Posts Tagged ‘psychiatric disorders’

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Australia’s Reckless Experiment In Early Intervention

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Note from CCHR: The article below was written by Allen Frances, a psychiatrist, and former Chairman of the DSM IV task force.  The subject of the article is Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry and his agenda to pre- diagnose kids with mental ‘illness’ before they develop it, which  Frances calls  a dangerous and risky proposition.    It is.  Yet Frances seems to be making excuses for the fact that McGorry’s plan is not only dangerous – its criminal.    He calls McGorry a charismatic psychiatrist, which may be true, but this is exactly what makes him so dangerous.  Because the Australian government has just funded a program so controversial and dangerous to children that even other psychiatrists, leaders in the field, are speaking out against it.  And why did they fund it?   Because “charistmatic” Patrick McGorry sold them  a $400 million bill of goods.

“Charisma is a tricky thing.  Jack Kennedy oozed it–but so did Hitler and Charles Manson. Con artists, charlatans, and megalomaniacs can make it their instrument as effectively as the best CEOs, entertainers, and presidents.” Patricia Sellers, FORTUNE Magazine


prevention that will do more harm than good

Psychology Today
By Allen Frances
May 31, 2011

Patrick McGorry is a charismatic psychiatrist who has recently gained heroic status. First he was chosen to be Australia’s Man Of The Year. Now, he has convinced the Australian government to spend more than $400 million over five years to fund his plan for a nationwide system of Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centres. McGorry is the visionary prophet and pied piper of preventive psychiatry. His goal is to diagnose mental disorders early and treat them expectantly- before they can do their worst damage.

McGorry’s goal is certainly great. But its current achievement is simply impossible and Australia’s plans are patently premature. Early intervention to prevent psychosis requires first that there be an accurate tool to identify who will later become psychotic and who will not. Unfortunately, no such accurate tool exists. The false positive rate in selecting prepsychosis is at least about 60-70% in the very best of hands and may be as high as 90% in general practice. That’s right, folks, nine misidentified non patients for one accurately identified truly prepsychotic patient. Those are totally unacceptable odds.

What are the costs? McGorry does not recommend antipsychotic medications as a routine part of his prevention regimen. But experience teaches us that they will be overused despite having no proven efficacy and posing the risk of massive weight gain (and its consequent array of serious complications). The false positives will also suffer unnecessary stigma and worry and will undergo unnecessary and misdirected treatment. And surely there are many more productive ways to spend $400 million doing a better job of managing the mental health needs of those who have real and treatable psychiatric disorders.

Unfortunately, Mcgorry is a false prophet who’s visions are offered at least a few decades before their time. Australia, led astray by his impractical hopes, is about to embark on a vast and untried public health experiment that will almost surely cause more harm to its children than it prevents. Before embarking on this headlong and reckless rush, the following research steps need to be accomplished:

1)Developing a proven and reliable definition of “Psychosis Risk”

2)Learning how to use it in a way that reduces current outrageously high false positive rates to levels that are tolerable.

3)Demonstrating that the interventions chosen are indeed effective in preventing psychosis.

4)Determining the likely rate of antipsychotic use and how this influences the overall risk/benefit balance sheet of early intervention.

5)Studying the beneficial and harmful impacts of early diagnosis on stigma and self perception.

6)Comparing the marginal utility of a dollar spent trying to prevent an alleged future disorder vs a dollar spent treating an already clearly established one.

This is a research enterprise that will take many groups around the world many decades to complete. But it is an absolutely necessary precondition before spending $400 million on what is likely to be a failure. The Australian experiment will be flying blind on an airplane that is not at all ready to leave the ground. Doing prevention prematurely and poorly will give a good idea an unnecessary bad name.

McGorry’s intentions are clearly noble, but so were Don Quixote’s. The kindly knight’s delusional good intentions and misguided interventions wreaked havoc and confusion at every turn. Sad to say, Australia’s well intended impulse to protect its children will paradoxically put them at greater risk. Let’s applaud McGorry’s vision but not blindly follow him down an unknown path fraught with dangers.

Read article here:  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201105/australias-reckless-experiment-in-early-intervention

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Children Exploited for Profit Using Fictitious Mental Disorders

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

"For over two decades drug and psychiatric industries have bombarded schools, parents, doctors, the media and government with propaganda that ADHD is a medical condition that must be managed with drugs."

