Guest Blog: Psychiatric Diagnostic Manual Editor Reveals Emperor Has No Clothes
Psychiatric Diagnostic Manual Editor Reveals Emperor Has No Clothes
http://www.naturalnews.com/031088_psychiatric_disorders_mental_health.html
Monday, January 24, 2011 by: Monica G. Young, citizen journalist
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bull___. I mean, you just can’t define it,” states Allen Frances, MD, lead editor for the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). As DSM-IV is the imperial doctrine used by psychiatrists in diagnosing mental disorders, prescribing powerful psychotropic drugs to the masses, and commanding health care dollars, this is quite a confession. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,”Francesconcedes.
Gary Greenberg who interviewedFrancesand wrote an in-depth article for Wired Magazine, describes howFrances’ conscience has been hitting him in the gut. “Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, andFrancesthinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics — and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs,” writes Greenberg.
DSM-IV led to a 40X increase in child bipolar diagnoses and an epidemic of dangerous anti psychotic prescriptions for children, even as young as 3.
Senior editor of DSM-III (the prior version), Robert Spitzer MD, had his own rude awakening. He is the one who spurredFrancesto join him in battling against the creators of DSM-5 — the next edition in progress. Spitzer publicly censured the APA for mandating that psychiatrists involved in DSM-5 sign a written promise to never talk about what they were doing, except when necessary for their jobs. “The intent seemed to be not to let anyone know what…was going on,” says Spitzer.
Spitzer and Frances warn that including a proposed “pre-psychotic” disorder could lead to a new diagnosis explosion and drug company marketing onslaught.Francessays an emphasis on early intervention would encourage the “wholesale imperial medicalization of normality,” producing “a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry” while imposing on patients the “high price [of] adverse effects, dollars, and stigma.”
There are many other dissenters in the field. Greenberg says “they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree withFrancesthat public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will ‘take psychiatry off a cliff.’”
Greenberg, himself a psychotherapist, points out that scientific certainty eludes psychiatry. He reports, “every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering.”
With 25% more mental disorders than DSM-III, DSM-IV has been a goldmine for drug companies. According to a 2006 study byTuftsUniversity, more than half of the DSM-IV authors had financial links to the pharmaceutical industry.
Lacking medical research, the DSM-5 website is riddled with “deliberating”, “discussing”, and “heavy discussions” to describe how these professed experts attempt to decree new disorders. New proposals for DSM-5 include “Hoarding Disorder”, “Skin Picking Disorder” and worse, new labels for babies: “Temper Dysregulation Disorder” and “Feeding Disorder”. This would open the door to an infant drugging marketing campaign!
Like the tale of the pompous emperor who pretends his clothes are so magnificent they can only be seen by wise people, the psychiatric and drug industries peddle their fabricated labels and drug remedies to the world. And like the little boy who shouts the obvious “the emperor has no clothes”, it’s up to public pressure to stop this.
Sources include:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/…
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/dsm…
http://www.tufts.edu/~skrimsky/PDF/…
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031088_psychiatric_disorders_mental_health.html#ixzz1BzdJhdBD
Dorothy,
We are bombarded by messages of needing medicine and surgery to cure ourselves.
It’s rare to find people who realize the body can heal itself as well as how dangerous the toxic chemicals (medications) are that we put into our body. In addition we are financially making certain people very wealthy in essence by letting them kill us and making us sick. I wish I thought that was an overstatement, but I’ve seen too much to not realize what’s going on here. I do a lot of reading and research and I will say that I think we are taking steps towards awareness of this, so that is wonderful.
I just recently read Kevin Trudeau’s book Natural Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About. The fact that it has been read by so many is a testament to the direction we are moving towards. In case you do read it I will say the author himself has quite a sketchy persona not just of his past but also what consumers off of his site say. His book was information that I thought was very on track though both with what I have personally experienced and researched. I read other reviews of it too where people said they were leery of Kevin but the book was on track.
I can say from a personal perspective that the medical and psychiatric professions here have become way out of hand. I am 26 now but as a teenager I had a issues with depression. The truth of it is, looking at my life and my past it’s easy to see why I would have had that emotional weight and it’s also easy to see that toxins shouldn’t have been the answer to solving it. I did have a few hospital stays when it was at it’s worst but besides that it was depression and I was a cutter and at one time intentionally overdosed. The pain was to the point where I couldn’t handle it anymore and I was drinking and consuming illegal drugs, mostly weed. However, I wasn’t hallucinating, I wasn’t bipolar, I wasn’t hurting other people or anything like that.
