A Behavioral Approach to Mental Disorders

The first benzodiazepine – chlordiazepoxide – became available, from Hoffman-La Roche, in 1960, under the brand name Librium. It was soon followed by: diazepam (Valium) 1963; nitrazepam (Mogadon) and oxazepam (Serax) in 1965; temazepam (Restoril) 1969; clorazepate (Tranxene) 1972; flurazepam (Dalmane) 1973; clonazepam (Klonopin) 1975; lorazepam (Ativan) in 1977; and alprazolam (Xanax) in 1981; etc. Benzodiazepines are categorized as sedative/hypnotics, which means that they have a relaxing, generally pleasant, sleep-inducing effect, and were embraced promptly by psychiatry for the "treatment" of anxiety, tension, worry, sleeplessness, etc. In this respect, the benzodiazepines largely replaced the earlier barbiturates, which had received a great deal of negative publicity because of their much publicized role in lethal overdoses, both accidental and intentional. ...

On October 12, 2014, the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, MD, participated in a panel discussion at the Mad In America film festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. After the festival, he wrote an article – Finding a Middle Ground Between Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry – for the Huffington Post Blog, summarizing the positions he had discussed at the festival. The article was re-published on MIA on October 26, 2014. The article is ostensibly an attempt to find common ground between psychiatry and its critics, but the piece contains numerous distortions and omissions which I think need to be identified and discussed. ...

On June 12, an interesting and important article was posted on pharmabuse.com. The article is titled Army Report: Fort Hood Mass Shooter Ivan Lopez On Psychotropic Cocktail Of Celexa, Wellbutrin, Ambien, Lunesta. Ivan Lopez-Lopez is the second Fort Hood shooter, who killed three people and then himself on April 2, 2014. Here are some quotes: "On January 23, 2015, the Army released its long anticipated report on the second fatal mass shootings at Fort Hood that occurred on April 2, 2014. In support of the report, the Army simultaneously released five appendices contained in nineteen other files pertaining to Specialist Ivan Lopez's deadly shooting rampage." ...

BACKGROUND On June 19, 2015, I published a post titled Allen Frances’ Ties to Johnson & Johnson. In that post, I set out some very serious allegations against Dr. Frances. I drew these allegations from a document titled Special Witness Report dated October 15, 2010. The report was written by David Rothman, PhD, Professor of Social Medicine at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Rothman’s report was produced in the context of a lawsuit filed by the State of Texas against Janssen Pharmaceutica, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. ...

INTRODUCTION I recently came across an article titled Diagnosisgate: Conflict of Interest at the Top of the Psychiatric Apparatus, by Paula Caplan, PhD. The article was published in Aporia, the University of Ottawa nursing journal, in January 2015. Aporia is “a peer-reviewed, bilingual, and open access journal dedicated to scholarly debates in nursing and the health sciences.” Dr, Caplan is a clinical and research psychologist, and an Associate at Harvard’s DuBois Institute. She worked as a consultant to the DSM-IV task force in the 1980’s, but resigned from this position after two years. Here’s a quote from her February 2014 post on Mad in America The Great “Crazy” Cover-up: Harm Results from Rewriting the History of DSM: ...

On May 27, The Lancet Psychiatry published an editorial titled This year’s model. The article is a response to the British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology’s Guidelines on Language in Relation to Functional Psychiatric Diagnoses, which was published in March of this year. The paper was produced: "…to support clinical psychologists in the development of documents using language consistent with the Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP) position on functional psychiatric diagnoses." ...

I have recently read this book, and I think it would be extremely helpful for parents, teachers, and counselors who work with children in this area. Here are some quotes: "…ADHD [is] something that your child does rather than something that she has." "The first thing to realize is that while you and other adults see your child’s ADHD behavior as a problem to overcome, for your child, ADHD behavior holds solutions to the difficulties that he faces on a daily basis. When your child encounters adversity, ADHD behavior somehow mitigates the situation. When you identify what gives his ADHD behavior its staying power, you will have gained valuable insight into why such behavior repeats so frequently. You will also be taking a giant step forward in knowing how to eliminate it." ...

On February 26, 2015, The Lancet published online an article by Soren Dalsgaard et al titled Mortality in children, adolescents, and adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a nationwide cohort study. The article describes a Danish study that was designed to assess “ADHD-related mortality in a large cohort of Danish individuals.” The researchers describe their methods as follows: "By use of the Danish national registers, we followed up 1·92 million individuals, including 32 061 with ADHD, from their first birthday through to 2013. We estimated mortality rate ratios (MRRs), adjusted for calendar year, age, sex, family history of psychiatric disorders, maternal and paternal age, and parental educational and employment status, by Poisson regression, to compare individuals with and without ADHD." ...

In November of last year, the Schizophrenia Bulletin published online a research study: Antipsychotic Treatment and Mortality in Schizophrenia, by Minna Torniainen et al. The research was conducted in Sweden. The authors offer the following background for the study: "It is generally believed that long-term use of antipsychotics increases mortality and, especially, the risk of cardiovascular death. However, there are no solid data to substantiate this view." and the following conclusions: "Among patients with schizophrenia, the cumulative antipsychotic exposure displays a U-shaped curve for overall mortality, revealing the highest risk of death among those patients with no antipsychotic use. These results indicate that both excess overall and cardiovascular mortality in schizophrenia is attributable to other factors than antipsychotic treatment when used in adequate dosages." ...

On March 25 of this year, Psychiatric Times published an article titled Dementia, Agitation, and Aggression: The Role of Electroconvulsive Therapy. The author is Manjola Ujkaj, MD PhD, and the article’s subtitle is “What role might electroconvulsive therapy play for short-term treatment of agitation and aggression in patients with dementia?” According to their website Psychiatric Times is a medical trade publication that covers news, reports, and clinical content related to psychiatry “for psychiatrists and allied mental health professionals who treat mental disorders.” The circulation of the monthly print publication is approximately 40,000. ...