IMPORTANT FACTS

1. Unlike in medical practices, the psychiatric profession has no tests to validate any mental disorder or �disease.� Many disorders are literally voted into existence without scientific basis or proof.

2. One of psychiatry�s most successful means of defrauding those who pay for psychiatric treatment is through the use of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The unscientific and spurious nature of DSM invites fraud.

3. DSM is the therapist�s password for insurance reimbursement, providing the key to the dollars from private health and government insurance carriers.

4. The DSM , itself, says that it cannot be used for forensic purposes and cannot establish the �existence for legal purposes of a �mental disorder,� �mental disability,� �mental disease,� or �mental defect.�� in relation to criminal responsibility. Yet it is used in court cases to do just that.

CHAPTER FOUR Inventing �Diseases,� Spawning Fraud

In legal terms, fraud involves intentional deception or deliberate misrepresentation to secure money, rights, property or privilege. In general terms, fraud is understood to mean dishonest dealings, cheating or trickery.

One of psychiatry�s most successful means of defrauding those who pay for psychiatric treatment is through the use of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the companion mental disorders section of the International Classifications of Diseases, (ICD-10) mental disorders section.

As Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, authors of Making Us Crazy, state, �� one of the most powerful effects of DSM is due to its connection to insurance coverage: DSM is the psychotherapist�s password for insurance reimbursement. Whether you are depressed or just blue, manic-depressive or just moody, anxious or just high-strung is not simply a matter of semantics; it is the key to millions of dollars in insurance coverage for psychotherapy, hospitalization and medications. This vital connection exists because all mental health professionals must list a psychiatric diagnostic label, accompanied by appropriate code number, on their claims for insurance reimbursement.

�DSM provides the key to the dollars not only from private health insurance carriers but also from massive government programs such as Medicaid, Social Security Disability Income, benefit programs for veterans and Medicare.�

The unscientific and spurious nature of DSM invites fraud.

Dr. Robert F. Stuckey, a former medical director at one of National Medical Enterprises� psychiatric hospitals, admitted that psychiatrists and hospital staff �were absolute geniuses at diagnosing insurance.� When a prospective patient contacted the hospital, his or her insurance was thoroughly researched. Once the patient was admitted, insurance was regularly reviewed to ascertain �how the hospital could legally acquire every dollar possible that was still available that day, on that policy,� Stuckey said. �The patient usually received the diagnosis that matched the category with the most money available to it. � The primary function of the hospital, a function so important that it rendered all other functions incidental, was to extract every single penny possible from the patients.�

Joe Sharkey, author of Bedlam, a book about psychiatric fraud, says that in the 1980s psychiatrists created diagnoses designed to meet insurance requirements for hospitalizing youths. �Those new diagnoses were breathtaking in their scope. Consider the wide range of child and adolescent behaviors and classroom difficulties that are assigned official code numbers (keyed to insurance reimbursement) and classified as disorders in psychiatry�s clinical bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III-R).�

The following childhood diagnoses are part of the DSM/ICD:
Speech Articulation Disorder
Spelling Disorder
Written Expression Disorder
Mathematics Disorder
Stuttering
Communication Disorder Not Otherwise Specified
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Oppositional Defiant Disorder
Conduct Disorder
Phonological Disorder
Sibling Rivalry Disorder
Noncompliance with Treatment Disorder
and the all-encompassing �Phase of Life Problem.�

Carefully honed and marketed by psychiatrists for over four decades, the DSM and ICD are now featured heavily as diagnostic tools, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody battles, discrimination cases based on alleged psychiatric disability, court testimony, education and more. In fact, wherever a psychiatric opinion is sought or offered, the DSM/ICD are increasingly accepted as the final word on sanity, insanity and so-called mental illness.

For adults, disorders that are fraudulently billed for include:
Sleepwalking Disorder
Nicotine Withdrawal
Caffeine Intoxication/Withdrawal
Sleep Terror Disorder (includes waking up in a sweat from a nightmare)
Nightmare Disorder.

New York practitioner Ron Leifer warns that psychiatrists will find a mental illness in everything and that there�s no science to it. Labeling the DSM diagnostic method, �arrogant fraud,� he says, �To make some kind of pretension that this is a scientific statement is ... damaging to the culture.�

According to Margaret Hagen, Ph.D., a psychologist and lecturer at Boston University, �Our legal system has been told that clinical psychology is a scientific discipline, that its theories and methodology are those of a mature science, and our legal system has believed it. Given the deplorable state of the �science� of clinical psychology, that is truly unbelievable.�

According to the DSM, itself, �When the DSM- IV categories, criteria, and textual descriptions are employed for forensic purposes, there are significant risks that diagnostic information will be misused and misunderstood.� And it is �not suffi- cient to establish the existence for legal purposes of a �mental disorder,� �mental disability,� �mental disease,� or �mental defect,�� in relation to competency, criminal responsibility or disability.

Invented �mental diseases� have absolved the guilty of their crimes through an insanity defense. Psychiatry�s billing bible also includes the following �disorders,� excuses for what are, in fact, crimes:
Pedophilia, a �habit and impulse disorder� to excuse child molestation
Physical abuse of a child �problem�
Sexual abuse of a child �problem�
Pyromania disorder, for arson
Pathological fire-setting, also for arson
Pathological stealing, for theft

Dr. Thomas Dorman, member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and Canada, sums it up this way: �In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of �disease,� formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.�

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