Tag Archives: psychiatry

Taking a Stand: The Only University To Formally Challenge the American Psychiatric Association

This is a crucial issue. As the Saybrook psychology faculty note in their remarkable blog “The New Existentialists:” “the DSM-5 inflates diagnostic criteria to such an extent that it pathologizes normal behavior and natural human functioning.”

Under this new “Bible of Psychiatry” every aspect of human life, every thought and feeling, can be considered a form of “mental illness” and treated with drugs. An egregious example is a proposed change that would make any depression about the death of a loved one that lasts longer than two months a mental illness treatable by anti-depressants.

This is madness. Millions of people who are perfectly healthy, who are not sick but are looking for help, will be forcibly turned into customers for the pharmaceutical industry. Psychologists are being encouraged to spend less and less time actually talking with those they are seeking to help, getting to know them as human beings, and taking their search for meaning in life seriously.

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

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.”

The end of antidepressants? Studies show they’re no more effective than placebo yet carry serious health risks

Watchers of a February broadcast of “60 Minutes” may have been stunned to learn that studies have been conducted that seem to prove that antidepressants, on the whole, are no more effective than placebo.

This revelation about antidepressants – among the top-selling and top-prescribed drugs in the United States – may have been new news to some, but the studies conducted by Irving Kirsch, PhD, and colleagues, have been raising eyebrows and garnering attention since 1998. Which begs the question, have Kirsch’s studies had any impact on the sales of antidepressants and/or on the prescribing patterns of doctors?

Time for real medicine, rather than psychiatry

Experts have suggested a controversial psychiatric “disorder” may have been misdiagnosed in a large percentage of cases, according to a new study. The disorder is the highly lucrative ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

The study suggests three out of four cases may be wrongly diagnosed. On the basis, however, that ADHD has never been scientifically proven to exist, and on the basis that ADHD came into being after it was unscientifically voted into existence, it would be entirely accurate to say four out of four cases are wrongly diagnosed.