Posts Tagged ‘psychiatrists’

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People & Power—Drug Money

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

A 23 minute TV expose on Big Pharma by ALJAZEERA (see video at bottom of this page)

This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices  and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.

  • “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.
  • Lewis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”
  • Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states, “Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent,  3-10% of that is believed to be siphoned off into fraud—that’s  money that  could be going to very needy patients.”

Now the U.S. government is fighting back.  In the last two years alone, the  government has fined six of America’s  top ten pharmaceutical companies for fraud.  Investigations are ongoing against another three.  In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history.   ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business.  Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.

Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this.  And leading that pack sits none other than the  [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose.   Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”

This is a 23 minute expose well worth watching.

This is one of the best exposé’s on Big Pharma we’ve seen:

People & Power —Drug Money, produced by ALJAZEERA.  This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices  and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.

* “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.

* Louis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”

*Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states,  ”Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent,  3-10% is believed to be siphoned off into fraud that’s  money that  could be going to very needy patients.”

Now the U.S. government is fighting back.  In the last two years alone, the  government has fined six of America’s 10 pharmaceutical companies for fraud.  Investigations are ongoing into another three.  In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history.   ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business.  Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.

Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this.  And leading that pack sits none other than the  [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose.   Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”

This is a 23 minute expose well worth watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwdsYVHjGA&feature=player_embedded#!

This is one of the best exposé’s on Big Pharma we’ve seen:

People & Power —Drug Money, produced by ALJAZEERA.  This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices  and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.

* “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.

* Louis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”

*Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states,  ”Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent,  3-10% is believed to be siphoned off into fraud that’s  money that  could be going to very needy patients.”

Now the U.S. government is fighting back.  In the last two years alone, the  government has fined six of America’s 10 pharmaceutical companies for fraud.  Investigations are ongoing into another three.  In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history.   ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business.  Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.

Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this.  And leading that pack sits none other than the  [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose.   Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”

This is a 23 minute expose well worth watching.

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Now Psychiatrists Want to Repackage Grief as a “mental disorder”

Sunday, August 15th, 2010
The New York Times
by Allen Frances, an emeritus professor and former chairman of psychiatry at Duke University, was the chairman of the task force that created the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Illustration credit: Cyprian Koscielniak

A startling suggestion is buried in the fine print describing proposed changes for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — perhaps better known as the D.S.M. 5, the book that will set the new boundary between mental disorder and normality. If this suggestion is adopted, many people who experience completely normal grief could be mislabeled as having a psychiatric problem.

Suppose your spouse or child died two weeks ago and now you feel sad, take less interest and pleasure in things, have little appetite or energy, can’t sleep well and don’t feel like going to work. In the proposal for the D.S.M. 5, your condition would be diagnosed as a major depressive disorder.

This would be a wholesale medicalization of normal emotion, and it would result in the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of people who would do just fine if left alone to grieve with family and friends, as people always have. It is also a safe bet that the drug companies would quickly and greedily pounce on the opportunity to mount a marketing blitz targeted to the bereaved and a campaign to “teach” physicians how to treat mourning with a magic pill.

It is not that psychiatrists are in bed with the drug companies, as is often alleged. The proposed change actually grows out of the best of intentions. Researchers point out that, during bereavement, some people develop an enduring case of major depression, and clinicians hope that by identifying such cases early they could reduce the burdens of illness with treatment.

This approach could help those grievers who have severe and potentially dangerous symptoms — for example, delusional guilt over things done to or not done for the deceased, suicidal desires to join the lost loved one, morbid preoccupation with worthlessness, restless agitation, drastic weight loss or a complete inability to function. When things get this bad, the need for a quick diagnosis and immediate treatment is obvious. But people with such symptoms are rare, and their condition can be diagnosed using the criteria for major depression provided in the current manual, the D.S.M. IV.

What is proposed for the D.S.M. 5 is a radical expansion of the boundary for mental illness that would cause psychiatry to intrude in the realm of normal grief. Why is this such a bad idea? First, it would give mentally healthy people the ominous-sounding diagnosis of a major depressive disorder, which in turn could make it harder for them to get a job or health insurance.

