IMPORTANT FACTS

1. Redefining addiction as a mental disorder justifies the use of psychiatry and psychology in the treatment of it.

2. Psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM) lists substance abuse and intoxication as disorders so that insurance companies and governments can be billed.

3. Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen says, “Addiction treatment is a cash cow of the psychology industry, which has argued, in most cases successfully, that treatment of the ‘disease’ ought to be covered by health insurance.”

4. Other related psychiatric deceptions include the concept of drug addiction as a brain disease, and the existence of “chemical imbalance” in the brain. These are no more than theories quoted as fact.

CHAPTER TWO Harmful Diagnostic Deceptions

Methadone treatment is a deception and failure. Redefining drug addiction as a treatable “disease” is part of the deception.

According to renowned Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus Thomas Szasz, “[T]here is not one iota of evidence” that addiction is a brain disease.” Szasz says that by defining the use or abuse of illegal drugs as a “disease,” this placed the treatment for it within the province of the psychiatrist. Psychiatrists then describe the course of this “untreated disease” —“steady deterioration leading straight to the insane asylum”— and prescribe its “treatment”: “psychiatric coercion with or without the use of additional, ‘therapeutic’ drugs (heroin for morphine; methadone for heroin…).”

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV) and Europe’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), mental disorders section provide all-inclusive listings, lumping together everything from alcohol, amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants, nicotine, sedatives and hypnotics to caffeine. The DSM-IV lists “Substance Dependence,” “Substance Abuse” and
“Substance Intoxication” to cover the various types of “mental disorders” related to these substances. There’s even “Substance-Induced Anxiety Disorder.”

This generalized classification gives rise to some outrageously false psychiatric claims: “24% of American men have a lifetime diagnosis of Alcohol Abuse or Alcohol Dependence,” and “24.1% of the population, or 48.2 million Americans have some kind of mental disorder.” The media quote these bold pronouncements as fact. However, in their book Making Us Crazy, Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk say, “Such statistics come from studies that are based on DSM’s inadequate definition of mental disorder. … DSM is used to directly affect national health policy and priorities by inflating the proportion of the population that is defined as ‘mentally disordered.’” The numbers are also used to “shape mental health policy and the allocation of federal and state revenues.”

Michael First, one of the developers of the DSM-IV, is quoted as saying that the DSM “provides a nice, neat way of feeling you have control over mental disorders,” but he confessed this is “an illusion.”

In 2001, Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen, author of Manufacturing Victims, said, “Addiction treatment is a cash cow of the psychology industry, which has argued, in most cases successfully, that treatment of the ‘disease’ ought to be covered by health insurance.”

As for Leshner’s claim that addiction is a “brain disease,” in his 2001 book, Pharmocracy, Professor Szasz says, “Psychiatrists maintain that our understanding of mental illnesses as brain diseases is based on recent discoveries in neuroscience, made possible by imaging techniques for diagnosis and pharmacological agents for treatment. This is not true.”

Pediatric neurologist Fred Baughman, Jr.says that ‘“biological psychiatry’ has yet to validate a single psychiatric condition/diagnosis as an abnormality/disease, or as anything ‘neurological,’ ‘biological,’ ‘chemically imbalanced’ or ‘genetic.’”

In 1998, the late Loren Mosher, M.D., a member of the American Psychiatric Association for 30 years, wrote that there is no evidence confirming “brain disease attribution.” Elliot S. Valenstein, Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain is unequivocal: “The theories are held onto not only because there is nothing else to take their place, but also because they are useful in promoting drug treatment.”

The obvious conclusion, then, is that due to their drug rehabilitation failures, psychiatry redefined drug addiction as a “treatable brain disease,” making it conveniently “incurable” and requiring massive additional funds for “research” and to maintain treatment for the addiction.

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