While sipping drinks from coconut shells, psychiatrists from around the world recently met in Honolulu to discuss more ways to capitalize on human behavior and promote drug dependency. The occasion was the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), held in a Hawaiian convention center lined with mental disorder displays and pharmaceutical booths.
As the DSM-V looms closer to becoming a reality, I can’t help but think of words from the man who chaired the committee for the DSM-IV. Allen Frances, M.D., wrote in the in the LA Times:
As chairman of the task force that created the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), which came out in 1994, I learned from painful experience how small changes in the definition of mental disorders can create huge, unintended consequences.
Our panel tried hard to be conservative and careful but inadvertently contributed to three false ‘epidemics’ – attention deficit disorder, autism and childhood bipolar disorder. Clearly, our net was cast too wide and captured many ‘patients’ who might have been far better off never entering the mental health system.
Some 5.4 million children in the United States have been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, with two-thirds of them taking psychiatric drugs. Sales of ADHD drugs reached $1.2 billion in 2010, a demand level so high that the U.S. is experiencing an ADHD drug shortage. But an increasingly vocal contingent of psychiatric experts is speaking up against diagnosing children with ADHD, arguing it is a non-existent condition drummed up by pharmaceutical companies to increase sales.
A photograph of an unnamed boy in a cage features in Sean O’Carroll’s exhibition about Ritalin.
A BOY crouches naked in a steel animal cage, with the downcast eyes of a prisoner.
This confronting image, meant to represent a ”chemical cage” of drugs to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is part of an exhibition called Ritalin by photographer Sean O’Carroll.
O’Carroll, a former teacher, said the exhibition expressed his concern about the widespread administering of what he called addictive mind-altering drugs to young boys, which was ”a catastrophic failure on the part of our society to deal with the challenge of raising active, energetic and ‘difficult’ boys”.
People who obediently follow the herd, never markedly sad, angry or excited; children who play quietly and never annoy or talk out of turn – this is the object of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industries. And when anyone steps out of line, the answer is simple: stamp them “abnormal” and give them a pill.
Human sorrow could soon be more easily diagnosed and medicated as a mental disorder. Psychiatrists creating the next edition of the psychiatric bible – the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-5, due out in 2013) – are recommending to eliminate the time clause for major depressive disorder. So instead of grieving for two months to qualify, if you mourn the loss of a loved one for only two weeks doctors could label you mentally ill and prescribe a drug.