Then there would be the expense and the potentially harmful side effects of unnecessary medical treatment. Because almost everyone recovers from grief, given time and support, this treatment would undoubtedly have the highest placebo response rate in medical history. After recovering while taking a useless pill, people would assume it was the drug that made them better and would be reluctant to stop taking it. Consequently, many normal grievers would stay on a useless medication for the long haul, even though it would likely cause them more harm than good.

The bereaved would also lose the benefits that accrue from letting grief take its natural course. What might these be? No one can say exactly. But grieving is an unavoidable part of life — the necessary price we all pay for having the ability to love other people. Our lives consist of a series of attachments and inevitable losses, and evolution has given us the emotional tools to handle both.

Read the rest of this article here http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/opinion/15frances.html

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Australian of the Year Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry. a.k.a. The Spin Doctor

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Note:  Should there be any doubt of how highly controversial and dangerous Patrick McGorry’s pre-diagnosing, pre-drugging agenda actually is,  consider that even the former task force chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders (DSM),  has had articles featured in Psychology Today calling “Psychosis Risk” syndrome “dangerous and stigmatizing” and that it will inevitably lead to children being needlessly drugged with psychiatry’s  most powerful psychotropics, antipsychotic drugs.  When even fellow psychiatrists start slamming proposed “mental disorders” at this level,  it is evident that McGorry’s agenda is far more dangerous than anything previously witnessed. http://www.cchrint.org/2010/07/30/austrailan-psychiatrist-patrick-mcgorrys-global-agenda-takes-a-hit-from-former-dsm-task-force-member-psychiatrist-allen-frances/

OnlineOpinion.com

By Melissa Raven and Jon Jureidini
August 9, 2010

Since Professor Patrick McGorry was appointed 2010 Australian of the Year, mental health has had a remarkably prominent public profile.

GetUp has played a major role, with a campaign promoting McGorry’s call for radical reform, particularly in relation to youth mental health, arguing that early intervention should be the norm. Many Australians have enthusiastically responded, donating money, signing a petition, and sending faxes to politicians.

A further impetus came when Adjunct Professor John Mendoza dramatically resigned as Chair of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health (or, as he terms it, “head advisor to the Rudd Government on mental health”) and joined the GetUp campaign. Mendoza endorses many of McGorry’s demands, including a national rollout of headspace youth mental health centres and the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC).

McGorry and Mendoza are adept at capturing media attention, using emotive statistics and feel-good messages as powerful soundbites. However, few people seem to have critically examined their claims, which have been widely accepted at face value.

We have examined several claims, and found them seriously problematic. Not only is there a high degree of spin in the rhetoric but also there is misrepresentation of evidence.

Two claims are analysed here. In each case the evidence cited to justify the claim, although relevant, does not support it, and other evidence challenges the validity of the claim.

Claim: One third of Australian suicide cases had been discharged inappropriately

According to Mendoza, more than a third of Australians who kill themselves had been discharged too early or without care from hospitals. This claim has been publicised by GetUp on its website and in emails from Mendoza about his resignation distributed to GetUp members.

Mendoza has confirmed to one of us (JJ) that the basis is the 2007 New South Wales Tracking Tragedy report. The introduction of that report does refer to “a third of suicides”:

Other systematic reviews of suicide and previous work of this Committee suggest that around a third of suicides may realistically have been preventible [sic] with more optimal care.

However, the report does not support Mendoza’s claim, because it focuses specifically on 113 cases of suicide by people receiving treatment for depression in community mental health settings, not on suicides in the general population. It is tragic that approximately 38 suicides might have been prevented, but this number is hundreds less than one-third of the 1,776 suicides in the NSW population in that period (2003-2005 inclusive). Furthermore, only 14 (12 per cent) of the 113 people had been discharged (figure 1, p34), appropriately or otherwise.

An earlier Tracking Tragedy report revealed there were about 20 suicides annually in NSW within 28 days of discharge. It concluded that “Suicide death on discharge from hospital is a rare event”.

In the period covered in that report (1999-2003), there were approximately 750 suicides annually in NSW. The 20-odd people discharged within 28 days prior to suicide annually constituted only 2.7 per cent of them. Even if all those discharges were inappropriate, Mendoza’s claim would be wrong by a factor of more than ten. However, the report concluded that only “Between one-quarter and one-third of suicide deaths following discharge from hospital could reasonably be prevented”. Taking the higher of those estimates gives approximately 7 out of 750 (less than 1 per cent), making Mendoza’s claim more than 30-fold wrong.

