Truly a must-read article by psychiatrist Peter Breggin: The Huffington Post— The Hazards of Psychiatric Diagnosis

Is there anything wrong with diagnosing ourselves or even accepting the mental health diagnoses of psychiatrists, family doctors, psychotherapists and other health professionals? Psychiatric diagnoses are seductive. They seem to give us important information about ourselves and our emotional ills. They provide a key to what psychiatric drug we may need. It seems rational and scientific. In reality, psychiatric diagnosing is a kind of spiritual profiling that can destroy lives and frequently does.

“Drugging Pre-School Children: A crime against childhood—children as young as 2 prescribed powerful anti-psychotics”

In 2001, Harry Markopolos repeatedly warned the authorities about Bernie Madoff. No one listened. Only a serious downturn in the economy led to Madoff’s downfall. It’s not a Ponzi scheme, but once again, no one is listening and the red flags are everywhere. This time the victims are our very young, innocent children in the millions. Today, children as young as 2, are being prescribed powerful anti-psychotic medications. Side effects include tics, drooling, and incessant eating. Some children have gained up to 100 pounds and often progress to becoming diabetic.

Former Head of Psychiatric Billing Bible—Theres no lab test, X-ray or any test that can prove someone has a mental disorder

Fads in psychiatric diagnosis come and go and have been with us as long as there has been a psychiatry. The fads meet a deeply felt need to explain, or at least to label, what would otherwise be unexplainable human suffering and deviance. In recent years the pace has picked up and false “epidemics” have come in bunches involving an ever increasing proportion of the population. We are now in the midst of at least three such epidemics- of autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar disorder. And unless it comes to its senses, DSM5 threatens to provoke several more (hypersexuality, binge eating, mixed anxiety depression, minor neurocognitive, and others).

An exceptional article from psychiatrist Peter Breggin: Huffington Post – Our Psychiatric Civilization

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.