FW: Inside Psychiatry's Battle to Define Mental Illness

March 19, 2011

It's based on total quackery invented by bullshitters.

Ingrid

Alliance for Human Research Protection

A Catalyst for Debate

In our era, psychiatry as a profession has suffered a significant loss of

credibility: the most influential leaders and academics in psychiatry have

been shown to be agents for the drug industry, disregarding psychotropic

drugs' documented, severe, debilitating harmful effects for patients. The

American Psychiatric Association itself acknowledged -- under pressure from

Senator Grassley's requests for its funding sources-- that over one

third of its funding came from the drug industry.

Dr. Frances, MD, the subject of an illuminating interview and article

by Greenberg in WIRED, chaired the American Psychiatric Association's

(APA) DSM-IV Task Force in the early 1990s but has recently become a

formidable critic of APA's revision process toward the DSM-5. His publicly

expressed criticism of psychiatry's grandiose ambition--demonstrated by its

ever expanding list of unvalidated disease designations and reliance on

demonstrably harm-producing chemical interventions--essentially validates

the criticism expressed by the Alliance for Human Research Protection for

more than a dozen years.

The DSM-5 revision process mirrors the disconnect between psychiatry's

grandiose ambition and the absence of scientific legitimacy to support its

diagnostic or clinical practices.

Dr. Frances confesses that the diagnostic concepts in the DSM " are virtually

impossible to define precisely.. " Even Carol Bernstein, the current

president of the APA, acknowledges in this month's Psychiatry News the

absence of any validated diagnostic tools in psychiatry--they were invented

because of " the need to match patients with newly emerging pharmacologic

treatments: "

" It became necessary in the 1970s to facilitate diagnostic agreement among

clinicians, scientists, and regulatory authorities given the need to match

patients with newly emerging pharmacologic treatments and the associated

need to conduct replicable clinical trials so that additional treatments

could be approved. "

" Indeed, even today objective tests and biomarkers for mental disorders

remain research goals rather than clinical tools. "

Vera Hassner Sharav

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March 19, 2011