Psychiatry Under Fire

Update: Article published by Washington Post


Scientific Legitimacy of Psychiatry’s “Billing Bible” Increasingly Under Fire

A new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry exposes the lack of medical legitimacy behind psychiatric diagnoses. Using the diagnostic criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, researchers Michael B. First (DSM editor), Jerome Wakefield, Allan Horwitz and Mark Schmitz found that people experiencing normal sadness, divorce, rejection and economic misfortune are erroneously being classified with a mental disorder. Horwitz stated, “People are starting to think that any sort of negative emotion is unnatural.” He further remarked that psychiatry has come to think of itself as “the arbiter [judge] of normality.”

This study is only the latest in a series of events that have exposed the DSM’s lack of credibility and undermined public confidence in the psychiatric profession. Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who oversaw two out of five revisions of the DSM and defined more than a hundred mental disorders, recently admitted to the BBC, “What happened, is that we made estimates of the prevalence of mental disorders totally descriptively, without considering that many of these conditions might be normal reactions which are not really disorders. That’s the problem, because we were not looking at the context in which those conditions developed.”

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog, says that the study only partially reveals the fraud of psychiatric diagnoses being used to justify the mass drugging of millions. There are no physical tests—such as blood or urine tests, brain scans or X-rays—which can be used to medically/scientifically prove who is mentally ill and who isn’t. It is all a matter of opinion, which has enabled psychiatrists to redefine behaviors as illness or disease. Mathematical problems, jet lag and drinking too much coffee, for example, are listed in the DSM as “disorders”—and for each “disorder”, the pharmaceutical industry invents a drug to treat it. While people do experience real life difficulties, this does not mean they have an illness of the brain requiring the administration of potentially lethal, mind-altering drugs. CCHR says the stigma of an unproven psychiatric label often prevents people from seeking out safe, medically proven alternatives to handling problems of attention, mood or emotional duress.

The profitability of psychiatry “medicalizing” behaviors and emotions can be traced to the vested interests of psychiatrists who profit from inventing and categorizing new mental disorders. A 2006 study in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics found a majority (56%) of the panel members responsible for revisions to the DSM had one or more financial ties to drug companies. The study also found that 100% of the panel members on “Mood Disorders” and “Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders” had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. The lead author of this study, Lisa Cosgrove of the University of Massachusetts Boston stated, “No blood tests exist for the disorders in the DSM. It relies on judgments from practitioners who rely on the manual.”

Commenting on this study, UCLA psychiatry professor, Dr. Irwin Savodnik, stated “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”

The heavy scrutiny over psychiatrists’ conflicts of interest and the subjectivity of psychiatric diagnoses comes at a time when international governmental bodies are issuing an increasing number of warnings—24 in the last two years—about the serious dangers of psychiatric drugs, including suicidal behavior, homicidal ideation, fatal birth defects, psychosis, heart attack, stroke and sudden death.

To learn more about the DSM, read CCHR's publication, Psychiatric Diagnostic Manual Link to Drug Manufacturers, or click here to see what experts say about the issue. For more information on the dangers of psychiatric drugs, read The Report on the Escalating International Warnings on Psychiatric Drugs by CCHR.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights was co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.

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Great Strides in Psychiatry: What Are They and Qui Bono?

Considering the 'great strides’ we have made? With the billions of dollars donated to the psychiatric industry; there are few, other than an astonishingly high rate of diagnoses of so-called mental disorders that are often created out of thin air and the prescription of often catastrophically dangerous medication for such disorders.

Psychiatrists no longer dip their patients in ice cold water, perform psychosurgery to destroy healthy brain tissue, give Metrozol, insulin and electric shock therapies to induce seizures to control behavior; hammer ice picks behind the eyes of patients to sever brain tissue; use Ovary Compressors to crush the ovaries of hysterical woman nor induce bleeding to relieve the "excessive action" in their brain. They've eliminated cauterizing the spine and genital of patients as first encouraged by the "father of American psychiatry,” Dr. Rush in 1812. Conditioning experiments employed by Pavlov, Watson and Skinner on people and animals to prove Wundt’s ‘man-is-an-animal’ theory have been debunked. Unfortunately, Galton’s invention of ‘eugenics’ was adopted even by Hitler and its idea carried on into 1999 with the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

Each day, a new disorder is invented, such as ‘shopaholicism’ or a disorder premised on the concept that road rage is a mental disorder and not just a manifestation of boorish behavior. We still have no blood test, x-ray, CT scan to prove any authenticity, yet billions of dollars in drugs are prescribed. When there are objective standards to which psychiatry is held, just as any other branch of medicine is, then ‘great strides’ will have been made---until then, it will remain a labeling and drug dispensing mechanism, with no more reliability than tarot cards, palm readings and ouija boards and just about as much connection to the practice of “medicine.”

Tell me, is the disorder ‘Drapetomania’ still found in the DSM?


By: Kathrine Nisley

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Article Citing Steve Wagner From The Citizens Commission on Human Rights

