The Unscientific Basis for Mental Disorder Diagnosis

While medicine’s scientific procedures are verifiable, psychiatry’s lack of any systematic approach to mental health and, most importantly, its continued lack of measurable results, have contributed greatly to its declining reputation, both among science-based professions and the population at large.

The development in 1948 of the sixth edition of the World Health Organization’s  International Classification of Diseases (ICD) , which incorporated psychiatric disorders (as diseases) for the first time, and the publication of DSM in the United States in 1952, were psychiatry’s early steps towards a system of diagnosis. They represented an attempt to emulate and gain acceptance from medicine, which, over the course of many centuries, had earned a reputation for being able to resolve physical ailments.

“Mental disorders” are established by a vote of APA Committee members. A psychologist attending DSM hearings said, “The low level of intellectual effort was shocking. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so let’s go to a cafeteria. Then it’s typed into the computer. It may reflect on our naiveté, but it was our belief that there would be an attempt to look at things scientifically.”

Dr. Margaret Hagen, professor of psychology at Boston University, summarily dismisses the DSM: “Given their farcical ‘empirical’ proce- dures for arriving at new disorders with their associated symptoms lists, where does the American Psychiatric Association get off claim- ing a scientific, research-based foundation for its diagnostic manual? This is nothing more than science by decree. They say it is science, so it is.”

In the absence of objective, scientific evidence, psychiatry has decreed the following to be mental illnesses:

Expressive Language Disorder

Phonological Disorder

Caffeine Intoxication/Withdrawal Disorders

Conduct Disorder

Mathematics Disorder

Nicotine Use or Withdrawal Disorder

Non-Compliance with Treatment Disorder

Separation Anxiety Disorder

Sibling Rivalry Disorder

Phase of Life Problem

Sexual Abuse of a Child Problem

In his book  A Dose of Sanity the late neurologist and psychiatrist, Sydney Walker III, wrote of the dangers of the  DSM, concluding, “It’s important to remember … that a number of  DSM-oriented psychiatrists have, to a large degree, abandoned the science of differential diagnosis, and thus consider most psychiatric illnesses ‘incurable.’ This leaves them with only two weapons: psychotherapy and drugs. It’s not surprising that they’re among the first to leap on each new drug bandwagon; like long-ago doctors who recommended bleeding for every ailment, they have little else to offer.”

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