Biopsychiatry Illuminated

THE CANDLELIGHT PROJECT
by Bob Collier

8 September 2003
Issue 58

The American Psychiatric Association's 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' (or 'DSM') is often referred to as the 'bible of psychiatry'. I'd never heard of it less than a year ago, but these days I tend to refer to it as the Psychiatrist's Joke Book. The following information about this wonder of modern literature may provide you with one or two clues as to why I do that!

I found this first item on file but with no reference, and I don't recall now where I got it from. If anybody recognizes it, please let me know so that I can properly attribute it to its source.

IS THE DSM-IV SCIENCE OR POLITICS?

According to Paula J. Caplan, a clinical and research psychologist at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and lecturer at the University of Toronto, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association) "is a guide that most psychiatrists, therapists, and social workers use to determine not only what care will be covered by insurers, but who, in effect, may be hospitalized against their will and who may be judged incompetent or too disturbed to rear their own children. On a more day-to-day level, the DSM determines how millions of people feel about themselves once they are labeled psychologically 'abnormal.' And yet this powerful manual, recently released in its fourth edition, is constructed by a small clique in the psychiatric establishment...."

Ms. Caplan has written a book called They Say You're Crazy, (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995). Ms. Caplan writes, "My primary focus in this book...is on how the most powerful mental health enterprise in the world - the American Psychiatric Association - is defining abnormality, mental illness, or mental disorder..." "The point is not that decisions about who is normal are riddled with personal biases and political consideration but rather that, by dint of a handful of influential professionals' efforts, those subjective determinants of diagnoses masquerade as solid science and truth."

Ms. Caplan quotes Donald Godwin, chairman and professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry at the University of Kansas: "Like all semireligious works, DSM-III needs an exegesis."

She laments the fact that "the tendency to accept high-status medical scientists' and practitioners' words as truth is still widespread." Reviewer, Carol Tavris, Ph.D. says, "Paula Caplan has written a lively, marvelous insider's story of how psychiatric diagnoses are invented - how subjective, political, and personal agendas are dressed up in the lab coats of science and offered to the public as 'truth.' Mental-health professionals need to read this book to cure themselves of Delusional Scientific Diagnosing Disorder, and the public needs to read it for self-protection."

Another book also reveals how the DSM is more politics than science. Written by Stuart Kirk and Herb Kutchins, The Selling of the DSM, The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, (Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1992) is a "well-documented exposé of the pretense that psychiatric diagnoses are the names of genuine diseases and the authentication of this fraud by an unholy alliance of the media, the government, and psychiatry," according to psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Szasz of the State University of New York.

The next time a psychotherapist refers to the DSM as an authoritative source of diagnostic information, refer him to these two works. You need not be intimidated by the pronouncements of scientific pretenders.

There is, I've discovered, an alternative to the DSM. It's published by the World Health Organization and called the 'International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems'.

This week, I asked Barry Turner, a Lecturer in Law at the University of Lincoln in the UK and a previous contributor to The Candlelight Project, about the relationship between the two publications. This is his reply:

Bob

The WHO ICD-10 is the main classification for psychiatric disorders but the DSM has usurped it mainly by better marketing. The DSM is of course the handbook for the American Psychiatric Association, that wonderful organisation that thinks that paedophiles should not be listed as disordered but that naughty children should. (Some psychiatrists have linked ADHD type behaviours to child abuse, so another way of looking at the APA's view is that the perpetrators should be classed as normal but their victims as disordered.)

In the ICD which is similar to the DSM in its diagnostic criteria there is a wonderful comment on ADHD and I quote "These conditions are not yet included in the main classification because of insufficient empirical predictive validation".*

The DSM grows every year as the APA meet to invent new psychiatric disorders. Within the next five years every human emotion and action that can be affected by SSRI's or psychostimulants will be classed as a symptom of some disorder or other.

No one is greedy, shy, selfish, rude, arrogant, aggressive or impulsive any more, even showing strong positive emotions like love and affection are considered a disorder by the APA.

Needless to say, it is not the human desire to learn evermore about ourselves that is driving this hideous distortion of medical science. A remarkable observation about all of these new disorders is the fact that in nearly every case there is a drug already on the market to "treat" them. It is no coincidence that the APA want the paraphillias removed from the DSM-IV, there is no psychopharmacological treatment available that controls paedophiles, so there is no money in it.

This hideously distorted and grossly magnified branch of medical science is driven entirely by profit and the super inflated egos of the APA board.

There is not one piece of objective, empirically validated scientific evidence to support the ever increasing array of psychiatric disorders. Modern psychiatry is a belief system more closely related to a pseudo-religious cult than a science. The tenets of the belief are dictated by a handful of self appointed psych gurus whose main purpose seems to be self enrichment.

Many psychiatrists as physicians are in breach of all four of the fundamental medical ethics. Patient autonomy is totally disregarded with some psychiatrists showing a marked contempt for the welfare and feelings of patients.

Beneficence, the concept of doing good by your patients, falls by the wayside, usually accompanied by platitudes of societal greater good (which incidentally contradicts the Hippocratic oath as well as all modern protocols on medical ethics).

Non-Maleficence, the fundamental ethic of "first do no harm", is disregarded completely. Dangerous psychopharmaceutical products are applied willy-nilly. The sometimes terrible side effects are brushed aside as a necessary evil that the patient must put up with. Often it is not even believed necessary that those unfortunate enough to have the drugs forced on them should be warned about the side effects. Electric shocks and even the mediaeval practice of psychosurgery are used.

Justice, the last of the ethics, comes in nowhere. Psychiatric patients receive shabby treatment that would not be tolerated in general medicine, because no one will listen if they complain. Dirty drugs, disrespectful, even insulting treatment can be meted out and if a patient complains or refuses to put up with it, it is dismissed as being "symptomatic of their illness".

Modern psychiatry is a sham. Many of its practitioners are no better than fairground snake oil salesmen or cult leaders exploiting people for profit.

The DSM is not worth the paper it is printed on.

* p. 292, ICD-10: DCR-10

Regards

Barry

Finally, this week, what seems to me to be a classic example of the shenanigans behind the DSM. This is an extract from a booklet published by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights called "Re-defining Life's Every Problem as a Mental Disorder":

"In 1973, APA committee members voted - 5,584 to 3,810 - to cease calling homosexuality a mental disorder after gay activists picketed the APA conferences.

Attorney Lawrence Stevens comments: "If mental illness were really an illness in the same sense that physical illnesses are illnesses, the idea of deleting homosexuality or anything else from the categories of illness by having a vote would be as absurd as a group of physicians voting to delete cancer or measles from the concept of disease.""

Quite so.

"Is psychiatry a hoax - as practiced today? Unfortunately, the answer is mostly yes." - Loren R. Mosher, M.D., a former official of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), in his letter of resignation to the American Psychiatric Association.

ADHD-Report.com: The concerned parents' guide to childrens' attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD/ADD)

Contact
Resources