Posts Tagged ‘symptoms’

Diagnoses aren’t the quick fix people think they are

Friday, November 12th, 2010

The Spectator, November 11, 2010

by Haley Zblewski

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More and more people, especially young adults, are being diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder.

From depression and anxiety, to Attention Deficit Disorder and bipolar disorder, mental disorder diagnoses are convenient. They sum up all of our problems on a prescription bottle filled with pills that will fix everything.

Pharmaceutical companies obviously want to sell their drugs, but the selling involves deceiving the consumer. They have to sell the illness first. They present advertisements that say, “Do you have symptoms A and B? Well, this is what’s wrong with you.” It offers consumers a solution to their everyday problems. But let’s face it; when it comes to the symptoms presented by the commercials you see while watching TV, we probably all feel them at some point.

Do you ever feel sad? Tired for no reason? Do you feel this way often? You’re probably depressed … or maybe you’re just a college student.

Feel awkward speaking in front of a crowd? Do you dislike being in crowds altogether? You must have some sort of anxiety disorder … or maybe you’re just human.

Doctors want to diagnose their patients with something. It’s what the patients expect – answers. And let’s not forget that doctors make money from the pharmaceutical companies for prescribing pills.

This deception by pharmaceutical companies and doctors about the be-all, end-all cures is what allows parents and young adults to go along with the idea that it’s OK to pop pills.

I mean, in a world where we want everything handed to us as soon as it’s needed, a world that runs on fast food and cell phones, it really isn’t surprising that being medicated isn’t really taboo anymore.

Parents almost want something to be wrong with their children. They want reasoning behind the behaviors of their children. Behaviors that are, well, typical of kids today. A diagnosis gives the parents all the proof they need to tell them it wasn’t their parenting skills, but that something’s wrong with their kid. It takes the blame away from parents.

Moods that go up and down, not paying attention in class, being sad or angry for no apparent reason; that’s just the way young people act. It shouldn’t have to be defined as a mental disorder.

What’s more is that there seems to be a cool factor that comes along with it for the younger generation. Disorders that were once taboo are now a means for bragging rights. Young adults say to their friends “I live with this everyday,” as though other problems are dwarfed by it. As though they are brave and superhuman for getting out of bed every morning. There’s a sort of mystery that comes along with taking pills. Think about it. When you see someone taking some nameless medication, don’t you think to yourself “Ohhh, I wonder what’s wrong with them”?

Mental disorders can also be a good excuse to not show up to class or hand in an assignment or to go to work. “It’s not that I didn’t finish my paper, professor. My depression was acting up and I was having a hard time dealing with it.”

These diagnoses are allowing people to label themselves as sick, when for many that’s far from the case.

With the taboo of being “crazy” having been lifted, we’ve just seen an increase of laziness, and, strangely enough, it has created people who think respect and compromises should be bent in their own direction.

A diagnosis does not fix all of your problems; in some instances, it only allows you to hide from them.

http://media.www.spectatornews.com/media/storage/paper218/news/2010/11/11/Editorialopinion/Haleys.Comments.Diagnoses.Arent.The.Quick.Fix.People.Think.They.Are-3957358-page2.shtml

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INFOWARS.COM — Madhouse Medical Tyranny: When Health Becomes Sickness

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

INFOWARS.COM
By John Galt
July 2, 2010

Dictatorships know that the battle for complete control is ultimately won or lost in the minds of the target population.  As the oppression advances, it tends to move from propaganda mind control to the direct intervention into the mind via pharmaceuticals.  We are now seeing the overt global coordination of the psychiatry profession to convince every resident of planet Earth that all clear thinking, healthy living, and wholesome innocence is some kind of disorder that needs to be corrected (suppressed) with drugs to render zombie-like those whose instincts afford them the ability of discernment.

