Psychiatry Disorders a Step in the Wrong Direction
March 2, 2010
Washington Post
By George F. Will
Peter De Vries, America’s wittiest novelist, died 17 years ago, but his discernment of this country’s cultural foibles still amazes. In a 1983 novel, he spotted the tendency of America’s therapeutic culture to medicalize character flaws:
“Once terms like identity doubts and midlife crisis become current,” De Vries wrote, “the reported cases of them increase by leaps and bounds.” And: “Rapid-fire means of communication have brought psychic dilapidation within the reach of the most provincial backwaters, so that large metropolitan centers and educated circles need no longer consider it their exclusive property, nor preen themselves on their special malaises.”
Life is about to imitate De Vries’s literature, again. The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s encyclopedia of supposed mental “disorders,” is being revised. The 16 years since the last revision evidently were prolific in producing new afflictions. The revision may aggravate the confusion of moral categories.
Today’s DSM defines “oppositional defiant disorder” as a pattern of “negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures.” Symptoms include “often loses temper,” “often deliberately annoys people” or “is often touchy.” DSM omits this symptom: “is a teenager.”
This DSM defines as “personality disorders” attributes that once were considered character flaws. “Antisocial personality disorder” is “a pervasive pattern of disregard for . . . the rights of others . . . callous, cynical . . . an inflated and arrogant self-appraisal.” “Histrionic personality disorder” is “excessive emotionality and attention-seeking.” “Narcissistic personality disorder” involves “grandiosity, need for admiration . . . boastful and pretentious.” And so on.
If every character blemish or emotional turbulence is a “disorder” akin to a physical disability, legal accommodations are mandatory. Under federal law, “disabilities” include any “mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities”; “mental impairments” include “emotional or mental illness.” So there might be a legal entitlement to be a jerk. (See above, “antisocial personality disorder.”)
The revised DSM reportedly may include “binge eating disorder” and “hypersexual disorder” (“a great deal of time” devoted to “sexual fantasies and urges” and “planning for and engaging in sexual behavior”). Concerning children, there might be “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria.”
This last categorization illustrates the serious stakes in the categorization of behaviors. Extremely irritable or aggressive children are frequently diagnosed as bipolar and treated with powerful antipsychotic drugs. This can be a damaging mistake if behavioral modification treatment can mitigate the problem.
Another danger is that childhood eccentricities, sometimes inextricable from creativity, might be labeled “disorders” to be “cured.” If 7-year-old Mozart tried composing his concertos today, he might be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated into barren normality.
Furthermore, intellectual chaos can result from medicalizing the assessment of character. Today’s therapeutic ethos, which celebrates curing and disparages judging, expresses the liberal disposition to assume that crime and other problematic behaviors reflect social or biological causation. While this absolves the individual of responsibility, it also strips the individual of personhood and moral dignity.
James Q. Wilson, America’s preeminent social scientist, has noted how “abuse excuse” threatens the legal system and society’s moral equilibrium. Writing in National Affairs quarterly (“The Future of Blame”), Wilson notes that genetics and neuroscience seem to suggest that self-control is more attenuated — perhaps to the vanishing point — than our legal and ethical traditions assume.
The part of the brain that stimulates anger and aggression is larger in men than in women, and the part that restrains anger is smaller in men than in women. “Men,” Wilson writes, “by no choice of their own, are far more prone to violence and far less capable of self-restraint than women.” That does not, however, absolve violent men of blame. As Wilson says, biology and environment interact. And the social environment includes moral assumptions, sometimes codified in law, concerning expectations about our duty to desire what we ought to desire.
It is scientifically sensible to say that all behavior is in some sense caused. But a society that thinks scientific determinism renders personal responsibility a chimera must consider it absurd not only to condemn depravity but also to praise nobility. Such moral derangement can flow from exaggerated notions of what science teaches, or can teach, about the biological and environmental roots of behavior.
Or — revisers of the DSM, please note — confusion can flow from the notion that normality is always obvious and normative, meaning preferable. And the notion that deviations from it should be considered “disorders” to be “cured” rather than stigmatized as offenses against valid moral norms.
Click here for the full report.
Psychiatry Revamp? New Psychiatry Manual a Stretch
March 2, 2010
Wall Street Journal
By Edward Shorter
To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline’s floundering writ large. Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.
Psychopharmacology, or the treatment of the mind and brain with drugs, has come to dominate the field. The positive side is that many illnesses respond readily to medication. The negative side is that the pharmaceutical industry seeks the largest possible market for a given drug, and advertises huge diseases, such as major depression and schizophrenia, the scientific status of which makes insiders uneasy.