The “other systematic review” cited in the 2007 Tracking Tragedy report is the 2006 report of the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness (in England and Wales). This does not support Mendoza’s claim. Only 27 per cent of suicides had followed any current or recent contact with the mental health system. Twenty per cent of suicides among these patients occurred within three months of discharge (5.4 per cent of total suicides), but only 18-22 per cent of these were judged preventable, representing only about 1 per cent of all suicides in England and Wales.

Unquestionably there is a need to improve discharge planning and follow-up – for many reasons, not just because of the risk of suicide. However, this is not relevant to the majority of suicide cases.

Mendoza has had the unwitting assistance of GetUp in misleading the Australian public. However, when one of us (JJ) explained why Mendoza’s claim is incorrect, GetUp’s response was “we’ll adjust our future communications accordingly”, but inexplicably it “won’t however be removing anything from the website or issuing any correction statements”. GetUp focuses on “giving everyday Australians opportunities to get involved and hold politicians accountable, on important issues”, yet it is unwilling to be held accountable for misleading everyday Australians about mental health, and its website carries information it knows to be incorrect.

Claim: 750,000 young Australians are denied desperately needed mental health services

McGorry has repeatedly claimed there is a hidden waiting-list of 750,000 young Australians who are denied access to much-needed mental health services. His website refers to “the waiting list of 750,000 young Australians currently locked out of the mental health care they and their families desperately need”.

In his submission to the Senate inquiry into COAG health reforms, McGorry explicitly linked the unmet need to insufficient funding for headspace and EPPIC. He made similar claims at a hearing (PDF 442KB). The Senate report (PDF 1.32MB) quoted his testimony uncritically. Others have also echoed his claim uncritically, including Lesley Russell (PDF 93KB) from the Menzies Centre for Health Policy. Furthermore, McGorry’s claim has been implicitly endorsed by the Coalition’s Real Action Plan for Better Mental Health.

McGorry’s 750,000 claim is based on the 2007 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (NSMHW), which found that 671,000 (26 per cent) 16-24-year-olds experienced a mental disorder in the previous year, and only 23 per cent of them accessed treatment. McGorry’s 750,000 figure, encompassing 12-25-year-olds, the focus of headspace, seems a reasonable estimate of people in that age range with untreated disorders.

However, diagnosis, particularly in surveys, is not the same as treatment need, contrary to the usual interpretation. According to Scott Henderson (an architect of the original NSMHW) and colleagues:

having symptoms, even at case level, is necessary but not sufficient to justify treatment … it is irrational to suggest that one in five adults need treatment for a case-level mental disorder. (p204)

Leading US psychiatric epidemiologists have similarly argued that prevalence rates in surveys do not represent treatment need. Robert Spitzer, a key player in the development of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder), published a paper with the title: “Diagnosis and need for treatment are not the same”. The main reason is that many cases are not particularly serious. According to Darrel Regier (Vice-Chair of the DSM-V Task Force) and colleagues: “most episodes of mental illness are neither severe nor long-lasting”.

There is a strong bias towards treatment of people who most need it. In the NSMHW, only 17 per cent of young people with disorders (PDF 308KB) had severe disorders, 35 per cent moderate, and 48 per cent mild. Furthermore, 51 per cent of young people with severe disorders accessed treatment. And according to Gavin Andrews (another key player in the NSMHW), many cases of mental disorders are transient but the extent of remission is usually underestimated.

The gap between prevalence and help-seeking in young people is largely due to high rates of substance use disorders (particularly mild cases of harmful alcohol use) with low rates of help-seeking (particularly by young men). The relatively low threshold for diagnosis of harmful alcohol use – which has a high rate of spontaneous remission – inflates the prevalence of mental disorders. This was recently discussed in some detail by one of us (MR).

Undoubtedly some untreated young people would benefit from treatment. However, for many of them, GP services would be more appropriate than specialist services like headspace or EPPIC. Indeed, according to Andrews and colleagues, “in Australia as elsewhere, the GP is the key to treatment for most people with mental disorders”.

