Bruce Levine, Ph.D.
February 10, 2013
After the American Psychiatric Association (APA) approved the latest version of its diagnostic bible, the DSM-5, psychiatrist Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce and currently professor emeritus at Duke, announced, “This is the saddest moment in my 45-year career of practicing, studying and teaching psychiatry” (“A Tense Compromise on Defining Disorders”).
The DSM-5 (the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) will be released by the APA in spring 2013. However, a forlorn Frances states, “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.”
For mental health professionals, this advice from the former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce is shocking—almost as if Colin Powell were to advise U.S. defense and state department employees not to blindly follow all administration orders.
Particularly upsetting for Frances is the DSM-5’s pathologizing of normal human grief. On January 7, 2013 in “Last Plea To DSM-5: Save Grief From the Drug Companies,” Frances writes, “Making grief a mental disorder will be a bonanza for drug companies, but a disaster for grievers. The decision is also self-destructive for DSM-5 and further undermines the credibility of the APA. Psychiatry should not be mislabeling the normal.”
In the DSM-4, which Frances helped create, there had been a so-called “bereavement exclusion,” which stated that grieving the loss of a loved one, even when accompanied by symptoms of depression, should not be considered the psychiatric disorder of depression.
Prior to the DSM-5, the APA had acknowledged that to have symptoms of depression while grieving the loss of a loved one is normal and not a disease. Come this spring, normal human grief accompanied by depression symptoms will be a mental disorder.
Psychiatry’s official diagnostic battle is over. Mental illness gatekeepers such as Frances who are concerned about further undermining the credibility of the APA have lost, and mental illness expansionists —psychiatry’s “neocons”— have won.
Read the rest here
Showing posts with label APA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label APA. Show all posts
Monday, February 11, 2013
Saturday, May 26, 2007
American Psychiatric Association (APA) Greeted by Hundreds of Protestors
Demonstrators in San Diego Claim “Psych Drugs Turn Kids into Killers”
On Saturday, May 19, psychiatrists attending the 160th annual American Psychiatric Association (APA) convention received an unusual greeting when they arrived at the Convention Center in San Diego—a mobile billboard decrying the mass psychiatric drugging of millions of children, and hundreds of protestors.
Wearing black T-shirts stating, “Stop Psychiatric Drugging of Children” and “Psych Drugs Turn Kids into Killers,” the protestors rallied against the epidemic of child drugging in America and the APA members’ long and negligent history of failing to inform people that psychiatric drugs—especially antidepressants—cause violent, even homicidal urges.
In the last decade alone, eight school shooters taking psychiatric drugs killed 29 people and wounded 62. This includes 18-year-old Jason Hoffman from El Cajon, CA, just east of San Diego, who wounded five after he opened fire at his Granite Hills High School in March 2001, while taking antidepressants. The recent Virginia Tech school shooter, Cho Seung Hui, also reportedly had a prescription for “depression medication,” and protestors are calling for the release of Cho’s toxicology reports to determine if he is the 9th school shooter to have been under the influence of drugs documented to cause violent and suicidal behavior.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog group that organized the protest, said that for 13 years, many psychiatrists and their pharmaceutical company cohorts hid the fact that antidepressants cause suicide and it took public pressure for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to finally issue a black box warning in 2004 of suicide risk.
The group wants a black box warning extended to include the potential for these and other psychotropic drugs to cause violent behavior. In 2004, the FDA warned that Prozac or Paxil-like antidepressants cause agitation, hostility, impulsivity, and mania, but the information is so buried parents and consumers need the FDA's strongest black box warning to speedily alert them. Between 1987 and 2002, there was a 500% increase in those 18 years of age and younger taking antidepressants. Between 1990 and 2005, there was a more than 380% increase in the pediatric use of stimulants, which the FDA warned in 2006 could cause psychosis, mania and aggression.
CCHR says that not only do psychiatrists knowingly obscure and mislead the public about the documented violence-inducing effects of psychiatric drugs, but invent – not discover – the criteria for so-called mental disorders that have resulted in millions of children needlessly prescribed dangerous and deadly drugs. Psychiatrists attending APA conventions literally vote psychiatric disorders into existence by a show of hands. There are no blood tests, brain scans or chemical imbalance tests that can prove any child has a mental disorder – and psychiatrists mislead the public about the validity of psychiatric diagnoses in order to maintain a multi-billion dollar child drugging industry. CCHR says the psychiatric pharmaceutical alliance is evident to anyone walking into the convention – wall-to-wall pharmaceutical displays and sponsorship.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.
On Saturday, May 19, psychiatrists attending the 160th annual American Psychiatric Association (APA) convention received an unusual greeting when they arrived at the Convention Center in San Diego—a mobile billboard decrying the mass psychiatric drugging of millions of children, and hundreds of protestors.
Wearing black T-shirts stating, “Stop Psychiatric Drugging of Children” and “Psych Drugs Turn Kids into Killers,” the protestors rallied against the epidemic of child drugging in America and the APA members’ long and negligent history of failing to inform people that psychiatric drugs—especially antidepressants—cause violent, even homicidal urges.
In the last decade alone, eight school shooters taking psychiatric drugs killed 29 people and wounded 62. This includes 18-year-old Jason Hoffman from El Cajon, CA, just east of San Diego, who wounded five after he opened fire at his Granite Hills High School in March 2001, while taking antidepressants. The recent Virginia Tech school shooter, Cho Seung Hui, also reportedly had a prescription for “depression medication,” and protestors are calling for the release of Cho’s toxicology reports to determine if he is the 9th school shooter to have been under the influence of drugs documented to cause violent and suicidal behavior.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog group that organized the protest, said that for 13 years, many psychiatrists and their pharmaceutical company cohorts hid the fact that antidepressants cause suicide and it took public pressure for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to finally issue a black box warning in 2004 of suicide risk.
The group wants a black box warning extended to include the potential for these and other psychotropic drugs to cause violent behavior. In 2004, the FDA warned that Prozac or Paxil-like antidepressants cause agitation, hostility, impulsivity, and mania, but the information is so buried parents and consumers need the FDA's strongest black box warning to speedily alert them. Between 1987 and 2002, there was a 500% increase in those 18 years of age and younger taking antidepressants. Between 1990 and 2005, there was a more than 380% increase in the pediatric use of stimulants, which the FDA warned in 2006 could cause psychosis, mania and aggression.
CCHR says that not only do psychiatrists knowingly obscure and mislead the public about the documented violence-inducing effects of psychiatric drugs, but invent – not discover – the criteria for so-called mental disorders that have resulted in millions of children needlessly prescribed dangerous and deadly drugs. Psychiatrists attending APA conventions literally vote psychiatric disorders into existence by a show of hands. There are no blood tests, brain scans or chemical imbalance tests that can prove any child has a mental disorder – and psychiatrists mislead the public about the validity of psychiatric diagnoses in order to maintain a multi-billion dollar child drugging industry. CCHR says the psychiatric pharmaceutical alliance is evident to anyone walking into the convention – wall-to-wall pharmaceutical displays and sponsorship.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.
Contact: Marla Filidei at 800-869-2247 for more information.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Science Proves Antidepressants Addictive. Withdrawal Unbearable For Some.
As psychiatry and the giant pharmaceutical companies fight to create a PR spin that antidepressants are harmless non-addictive drugs – the truth is beginning to come out showing the dangers of these drugs.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
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