Tag Archives: APA

How Big Pharma and the Psychiatric Establishment Drugged Up Our Kids

In his book Psychiatryland, psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin recounts reading a scientific article in which it was debated whether a three-year-old girl who ran out into traffic had oppositional-defiant disorder or bipolar disorder, the latter marked by “grandiose delusions” that she was special and cars could not harm her.1

How did the once modest medical specialty of child psychiatry become the aggressive “pediatric psychopharmacology” that finds ADHD, pediatric conduct disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, assorted “spectrum” disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders, and even schizophrenia under every rock? And how did this branch of psychiatry come to find the answer to the “psychopathologies” in the name of the discipline itself: pediatric psychopharmacology? Just good marketing. Pharma is wooing the pediatric patient because that’s where the money is. Just like country and western songs about finding love where you can when there is no love to be found at home. Pharma has stopped finding “love” in the form of the new blockbuster drugs that catapulted it through the 1990s and 2000s. According to the Wall Street Journal, new drugs made Pharma only $4.3 billion in 2010 compared with $11.8 billion in 2005—a two-thirds drop

American Psychiatric Association Protest—This Weekend, Philadelphians Can Say “Screw You” to Normal

This weekend, there’s going to be an Occupy day of protest and rallies in Philadelphia—but not by Occupy Philly. On Saturday, activists will come from all over the country for Occupy the APA, a peaceful day of action to protest the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), which is being rolled out at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) at the Convention Center. Unlike other protests that sometimes divide the mental health advocacy community, this protest will include people from diverse constituencies—from psychiatrists and those who take medications to psychiatric “survivors” who believe psychiatry is dangerously abusive.

ABC News: DSM-5 Criticized for Financial Conflicts of Interest—70% of task force members have ties to Pharma

Controversy continues to swell around the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as DSM-5. A new study suggests the 900-page bible of mental health, scheduled for publication in May 2013, is ripe with financial conflicts of interest.

The manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association, details the diagnostic criteria and recommended treatments — many of which are pharmacological — for each and every psychiatric disorder. After the 1994 release of DSM-4, the APA instituted a policy requiring expert advisors to disclose drug industry ties. But the move toward transparency did little to cut down on conflicts, with nearly 70 percent of DSM-5 task force members reporting financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies — up from 57 percent for DSM-4.

Fox News—The American Psychiatric Association Scam

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.

The New York Times on Psychiatric Disorders, “Not Diseases, but Categories of Suffering”

YOU’VE got to feel sorry for the American Psychiatric Association, at least for a moment. Its members proposed a change to the definition of autism in the fifth edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, one that would eliminate the separate category of Asperger syndrome in 2013. And the next thing they knew, a prominent psychiatrist was quoted in a front-page article in this paper saying the result would be fewer diagnoses, which would mean fewer troubled children eligible for services like special education and disability payments.

Then, just a few days later, another front-pager featured a pair of equally prominent experts explaining their smackdown of the A.P.A.’s proposal to eliminate the “bereavement exclusion” — the two months granted the grieving before their mourning can be classified as “major” depression. This time, the problem was that the move would raise the numbers of people with the diagnosis, increasing health care costs and the use of already pervasive mind-altering drugs, as well as pathologizing a normal life experience.

Fewer patients, more patients: the A.P.A. just can’t win. Someone is always mad at it for its diagnostic manual.