So most of the 750,000 are not locked out of treatment, and most do not desperately need it. Most choose not to access treatment, and often that choice is appropriate, because the disorders are mild and transient. 750,000 is a gross over-estimate of treatment need, particularly need for specialist services like headspace and EPPIC.

Conclusion

These are only two of a number of inaccurate claims made by McGorry and Mendoza that inflate the scale of problems in the mental health system and exaggerate the benefits of their brand of solution – central to which is massively increased funding for headspace and EPPIC – which they imply is the only alternative to the status quo.

But does it really matter if some of the claims made by high-profile mental health advocates are inaccurate? The system is in crisis, and radical change is needed. McGorry’s plan, resoundingly seconded by Mendoza and many mental health community groups, has the support of the public and politicians, so shouldn’t we capitalise on the momentum?

That is how many people will respond to our critical analysis of these claims. It is essentially how GetUp has responded.

However, we believe it does matter that people have been misled to believe that more than a third of people who kill themselves have been inappropriately discharged from hospital, because this implies that massive resources should be directed towards psychiatric inpatients, who constitute only a small proportion of people at risk of suicide, and it deflects attention from other at-risk groups such as unemployed and elderly men. Such resourcing would have inevitable opportunity costs in terms of funding of other services.

We believe it does matter that people have been misled to believe there is a huge hidden waiting-list of young Australians desperately in need of mental health treatment, because this implies that even more resources should be directed towards a relatively narrow age-band. It matters even more that it is claimed that the treatment required is headspace/EPPIC treatment, and the claim is used to justify demands for greatly increased funding for those services, which would increase the opportunity costs.

We also believe it matters that the important role of GPs in mental health treatment is being ignored and implicitly denigrated. This is likely to lead to further deskilling and under-resourcing of GPs, reducing their capacity to intervene effectively with young people, many of whom have mild and relatively short-term mental health problems.

We are not entirely alone in criticising McGorry’s campaign for mental health reform centred on specialist early intervention in youth mental health. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists’ submission (PDF 157KB) to the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission expressed concern about “investment in age specific community based services that have neither identified transition points nor evidence to support that age specific services provide better outcomes” and cautioned that “there are no simple solutions to reforming the mental health sector”. However, this seems to have been ignored by the NHHRC: its report (which will profoundly influence Australian health policy for decades) endorsed McGorry’s demand for a national rollout of EPPIC and favourably mentioned headspace.

On a different level, we also believe it matters that high-profile mental health advocates are able to mislead by proclaiming authoritative-sounding statistics that almost no one bothers to check, and that misleading claims are incorporated into health policy. This uncritical acceptance is an impediment to evidence-based policy. Worse, when the inaccuracies of claims are pointed out, there is often reluctance to acknowledge the misinformation and attempt to rectify it, as is the case with GetUp.

Read the rest of this article here:  http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10793&page=0

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So much for psychiatry’s claim mental disorders are ‘medical conditions’—they’re now diagnosing patients by video uploads

Friday, August 6th, 2010

We would like to point out something quite obvious regarding this latest psychiatric evaluation tool;  Psychiatrists are forever claiming that mental “disorders” are on par with real physical illness—That ADHD, Bipolar Disorder,  Obsessive Compulsive disorder and the myriad of DSM diagnoses are the same as real medical conditions like cancer or diabetes.  Well,  try and imagine a doctor diagnosing a patient with cancer via a videotaped interview.  Or diabetes.     Yet the “mental illness is the same as physical illness” is the PR line used by psycho/pharma to obtain billions in government funding.     And that’s why mandating mental health parity (equal insurance coverage for mental disorders as that which is covered for real physical illness/disease)  is a joke.  Its not about parity for people with “mental illness” its about a blank check for Psycho/Pharma to bill insurance.

PhysOrg.com
August 6, 2010

Psychiatrists can accurately assess a patient’s mental health by viewing videotaped interviews that are sent to them for consultation and treatment recommendations, according to a new study by researchers at the UC Davis School of Medicine.

The approach, called asynchronous telepsychiatry, uses store-and-forward technology, in which medical information is retrieved, stored and transmitted for later review using e-mail or Web applications. It has been used extensively for specialties like dermatology, with photos of skin conditions sent to dermatologists, or x-rays sent to radiologists for assessment.

