutes late, they’ll get a chance to get educated by a flat screen TV in the waiting room which instructs them about the symptoms of the psychiatric diagnosis de jour as well as its treatment with a propriety drug.

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/our-psychiatric-civilizat_b_586498.html

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