October 4, 2006
Anti-depressant pharmaceutical medications may cause violence

Taken from: http://www.indianainjurylawblog.com/


Is there a relationship between certain anti-depressant medications and violence. Steve Wagner, the Director of Litigation & Prosecution for the advocate group Citizens Commission on Human Rights, www.cchr.org, thinks so. Steve recently authored the following report:
29 people have been killed and 62 wounded by school shooters taking violence- and suicide-inducing psychiatric drugs. These notorious schoolyard crimes include, among others, the 2005 Red Lake Indian Reservation shooting by Jeff Weise—on Prozac, the 1999 Columbine shooting by Eric Harris—on Luvox, and a 1998 shooting in Springfield, Oregon by Kip Kinkel—on Prozac. Including Monday morning's murder in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, three shootings have occurred within the last week. One of these three shootings occurred at a school in Bailey, Colorado, less than an hour's drive from Columbine. Rocky Mountain News reports that outside Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, antidepressants were recovered from shooter Duane Morrison's jeep, after he took several girls hostage and killed one of the school girls before taking his own life. This is to say nothing of the numerous other acts of seemingly "senseless violence" carried out by adults who were later exposed as having been under psychiatric treatment, including "Unabomber" Ted Kaczinski, Michael McDermott (on Prozac when he shot and killed seven co-workers in December 2000), John Hinckley, Jr. (attempted assassination of President Reagan), Byran Uyesugi (Hawaiian Xerox employee who shot and killed seven co-workers in November 1999), Mark David Chapman (assassinated John Lennon) and many others. Was Charles Carl Roberts IV, who murdered five Amish schoolgirls before shooting himself, on these behavior-altering drugs, like so many ofther perpetrators of "senseless violence?" The U.S. FDA warns that antidepressants can cause suicidal ideation, mania and psychosis. The manufacturers of one antidepressant, Effexor, now warn that the drug can cause homicidal ideation. This month, a study came out in the Public Library of Science-Medicine journal, conducted by Dr. David Healy, director of Cardiff's University's North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine, which found that the antidepressant Paxil raises the risk of violence. Though the study focuses specifically on Paxil, Healy reasoned that other antidepressant drugs like Prozac, Celexa and Zoloft, most likely pose the same risk of violence. "We've got good evidence that the drugs can make people violent and you'd have to reason from that that there may be more episodes of violence," Healy said. The connection to psychiatry's violence-inducing drugs and treatments has been made in incident after incident. It is acknowedged by the FDA and reputable medical researchers. With this knowledge, one can finally put some sense into these "senseless acts." With three such incidents in the last week alone, investigators must look in the most obvious place for the causes for such psychotic, suicidal behavior and consider the potential culpability of the psychiatrists who prescribe such drugs. Click here to learn more about the connection between violence and antidepressants, or read the Report on Escalating International Warnings on Psychiatric Drugs, published by the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights.

Barry Rooth


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The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony

Dr. Margaret Hagen, Ph.D., lecturer in psychology at Boston University and author of Whores of the Court Whores of the Court, The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice is forthright about psychiatrists and psychologists redefining criminal behavior as “disease”: “Why not just flip pennies or draw cards? Why not put on a blindfold and choose without being able to identify the patients? It could hardly hurt [a diagnostic] accuracy rate that hovers at less than one out of three times correct.…There is no psychological cure for the desire to beat up women, to rape and murder them. The very idea that [psychology] today could even pretend to such an ability is ludicrous.…”[i]

[i] Margaret Hagen, Ph.D., Whores of the Court, The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., New York, 1997), p. 165.

Mother of Five with a Brain Tumor Treated as Borderline Personality Disorder

MENTAL HEALTH CENTER'S PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS PROVEN WRONG BY BRAIN TUMOR
In 1996, mother-of-five Kathy Nisley of Mishawaka, Indiana, began to feel depressed following the birth of her twins (her fifth pregnancy). She went to Madison Center, a psychiatric facility, for treatment. From June 1996 to October 2003, she was labeled with "severe depression," then "bipolar," then "borderline personality disorder" and finally "post-traumatic stress disorder." Kathy was given psychotropic drugs in increasing doses and combinations that caused her to become psychotic. She ended up being hospitalized five times in a psychiatric ward. Her family witnessed her psychiatric drug-induced psychosis and self-mutilation. In November 2004, she experienced a grand mal seizure. A few days later, a neurosurgeon removed a tennis ball-sized meningioma (tumor) from her left frontal lobe. [pic1 , pic2] Her depression subsequently disappeared. Her surgeon estimated it to have been growing in her skull for between 10 and 15 years.

This article was originally published by the Citizens Commission for Human Rights International.

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My Space link

A Lack of Sleep Can Cause Depression

My Personal Care Physician gave me a referral to Behavioral Health for Stress Reduction Workshops, because I was having a difficult time sleeping due to a stressful merger at work. When I arrived at Behavior Health the psychiatrists diagnosed me with Bipolar and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. They argued that depression and mania can cause a sleep disturbance. They however overlooked the opposite but equally valid argument that sleep deprivation can cause depression, anxiety and manic like symptoms, which does not necessarily make you Manic Depressive or Bipolar. Sleep deprivation can be caused my many other things, such as stress, poor sleep hygiene or in my case allergies and Restless Leg Syndrome. American are getting far less sleep than needed, this may contribute to the rise in “mental illness” diagnosis. I did an overnight sleep study and it was determined that I had Restless Leg Syndrome, a distant cousin to Parkinson disease; the doctors also noted that I had 15 allergy symptoms such as swelling, hives and gasping for air. After I was properly treated for my allergies the swelling and other symptoms went away. The Parkinson’s like tremors from the Restless Leg Syndrome also disappeared when the pressure on the nerves in my legs was relieved. I now sleep like a baby without medication and all of my “mental illness” symptoms disappeared.

I was never mentally ill and should not have been treated with psychotropic drugs. Complaints have been filed on my behalf by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International. After doing my own research I discovered that my situation is not an isolated incident. I am calling on all other psych patients and their loved ones to question their diagnosis and seek medical treatment looking for a real reason for their depression and anxiety. I made the error in believing because these psychiatrists were also MD’s and DO’s that meant that they were practicing medicine. This is WRONG, psychiatrists do not practice medicine they practice psychiatry. Ask to see test results that prove you are mentally ill. Ask for, NO DEMAND, a medical exam! Your life and your livelihood may depend on it.

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Hippocratic Oath - Modern Version

Hippocratic Oath—Modern Version


I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.


Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today.

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