However, the current study is the first to examine store-and-forward technology for psychiatry, said Peter Yellowlees, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study’s lead author. “A Feasibility Study of the Use of Asynchronous Telepsychiatry for Psychiatric Consultations” is published in the August issue of the journal Psychiatric Services.

“We’ve demonstrated that this approach is feasible and very efficient,” said Yellowlees, who is an internationally recognized expert in telepsychiatry. “Using store-and-forward technology allows us to provide opinions to primary-care doctors much more quickly than would usually be the case.”

The researchers conducted the study to determine the effectiveness of asynchronous telepsychiatry for patients in Tulare County, a rural county in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Sixty male and female patients between the ages of 27 and 64 who had mostly mild-to-moderate mental-health disorders were included in the study.

Researcher Alberto Odor, associate adjunct professor of anesthesiology and , conducted 20- to 30-minute structured videotaped interviews at a community-based primary-care clinic. The videos were then uploaded to UC Davis’ specially designed Web-based telepsychiatry consultation record. Yellowlees and Donald Hilty, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, reviewed the videotapes and provided psychiatric evaluations to the patients’ community-based primary-care physicians.

Fifty-one percent of patients received diagnoses of mood disorders, 19 percent received diagnoses of substance use disorders, 32 percent received diagnoses of anxiety disorders and 5 percent received other diagnoses — including kleptomania, schizophrenia and parasomnia. Five patients also were diagnosed with disorders such as borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder or personality disorder. Some of the individuals had multiple diagnoses.

Read entire article:  http://www.physorg.com/news200305373.html

Psychiatrists can accurately assess a patient’s mental health by viewing videotaped interviews that are sent to them for consultation and treatment recommendations, according to a new study by researchers at the UC Davis School of Medicine.

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The Guardian: Mental Health Diagnoses Mask the Real Problems—Range of new diagnoses is mythology, not scientific text

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

The Guardian
By Dorothy Rowe
July 29, 2010

A textbook of mental health disorders makes it far too easy for doctors to label patients – and disregard the roots of suffering

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, whose updated fifth edition will include a range of new diagnoses, is a mythology, not a scientific text. It is created by American psychiatrists who meet in groups to consider whether or not a certain diagnosis should be included in the DSM. These groups meet a number of times so that they can say that their agreement about a certain diagnosis is reliable. Thus they could reliably agree that there is a mental disorder called Guardian Readers’ Personality Disorder with the symptoms of a need to read this paper regularly, an overvaluation of the Guardian, and so on. Who knows, it might already be in the most recent version of the DSM.

In their book, Making Us Crazy: DSM – The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders – which won the Mind Book of the Year Award in 1999 – Herb Kutchins and Stuart A Kirk wrote: “DSM is a book of tentatively assembled agreements. Agreements don’t always make sense, nor do they always reflect reality. You can have agreements among experts without validity. Even if you could find four people who agreed that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese, that smoking cigarettes poses no health risks, or that politicians are never corrupt, such agreements do not establish truth.”

For any statement to be valid there has to be evidence for that statement outside of the statement itself. Thus any textbook of physical disorders will list not just the symptoms of each illness but evidence that exists separate from those symptoms and that is derived from a wide variety of tests. Apart from the disorders listed in the DSM as the result of brain trauma, there are no physical tests for any of the disorders listed in the DSM. No physical cause has been found for any of these mental disorders. The diagnosis you receive from a psychiatrist is no more than the psychiatrist’s opinion of what you have told him. Go to another psychiatrist and you’re likely to get a different diagnosis.

Why do psychiatrists accept such an unscientific document as the DSM? In her book, The Users and Abusers of Psychiatry, my colleague Lucy Johnstone wrote, “To admit the central role of value judgments and cultural norms [in the creation of the DSM] is to give the whole game away. The DSM has to be seen as reliable and valid, or the whole enterprise of medial psychiatry collapses.”

