By Kelly Patricia O’Meara October 15, 2015 The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which receives billions of taxpayer dollars in funding for “mental health…
Steven Soderbergh’s “psychological thriller,” Side Effects, very clearly demonstrates two things: the fraud and criminality of psychiatric diagnosing.
The “cat’s out of the bag” about the numerous convoluted twists and turns that make up what Rex Reed called “a tank of twaddle called Side Effects.” And, rather than guess, much to his credit, Reed was honest enough to admit, “I have seen it twice, and I still don’t know what it’s about.” Fair enough. It’s easy to see how anyone could be confused about the underlying story line.
Aside from the razzle-dazzle of yammering on about every antidepressant known to man (including a new and fictitious antidepressant called Ablixa), some very brief blather about the adverse side effects of the new psychiatric drug, psychiatrist/patient sexual abuse and, oh yeah, a bloody murder scene, there really isn’t anything new to get excited about.
When Mark Twain’s hero Huckleberry Finn was forced to study spelling for an hour every day, he said, “I couldn’t stand it much longer. It was deadly dull, and I was fidgety.” His teacher, Miss Watson, threatened him with eternal damnation if he didn’t pay attention. Huck admits it didn’t seem like such a bad alternative. “But I didn’t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.”
If that had happened today, Huck would have been diagnosed as ADHD, put on Adderall, and forced to attend school, while the book about his adventures would never have been written.
The American Psychiatric Association invented the term “ADHD” in 1980 to give kids with hyperactivity, impulsivity, short attention span and easy distractibility a diagnosis.
Who would have thought that 28 years later, the National Center for Health Statistics would report that over 5 million American kids (8 percent) between the ages of 3-17 would receive this diagnosis? That’s 1 out of 12, with about half of those on medication.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is in danger of losing the little credibility it still enjoys.
The organization is chasing medical insurance company reimbursement money by empowering “working groups” to invent whole new diagnoses by committee.
This is bad form for an association of professionals whose life work is supposed to be pursuit of the truth. And it comes at the worst time: When Americans have about had it with ploys to pump up revenues and profit from the public till.
According to sources familiar with the content of the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V—under development by the APA and slated for publication this year—people who are grieving and people who are shy will be labeled with “disorders.” So, too, will some people who rape children or adults. Hoarders—who, heretofore, might have qualified for obsessive-compulsive disorder—may get their own special diagnosis, too.
MILLIONS of healthy people – including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes – may be wrongly labelled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said recently.
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Healthy people who are shy may be wrongly classified as mentally sick in a new health manual issued by the American Psychiatric Association. AFP/SOURCES
In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health experts said its new categories and “tick-box” diagnosis systems were at best “silly” and at worst “worrying and dangerous”.