A Behavioral Approach to Mental Disorders

It is a central theme of this website that there are no mental illnesses/disorders, and that the psychiatric medicalization of ordinary human problems is arbitrary, spurious, and destructive. The widespread acceptance of ADHD as a mental illness/chemical imbalance has no scientific underpinning, but rather is based on marketing and promotion. The ADHD “diagnosis” is particularly destructive, in that it targets children, and serves as the justification for “treating” these children with dangerous drugs. ...

There’s a take-no-prisoners article by Paula Caplan on Psychology Today. You can see Paula’s article here. (Thanks to @yobluemama2 on Twitter for the link.) Here are some quotes: "…the now well-established facts that psychiatric diagnosis is unscientific, does not reduce human suffering, and causes many kinds of serious harm." "…the chances even that two therapists simultaneously meeting with the same person will assign that person the same label are poor, which of course means that diagnosis is not helpful in choosing treatment or improving outcome." ...

Today I received a short comment from Ruth Elliot on my post Psychiatric “Diagnoses” for Children. Ruth linked to an article by Claudia Gold, MD. Claudia is a Freudian psychoanalyst. My ideological orientation is behavioral, and if you were to ask people in this business: what is the opposite of a behaviorist? you would probably get the answer: a Freudian psychoanalyst. And vice versa. They are two very different ways of conceptualizing human activity. ...

I’ve come across an article by Lisa Cosgrove et al entitled Conflicts of interest and the quality of recommendations in clinical guidelines. It was published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice in December of last year. As everyone knows, the APA publishes the DSM, but they also publish “Clinical Practice Guidelines” for various “diagnoses,” including the condition known as major depression. Dr. Cosgrove and her colleagues examined the guidelines for major depression to see if the authors had financial or intellectual conflicts of interest. An example of a financial conflict of interest would be recommending drug treatment when one is on the payroll of a drug company. An example of an intellectual conflict of interest would be relying on and citing a poor quality study in support of a position in which one had a stake. ...

There’s a new post on SOAP – How to Escape from a Psychiatric Hospital. It’s light-hearted in tone, but relevant and significant in its implications. It discusses three ways to escape: make a run for it; play the game; and the tribunal. In its undertones, the article levels a number of valid and accurate criticisms at the mental health system. These include: - the system is patronizing - the use of tranquilizers is common - mental hospitals are overly restrictive - lengths of stay can be arbitrarily extended - the biological illness model predominates - the patient-psychiatrist status imbalance is marked - refusing to accept that one is sick is considered proof of illness - discharge is contingent on surrender and compliance - etc. ...

BACKGROUND There’s an article by Jack Carney, DSW, on this topic on Mad in America. Jack refers to the DSM-5 field trials published earlier this year in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Inter-rater reliability is measured by a statistic called a kappa score. A score of 1 means perfect inter-rater agreement; a score of 0 indicates zero agreement. In psychosocial research a kappa score of 0.7 or above is generally considered good. ...

DELICATE THINGS REQUIRE DELICATE HANDLING When I was a teenager, one of my hobbies was making small transistor radios. It sounds complicated, but is well within the reach of an average 15-year-old. You get some magazine articles, learn how to read a circuit, and learn how to use a soldering iron. A transistor is a small device – about half the size of a pencil eraser – with three wires coming out of it. In building a radio receiver, the transistors have to be soldered to other devices which are in turn soldered to other devices, etc… The soldering iron is plugged into a wall outlet, but no mains electricity reaches the tip of the iron. However, tiny eddy currents can circulate in the tip, and although they are only of the order of milliamps, they can burn a transistor in seconds. What you have to do is unplug the iron from the socket, make the joint with the tip’s retained heat, and then replug the iron to have it ready for the next joint. The point being that delicate things require delicate handling, and that electricity can be very destructive. ...

Today, courtesy of Monica, I came across an article by Marilyn Wedge, PhD. It’s called Six Problems with Psychiatric Diagnosis for Children. You can read it here. Here are some quotes: "Psychiatric diagnoses contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders are not classified by causes like genuine medical diseases." "Perhaps worst of all, a child who has been labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis grows up believing that there is something wrong with her, that she is somehow “abnormal.” ...

There’s an interesting new article by Paula Caplan here. It discusses the harmful effects of psychiatric “diagnoses,” including the fact that because of these labels, people have lost their “… jobs, custody of children, health insurance, and the right to make decisions about their medical and legal affairs.” Paula also mentions a petition she created in December 2011 calling for “Congressional Hearings about Psychiatric Diagnosis.” The petition is still up. You can find it here ...

BACKGROUND I recently wrote a post called DSM-5: Another Step in the Wrong Direction. In that article I argued that DSM-5 was simply another step in the APA’s ongoing agenda to medicalize all human problems and to legitimize the administration of drugs as the front line “solution” to these problems. I also expressed concern that the widely publicized movement to develop an alternative diagnostic system might not look all that different from what we have today. ...