NaturalNews.com— April 7, 2011

By Monica G. Young

We’re ashamed that exploitation of children for profit was once tolerated in America: such as children as young as five shackled to machines while working 16-hour days in factories, or black children auctioned and sold as slaves. Yet future generations will look back on our era too with shame: a time when labeling kids with fictitious mental disorders and hooking them on drugs was a multi-billion dollar business.

About 10 percent of U.S children – over five million – are said to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a mental illness treated with drugs. A recent study blows a wide hole in that myth.

A team of Dutch researchers took 100 unmedicated children diagnosed with ADHD and fed half of them a diet free of processed foods and allergens. The other half served as a control group. Within five weeks, 64 percent of those in the test group saw remarkable changes. “After the diet, they were just normal children with normal behavior,” lead researcher Dr. Lidy Pelsser tells NPR. “They were no longer more easily distracted, they were no more forgetful, there were no more temper-tantrums.”

Dr. Pelsser explains, “ADHD, it’s just a couple of symptoms — it’s not a disease. There is a paradigm shift needed. If a child is diagnosed ADHD, we should say, ‘OK, we have got those symptoms, now let’s start looking for a cause.’… With all children, we should start with diet research. But now we are giving them all drugs, and I think that’s a huge mistake.”

Most ADHD-diagnosed kids are prescribed powerful stimulants which can cause nausea, insomnia, liver damage, heart failure, hallucinations, convulsions, violent behavior, suicidal thoughts and sudden death. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration categorizes these as Schedule II drugs – the same class as cocaine and opium.

For over two decades drug and psychiatric industries have bombarded schools, parents, doctors, the media and government with propaganda that ADHD is a medical condition that must be managed with drugs. But let’s dissect this:

* Pharmaceutical and psychiatric literature, ads and advocates typically claim ADHD kids have brain dysfunctions or brain chemical imbalances and that it’s genetically based, while also stating the cause is unknown and no lab tests can detect it.

Huh? As no lab tests can detect it and its cause is unknown, how can they scientifically link it to brain malfunction, chemical imbalances or genetic influence? They can’t.

* They say a doctor’s diagnosis relies on the child’s response to questions, the family’s description of behavior problems and a school assessment.

Hello? Can you imagine a doctor diagnosing cancer without lab tests? Or diagnosing diabetes and prescribing insulin injections based on a family member’s report? Or putting a boy’s leg in a cast due to a teacher’s assessment? We would call such a doctor a fraud.

* They say symptoms include impulsivity, dashing around, difficulty focusing on one thing, avoiding activities that are boring, squirming and bouncing a lot, talking excessively and finding it difficult to play quietly. And these symptoms must have been present before the age of seven.

Wait a second. When are kids generally the most spontaneous, energetic, rambunctious and have the lowest attention span? Before the age of seven!

* They say that in a child with ADHD, the above symptoms are more pronounced than in other kids the same age. In other words, this isn’t medical science – it’s OPINION. Plus they omit or enormously downplay the factor of diet.

*And here’s the clincher. They say ADHD cannot be cured but its symptoms can be managed with medication.

So there you have it – it’s clearly a marketing scheme to target children and create lifelong customers for the psychiatric drug industry.

Dr. Fred Baughman, neurologist and author who has testified before Congress, says it like this, “They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children; those which bother teachers and parents most, and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive — termed them a ‘disease.’ Twenty five years of research, not deserving of the term ‘research,’ has failed to validate ADD/ADHD as a disease. Tragically – the ‘epidemic’ having grown from 500 thousand in 1985 to between five and seven million today – this remains the state of the ‘science’ of ADHD.”

One of the world’s most influential child psychiatrists and “expert” proponents of ADHD for years has been Harvard’s Dr. Joseph Biederman. He has published hundreds of papers on ADHD and ADHD drug treatment, and is one of the most-cited researchers on the subject. In 2009 a Congressional inquiry revealed that between 2000-2007, Biederman earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers. It appears Dr. Biederman has an acute case of Greed Disorder.

Just as our country has defeated and outlawed child exploitation in the past, psychiatric labeling and drugging of children must too be abolished.

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DSM: The Book of Woe—Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Wired—December 27, 2010

by Gary Greenberg

Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt.

