IMPORTANT FACTS

1. Psychiatrists redefined behavior and educational problems as “disorders” in order to claim insurance reimbursements. Literally by a vote, they decide which disorder should be included in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

2. In April 2003, in a Psychiatric Times article entitled, “Dump the DSM,” psychiatrist Paul Genova said that psychiatric practice is governed by a diagnostic system that “is a laughingstock for the other medical specialties.”

3. Bruce Levine, Ph.D., author of Commonsense Rebellion says: “… no biochemical, neurological, or genetic markers have been found for attention deficit disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling, or any other so-called mental illness, disease, or disorder.”

4. Psychiatrist M. Douglas Mar says, “There is no scientific basis for these claims [of using brain scans for psychiatric diagnosis].”

5. Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist, psychiatrist and author of A Dose of Sanity, said that the DSM has “led to the unnecessary drugging of millions.”

CHAPTER TWO Fraudulent Diagnoses

It may be stating the obvious, but for a doctor to legally prescribe a drug, there has to be some sort of agreed-upon diagnosis, some standard by which to act, that would include agreed-upon, legitimate physical symptoms. This isn’t the case with psychiatry.

Harvard Medical School’s Joseph Glenmullen explains: “In medicine, strict criteria exist for calling a condition a disease. In addition to a predictable cluster of symptoms, the cause of the symptoms or some understanding of their physiology [function] must be established. This knowledge elevates the diagnosis to the status of recognized disease. For example, ‘fever’ is not a disease, it is merely a symptom. In the absence of known cause or physiology [function], a cluster of symptoms that one sees repeatedly in many different patients is called a syndrome, not a disease.” In psychiatry, “we do not yet have proof either of the cause of the physiology for any psychiatric diagnosis. … The diagnoses are called disorders because none of them have established diseases.”

The development of the sixth edition of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 1948, which incorporated psychiatric disorders (as diseases) for the first time, and the publication of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the United States in 1952, provided an apparent diagnostic system.

The 1952 edition of the DSM contained a list of 112 mental disorders. In 1980, the third edition, DSM-III, was released, listing an additional 112 disorders, bringing the total to 224. In the “Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence” section, 32 new mental disorders were added, including: Attention Deficit Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Developmental Reading
Disorder, Developmental Arithmetic Disorder, and Developmental Language Disorder. By 1994, DSM-IV had taken the total count of mental disorders to 374.

For all its technical pretense, the DSM has never scored a scientific mark with any professional group except psychiatrists themselves.

The reason for this is very simple.

DSM-II reports, “Even if it had tried, the [APA] Committee could not establish agreement about what this disorder [schizophrenia] is; it could only agree on what to call it.” Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, Thomas Szasz, says that schiz- ophrenia is “defined so vaguely that, in actuality, it is a term often applied to almost any kind of behavior of which the speaker disapproves.”

Psychiatrists put their own finger on it in their introduction to DSM-III: “For most of the DSM- III disorders … the etiology [cause] is unknown. A variety of theories have been advanced, buttressed by evidence not always that convincing to explain how these disorders come about.”

As psychiatrist Matthew Dumont commented, “They say: ‘… while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder … no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept.’ They then provide a 125-word definition of mental disorder, which is supposed to resolve all the issues surrounding the sticky problem of where deviance ends and dysfunction begins. It doesn’t.”

Stated another way, while individuals do suffer from mental disturbances, there is no proof that any of psychiatry’s mental “diseases” exist at all; they exist because psychiatry says they exist.

So how does a “disorder” appear in the DSM? A “disorder” becomes qualified by a consensus process which involves a mere show of “expert” hands— the key question being, “Do you think this is a disorder or not, yes or no?” This unscien- tific procedure has prompted psychiatrist Al Parides to call the DSM “a masterpiece of political maneuvering.” He also observed that “what they [psychiatrists] have done is medicalize many problems that don’t have demonstrable, biological causes.”

Obviously, people can and do experience serious mental difficulties and need help. However, professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, authors of Making Us Crazy, warn: “The public at large may gain false comfort from a diagnostic psychiatric manual that encourages belief in the illusion that the harshness, brutality, and pain in their lives and in their communities can be explained by a psychiatric label and eradicated by a pill. Certainly, there are plenty of problems that we all have and a myriad of peculiar ways that we struggle … to cope with them. But could life be any different? Far too often, the psychiatric bible has been making us crazy— when we are just human.”

Next

Back to Contents