Imagine a medical doctor treating high blood pressure or diabetes, who cannot even define what it is. Now consider that not one psychiatrist can define what he is supposedly “treating.”

On schizophrenia, the DSM-II admitted, “Even if it had tried, the Committee could not establish agreement about what this disorder is; it could only agree on what to call it.”

In DSM-III psychiatrists said there is no satisfactory definition that specifies precise boundaries for the “concept ‘mental disorder.’… For most of the DSM-III disorders … the etiology [cause] is unknown. A variety of theories have been advanced … not always convincing— to explain how these disorders come about.”

DSM-IV claimed the term “mental disorder” continues to appear in the volume “because we have not found an appropriate substitute.”

According to Allen J. Frances, professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, “There could arguably not be a worse term than mental disorder to describe the conditions classified in DSM-IV.”

Psychiatric diagnoses are a combination of social engineering and “what’s good for business,” never medicine. 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.

Lawrence Stevens, a former Assistant District Attorney in California, commented: “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.”

In 1994, psychiatrist Norman Sartorius, later president of the World Psychiatric Association (1996–1999), declared at a meeting of a congress of the Association of European Psychiatrists, “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.”

In 1995, after more than $6 billion ( 4.9 billion) in taxpayer money had been poured into psychiatric research, psychiatrist Rex Cowdry, director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, agreed with the WPA chief: “We do not know the causes [of mental illness]. We don’t have the methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.”

Dr. Thomas Dorman, a member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and Canada, wrote, “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 insur- ance 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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