But he recovers quickly, and back in the living room he finishes explaining why he came out of a seemingly contented retirement to launch a bitter and protracted battle with the people, some of them friends, who are creating the next edition of the DSM. And to criticize them not just once, and not in professional mumbo jumbo that would keep the fight inside the professional family, but repeatedly and in plain English, in newspapers and magazines and blogs. And to accuse his colleagues not just of bad science but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies. These aren’t new accusations to level at psychiatry, but Frances used to be their target, not their source. He’s hurling grenades into the bunker where he spent his entire career.

One influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids failed to disclose money he received from the makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal.

As a practicing psychotherapist myself, I can attest that this is a startling turn. But when Frances tries to explain it, he resists the kinds of reasons that mental health professionals usually give each other, the ones about character traits or personality quirks formed in childhood. He says he doesn’t want to give ammunition to his enemies, who have already shown their willingness to “shoot the messenger.” It’s not an unfounded concern. In its first official response to Frances, the APA diagnosed him with “pride of authorship” and pointed out that his royalty payments would end once the new edition was published—a fact that “should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.”

Frances, who claims he doesn’t care about the royalties (which amount, he says, to just 10 grand a year), also claims not to mind if the APA cites his faults. He just wishes they’d go after the right ones—the serious errors in the DSM-IV. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics—and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.

The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it. Dissidents complain that the revision process is in disarray and that the preliminary results, made public for the first time in February 2010, are filled with potential clinical and public relations nightmares. Although most of the dissenters are squeamish about making their concerns public—especially because of a surprisingly restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign—they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will “take psychiatry off a cliff.”

At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children. If, as Frances warns, the new volume is an “absolute disaster,” it could cause a seismic shift in the way mental health care is practiced in this country. It could cause the APA to lose its franchise on our psychic suffering, the naming rights to our pain.

This is hardly the first time that defining mental illness has led to rancor within the profession. It happened in 1993, when feminists denounced Frances for considering the inclusion of “late luteal phase dysphoric disorder” (formerly known as premenstrual syndrome) as a possible diagnosis for DSM-IV. It happened in 1980, when psychoanalysts objected to the removal of the word neurosis—their bread and butter—from the DSM-III. It happened in 1973, when gay psychiatrists, after years of loud protest, finally forced a reluctant APA to acknowledge that homosexuality was not and never had been an illness. Indeed, it’s been happening since at least 1922, when two prominent psychiatrists warned that a planned change to the nomenclature would be tantamount to declaring that “the whole world is, or has been, insane.”

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.”

If bad tests are sanctioned in the DSM, insurance companies might use them to cut off coverage for patients deemed not sick enough. It could be a disaster.

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 the rest of the article here:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all/1

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1 million misdiagnosed ADHD children for $80B drug industry

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Examiner.com
By Deborah Dupre
October 30, 2010

Two new studies published suggest something wrong with the way ADHD is diagnosed in young children in the US, confirming the need for the public to utilize Citizens Commission on Human Rights International resources for injury prevention.

One or the new studies found nearly 1 million children potentially misdiagnosed just because of being youngest in their kindergarten year, with the class youngest twice likely to be medicated with stimulant medication. The other study confirmed that whether children were born just before or just after the kindergarten cutoff date significantly affected chances of being diagnosed ADHD.

20 million children are taking psychiatric drugs according to the mental health watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHRI).

CCHR works shoulder-to-shoulder with like-minded groups and individuals who share a common purpose to restore basic inalienable human rights to the field of mental health. These rights include, but are not limited to, full informed consent regarding risks of treatments and all available medical alternatives, and the right to refuse any treatment considered harmful.

Psychiatric disorders fuels an 80 billion dollar industry, highlighted CCHTI’s new documentary online, THE STAMP: Psychiatric Disorders Fuel $80 Billion Drug Industry.

Most authors of the “official” Diagnostic Manual that sets criteria for mental “diseases” have ties to the drug industries.”

“The psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year to convince the public, legislators and the press that psychiatric disorders such as Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, etc., are medical diseases on par with verifiable medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Yet unlike real medical disease, there are no scientific tests to verify the medical existence of any psychiatric disorder. To counter this obvious flaw in their push to medicalize behaviors, the psychiatric industry will claim that there are certain medical conditions that do not have a verifiable test so this is why there isn’t one for “mental illness.” This is frankly a lame argument; Whereas there may be rare medical conditions that do not have a verifiable medical test, there are virtually no psychiatric disorders that can be verified medically as a physical abnormality/disease. Not one.” (CCHR)

Parents, legislators and the general public are not being given documented risks of drugs prescribed to children. CCHRI provides an easy to use search engine with complete information including warnings, studies, and adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs at www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/.

