By CCHR Int

The American Psychiatric Association’s release of the proposed fifth revision of its billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) fuels University of California’s  Dr. Irwin Savodnik’s statement, “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”

Take a look at some of psychiatry’s proposed mental disorders for their new manual and you can bet Pharma already has clinical drug trials in the works for such ludicrous mental “illnesses” as: Compulsive Shopping disorder, Skin Picking Disorder, Hoarding Disorder, Olfactory Reference Syndrome (smelling things not really there), Gender Identity Disorder, Impulse-Control Disorders Not Elsewhere Classified, and then there’s the redefinition of losing your cool: Temper Dysregulation (mood swings) Disorder with Dysphoria (abnormal discontent).  Add to that one of psychiatry’s latest drug sale boosters, Restless Leg Syndrome, newly added to the DSM.

The real danger of any revision of DSM, despite medicalizing all of life’s problems or idiosyncratic behaviors into a mental “disease” is that it is the primary feeder line for psychiatric drug sales.  Psychiatry’s 300% increase of mental disorders in the DSM over five decades has already generated billions of dollars in government funding—largely covering drug treatment.  Since DSM-IV in 1994, there has been a 256% increase in antipsychotics and antidepressants drug sales.  The diagnosis of so-called bipolar disorder has increased 4000%, with 2.5 million kids now on antipsychotic drugs that can cause life-threatening side effects including diabetes, fatal blood clots, cardiac arrest, suicidal thoughts and violence.

Despite major controversy and Senate investigations into psychiatry’s conflicts of interest (psychiatrists get more money from Pharma than any other medical specialty), psychiatrists participating in the DSM-V revision still have direct ties to Pharma: 18 of the 20 members overseeing the revision for treating just three “mental disorders” have financial ties to drug companies, with drug treatment for these disorders alone generating $25 billion a year in pharmaceutical sales.  Since 2008, the APA has been under U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation for its conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry, from which it derives a third of its annual income.

In the earlier revision, the Committee was rife with psychiatrists with undisclosed financial interests with pharmaceutical companies, with sales of drugs for conditions voted into the DSM resulting in more than $80 billion in revenue worldwide.

As the late Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist and psychiatrist, wrote: “Drug company money influences every aspect of modern-day psychiatry. The American Psychiatric Association is literally built on a foundation of drug money…In return, the APA bends over backward to help drug companies promote their products.”^[1] This habit looks more like one of the compulsions the APA tries so hard to foist off on others in its proposed new cookbook of mental disorders: DSM-V.

Further, the APA advises members about DSM-V: “when considering whether to add a mental/psychiatric condition to the nomenclature, or delete a mental/psychiatric condition from the nomenclature, potential benefits…should outweigh potential harms….” Emphasis added for a reason: delete a mental disorder?   If psychiatrists can simply delete  a mental disorder, does that mean that all the people previously diagnosed with the “illness” who were drugged and harmed, get to sue the APA for being fraudulently diagnosed?

As Lawrence Stevens, former Assistant District Attorney in California, stated in response to the APA “deleting” homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 (prompted only by activists protesting it): “If mental illness were really an illness in the same sense that physical illnesses are illnesses, the idea of deleting homosexuality or anything else from the categories of illness by having a vote would be as absurd as a group of physicians voting to delete cancer or measles from the concept of disease.”^[2]

For more information on the DSM click here.

[1] Sydney Walker, III, M.D., A Dose of Sanity, (John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, 1996), p. 229.

[2] Lawrence Stevens, J.D., “Does Mental Illness Exist?,” undated article, Internet URL: http://www.mentalhealthfacts.com/antipsychiatry/exist.htm, accessed: 9 Jan. 2001.