We have seen this before — the role of the medical establishment in dictatorships such as Nazi Germany is well documented. It is the pre-Endgame, if you will, before the final culling takes place.  The proof that we are being led by a medical tyranny to soften us up for population reduction is of course not something to make light of.  However, it is absurd, because it is a manufactured attempt to re-define the natural human condition.  So, let us get up to speed on our mental disorders as a gallows humor descends.

Independent Thinking

This disorder is naturally a wide-ranging one, as each unique human being tends to have opinions.  Some of the more deviant forms of individuality are questioning authority and anxious distress, which includes symptoms like the “fear that something awful may happen.”  Like the fear that individuality will be declared a mental disorder by a scientific dictatorship?

Emotions

The natural highs and lows that come with being a sentient human being experiencing the joys and sorrows of life apparently need to be eradicated.  Happiness tests should be given to children to be sure that they feel elated at all times, and perfectly at peace with their indoctrination. If not, be sure to take your happy pills each day.

Healthy Eating

Concern for your own well-being is apparently in direct opposition to the goals of those who wish to keep the population fat, dumb, and toxic.  Mike Adams gives a run-down on the latest crazy thinking associated with eating broccoli, taking vitamins and minerals, drinking purified water, and avoiding known toxins.

Pregnancy

The act of experiencing the emotions of childbirth is definitely something that needs strong legislation.  Instead of thinking about creating life, and the family bonding process, it is much healthier instead to focus on the increasing numbers of disorders surrounding the most natural of processes and how the medical establishment can keep mothers worried sick about their babies.

And Now: BEING BORN

The Psychiatric Dictatorship has begun in earnest to target infants as mental patients.  The amniotic world and the newly born are now under surveillance by agents of the medical elite such as John H. Gilmore, Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, for signs of schizophrenia.  Unfortunately, Gilmore is not an isolated mad scientist; this is a global initiative.  The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International recently covered the story of “Australian of the Year,” Patrick McGorry, who would like Australia to lead the world in treating mental illness.  Consulting fees and research grants are raining down on pre-detection initiatives from all of the major pharmaceutical peddlers.

Read entire article:  http://www.infowars.com/madhouse-medical-tyranny-when-health-becomes-sickness/

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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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42 percent of all kids in foster care are taking three or more mood-altering drugs

Monday, June 7th, 2010

NewsTimes.com
By Eileen FitzGerald
June 7, 2010

Here’s just one statistic that Danbury school psychologist Charles Manos worries about: 42 percent of all kids in foster care are taking three or more mood-altering drugs.

“All kids in foster care have some story of trauma, like abuse or neglect, so we need to ask the question `How are we dealing with trauma?’” Manos asked.

Overall, children are receiving more prescriptions than ever before to treat medical, emotional and psychological problems, according to a May report from Medco Health Solutions.

More than one in four children with health insurance in the U.S., and nearly 30 percent of all children from 10 to 19, take at least one prescription to treat a chronic condition. The most substantial increases over the past nine years have been in antipsychotic, diabetes and asthma drugs, according to the Medco report.

In some cases, students take medications at home. In many cases, school nurses dispense it.

For instance, Danbury schools health coordinator Sue Levasseur said 80 middle school students receive asthma medication each day at school and another 14 to 15 children receive a psychotropic drug at school.

Part of the school system’s job is to educate parents, said Manos, who has worked in local schools for more than 30 years and also has a private practice.

“I think we have become a society that says it’s OK to medicate the symptoms of kids. Medication is easier. I think as a society we are quick to change behavior rather than understand it,” Manos said.

Behavior medications can be destructive if used improperly, he said.

“Say there is abuse or trauma, and we don’t do an adequate analysis. Then we silence the symptoms through the medications,” Manos said.

“The fact is that medication does not treat a disorder, it treats the symptoms of the manifestation, and people don’t understand that. I think there is a myth that medication treats the disorder.”

Read entire article:  http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Growing-numbers-of-children-on-medication-514614.php

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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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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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