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. ...
On October 23, Psychiatric News (the APA’s media outlet) ran an article titled ‘60 Minutes’ Interviews APA President on Schizophrenia. The article was written by Mark Moran, a Psychiatric News reporter. The piece opens with a quote from Jeffrey Lieberman, MD (President of the APA): "'60 Minutes' showed a genuine interest beyond simply producing what was expected to be a popular segment and indicated a desire to do follow-up reporting on psychosis and violence." ...
I have recently read De-Medicalizing Misery [palgrave macmillan, 2011]. It’s a comprehensive collection of articles, edited by Mark Rapley, Joanna Moncrieff, and Jacqui Dillon. The table of contents provides a sense of the book’s scope. Table of Contents Carving Nature at its Joints? DSM and the Medicalization of Everyday Life, Mark Rapley, Joanna Moncrieff, and Jacqui Dillon Dualisms and the Myth of Mental Illness, Philip Thomas and Patrick Bracken Making the World Go Away, and How Psychology and Psychiatry Benefit, Mary Boyle Cultural Diversity and Racism: An Historical Perspective, Suman Fernando The Social Context of Paranoia, David J. Harper From Bad Character to BPD: The Medicalization of 'Personality Disorder', James Bourne Medicalizing Masculinity, Sami Timimi Can Traumatic Events Traumatize People? Trauma, Madness, and Psychosis, Lucy Johnstone Children Who Witness Violence at Home, Arlene Vetere Discourses of Acceptance and Resistance: Speaking Out about Psychiatry, Ewen Speed The Personal is The Political, Jacqui Dillon 'I'm Just, You Know, Joe Bloggs': The Management of Parental Responsibility for First-episode Psychosis, Carlton Coulter and Mark Rapley The Myth of the Antidepressant: An Historical Analysis, Joanna Moncrieff Antidepressants and the Placebo Response, Irving Kirsch Why Were Doctors So Slow to Recognize Antidepressant Discontinuation Problems? Duncan Double Toxic Psychology, Craig Newnes Psychotherapy: Illusion with No Future? David Smail The Psychologization of Torture, Nimisha Patel What Is to Be Done? Joanna Moncrieff, Jacqui Dillon, and Mark Rapley Each author brings to the general topic his or her unique perspectives, and the result is persuasive and inspiring. Here’s a quote from the final chapter: ...
On Monday, October 7, 2013, The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper ran the following headline: 1,200 Killed By Mental Patients. Shock 10-year toll exposes care crisis. It took up almost all of the front page. The headline precipitated a great deal of protest from politicians, advocacy groups, mental health professionals, and others. The general points in most of these protests were that the headline was sensationalistic, misleading, and would serve to increase the stigma associated with “mental illness.” ...
On January 17, 2013, Peter Kinderman, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool, wrote an article titled Grief and Anxiety are not mental illnesses. On February 4, 2013, Steven Novella, MD, wrote a critique of Dr. Kinderman’s article. On February 20, I wrote a critique of Dr. Novella’s article. And finally, on September 17, Dr. Novella wrote More On Mental Illness Denial and How Not to Argue, a critique of my critique. ...
If you haven’t seen Jon Rappoport’s blog, please take a look. Here are two quotes from his September 22 post, Psychiatry targets college students for destruction: "The concept called 'mental disorder' is a sales pitch backed up by extraordinary PR, money, academic gibberish, and government-granted official status." "People need to wake up to the fact that the whole panoply of human suffering has been co-opted, taken over, redefined, re-translated into a lexicon of pseudoscience." ...
In my view, one of the most destructive developments in psychiatry in recent years is the prescribing of neuroleptic drugs to children. Much of this prescribing is off-label, meaning that the prescribed use is not approved by the FDA. Off-label drug prescribing is legal, however. Once the FDA has approved a drug for one purpose, a physician may prescribe it for another purpose. But under Medicaid rules, the physician is not permitted to bill Medicaid for writing this prescription unless the use of the drug in the specific circumstances is endorsed by any of the three pharmaceutical compendia approved by Congress for this purpose. A physician who deliberately submits a bill to Medicaid and, thereby, effectively causes Medicaid to pay for, a prescription that is both off-label and unapproved by any of the compendia is open to a charge of Medicaid fraud. Medicaid, incidentally, is the US government’s health insurance system for poor people. Eligibility is based on income. ...
Thanks to Graham Davey and Richard Pemberton on Twitter for the link to an interesting article in the August 29, 2013 issue of the Lancet. It’s titled Global burden of disease attributable to mental and substance use disorders: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, and was written by Harvey A. Whiteford, et al. The Global Burden of Disease survey is a systematic, scientific attempt to quantify the comparative magnitude of disease, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geography over time. ...
A few days ago, there was an interesting item in the Dear Abby column of our local newspaper. Dear Abby is a general advice column written by Jeanne Phillips, and is widely read. The letter in question was written by “Sibling Standing By,” who described his/her 63 year old sister as someone who “…takes no responsibility for her health.” The sibling goes on to say: "She’s extremely overweight because she overeats and doesn’t exercise. She complains every day that she feels 'terrible.' (I call it self-pitying whining.)" ...
Courtesy of Carl Elliott via Twitter, I’ve recently read Dr. Lieberman’s latest post on Psychiatric News. It’s called – believe it or not – Time to Re-Engage With Pharma? dated August 1, 2013. And it’s classic Dr. Lieberman sleight of hand. His opening statement, for instance, reads: "Drug companies aren’t held in high esteem by the public these days." This may or may not be true. But note what he's done. The issue here is the long-standing and corrupt relationship between psychiatry and the manufacturers of drugs. But from his first sentence, Dr. Lieberman has taken psychiatry out of the equation. He has also lumped the makers of legitimate medicines in with the makers of psychiatry’s drugs. ...