Health and Medical News and Resources

General interest items edited by Janice Flahiff

[Reblog] Pathologizing the Human Condition

There are times where I believe medications are the only answer to moderate to severe mental conditions.

 

Light bedtime reading

Light bedtime reading (Photo credit: Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious)

 

However, as one of the comments stated, is the exponential increase in diagnoses largely due to the influence of BigPharma???

 

From the 1 Sept 2013 article by Dan Peters at the Health Care Blog

 

The American Psychiatric Association recently published a new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). The DSM-5 is what medical, mental health, and chemical dependency professionals use to diagnose developmental, mental health, substance abuse and dependence, learning, and personality “disorders.” Now in its 5th edition, the DSM was first published in 1952. At that time, the DSM was 129 pages containing 106 diagnoses.

Now, 61 years later, the DSM-5 consists of approximately 950 pages and roughly 375 diagnoses. The DSM-5, while researched far more than previous editions, is based on the medical model or the model of disease. Simply put, the medical model finds the causes of disease and illness and then prescribes a treatment to cure the disease or illness. This means a person has a pathology or pathogen that needs to be treated and cured.

…

Without going into detail about some of the changes in the newest edition of the DSM, some diagnostic categories have been added and some diagnosis “thresholds” have been lowered. This means that you need fewer symptoms to “meet diagnostic criteria.” Here are some examples of concerns with the new DSM-5:

  • Temper tantrums will now be diagnosed as Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder
  • Normal forgetting will now be diagnosed as Minor Neurocognitive Disorder
  • Gluttony will be diagnosed as Binge Eating Disorder
  • Grief will be diagnosed as Major Depression
  • First time substance users and college partiers will get a diagnosis of Substance Use Disorder
  • Everyday Worry will be diagnosed as Generalized Anxiety Disorder 

And what’s the number one treatment for all of these diagnoses? Medication.

 

Read the entire article here

 

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September 3, 2013 Posted by | Psychiatry | , , , , | Leave a comment

[Reblog] A prominent psychiatrist admits helping invent ADHD as a disease

Psychiatrist-Quack-Crazy

 

From the 25 August 2013 article at ForwardMotion

Many vaguely understand that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) keeps making up diseases as they continue developing new issues of their DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Recently, a founding father of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), announced a few months before his death that … “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease.”

After turning 87 years old, American psychiatrist Dr. Leon Eisenberg made this statement to the German weekly Der Spiegel on 2 February 2012. Seven months later, he died. Apparently, he had decided to come clean and confess before moving to the beyond.

Dr. Eisenberg was among the committee of psychiatrists who put together the DMS II in 1968. He had initially coined the term “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood,” which was described and agreed upon by the committee and confirmed by a small percentage of APA members as a mental disorder. Later, the term was altered to the current ADHD.

Yet, there is no biological proof or test to determine exactly what chemicals are “out of balance” in the brain for ADHD or any other disorder. Most psychiatric drugs are unnecessary at least. And they have often caused suicide and homicide.

Then there are the milder adverse reactions that include feeling depressed or not like oneself and even physically out of sorts among those taking psychotropics for mental disorders created by committees.

An epidemic of pharmaceutical drug use is harming millions of kids

Since that DSM conference in 1968, Dr. Eisenberg’s contribution to mental disease by invention and committee consensus has resulted in drugging millions of children from preschool age through high school.

It’s currently estimated that up to 20% (one out of five) of children from nursery school and kindergarten through high school and in foster homes have been prescribed Ritalin.

Ritalin, commonly prescribed for kids “diagnosed” (labeled is more appropriate) with ADHD was tested a little over a decade ago by the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The BNL study determined that Ritalin is pharmacologically similar to cocaine with perhaps even worse brain damaging potential.

Even the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control classifies methylphenidate (RitalinR) as a Class II controlled substance with … “a high potential for abuse which may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence.”

Ritalin and other pharmaceutical psychotropic prescriptions are often enforced with threats of expulsion of those kids deemed inattentive or difficult to manage.

Parents, teachers, or foster home caretakers who are too busy to bother managing children with dietary changes or appropriate social management skills are easily convinced that these drugs offer solutions.

Meanwhile, the collusion of Big Pharma and psychiatry thrives with their DMS invented diseases, which legitimized government and private insurance funding for their bogus medical racket. You don’t have to be well off to pay for a shrink anymore. Just make sure your coverage includes psychotropic drugs.

Psychiatrists with pharmaceutical ties comprised at least 68% of the DSM-V committee. Big Pharma pays psychiatrists to deliver seminars, act as consultants, or enroll their clients into final testing of new drugs.

Some receive up to $100,000. Big Pharma paid out $250 million for these and other professional services during the years 2009 and 2010. Dr. Irwin Savodnik, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, stated succinctly, “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”

The widespread drugging of children with neurological damage potential puts normal kids in harm’s way while creating psychological ignorance and dependence on a pseudo-scientific medical racket that’s raking in billions.

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August 29, 2013 Posted by | Psychiatry | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Medicalization of Modern Life

Pinocchio DSM 5

Pinocchio DSM 5 (Photo credit: Leonard John Matthews)

From the 12 December 2012 article by Allen Frances, MD at The Health Care Blog

…This is the saddest moment in my 45 year career of studying, practicing, and teaching psychiatry.

The Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association has given its final approval to a deeply flawed DSM 5 containing many changes that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound. My best advice to clinicians, to the press, and to the general public – be skeptical and don’t follow DSM 5 blindly down a road likely to lead to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication.

Just ignore the ten changes that make no sense….

