Tag Archives: dsm

According to Psychiatry…Everybody must be addicted

Seems like such a win-win change to the DSM. The Drug Czar wins because with all these new people “needing treatment” it justifies his emphasis on treatment. The drug companies win because they get to drug people up on drugs for which they get paid. The treatment industry wins because they get a ton of new people “needing treatment” that aren’t difficult cases, and with health care covering much of it, they can just rake in the dough without really having to do anything.

As far as I can tell, the only ones who lose are, well, the people.

Critics Blast Big Psychiatry for Invented & Redefined Mental Illnesses—13,000 Professionals Petition the APA

“[The DSM] is wrong in principle, based as it is on redefining a whole range of understandable reactions to life circumstances as ‘illnesses,’ which then become a target for toxic medications heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry,” clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone with a Health Board in Wales told Reuters. “The DSM project cannot be justified, in principle or in practice. It must be abandoned so that we can find more humane and effective ways of responding to mental distress.”

Countless other experts agree, according to recent news reports, with many questioning whether a private group of individuals who stand to benefit by creating more diseases should really be writing the manual in the first place. Among the most vocal critics of the new proposals is Duke University psychiatry Prof. Allen Frances, who told the New York Times that the overly broad and vague definitions would create more “false epidemics” and increase the “medicalization of everyday behavior.”

Reuters—Battle Looms in Pychiatry World Over Controversial Manual Update

Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist for the Cwm Taf Health Board in Wales agreed: “(The DSM) is wrong in principle, based as it is on redefining a whole range of understandable reactions to life circumstances as ‘illnesses,’ which then become a target for toxic medications heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry,” she said.

“The DSM project cannot be justified, in principle or in practice. It must be abandoned so that we can find more humane and effective ways of responding to mental distress.”

NaturalNews— Are your imperfect relationships a disease? Psychiatry thinks so

The ever-expanding list of so-called psychiatric conditions included in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) may soon include “relational disorders,” or mental illnesses supposedly attributed to two or more people involved in a relationship together.

According to the official definition, relational disorders are “persistent and painful patterns of feelings, behavior, and perceptions involving two or more partners in an important personal relationship.” A married couple, for instance, that continually fights would constitute a relational disorder, as would a troubled parent-child relationship.

If recognized and included in the manual, relational disorders will be the first psychiatric condition that involves more than one person. It will also be the first condition that exists only between two or more people, and not in a single individual.

Huffington Post—Why Relationships May Soon Be Psychiatric Diseases

For some years now there has been a movement afoot in the mental health care field to include a diagnosis called “relational disorder” in the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), due out in 2013.

DSM certification of RD could prove to be a cash cow for all of the professionals treating people from heartbroken marriages and feuding families. 800,000 U.S. couples a year visit offices for marital and family help. Do the math. Some people stand to make a lot of money.