In the 1950s and ’60s, when psychiatry was still under the influence of the European scientific tradition, reasonably accurate diagnoses still sat at center stage. If you felt blue, uneasy and generally jumpy, “nerves” was a common diagnosis. For the psychotherapeutically oriented psychiatrists of the day, “psychoneurosis” was the equivalent of nerves. There was no point in breaking these terms down: clinicians and patients alike understood “a case of nerves,” or a “nervous breakdown.”
Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms. A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has “social anxiety disorder” or “seasonal affective disorder.” The increased specificity is spurious. There is little risk of misdiagnosis, because the new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches.
For those more seriously ill, contemplating suicide or pacing restlessly and saying “It’s all my fault,” melancholia was the diagnosis of choice. The term has been around for donkey’s years.
All the serious disorders of mood were once lumped together technically as “manic-depressive illness”—and again, there was little point in differentiating, because medications such as lithium that worked for mania were also sometimes effective in forestalling renewed episodes of serious depression.
Psychopharmacology—the treatment of disorders of the mind and brain with drugs—was experiencing its first big push, and a host of effective new agents was marketed. The first blockbuster drug in psychiatry appeared in 1955 as Wallace Lab’s Miltown, a “tranquilizer” of the dicarbamate class. The first of the “tricyclic antidepressants” (because of their chemical structure) was launched in the U.S. in 1959, called imipramine generically and Tofranil by brand name. It remains today the single most effective antidepressant on the market for the immediate treatment of serious depression.
To continue reading this report, click here.
Illegally Obtained Blood Samples of Babies in Texas Ordered Destroyed
February 22, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
The subject of a recent federal lawsuit, routine blood samples legally taken from Texas newborns to screen for disorders and diseases were illegally being kept by the Texas Department of State Health Services without parental consent. Found to have begun holding and retaining such blood samples since 2002, the agency is being sued on behalf of the children’s parents by the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Legislation passed in May 2009 allows for blood samples to be retained indefinitely but allows parents to opt out if they wish to do so. However the lawsuit maintains that all blood samples obtained prior to the legislation be destroyed in cooperation with the law at that time. While the Health Department has agreed to destroy the samples, which have been preserved as blood spot cards, it is requesting permission to keep the blood samples of 400 children whose blood tested positive for certain atypical disorders.
The lawsuit is demanding no financial restitution for the state’s crimes, citing only privacy concerns and the principle of holding the government accountable when it violates the rights of its people. According to Andrea Beleno, an Austin mother and plaintiff in the suit, people must stand up and oppose governmental lawlessness otherwise nobody will.
An agreement was reached on December 14 whereby the Center must destroy all samples within 120 days unless the state receives written permission to retain specific samples. The Health Department must also inform the parents who were plaintiffs in the suit how their children’s blood samples were used and if any financial transactions took place during the research process. All projects must also be published on the agency’s newborn screening website.
Spokesmen from Texas A&M’s Health Science Center, the facility where the blood cards were being stored, expressed relief that a settlement has been agreed upon and the lawsuit dismissed, but it mourned the loss of what it described as a “superb database” that would have helped to prevent future birth defects in children.
The Health Department has agreed to comply fully with the new law concerning blood sample retention and is assuring parents that all information will be kept confidential and privacy maintained. The agency hopes that new parents will be willing to voluntarily allow their children’s blood samples to be retained for research purposes that could lead to novel new treatments for serious medical problems.
Click here for the full report
Anger to be Classified as Mental Illness
February 22, 2010
Mail Online
By Jerome Burne
Do you live surrounded by clutter – ancient copies of magazines, your children’s old toys, articles you’ve clipped out of newspapers over the years?
If you find it hard to throw out things of limited or no value, you could be suffering from hoarding disorder.
‘Hoarding’ is just one of the new mental conditions being added to the psychiatrists’ bible, or the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders (DSM), to give it its proper name.
Other new conditions identified as possibly needing professional help include binge eating – which is said to affect many people who are seriously obese – and ‘cognitive tempo disorder’, which seems very like laziness (symptoms include dreaminess and sluggishness).
There’s also ‘intermittent explosive disorder’, which involves occasionally becoming very angry suddenly.
Most bizarre of the proposed additions is one defined as ‘getting a thrill at being outraged by pornography’.
It was also described as Whitehouse syndrome after the campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who objected to sexual content on TV.
The DSM is a large book that lists all psychiatric disorders and describes their symptoms. If a condition is in there, it means it’s considered a mental illness.
But some of the new entries are controversial, not least because of fears they will result in many more people being put on drugs that could be ineffective or dangerous.
The DSM is produced by the American Psychiatric Association and is hugely influential worldwide.
‘Once a condition has got a label you’ve got a better chance of being treated and researchers are more likely to investigate it,’ explains Professor David Cottrell, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Leeds.