…DSM 5 has neither been able to self correct nor willing to heed the advice of outsiders. It has instead created a mostly closed shop- circling the wagons and deaf to the repeated and widespread warnings that it would lead to massive misdiagnosis. Fortunately, some of its most egregiously risky and unsupportable proposals were eventually dropped under great external pressure (most notably ‘psychosis risk’, mixed anxiety/depression, internet and sex addiction, rape as a mental disorder, ‘hebephilia’, cumbersomepersonality ratings, and sharply lowered thresholds for many existing disorders). But APA stubbornly refused to sponsor any independent review and has given final approval to the ten reckless and untested ideas that are summarized below….

…

1) Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder: DSM 5 will turn temper tantrums into a mental disorder- a puzzling decision based on the work of only one research group. We have no idea whatever how this untested new diagnosis will play out in real life practice settings, but my fear is that it will exacerbate, not relieve, the already excessive and inappropriate use of medication in young children. During the past two decades, child psychiatry has already provoked three fads- a tripling of Attention Deficit Disorder, a more than twenty-times increase in Autistic Disorder, and a forty-times increase inchildhood Bipolar Disorder. The field should have felt chastened by this sorry track record and should engage itself now in the crucial task of educating practitioners and the public about the difficulty of accurately diagnosing children and the risks of over- medicating them. DSM 5 should not be adding a new disorder likely to result in a new fad and even more inappropriate medication use in vulnerable children.

2) Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder, thus medicalizing and trivializing our expectable and necessary emotional reactions to the loss of a loved one and substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion, and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.

3) The everyday forgetting characteristic of old age will now be misdiagnosed as Minor Neurocognitive Disorder, creating a huge false positive population of people who are not at special risk for dementia. Since there is no effective treatment for this ‘condition’ (or for dementia), the label provides absolutely no benefit (while creating great anxiety) even for those at true risk for later developing dementia. It is a dead loss for the many who will be mislabeled.

4) DSM 5 will likely trigger a fad of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder leading to widespread misuse of stimulant drugs for performance enhancement and recreation and contributing to the already large illegal secondary market in diverted prescription drugs.

5) Excessive eating 12 times in 3 months is no longer just a manifestation of gluttony and the easy availability of really great tasting food. DSM 5 has instead turned it into a psychiatric illness called Binge Eating Disorder.

6) The changes in the DSM 5 definition of Autism will result in lowered rates– 10% according to estimates by the DSM 5 work group, perhaps 50% according to outside research groups. This reduction can be seen as beneficial in the sense that the diagnosis of Autism will be more accurate and specific- but advocates understandably fear a disruption in needed school services. Here the DSM 5 problem is not so much a bad decision, but the misleading promises that it will have no impact on rates of disorder or of service delivery. School services should be tied more to educational need, less to a controversial psychiatric diagnosis created for clinical (not educational) purposes and whose rate is so sensitive to small changes in definition and assessment.

7) First time substance abusers will be lumped in definitionally in with hard core addicts despite their very different treatment needs and prognosis and the stigma this will cause.

8 ) DSM 5 has created a slippery slope by introducing the concept of Behavioral Addictions that eventually can spread to make a mental disorder of everything we like to do a lot. Watch out for careless overdiagnosis of internet and sex addiction and the development of lucrative treatment programs to exploit these new markets.

9) DSM 5 obscures the already fuzzy boundary been Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the worries of everyday life. Small changes in definition can create millions of anxious new ‘patients’ and expand the already widespread practice of inappropriately prescribing addicting anti-anxiety medications.

10) DSM 5 has opened the gate even further to the already existing problem of misdiagnosis of PTSD in forensic settings.

DSM 5 has dropped its pretension to being a paradigm shift in psychiatric diagnosis and instead (in a dramatic 180 degree turn) now makes the equally misleading claim that it is a conservative document that will have minimal impact on the rates of psychiatric diagnosis and in the consequent provision of inappropriate treatment.

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December 17, 2012 Posted by | Psychiatry | , , , , , | Leave a comment

DSM-5 will capture the dynamic nature of mental illness

From the 20 July 2012 post at KevinMD.com

Much of the debate over the future edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-5) has centered on what disorders will be added, modified or dropped. But lost in the discussion is a change that will align disorders along a developmental continuum—one that looks at them across the lifespan. This shift will provide clinicians with a critical perspective that until now has been missing.

 

Historically, disorders were classified in DSM by symptom manifestation and patient presentation. As a result, they generally were grouped by discreet stages of life, as if there were no connections or implications from one stage to another. In particular, the opening chapter of DSM-IV, “Disorders Usually First Diagnosed in Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence,” segregated such conditions as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, pica, rumination and autism disorder from the rest of the manual. The implication was that disorders in the “child” chapter affect only children and disorders in the rest of the manual affect only adults….

 

…

he need for these changes is obvious: The real world doesn’t work within distinct boundaries, and clinicians are not best able to understand potential connections, interrelations and ramifications when they only consider a single, narrow point in time. A young girl who lashes out with persistent and significant anger could presage a young adult with similarly explosive behavior, for example. Conversely, a middle-aged man’s extreme anxiety might reflect a difficult recent event, such as a divorce or layoff. But it also might be a problem that first manifested itself decades earlier, in panic attacks or a fear of leaving the house. In both cases, diagnosis as well as treatment will be more clinically useful if the factors involved are evaluated through a longitudinal lens.

This different perspective will especially benefit women, for whom mental disorders are often linked to specific ages or periods of life. We know that young women between 15 and 22 are much more likely to have negative body image than young men and to develop eating disorders, low self-esteem, depression, self-harm and,  in the most extreme cases, suicide. But what happens after 22?  Even with treatment, the risk of recurrent depression remains, and it often needs to be assessed in terms of the extra emotional and physical issues many women face throughout their lives—because of lower income, discrimination, sexual harassment and violence….

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July 20, 2012 Posted by | Psychiatry, Psychology | , , , , , | Leave a comment

   

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