Legal cases and medical insurance require any doctor or psychologist filling in the necessary forms to state a diagnosis. In the UK many psychiatrists, GPs and psychologists now see applying a DSM diagnosis to a patient as a pointless exercise, but feel that it is not in their patient’s interest to refuse to fill in this part of the form. However, there are still far too many doctors and psychologists who are too intellectually lazy to think about patients as individuals, or too fond of the many freebies that the drug companies provide for them. These are the ones who spring to the defence of the DSM.

Read entire article here:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/29/mental-health-diagnostic-manual

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The Los Angeles Examiner: Psychiatric Overdiagnosis Means “Normal” Could Become Obsolete

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Examiner.com
By jenny Westberg
July 13, 2010

An intolerance of individual differences, according to some, has led to overdiagnosis.

Are you normal? Are you sure?

A growing number of behaviors and moods are being relabeled as mental disorders, according to two recent articles. Sadness, shyness, personality quirks and the ups and downs of everyday life may qualify almost anyone for a psychiatric diagnosis, effectively pathologizing normality.

Allen Francis, MD writes in the Psychiatric Times that almost everyone meets the criteria for one or another of the conditions listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book psychiatrists use to determine whether you have a mental illness. The fifth edition of the manual (DSM-5), due in 2013, will relax these criteria even further, giving psychiatric labels to even more people.

According to 2010 figures from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), more than 25 percent of the adult population has a diagnosable mental disorder. That’s approximately 60 million people. A prospective study found that, by age 32, half of U.S. adults could be diagnosed with anxiety; 40 percent with depression; and 30 percent with alcohol abuse or dependence.

With criteria proposed for the DSM-5, psychiatrists could diagnose “Nicotine Use Disorder” or “Caffeine-Induced Sleep Disorder.” If your child has temper tantrums, that’s one of the signs of “Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria.” Bad dreams? It could be a case of “Nightmare Disorder.”

Why is this a problem? Mental illness carries a stigma. A diagnostic label can follow you for the rest of your life. It is shared with your insurance company. Your family and friends might make certain assumptions about you. Your doctor may insist you need psychiatric drugs.

More and more behaviors, however, are being stamped as “mental illnesses.”

Francis writes that individual differences that were once accepted as normal have become medicalized. Our society, he says, has become perfectionistic and intolerant of even short-term distress.

Read entire article:  http://www.examiner.com/x-31400-Portland-Mental-Health-Examiner~y2010m7d13-Psychiatric-overdiagnosis-means-normal-could-become-obsolete

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The Huffington Post—Life is Not a Mental Disorder

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

The Huffington Post
By Ronald Ricker
July 13, 2010

The Bible (or really any religious text) can be made to say and mean anything the author wishes.

The “Bible” of psychiatry, that fabled and hoary text, the DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders written by the American Psychiatric Association), is no different. Conceived as an instrument to identify and help heal disorders of the mind, it has morphed as to both form and function. Too often, psychiatrists wield the DSM-IV-TR like a blunt instrument, desperate in their drive to assign names to supposed “mental conditions” and thus to be able to assign numbers to these “conditions.” Discover a new widely inclusive “condition,” give it a name and number and you have a winner: One more brick in the wall of sicknesses.

DSM-IV-TR is very large book. We have lots of diagnoses, the number rapidly growing. We need lots of page room. Aside from blank pages, Chapter Heading Pages, and long lists of Contributors, etc., DSM-IV-TR is chuck full of diagnoses, with detailed descriptions and code numbers for each diagnosis. This book is 952 pages long. It weighs 4.8 pounds.

There is an odd situation in DSM-IV-TR. Really odd. In its entirety, all 952 pages, there is no “No Disorder” option. Therefore, everyone is seen by DSM-IV-TR as sick, the only question being from which sickness(es) they suffer. The annual physical checkup many of us get, usually, unless there is something wrong, ends with “everything is fine.” This, apparently, doesn’t exist in mental health.

I have always felt that I was a crummy writer, starting from college and thereafter (including medical school, internship, National Institute of Mental Health, Psychiatric Residency). However, in writing this poorly written piece, while trudging through DSM-IV-TR, I found 315.2 – “Disorder of Written Expression.” It was an AH-HA moment. I may be a crummy writer, but it’s because I have a disease. Criteria, according to DSM-IV-TR, for this disease (315.2) are 3:

  • a) Writing skills below those expected given the person’s chronological age, measured intelligence and age appropriate education;
  • b) The disturbance in criterion A significantly interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living that require the composition of written texts (e.g, writing grammatically correct sentences and organized paragraphs);
  • c) If a sensory deficit is present, the difficulties in writing skills are in excesses of those usually associated with it.