Click here for the full report
The Kevin Trudeau Show: 2-17-10
Today, Kevin explains why he is in court today and the real reason he didn’t get fair coverage from the mainstream media. Plus, more predictions! You won’t want to miss this vital information!!
Foreclosures Reach 315,000 in January
Corporations Have No Interest In Your Safety
Updates to Mental Health Disorders Manual
Speaking of New Made-Up Disorders…
Anti-Depressant Drugs No More Effective Than Placebos
Household Cleaners May Cause Breast Cancer
Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!
Click below to hear The Kevin Trudeau Show RIGHT NOW!!!
Vaccinations Doing More Harm Than Good
November 20, 2009
Vactruth
By Andrew Moulden MD, PhD
This is a stern, yet humble, warning to all citizens of the globe. It is now proven that we are all being harmed by repeat vaccinations. This evidence must be circulated broadly in light of the imminent Fall, 2009 plan to turn North American schools into MASS vaccine centers to institute triple flu vaccine to us all. Children will be the first to be injected with experimental flu vaccines. The entire vaccine industry, as it turns out, has been experimental. We did not know that we were causing damages – for us all.
In case you are wondering what will happen, the answers are contained in this article. The same thing will happen as has been happening with all vaccines. Clinically silent ischemic brain and body damages will happen. The only difference is that you can now see these damages, with your own eyes, in the here and now, in real time, and in your family photos going back fifty or more years if you have to.
ALL vaccines are causing immediate and delayed, acute and chronic, waxing and waning, impairments to blood flow, throughout the brain and body. This IS causing us all to become chronically ill, sick, and causing brain damages along a continuum of clinically silent to death. This is causing ischemic “strokes”. In some respects, this is also “aging.” Since the damages are microscopic, we cannot see them as they occur. However, we can now see the neurological aftermath of these damages – within hours and days of vaccination – all vaccinations.
[View with PicLens]
In Revelations 18:4 by the epistle of Saint John we are told: “And I heard another voice from Heaven saying “Come out of her my people that ye be not partakers of her sins and that ye receive not of her plagues.” All vaccinations, as you can now clearly see, are causing chronic illness and mass disorders on mass scales. The global health consequences clearly amount to plaques.
As a medically trained Doctor, a PhD trained neuroscientist/neuropsychologist, with a Masters degree in Child/language neurodevelopment, I have been trained to follow clinical observations to empirical assessment couched within the scientific model we rely upon to answer questions of: What is normal and what is not? What is cause? What is coincidence? What is factual? What is fancy? What is reproducible? What is random? What is measurable? What is predictable? What is truth? What is consequence? What is “going on”?
Science is only a man made truth-seeking tool. It is fallible. It is a statistical, probabilistic mathematical model. It has limitations. Wielded for profit – truth can become lost.
Scientific methods, design, and analyses can just as soon hide the truth as they can discover truth, or create “truth” de-novo.
Science cannot replace God-given tools of common sense and observation we all have. You do not need statistical probabilistic mathematical models, wielded by experts, to deny what you can see with your very own eyes.
If you place your hand on a hot stove element, you will be burned. If you do not experience pain and you cannot see the burn, then you will not learn that touching hot stove elements is harmful.
All vaccines have been causing “burns” to body and brain. The brain has no pain receptors. You will not feel the pain. You can, however, see the footprints of these “burns” immediate and delayed, from each vaccination. The evidence was before our eyes all along. We simply did not appreciate what these “burns” meant let alone that they were emerging, after each vaccination. The “burns” are largely to internal organ systems. We can ALL now see the damaging effects of these “burns” with our own eyes.
Click here for the full report
Autism On The Rise
October 6, 2009
New York Times
By Benedict Carey
More than 1 in 100 American children and teenagers may have autism, Asperger’s syndrome or a related developmental problem, although such diagnoses often do not hold up, according to a government report released on Monday.
The estimate, based on a telephone survey of some 78,000 households and published in the journal Pediatrics, is the highest yet of the prevalence of so-called autism spectrum disorders, which include everything from severe autism to milder social difficulties to “pervasive developmental disorder,” a description given to many troubled children.
Nearly 40 percent of the children in the study who were given such a diagnosis grew out of it or no longer qualified for it, the study found. The estimate is based on those whose parents said they were currently struggling with one of the disorders.
Prevalence estimates for autism-related disorders have increased so quickly over the past decade — to 1 in 150 in 2007, from 1 in 300 in the early 2000s — that researchers have debated whether the disorder is in fact becoming more common or is simply diagnosed more often.
The new survey is not likely to settle the question. “This is an excellent study, but what it looks at is the prevalence of the diagnosis, not the disorder,” said Dr. Susan L. Hyman, a pediatrician at Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester. “The next step scientifically is to see whether those diagnoses are being made accurately.”
Click here for the full report.