My doctor however had me on an average of say 13-20 drugs at a time. Some were for the depression, others were bipolar medications (including Lithium) and still others were very strong anti-psychotic medications. I was taking drugs that were meant for people who were uncontrollable and at regular adult dosages as well. I pretty much stopped functioning, I slept all the time and when I was up I was so foggy that I really didn’t get to experience much of that time. I actually have a very poor memory of that time. I was sleeping so often that I was also hardly eating anything there for a while. While on the medications I felt at times like a zombie and other times like they were making me go crazy. When I changed to a different doctor he mentioned that I was on way too many and on too high of a dosage. He cut way back but I was still on a handful at any given time. The doctor that I had prior to him I found out later is known for giving out way too many medications. The way she kept pushing them, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out if she (like many other doctors) had incentives from the pharmaceutical companies to prescribe.
I asked and begged my counselors and my parents to change it because I knew it wasn’t right but nobody would listen because I wasn’t the doctor. When I got out of my parents house I weaned myself off of most of them but still got bombarded with parents and doctors telling me I needed them or I wouldn’t be able to live a happy and sane life. Yet I knew it was the meds that were making me lose my mind. Once I got down to one pill I stayed there for probably 2-3 years. Every time I would try to get off I would have what I would describe as withdrawals where you feel dizzy, sometimes out of control, again you feel kind of crazy. After I was able to go really slow in weaning off of that last one I was able to completely get off of all of them.
I have lived the last few years as emotionally some of the best in my life. I won’t say they were perfect because after getting off of all of it I have done a lot of work to heal myself. Going through all that work and memories (including some that were so painful I had blocked out) is naturally going to be rough, but nobody wants to tells us that this natural and we are very capable of doing this.
I recently did a session with a psychic medium who brought up my days of being heavily medicated. She said the other side was saying that from their perspective they give her the image of me drawn on a chalkboard and an eraser erasing over me. They mentioned I have come a long way but they wanted me to detoxify because of how strong these medications are and what they have done to my body (they really didn’t divulge what the drugs did but it just didn’t sound positive.) I’m sure that my personal choices with alcohol and drugs didn’t help although I will say that my drug and alcohol usage to prescribed drugs was very small in comparison. I was also on prescribed drugs for a lot longer than the time I was taking recreational drugs. It’s also worth noting that the way the other side was addressing this did seem to us to be pointed pretty much at my mental health care.
You had mentioned that you had passed the information on to 3,000 people. Do you happen to have a copy of the information you had passed on? I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure if the information you sent out was the message from that last email or if there was more to it. I would be interested in doing something like that.
Also, doing something like 10 things you probably didn’t know about the medications you get or about the pharmaceutical industry etc might also be good for getting attention. I think there is a lot of information that people are being kept from, often from government.
I’ve recently considered doing a website with something along this line. For example most people don’t realize that their birth certificate has a code in the lower part that can be put into the stock market and that we are each property of the stock market and the international bank. This means if they became desperate enough they could sell or trade us. The sad part of this slavery is that most people don’t realize that they are currently slaves by definition, we think those days are over with. Of course this is great for those who “are in control” because how are people going to overthrow this if they don’t even know it exists? I think this situation goes under the name maritime law. There is a lot of stuff going on like this right now from what’s in our food, our water, bills we have no idea they have passed at a federal level. The idea I was contemplating was making a site bringing a plethora of this to light. The scary part of this is that they have shown other people who have made too much of wave often have consequences including deaths that nobody realizes what actually happened there. I don’t know how true this is but I am pregnant and don’t wish to put the life of myself or my baby in harms way. It’s a frustrating situation. I have been working to meditate in order to bring light and guidance to all this. Well, this email is a lot longer that I anticipated so I hope I didn’t bore you. Have a blessed night.
Cori
corirachael@yahoo.com
Dorothy,
Thanks for the insider information, that is very helpful. It’s almost too bad that we have to kind of tip toe around about alternative modalities at times, as beneficial as many of them are. Those healing methods would most likely be more widely utilized if insurance companies did start to be more open to coverage in these areas. Have a wonderful rest of the day.
Cori
corirachael@yahoo.com