Inside Psychiatry's Battle to Define Mental Illness
veracare
A Catalyst for Debate
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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 Charles Grassley's requests for its funding sources-- that over one
third of its funding came from the drug industry.
Dr. Allen Frances, MD, the subject of an illuminating interview and article
by Gary 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."
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/5/7.full
Read more... http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/783/9/
Vera Hassner Sharav
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