Tag Archives: dsm

Psychopharmaceutical industry seeks world of dispassionate sheeple

People who obediently follow the herd, never markedly sad, angry or excited; children who play quietly and never annoy or talk out of turn – this is the object of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industries. And when anyone steps out of line, the answer is simple: stamp them “abnormal” and give them a pill.

Human sorrow could soon be more easily diagnosed and medicated as a mental disorder. Psychiatrists creating the next edition of the psychiatric bible – the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-5, due out in 2013) – are recommending to eliminate the time clause for major depressive disorder. So instead of grieving for two months to qualify, if you mourn the loss of a loved one for only two weeks doctors could label you mentally ill and prescribe a drug.

Grief is most definitely not a mental illness

Those of us working at Nanaimo Hospice were shocked at this headline. The proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders designating grief as a mental illness leaves us wondering if we, as humans, have lost our way. And although I am not a cynical person, one has to wonder who is behind this kind of move to “medicalize” grief — who would benefit most?

Let me be clear — grief is not a mental disorder. It is a natural reaction to a life transition that we must all face many times over a lifetime.

Mad World:”A pill to make you numb, a pill to make you dumb, a pill to make you anybody else”— Marilyn Manson

If you’ve ever watched two episodes of House M.D., you know the routine. The doctors are on a mad rush to get a diagnosis, throwing one treatment after another at the symptoms to see if it works. All tests have been inconclusive, all theories have been shot down, and the only thing that can save the day is the last minute epiphany of a brilliant and eccentric doctor. If you take away that last step you get a somewhat less interesting show where the patients always die, but also a much better metaphor for the psychiatric industry.

Let’s put on our diagnostic whiteboard the term “chemical imbalance”. What is the cause? Unknown. What are the physiological signs of a chemical imbalance? Since there is no control model for a chemically balanced brain, there are no physiological signs of an imbalance.

Psychiatrists Want To Label Grief a Mental Disorder

Human grief could soon be diagnosed as a mental disorder under a proposal critics fear could lead to mood-altering pills being pushed for “mourning.”

Psychiatrists charged with revising the official “bible” of mental illness are recommending changes that would make it easier for doctors to diagnose major depression in the newly bereaved.

The Illegitimacy of the “Psychiatric Bible” by Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry

“Mental health experts ask: Will anyone be normal?” So read the title of a July 27 Reuters report. The “experts” warned that the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), scheduled for publication in 2013, “could mean that soon no-one will be classed as normal. . . . [M]any people previously seen as perfectly healthy could in future be told they are ill.”

This is not news. More than 200 hundred years ago Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) warned: “I believe that in the end humanitarianism will triumph, but I fear that, at the same time, the world will become a big hospital, each person acting as the other’s humane nurse.”