IMPORTANT FACTS

1. In psychiatry, all its diagnoses are called �disorders� because none of them are established medical diseases.

2. Decided on by a vote of American Psychiatric Association members, mental �disorders� are based on opinion, not science.

3. Norman Sartorius, former president of the World Psychiatric Association, has declared: �The time when psychiatrists considered they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill will have to learn to live with their illness.�

4. Dr. Rex Cowdry, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, admitted to the U.S. Congress that psychiatrists do not know the causes of any mental illness, nor do they have �methods of �curing� these illnesses yet.�

CHAPTER THREE Diagnostic Fraud

In medicine, strict criteria exist for calling a condition a disease. In addition to a predictable group of symptoms, the cause of the symptoms or some understanding of their physiology (functions) must be established. Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite that is transmitted from an infected to an uninfected individual by the bite of a particular mosquito. Its symptoms include periodic chills and fever.

In the absence of a known cause or physiology, a group of symptoms, presumed to be related, is called a disorder. �In psychiatry, all of its diagnoses are called disorders because none of them are established diseases,� says Dr. Joseph Glenmullen of Harvard Medical School. In fact, psychiatry has never advanced beyond theory, conjecture and opinion.

Dr. Rex Cowdry, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), testified before the U.S. Congress in 1995, saying: �Over five decades, research supported and conducted by NIMH has defined the core symptoms of the severe mental illnesses ....� However, �we do not know the causes. We don�t have the methods of �curing� these illnesses yet.� [Emphasis added]

The definitions of these �core symptoms� constitute the American Psychiatric Association�s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and its companion, the International Classifications of Diseases (ICD) mental disorders section. Decided upon by a vote of American Psychiatric Association members,
psychiatry and psychology�s �disorders� are not based on science.

Professor Herb Kutchins from the California State University, Sacramento, and Stuart A. Kirk from the State University of New York-Albany, authors of Making Us Crazy, state, �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.� The bitter medicine is that DSM has unsuccessfully attempted to medicalize too many human troubles.

As Dr. Thomas Dorman, an internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and of 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 insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.�

However, the �bitter medicine� is much more than just the failure of the DSM and psychiatrists are much more than just frauds living high at the public�s expense. The harsh reality is that in their hands, these �diagnostic� manuals have been used to decide someone�s fate, often leading to brutal assault and death.

The harsh reality is that thousands die or are physically and mentally disabled each year because of psychiatry�s unscientific and fraudulent diagnoses.

Next

Back to Contents