Tag Archives: psychiatry

Politics and mental health a poor mix

Imagine a tribunal where the public could challenge clinical decisions by neurosurgeons or cardiologists. It would be ridiculous. But mental health is different. Unlike other medical specialties, it resembles law or politics: fields where subtle variations in the interpretation of a word can alter the entire trajectory of a patient’s treatment.

That’s why the right to appeal clinical decisions by mental health professionals through a tribunal, announced recently by the NSW government, met with public approval. Mental health possesses a built-in capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine. A patient’s psychiatric diagnosis has enormous cultural power in many other fields, from the marketing of antidepressant medications, to general practice, disability claims and legal proceedings.

Depression? Don’t believe it —Big Pharma has gained an ever greater hold over our mental & emotional lives

Over the last 40 years the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the bible of the psychiatric professions – has spawned more and more diagnostic categories, “inventing” disorders along the way and radically reducing the range of what can be construed as normal or sane. Meanwhile Big Pharma, feeding its appetite for profits and ours for drugs, has gained an ever greater hold over our mental and emotional lives, medicalising normality.

Are you shy? Then you have a mental disorder

Even in these overly medicalised times, where feeling well is increasingly confused with awaiting diagnosis, the idea that well over a third of Europe is suffering from a mental disorder just doesn’t tally with our actual lived experience. After all, does it not seem absurd to think that one in every three Europeans is mentally ill? As many have observed before, absurdity abounds in the psychiatric worldview. The most banal of everyday behaviours, emotional states that I’d wager almost everyone has encountered at some point in their lives, have been given technical, medical-sounding names. So shyness becomes ‘avoidant personality disorder’; anger becomes ‘intermittent explosive disorder’; and if the experts get their way, not throwing stuff away will become ‘hoarding disorder’. In an incredible bit of insightless prose, we are told by DSM’s recent consultation document that, ‘The symptoms [of hoarding disorder] result in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible’.

CCHR exposes list of psycho-pharma front groups

A highly effective public relations technique is the “third party technique” of creating front groups to endorse or promote the need of any service or product. The first party is the original group or client that would benefit more from increased public trust or affinity. The second group is the public or consumers. A third group is created with a contrived name to appear publicly as a disinterested party endorsing the industry of the first party.

Often, the third party, or front group, uses a name that implies authority or concern for the public’s welfare or concerns. You can be sure these bogus front groups are usually only concerned about their clients welfare and themselves.

US health agency revises conflict of interest rules

WASHINGTON, Aug 23 (Reuters) – The U.S. National Institutes of Health revised on Tuesday its 16-year-old conflict of interest rules for medical researchers, lowering the amount of money that constitutes a financial conflict and expanding the required disclosures….Concern about the integrity of research in the United States has grown since 2008, when Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley criticized prominent Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman and others for failing to fully disclose payments from drug companies.