A Behavioral Approach to Mental Disorders

As my regular readers know, I am a big fan of Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, eminent President of the American Psychiatric Association. I study his bulletins on Psychiatric News avidly, not only for the insights they provide in the areas of human frailty and self-deception, but also for their literary qualities of obfuscation and semantic distortion. It is, therefore, with some alarm that I confess that I missed the good doctor’s epistle of December 13. This was pointed out to me by a reader, who was also kind enough to say that without my clarificatory commentary, he is simply unable to fathom Dr. Lieberman’s insights and erudition. ...

Yesterday, December 26, at 8:25 p.m., the following comment was posted on my December 16 post on the Murphy Mental Health Bill. "Read the article in today's Wall Street Journal (12/26/13), 'A Mental-Health Overhaul', and you cannot help but be in favor of the Murphy Bill. It is a huge misrepresentation to say it is about 'coercive tactics'. Take the bill piece by piece and debate it. If you have experienced the mental healthcare system you would recognize that this legislation is badly needed and long over due." ...

BACKGROUND On November 20, JAMA Psychiatry (formerly Archives of General Psychiatry) published an interesting letter. It was headed: Failure to Report Financial Disclosure Information, and was signed by Robert D. Gibbons PhD, David J Weiss PhD, Paul A. Pilkonis PhD, Ellen Frank, PhD , and David J. Kupfer MD. The letter is an apology for failing to disclose a financial interest in an article, Development of a Computerized Adaptive Test for Depression, that had appeared in Archives of General Psychiatry a year earlier (November 2012). The article described a computerized questionnaire for depression (the CAT-DI) and was generally positive with regards to the potential usefulness of the test in clinical settings. In the article, the authors had clearly stated that they had no conflicts of interest, but that: ...

BACKGROUND On December 8, I received the following question from a reader: (The subject matter is the controversial CAFÉ – Comparisons of Atypicals in First Episode of Psychosis - study. This was the study in which Dan Markingson committed suicide.) "It appears that there was no head-to-head with a control group taking a placebo pill. Nor was there a control group featuring 'old' types of 'antipsychotic'. If that was the case then it is very poor study. If you are just looking at 3 'new' subtypes of a 'new' class - then what on earth can you hope to show from the data." ...

It is no secret that pharma-psychiatry has come under considerable criticism in recent years. In general, they do not respond to these criticisms, but instead they continue to beat the same old drum: mental illness is becoming increasingly prevalent; we need more mental health screenings; we need more funding for “treatment”; and we need wider coercive powers to ensure that these sick people take their drugs. They are also using the school shootings to generate alarm about “untreated” mental illness, and are calling in support from various quarters, including politicians. ...

There’s a new entry on the Tell Your Story section of my website. The author, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells how during his teenage years, his social skills were poor, and he met the criteria for schizoid personality disorder, the essential features of which are social isolation and emotional detachment. Here are two quotes: "By the end of this project I had developed solid social skills, created an interesting circle of friends and no longer met the criteria for 'schizoid personality disorder'. This is without any psychiatry, medication, or even the knowledge that I was 'suffering' from something that many consider a 'disorder'." ...

On December 10, Vice President Joe Biden announced that $100 million of new Federal money is to be injected into the US mental health system “…to expand community-based services and treatment centers.” There’s a short article about this in the Washington Post. It’s written by Scott Wilson, the Post’s chief White House correspondent. The article states that the “…inadequacy of mental health and addiction care…” is a topic that “…gained urgency after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a year ago, a crime carried out by a mentally disturbed gunman.” This is a reference to 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who killed 20 children and 6 adult staff, himself, and his mother in the incident. ...

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA and Chair of Psychiatry at Columbia University, published a post on November 26 on Psychiatric News. The article is called Training the Psychiatrists of the Future, and is co-authored by Richard Summers, MD. Dr. Summers is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Drs. Lieberman and Summers open by telling us that psychiatrists’ roles “…are changing and will continue to change.” That sounds great, but don’t expect too much. There will still, they tell us, be a need for: ...

I found the above image online yesterday, at the site The Things We Say. Mental illness is also man-made. It is the invention of psychiatry - their spurious medicalization of all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving. Its purpose is to legitimize the prescription of dangerous psychotropic drugs to as many people as possible. It benefits psychiatrists and drug companies, but damages, stigmatizes, and disempowers its victims. ...

In 2004, 26-year-old Dan Markingson committed suicide. Since then, numerous concerns have been expressed about the events that led up to his death. In particular, it has been claimed that he was coerced into the CAFE study, and that he was too delusional to understand what was involved. It has also been reported widely that his mother, Mary Weiss, saw his condition deteriorate while he was taking the study drug - Seroquel (quetiapine) - and that she made numerous unsuccessful requests to the researchers to have him removed from the study. ...