Some of the most acrimonious arguments stem from worries about the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over psychiatry. This has led to the spotlight being turned on the financial ties of those in charge of revising the manual, and has made any diagnostic changes that could expand the use of drugs especially controversial.
Senator Grassley has asked 33 medical groups for information about their financial backing they get from the medical device, insurance and pharmaceutical industries, including several psychiatric front groups such as Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD), Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, Mental Health America, NARSAD, Screening for Mental Health Inc. and the National Center for Mental Checkups at Columbia University (TeenScreen).
The American Psychiatric Association is considering including ‘binge eating’ in its diagnostic manual, but to many skeptics, the recognition of binge eating as a psychiatric disorder does nothing but absolve weak-willed people of their responsibility to rein in a dangerous habit. And some suspect that the diagnosis is a sneaky way to sweep an entire nation of over-eaters under psychiatry’s umbrella — and possibly into the marketplace for new drugs.
Former editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have publicly declared their concerns that the ongoing revision process of the influential publication has been cloaked in secrecy. Some critics of the DSM process express other concerns in addition to matters of transparency. It’s been pointed out that about 70% of current task force members have ties to the pharmaceutical industry, up about 14% from DSM-IV.
The country is pacified by a blind belief that the drugs being prescribed to them have been proven safe because our government health agencies have our physical health and well-being in their best intentions. This is a lie, an extraordinarily deadly lie. Iatrogenesis, medically induced injury and death, is the number one cause of death in American medicine annually, since only a small percentage of these deaths are actually reported. Each year more Americans die from preventable deaths due to our medical system than all military causalities in the two world wars combined. This is tantamount to medical genocide. One of the major causes of these deaths is the overmedication of Americans in all ages. The constant need for profits has created an environment that allows the pharmaceutical industrial complex to use their enormous financial and political clout to literally make normal life experiences into new diseases, such as social anxiety disorder, in order to sell its drugs.