IMPORTANT FACTS

1. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) were aimed at rectifying psychiatry�s poor reputation among medical professionals.

2. DSM is devoted to the categorization of symptoms only, not diseases . None of the diagnoses are supported by objective evidence of physical disease or mental illness

3. Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D. says, �There are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person�s brain.�

4. Following the introduction of neuroleptic drugs in the 1950s, the number of mental disorders exploded from 163 in DSMII (1968) to 374 in DSMIV (1994).

5. In 2000, the total annual U.S. sales of antipsychotic drugs were more than $4 billion. By 2003, annual sales had reached $8.1 billion and international sales were more than $12 billion.

Unlike medical practices, the psychiatric industry has no tests to validate any mental disorder or �disease.� Many are literally voted into existence without scientific basis or proof.

CHAPTER THREE A Parody of Medicine and Science

While the appearance of Virchow�s Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology in 1858 firmly estab lished medicine�s scientific credentials, psychiatry was still fumbling around with brutal treatments and the lack of any systematic approach to mental health until the 1950s. The absence of an equivalent system of diagnosis for mental problems contributed greatly to psychiatry�s poor reputation, both among medical profes sionals and the population as a whole.

The development of the sixth edition of WHO�s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 1948, which incorporated psychiatric disorders for the first time, and the publication of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the United States in 1952, were first attempts to create a semblance of systematic diagnosis.

Later, with criticism of the day running high due to ambiguities and inaccuracies in DSMII, psychiatry sought to create a �new and improved� diagnostic system, one that would provide an international foundation of agreement for the entire profession.

According to David Healy, psychiatrist and director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine, the final result, the DSMIII, was a �revolution by committee.�

Politically voted in was a system of classifica tion that was drastically different from, and foreign to, anything medicine had seen before. Most notable among numerous other distinctions, the new DSM was devoted to the diagnosis or categorization of symptoms only, not disease. Another was that none of the diagnoses were supported by objective scientific evidence.

Psychiatrist David Kaiser states, �Symptoms by definition are the surface presentation of a deeper process. This is self-evident. However, there has been a vast and largely unacknowledged effort on the part of modern (i.e., biologic) psychiatry to equate symptoms with mental illness.� He says he would be a �poor psychiatrist� if the only tool he had for treatment was a prescription pad for medications which may �lessen symptoms,� but which �do not treat mental illness per se.� He is left, �still sitting across from a suffering patient who wants to talk about his unhappiness.�

In their 1997 book Making Us Crazy , Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk state that the transformation of psychiatry�s diagnostic manual is a �story of the struggles of the American Psychiatric Association to gain respectability within medicine and maintain dominance among the many mental health professionals.�

Dr. Thomas Dorman, an internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and 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 pseudoscientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.�

Psychiatrist Matthew Dumont has also written about DSM�s hollow pretensions to scientific authority: �The humility and the arrogance in the prose are almost indistinguishable. � They say: �� while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder � no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept � � [American Psychiatric Association (APA) 1987]� They go on to say: �� there is no assumption that each mental disorder is a discrete entity with sharp boundaries between it and other mental disorders or between it and no mental disorder� [APA, 1987].�

Shorter puts it this way: �What is the cause of something like erotomania, the delusional belief that someone else is in love with you? Nobody knows. � These considerations suggest that in classification it is very easy for psychiatry to lose its way.�

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