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.
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Tantrums in Children May be Labeled ‘Psychiatric Disorder’
February 15, 2010
Guardian
By Daniel Nasaw
Childhood temper tantrums, teenage irritability and binge eating may soon rate as psychiatric disorders in the US, according to proposed changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of the psychiatric profession.
The proposals are the product of a 10-year effort to update the handbook, which influences the vast network of American healthcare providers, insurance companies, courts, prisons and universities. At stake are billions of dollars in insurance payments, pharmaceutical sales and medical fees. The proposed revisions, published online today , will be subject to public comment until late April.
“It not only determines how mental disorders are diagnosed, it can impact how people see themselves and how we see each other,” Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the guide, told reporters. “It influences how research is conducted as well as what is researched. It affects legal matters, industry and government programmes.”
The DSM is in its fourth edition. It has been criticised for formalising character traits and emotions into mental conditions and for encouraging their medical treatment, often with drugs that have powerful side effects.
Christopher Lane, a professor at Northwestern University and author of 2007 DSM critique Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, said: “The organisation is clearly opening another Pandora’s box here, as well as paving the way for the medication of even-greater numbers of children and teenagers cycling through emotional stages as part of normal development.”
In an email, Lane said that categorising binge eating as a psychiatric disorder risks classifying millions of Americans as mentally ill at a time when the country is trying to rein in health care costs.
Among the proposals is a new condition, “temper dysregulation with dysphoria”, characterised by “severe, recurrent outbursts of temper” several times a week, that are “grossly out of proportion to the situation or provocation and that interfere significantly with functioning”. To be considered, the “symptoms” must have been “diagnosed” before age 10.
The proposed revisions would also recognise binge eating as a disorder. The condition is “characterised by recurring episodes of the consumption of unusually large amounts of food, accompanied by a sense of loss of control and strong feelings of embarrassment and guilt”. These episodes would need to occur at least once a week over the last three months, and the writers were keen to distinguish it from mere overeating.
“While overeating is a challenge for many Americans, recurrent binge eating is much less common and far more severe and is associated with significant physical and psychological problems,” wrote Dr B Timothy Walsh.
The panels proposed a new category of condition called “risk syndromes”, in which a patient is at risk for a mental disorder that is not yet present.
For example, a moody teenager who displays “excessive suspicion, delusions and disorganised speech or behaviour” may be labelled as having psychosis risk syndrome. The panel estimated that a quarter to a third of people who suffer from those “symptoms” go on to develop a psychotic disorder, and the writers acknowledged the new category could lead to inaccurate diagnosis of some who are not at risk.
“Given the severity of psychotic disorders, and evidence that early treatment may mitigate its long-term consequences, we believed that it was important to begin to recognise these conditions as early as possible,” wrote Dr William Carpenter of the American Psychiatric Association’s psychotic disorders work group.
The panels who proposed the revisions also took into account how race, ethnicity and gender affect the incidence of psychiatric disorders, and studied how those categories affect the expression of symptoms. For example, researchers noted differing ways of experiencing and describing symptoms of panic among some Asian and Hispanic patients.
The panel also recommended discarding the term “mental retardation” in diagnoses, replacing it with “intellectual disability”.
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Many Patients On Antidepressants Should Not Be On Them
January 18, 2010
Telegraph
By Kate Devlin
Half of patients do not respond when they are given the medications, which can be powerful tool in helping the depressed to feel better. Instead of raising levels of a “happiness chemical”, called serotonin, in their brain, they lower them.
The researchers found with some brain cells “the more antidepressants try to increase serotonin production, the less serotonin (they) actually produce,” said Dr Rene Hen, from Columbia University in New York and a researcher at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, who led the study. He and his team believe that the findings could lead to ways to identify patients for whom the drugs will not work, before they are prescribed expensive and ultimately pointless treatments.
But they also hope that their research could someday lead to ways to overcome the problem, so that the drugs can be used to help more people.
Their study, published in the journal Neuron, found that some brain cells reacted negatively to antidepressant medication.
Tests on mice show that the drugs had no such effect on the animals when they were genetically engineered to have more of these cells.
The team behind the study now plan to test their findings on a group of human patients.
They hope that drugs could be developed to prevent the actions of these cells and allow the medication to work as intended and increase serotonin production.
Most antidepressants, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s), such as prozac, work by increasing serotonin levels.
An estimated one in seven people will develop depression serious enough to need treatment at some point in their life.
Across England around 31 million prescriptions are written for antidepressants every year.
The Mental Health Foundation estimates that use of the drugs has doubled over the last 10 years.
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Children Becoming Pshychiatric Gold Mine
December 17, 2009
TruthOut
By Evelyn Pringle
Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.
On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.
In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.
The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as “mood stablizers” and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.
Happy Daze – Antidepressant Drugs Keeping you in”Drug-Induced State’
November 23, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Contrary to the impression promoted by the psychiatric and drug industries, psychiatric drugs do not work by correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain, Joanna Moncrieff of University College London wrote recently in an opinion piece for the BBC. Instead, such drugs merely put people into “drug-induced states” that make it harder for them to experience the symptoms of their illness.
“Magazines, newspapers, patients’ organizations and Internet sites have all publicized the idea that conditions like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be treated by drugs that help to rectify an underlying brain problem … just like a diabetic needs to take insulin,” Moncrieff writes. “The trouble is, there is little justification for this view.”
Moncrieff notes that prior to the 1950s, mental health workers largely saw antidepressants as psychoactive drugs, primarily sedatives, that eased the symptoms of depression without addressing the underlying cause – much as over-the-counter cold drugs may stop a runny nose without affecting the cold virus. This view was eventually replaced by the idea that depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and other mental health conditions result from chemical imbalances in the brain, imbalances that can be corrected by the right “magic bullet.”
“However, this transformation was not based on any compelling evidence,” she says.
Moncrieff holds to the older view, that “drugs used in psychiatry are psychoactive drugs, like alcohol and cannabis. They affect everyone, regardless of whether they have a mental disorder or not.”
Antipsychotics, she notes, mute people’s emotions and thoughts, which can reduce the effects of psychosis as a side effect. Anti-anxiety drugs are central-nervous system depressants, like alcohol.
“If you told people that we have no idea what is going on in their brain, but that they could take a drug that would make them feel different and might help to suppress their thoughts and feelings, then many people might choose to avoid taking drugs if they could,” she writes. “People need to make up their own minds.”
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