No More ADHD

Dr. Mary Ann Block, Medical director of the Block Center and associated with CCHRI is an outspoken critic of children being diagnosed ADHD and put on drugs documented to cause tics, stunted growth, heart attack, stroke and sudden death.

Dr. Block describes how parents are being misinformed about the medical legitimacy of ADHD and the dangers of the drugs being prescribed to treat children. She encourages parents to have their child given a full medical examination to find underlying medical problems that are being misdiagnosed as a mental disorder.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a mental health watchdog and non-profit organization. It has been responsible for more than 150 laws protecting individuals from abusive or coercive practices committed under the guise of mental health.

CCHR’s Board of Advisers, called Commissioners, include doctors, scientists, psychologists, lawyers, legislators, educators, business professionals, artists and civil and human rights representatives.

Co-founder of CCHR, Dr. Thomas Szasz is a Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York, Adjunct Scholar at Cato Institute and Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Considered by many scholars and academics to be psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, Szasz has authored over 35 books on the subject, the first being The Myth of Mental Illness, a book that rocked the foundations of psychiatry upon its release more than 50 years ago.

Photo: CCHR International

Watch the full CCHR documentary, THE STAMP: Psychiatric Disorders Fuel $80 Billion Drug Industry, here.

Read the entire article here:  http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/1m-misdiagnosed-adhd-children-for-80b-drug-industry

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Hundreds of U.S. Pilots Treated for Drug Abuse and Psychiatric Disorders, Review Finds

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Note From CCHR: If the fact that commercial airline pilots are now allowed to fly while under the influence on antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs doesn’t send off any alarm bells, then perhaps you should take two minutes and try this— go to this link http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/drug_warnings.php and in the Search box (with the red text) simply type in the word suicide and scroll down the page to quickly look over the results.   Then search  aggression,  hallucinations, violence and psychosis.   By reversing their previous ruling and now allowing commercial airline pilots to fly under the influence of these drugs, the FAA is playing a game of Russian Roulette with all of us.

FoxNews.com

Published September 15, 2010

By Jessica Heslam

Boston Herald

Hundreds of commercial and private U.S. pilots have been diagnosed and treated for a broad array of serious psychiatric and medical conditions, including schizophrenia, attempted suicide, sexual deviance, alcoholism and drug abuse, a Herald review has found.

The review comes in the wake of a chilling episode at Logan International Airport four months ago involving a distraught JetBlue [JBLU] pilot who threatened to “harm himself in spectacular fashion” an hour before takeoff – an incident that sent shudders through airline passengers across the country.

Medical record data from 2008, 2009 and 2010 provided by the Federal Aviation Administration under a public records request show:

– 15 pilots – including one from Massachusetts – have been treated for or diagnosed with schizophrenia.

– Another 292 pilots have attempted suicide, including five Bay Staters.

– 2,700 pilots have been treated for alcohol abuse, including 34 from Massachusetts, and another 1,253 have been diagnosed as alcoholics – including 20 Bay Staters.

– 1,377 pilots have been treated for drug abuse – 23 from Massachusetts – and another 94 for drug dependence.

Read the rest of this article here:  http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/15/hundreds-pilots-treated-drug-abuse-psychiatric-disorders-review-finds/?test=latestnews

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Science Mag—This Is Your Brain Off Drugs:Why Pharma May Be Cooling on Psychiatry Drugs—no pathology for mental ‘disease’

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Though this article includes some scientific/medical terminology, the  significance of what the neurologist is describing is extremely relevant:  Unlike regular “diseases” there is no clear pathology for psychiatric disorders.   See this previous blog/news entry by CCHR on this same subject: Wake Up FDA—Even Drug Giants Are Admitting No Lab Tests Exist To Prove If Antidepressants Work  http://www.cchrint.org/2010/02/05/wake-up-fda%E2%80%94even-drug-giants-are-admitting-no-lab-tests-exist-to-prove-if-antidepressants-work/

ScienceMag.com

by Greg Miller, July 28, 2010

Earlier this year, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced it was ceasing drug-discovery research for psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. The move, along with cutbacks at other companies, has raised concerns about where the next generation of neuropsychiatric drugs will come from—see this Friday’s issue of Science for a feature article exploring this topic.