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-ricker/life-is-not-a-mental-diso_b_644606.html

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Twitterers/Text-Messagers Beware: Psychiatrists in Australia Say Text Messaging is a Mental Disorder

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

TVNZ
June 30, 2010

A study into modern communication and young people has identified several new disorders linked to texting on mobile phones.

Researchers say teenagers who text their friends excessively could develop one of the new disorders, News Ltd newspapers reported.

Jennie Carroll, a Melbourne technology researcher with RMIT University, says she discovered the four disorders while studying the effects of modern communication.

She says teenagers who text too much could find themselves suffering from:

- Textaphrenia: thinking you’ve heard or felt a new text message vibration when there is no message.
- Textiety: a feeling of anxiety from not receiving or sending any text messages.
- Post-traumatic text disorder: injuries related to texting, such as walking into objects by not paying attention to your surroundings.
- Binge texting: sending massive amounts of texts to build self-esteem among peers.

Read entire article:  http://tvnz.co.nz/health-news/disorder-link-teenage-texting-3619511

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Seriously great article: “New Psychiatry Manual Defines Almost Anyone as Insane”

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Loewak
By Martijn Benders
June 27, 2010

What is wrong with a psychiatric industry that is financed by drug companies? Well isn’t that very obvious: they will try and try to classify more and more mental conditions as ‘diseases’ simply because their financers want them to do so. Nowadays children can’t behave like children anymore or they are ‘hyperactive’ or diagnosed as ‘ADHD’ and pumped full of drugs of which no one knows what the long term consequences of their use are.

At the same time, digg this, there was a recent research into which jobs have the highest suicide rates. Guess what? Yes, doctors and Psychiatrists rank amongst the highest, the most number of suicides take place in that job catagory.

Ask yourself this: why do these rather suicidally depressed people want to drug everyone? Because that’s basically what the new ‘Psychiatric Manual’ named ‘the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

“With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs,” Professor Shorter of the University of Toronto writes in the Wall Street Journal.

New diseases in the thick manual include the ‘Psychosis Risk Syndrome’ which is a particular type of ‘disease’ that can be streched to encompass half the world population. Twitch your eye? Behave a little weird? Have a stutter? Well, those might be signs of you having PSR which basically means you have the potential to become psychotic and, according to the manual, must be treated with drugs.

Symptoms of “psychosis risk syndrome” include vague descriptors as “disorganized speech.”

“Minor neurocognitive disorder” describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

The psychiatric industry has become a drugdealer culture. All these drugs do not just effect the people that take them but dissapear and mix with the environment. So ALL OF US are effected by these billions of tuns of chemical drugs that are pumped into the various water systems.

Read entire article:  http://www.loewak.nl/2010/06/27/new-psychiatry-manual-defines-almost-anyone-as-insane/

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The Total Failure of Modern Psychiatry

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Natural News
By David Gutierrez
June 27, 2010

Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine.

Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These “disorders” are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo.

“Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications,” he writes.

Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on “psychopathology” and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic “Bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course.

“With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs,” Shorter writes.

U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as “nerves,” “melancholia” or “manic-depressive illness.” These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed.

“Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms,” Shorter said. “A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has ‘social anxiety disorder’ or ‘seasonal affective disorder.’ … The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis — perceiving it as focusing excessively on “unconscious psychic conflicts” — and toward a more “scientific” model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of “major depression” and “bipolar disorder,” even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, “major depression” absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, “neurotic depression” and “melancholia.”

“This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases,” he writes.

DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: “To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline’s floundering writ large.”

For example, the new disorder of “psychosis risk syndrome” associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that “even if you aren’t floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic.” The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics.

Symptoms of “psychosis risk syndrome” include such vague descriptors as “disorganized speech.”

Other new “disorders” include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. “Minor neurocognitive disorder” describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

“DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases,” Shorter says, “turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity.”

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/029088_psychiatry_failure.htmll

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