Tag Archives: American Psychiatric Association

Psychiatry Set to Medicalize Hissy Fits

Every decade or two, the American Psychiatric Association reworks its Diagnostic Statistical Manual, or DSM, to try to have diagnostic categories reflect the current state of theory and practice. Given enormous evidence that we’re currently overdiagnosing things and medicalizing normal behavior, many had hope that the upcoming DMS-5 — the fifth major revision — would show some restraint. We may see it yet — but not if we go down the track described in a post today by neuroscientist, blogger, and DSM watchdog Neuroskeptic:. It seems that the DSM-5 may include a new proposed “mood disorder” called “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” or DMDD.

Taking a Stand: The Only University To Formally Challenge the American Psychiatric Association

This is a crucial issue. As the Saybrook psychology faculty note in their remarkable blog “The New Existentialists:” “the DSM-5 inflates diagnostic criteria to such an extent that it pathologizes normal behavior and natural human functioning.”

Under this new “Bible of Psychiatry” every aspect of human life, every thought and feeling, can be considered a form of “mental illness” and treated with drugs. An egregious example is a proposed change that would make any depression about the death of a loved one that lasts longer than two months a mental illness treatable by anti-depressants.

This is madness. Millions of people who are perfectly healthy, who are not sick but are looking for help, will be forcibly turned into customers for the pharmaceutical industry. Psychologists are being encouraged to spend less and less time actually talking with those they are seeking to help, getting to know them as human beings, and taking their search for meaning in life seriously.

Rape, PMS & wanting sex too much—All proposed ‘mental disorders’ for Psychiatry’s billing bible—the DSM

Madness is currently undergoing a redesign, with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often called the ‘Psychiatrist’s Bible’ being updated. Basically, a big group of grey-haired psychiatrists have been getting together to decide what qualifies someone as being mentally ill. There are a whole heap of proposed changes that have the potential to change how we think about our bodies and behaviours. Rape is set to become a mental disorder, and wanting to have sex all the time is being considered for inclusion.

The American Psychiatric Assocation’s PR Crisis—The Truth is Out There

As the news tumbled out last week that the American Psychiatric Association had hired GYMR, an expensive PR company, to help the organization “execute strategies that include image and alliance building, public education campaigns or media relations to harness the formidable forces of Washington and produce successful results for clients” (services that GYMR brags about in its mission statement), it became clearer than ever that the APA has more than an image-problem with DSM-5.

With The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, 51 professional organizations, a sizable blogging community, and the manual’s former editor, Allen Frances, all voicing strenuous concern about the manual’s planned revisions and likely content, the hiring of a PR firm to “execute … image-building”—that is, to gloss over serious diagnostic issues and controversies in psychiatry—amounts to a fig leaf, a frantic effort to whitewash the manual’s many flaws and questionable content.

Diseases Grow at Psychiatry Meeting—Thanks to Big Pharma

The first week in May brought a new leader in France and new prospects for same sex couples seeking marriage. But at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, attended by 11,000 psychiatrists, it was the same old same old. Instead of listening to the public outcry about overmedicated children, soldiers, elderly and everyday people watching too many drug ads, the psychiatry group re-affirmed its resolve to pathologize healthy people and even rolled out new groups to target.