FATAL FLAW Psychiatry’s Lack of Science

Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuar A. Kirk, authors of MakingUsCrazy, warned that people “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.”

In June 2004, John Read, senior lecturer in psychology at Auckland University, New Zealand put it this way: “More and more problems have been redefined as ‘disorders’or‘illnesses’,supposedly caused by genetic predispositions and biochemical imbalances. Life events are relegated to mere triggers of an underlying biological time bomb. … Worrying to much is ‘anxiety disorder.’ Excessive gambling, drinking, drug use or eating are also illnesses.…Making lists of behaviors, applying medical-sounding labels to people who engage in them, then using the presence of those behaviors to prove they have the illness in question is scientifically meaningless. It tells us nothing about causes or solutions. It does, however, create the reassuring feeling that something medical is going on.”

Dr. 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. …”

Professors Kutchins and Kirk also stated: “There are indeed many illusions about DSM 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.”

Bruce Levine, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Commonsense Rebellion said: “Remember that no biochemical, neurological, or genetic markers have been found for…compulsive alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling, or any other so-called mental illness, disease or disorder.”

In 2003, Peter Tyrer, professor of community psychiatry at Imperial College, London, debunked the DSM: “I always say that DSM stands for Diagnosis of Simple Minds; it provides what American [psychiatrists] call ‘operational criteria’ for the diagnosis of conditions. Basically, if you have a certain quota then you have the condition. It has led to a tick-box mentality. Well, you are a bad clinician if you have to do that. Doctors should be finding out about the person.”

J. Allan Hobson and Jonathan A. Leonard, authors of Out of Its Mind, Psychiatry in Crisis, A Call for Reform ,say that DSM-IV’s “authoritative status and detailed nature tends to promote the idea that rote diagnosis and pill-pushing are acceptable.”

The sham of psychiatry’s invented diagnoses in the field of drug rehabilitation is preventing cures and perpetuating addiction.

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