Yesterday, ScienceInsider spoke with neuroscientist Menelas Pangalos, who in May took over as AstraZeneca’s head of drug-discovery research and early development. His comments have been edited for brevity.

Q: What do the recent changes mean for neuroscience research at AstraZeneca?

M.P.: Basically, from a research perspective, we’re pulling out of the psychiatry space. We’re still very much focused on neurology, so Alzheimer’s disease, pain, cognition, … those areas are still very active.

Q: What makes research on psychiatric drugs less attractive?

M.P.: Our understanding of disease pathophysiology is still relatively in its infancy.

These are complex and heterogeneous disorders. Also, the size and robustness of the clinical trials made it a less attractive area for us to be in compared to other areas we were working in. There has to be a much better alignment between preclinical and clinical work.

Q: How so?

M.P.: In neurology, if you take stroke as an example, preclinical models of stroke tend to be occlusion of the middle cerebral artery, which causes ischemic damage in the brain of a rodent or nonhuman primate that mirrors fairly well what happens in the human situation.

When you start getting into psychiatry, we have tail suspension assays, we have forced swim assays, we have learned helplessness assays … none of which have been developed through a detailed understanding of the pathophysiology. [In these tests, researchers measure how long it takes a rodent to stop struggling after being suspended by its tail or placed in a pool of liquid; giving up is presumed to be a rodent version of despair.]

Read the entire article here:  http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/07/this-is-your-brain-off-drugs-why.html

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The New American: Psychiatry Enters Dangerous Territory—Newly proposed disorders and the threat to personal liberty

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

The New American
By Bruce Walker
May 20, 2010

The new fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association may define several new psychiatric disorders. Some of these do not sound like varieties of mental illness at all, but rather opinions and attitudes. What would “oppositional defiant disorder,” for example, represent?

According to the new edition of the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, this would include those who have “negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures.” Other varieties of newly created mental illnesses included being antisocial, arrogant, or cynical.

Those familiar with psychiatry in the Soviet Union will cringe at this sort of neo-psychiatry. Authority, for example, may often be wrong in a society. The right to contend with authority has long been considered a primary right of a free people. Soviet psychiatrists, however, institutionalized and “treated” those who defied Soviet authority, which was considered, per se, a variety of mental illness.

Cynicism is often the most sensible attitude of those who find government and politics to be a cesspool of corruption. The presumption that society and government are functioning properly, which is implicit in these new psychiatric “disorders,” looks very Orwellian. Only the dullest mind, or the most sheepish people, can look at our tax code, our school system, our immigration policies, and our foreign policy and see only goodness and wisdom.

Psychiatric opinions can have a dramatic impact upon court rulings. Laws are often built around those opinions: the right to bear arms, for example, is denied to those who have a history of mental illness. What if that mental illness is defined as a profound distrust of government in America? Then government would have the right to disarm those who saw something very wrong in our political system.

Many parents already worry about the over-medication of children, who may well be the first group diagnosed under these new standards. Eccentric children have often been the greatest men in history. Mozart, for example, was hyperactive (by today’s standards) and approached music differently than conventional composers did. Did he have a mental illness? Or was he rather, as the Pope who knew him said, “Amadeus” — Beloved of God? How about Capablanca, the greatest child chess prodigy in history? Was he mentally ill?

Both of those men led relatively conventional lives, but what about men like Newton and Beethoven, who were considered to be misanthropic. Was this mental illness, which must be treated with therapy and drugs? Or was it, rather, the expected response of geniuses living among men of much weaker minds? Treating such unique men with drugs and therapy might deprive mankind of its greatest innovators and analysts.

Read entire article:  http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/health-care/3586-psychiatry-enters-dangerous-territory

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Huffington Post: Poor Kids far more likely to be prescribed psychiatric drugs

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Huffington Post
By Bruce E. Levine
May 20, 2010

Children covered by Medicaid are far more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs than children covered by private insurance, and Medicaid-covered kids have a higher likelihood of being prescribed antipsychotics even if they have no psychotic symptoms. This is reported in the May19, 2010 Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) article, “Studies Shed Light on Risks and Trends in Pediatric Antipsychotic Prescribing.”

