1. In legal matters, psychiatrists rarely agree in their diagnoses of a witness, defendant, etc.

2. According to the DSM itself, when the “(mental disorder) descriptions are employed for forensic purposes, there are significant risks. …” It is “not sufficient to establish the existence for legal purposes of a ‘mental disorder,’ in relation to competency, criminal responsibility or disability.”

3. In 2003, The Psychiatric Times published an article calling the DSM “a laughingstock for the other medical specialties.”

4. It is a psychiatric invention that criminality is excusable due to insanity.

CHAPTER THREE False Testimony in Our Courts

One of the greatest harms perpetrated by the use of the DSM is reliance upon it for the “insanity” defense in our courts. While this defense has been around since the 1800s, it donned a “scientific” mantle with the introduction of the DSM in 1952. The entire gist of psychiatric testimony is that the criminal is not responsible for committing the crime. Psychiatry’s dilemma is that rarely can its members agree on what criminal responsibility means.

The problems created by this have plagued the court system for decades. Forty years ago, in a 1962 article in the Northwestern Law Review, psychiatrist Alfred Baur cited a case where his hospital received a patient for a three-month observation before he was to go on trial. Baur and two colleagues concluded that he had “no mental disorder.” The court, however, appointed two private psychiatrists to give their expert diagnosis. After inspection, one announced that the patient was a paranoid schiz phrenic; the other said he was merely in a paranoid state. During the trial, the two hospital psychiatrists testified that the patient was not insane, while the two court-appointed psychiatrists insisted that he was.

The ludicrousness of this situation was underscored, as Baur reported, by the fact that “the jury
thereupon found the man ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ and ‘still insane’ and committed him to the hospital which had just testified it had found him without mental disorder.”

In 1994, two California juries become hopelessly deadlocked in the trials of Erik and Lyle Menendez, adult brothers who had brutally killed their parents in the family’s $4 million home. A team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists were hired to build their defense. One psychologist testified that the brothers suffered from “learned helplessness” as a result of intense, repeated abuse. Another psychologist claimed the boys had “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The deadlock came about because of the psychiatric notion that criminality is excusable and that no two psychiatrists could agree on the boys’ mental diagnosis. 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 sufficient 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.

The late Jay Ziskin, a psychologist who led a movement to eliminate psychiatry from the court system, stated in a 1988 paper, “Studies show that professional clinicians do not in fact make more accurate clinical judgments than laypersons.” It’s about as reliable as predicting the future by gazing at a crystal ball.

Authors of Making Us Crazy, Kutchins and Kirk found “ample reason to conclude that the latest versions of DSM as a clinical tool are unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system.”

Dr. Hagen is forthright about psychiatrists and psychologists redefining criminal behavior as “disease”: “Why not just flip pennies or draw cards? Why not put on a blindfold and choose without being able to identify the patients? It could hardly hurt [a diagnostic] accuracy rate that hovers at less than one out of three times correct. … There is no psychological cure for the desire to beat up women, to rape and murder them. The very idea that [psychology] today could even pretend to such an ability is ludicrous. …”

In 1884, more than a hundred years ago, the New York Court of Appeals already concluded that “twelve jurors of common sense and common experience” would do better on their own than with the help of hired experts, “whose opinions cannot fail to be warped by a desire to promote the cause in which they are enlisted.”

However, psychiatrists and psychologists have been “warping” their opinion in the courts ever since. In the process, the “pursuit of truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth has given way to reams of meaningless data, fearful elaborate speculation, and fantastic conjecture. Courts resound with elaborate, systemized, jargon-filled, serious-sounding decep- tions that fully deserve the contemptuous label used by trial lawyers themselves: junk science.”

Justice is the action taken on an individual by a society after that person has violated society’s legal and criminal codes. It is an action taken by the group to ensure its own survival. When a psychiatrist testifies that a criminal is insane based on the “junk science” in the DSM, and should be acquitted or treated instead of imprisoned, justice is subverted into serving the individual instead of the group. In this way, psychiatrists have succeeded in weakening, even negating, the only legal means that society has to protect itself from criminal elements.

BUILDING THE BUSINESS
In 1998, psychiatry penetrated the physician’s domain with the release of the World Health Organization’s “Guide to Mental Health in Primary Care” kit, designed to facilitate and promote a medical doctor’s use of psychiatric behavioral checklists for diagnosing mental “disorders.” Psychiatry’s lack of scientific merit was compensated for by invasive and “hard sell” marketing. The pre-packaged list of symptoms enables diagnosis by checklist, with a pre-determined treatment plan and referral of patients to psychiatrists.

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