IMPORTANT FACTS

1. Patients with actual physical conditions are routinely misdiagnosed with psychiatric disorders, drugged and institutionalized.

2. Numerous studies show that undiagnosed physical problems can cause behavioral and emotional problems.

3. According to UCLA medical professor, Melvyn R. Werback, physicians diagnosing mental illness should check the patient’s dietary history and other nutritional factors.

4. One state’s mental health evaluation field manual says that mental health professionals have a “legal obligation to recognize physical disease” that “may cause a patient’s mental disorder….”

5. Proper medical screening by non-psychiatric diagnostic specialists could eliminate more than 40% of psychiatric admissions.

CHAPTER FOUR A Workable Mental Health System

Trusted with the care for our mentally disturbed, psychiatry has failed utterly to provide any humane solutions to their plight. In fact, medical—not psychiatric—doctors can treat such disturbance far more effectively. Charles B. Inlander, president of The People’s Medical Society, wrote in Medicine on Trial, “People with real or alleged psychiatric or behavioral disorders are being misdiagnosed—and harmed— to an astonishing degree. … Many of them do not have psychiatric problems but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a limbo from which they may never return. …”

In a book reflecting clinical research into nutritional influences on mental illness, Melvyn R. Werbach, M.D., assistant clinical professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine, recommends that in diagnosing patients, physicians should check “dietary history and current eating patterns,” “examine the patient for signs of nutritional deficiencies as part of the medical examination” and “if indicated, perform selective evaluative laboratory testing.”

The following is a small sample of literature and studies showing that undiagnosed, physical problems can be causing unwanted behavioral and emotional problems:

W.V. Tamborlane, professor of pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine, reported that when 14 healthy children were given a dose of sugar equivalent to two frosted cupcakes for breakfast, adrenaline levels rose to ten times their baseline levels, suggesting “children may be prone to such symptoms as anxiety, irritability and difficulty concentrating following a sugar meal.”

A high-protein, low-carbohydrate and sugar-free diet has helped reduce excessive activity in children. In a study conducted on 20 “learning disabled” children who were placed on such a diet, 90% showed widespread improvements in hyperactive symptoms.”

“Children with early-stage brain tumors can develop symptoms of hyperactivity or poor attention. So can lead- or pesticide-poisoned children. So can children with early-onset diabetes, heart disease, worms, viral or bacterial infections, malnutrition, head injuries, genetic disorders, allergies, mercury or manganese exposure, petit mal seizures, and hundreds—yes hundreds—of other minor, major, or even life-threatening medical problems. Yet all these children are labeled hyperactive or ADD,” said psychiatrist and neurologist Dr. Sydney Walker III, author of The Hyperactivity Hoax.

Professor Stephen J. Shoenthaler, Ph.D., a California State University criminologist, conducted a study at 12 juvenile correction institutions and 803 public schools, in which the researchers increased fruits and vegetables and whole grains and decreased fats and sugars in children’s diets. The juvenile institutions exhibited 47% less “antisocial behavior” in 8,076 confined juvenile delinquents. In the schools, the academic performance of 1.1 million children rose 16% and learning disabilities fells 40%.

Studies show the frequency with which physical illnesses are misdiagnosed as “mental illness”—in one study, 83% of people referred by clinics and social workers for psychiatric treatment had undiagnosed physical illnesses; 42% of those diagnosed with “psychoses” were later found to be suffering from a medical illness, 48% of those diagnosed by psychiatrists for mental treatment had an undiagnosed physical condition. Another study found that 76% of patients with certain types of cancer exhibited supposed psychiatric symptoms as a first indicator of the physical illness.

Several diseases closely mimic schizophrenia, fooling both patient and physician. Dr. A. A. Reid lists 21 conditions, beginning with an increasingly common one, “the temporary psychosis brought on by amphetamine drugs.” Dr. Reid explained that drug-induced psychosis is complete with delusions of persecution and hallucinations, and “is often indistinguishable from an acute or paranoid-schizophrenic illness.”

People suffering from mental disturbance should first obtain a full and searching medical—not psychiatric—examination. According to the California Department of Mental Health Medical Evaluation Field Manual (1991), “Mental health professionals working within a mental health system have a professional and a legal obligation to recognize the presence of physical disease in their patients ... physical diseases may cause a patient’s mental disorder [or] may worsen a mental disorder. …”

Dr. Julian Whitaker author of the respected Health & Healing newsletter, says: “When psychiatrists label a child or [adult], they’re labeling people because of symptoms. They do not have any pathological diagnosis; they do not have any laboratory diagnosis; they cannot show any differentiation that would back up the diagnosis of these psychiatric ‘diseases.’ Whereas if you have a heart attack, you can find the lesion; if you have diabetes, your blood sugar is very high; if you have arthritis it will show on the X-ray. In psychiatry, it’s just crystal-balling, fortune-telling; it’s totally unscientific.”

Psychiatry would prefer to say or imply that only brain-based, mental “illnesses” can affect irrational behavior or thinking, that they need long- term, if not life-long care, and that they are incurable. These falsehoods have been so successfully disseminated throughout the mental health system and amongst the public, that countless numbers have become trapped as lifelong patients of psychiatric and psychological services.

These falsehoods must be exposed.

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