Researchers at Rutgers University and Columbia University found that children and adolescents covered by Medicaid were four times as likely as those with private insurance to receive an antipsychotic in 2004. Among those aged six to 17 years who were covered by Medicaid, 4.2 percent were prescribed at least one antipsychotic drug. In contrast, among those in this same age group who had private insurance, less than 1 percent were prescribed an antipsychotic. Nearly half of these Medicaid-covered pediatric patients receiving antipsychotic drugs had nonpsychotic diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or some other disruptive behavior disorder. In contrast, of the privately insured pediatric patients receiving antipsychotics, about one fourth were diagnosed with ADHD or some other disruptive behavior disorder.

The current issue of JAMA also reports another troubling study published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics. This study, conducted by Robert Penfold of the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, examined the use of the antipsychotic Geodon (ziprasidone) in pediatric patients covered by Medicaid in Michigan in 2001. Of the pediatric patients who had been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and had received Geodon, only 53.3 percent actually had a diagnosis of psychosis. The other children who received Geodon had one or more of the following diagnoses: 24.1 percent were diagnosed with explosive personality disorder, 17.6 percent were diagnosed with depressive disorder, and 13.1 percent of these kids who were prescribed Geodon had oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). What exactly does it take to get an ODD diagnosis?

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-e-levine/psychiatric-drugs-and-poo_b_583568.html

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Why Antidepressants Don’t Work for Treating Depression, by Dr. Mark Hyman

Friday, May 14th, 2010

HealthierTalk.com
By Mark Hyman, M.D.
May 13, 2010

Here’s some depressing recent medical news: Antidepressants don’t work. What’s even more depressing is that the pharmaceutical industry and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have deliberately deceived us into believing that they DO work. As a physician, this is frightening to me. Depression is among the most common problems seen in primary-care medicine and soon will be the second leading cause of disability in this country.

The study I’m talking about was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. It found that drug companies selectively publish studies on antidepressants. They have published nearly all the studies that show benefit — but almost none of the studies that show these drugs are ineffective. (1)

That warps our view of antidepressants, leading us to think that they do work. And it has fueled the tremendous growth in the use of psychiatric medications, which are now the second leading class of drugs sold, after cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The problem is even worse than it sounds, because the positive studies hardly showed benefit in the first place. For example, 40 percent of people taking a placebo (sugar pill) got better, while only 60 percent taking the actual drug had improvement in their symptoms. Looking at it another way, 80 percent of people get better with just a placebo.

That leaves us with a big problem — millions of depressed people with no effective treatments being offered by most conventional practitioners. However, there are treatments available. Functional medicine provides a unique and effective way to treat depression and other psychological problems. Today I will review 7 steps you can take to work through your depression without drugs. But before we get to that, let’s take a closer look at depression.

What’s in a Name?

“Depression” is simply a label we give to people who have a depressed mood most of the time, have lost interest or pleasure in most activities, are fatigued, can’t sleep, have no interest in sex, feel hopeless and helpless, can’t think clearly, or can’t make decisions.

But that label tells us NOTHING about the cause of those symptoms.

Read entire article:  http://www.healthiertalk.com/why-antidepressants-don-t-work-treating-depression-1769

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Natural News: Children’s temper tantrums to be reclassified as mental disorders

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
May 11, 2010

Proposed changes to the U.S. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) could include reclassifying childhood temper tantrums, teenage angst, and binge eating as psychiatric disorders. If accepted, the proposals could equal billions of dollars in new revenue for pharmaceutical companies.

The DSM is often referred to as the “bible” of the psychiatric profession. The handbook exerts significant influence on the American healthcare system, affecting everything from insurance companies and medical providers to universities and prisons. Even the legal system lends credence to its provisions.

It is precisely because of its wide scope of influence that many condemn the DSM. The manual is known for categorizing character traits and emotions as mental conditions for which medical treatment, typically drugs with highly dangerous side effects, is advised.

According to Christopher Lane, author of a 2007 critique of DSM called Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness and professor at Northwestern University, responded to the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) proposal by saying, “The organization is clearly opening another Pandora’s box here, as well as paving the way for the medication of even greater numbers of children and teenagers cycling through emotional stages as part of normal development.”

He is right, considering the fact that if binge eating is reclassified as a psychiatric disorder, millions of Americans could instantly be declared as mentally ill. Though provisions would be included to exclude those who merely overeat, the ramifications of associating eating disorders with mental illness at all would likely include a massive increase in the number of people taking psychotropic drugs.

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/028762_children_disorders.html

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