2. Mental “disorders” are voted into and out of existence based on factors that have nothing to do with medicine. In fact, psychiatry admits that it has not proven the cause or source of a single mental “illness”.

3.The theory that a “chemical imbalance” causes “mental illness” has been thoroughly discredited.

4. While psychiatrists claim that brain scans can detect certain mental disorders, there is no scientific proof and medical experts say that such assertions are unethical.

5. The APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) states the term “mental disorder” continues to appear in the volume “because we have not found an appropriate substitute.”


CHAPTER ONE A Scientific Fraud

In a significant departure from medical diagnosis, psychiatric diagnoses are devoted to categorization of symptoms only, not the observation of actual physical disease. None of the diagnoses are supported by scientific evidence of biological disease or a mental illness of any kind.

Margaret Hagen, Ph.D. points out: “There are a great many ways to do science badly, and the junk science that makes up the bulk of the body of ‘knowledge’ of clinical psychology manages to exemplify every one of them. … 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.”

Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, authors of Making Us Crazy, state: “There are indeed many illusions about DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] and very strong needs among its developers to believe that their dreams of scientific excellence and utility have come true, that is, that its diagnostic criteria have bolstered the validity, reliability, and accuracy of diagnoses used by mental health clinicians."

Their dreams have remained an illusion.

The deepening reliance upon DSM in many social sectors is under increasing attack because of its lack of scientific validity.

Psychiatrist Matthew Dumont, who has written about DSM’s hollow pretensions to scientific authority, cites the APA’s inability to even define a mental disorder: “They say: “...while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder...no def inition adequately spec ifies precise boundaries for the concept....They [APA] go on to say: ‘... there is no assumption that each mental disorder is a discrete entity with sharp boundaries between it and other mental disorders or between it and no mental disorder.’”

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