The DSM Hoax PSYCHIATRY'S DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEM

The American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatrys billing bible of so-called mental disorders

The American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatrys billing bible of so-called mental disorders. With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a mental illness simply by adding the term disorder onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific/medical validity to the disorders, the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening treatments based solely on opinion.

Dr. Thomas Dorman, an internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, wrote, In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of disease, formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudoscientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough. Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, authors of Making Us Crazy, conclude: The public at large may gain false comfort from a diagnostic psychiatric manual that encourages belief in the illusion that the harshness, brutality and pain in their lives and in their communities can be explained by a psychiatric label and eradicated by a pill. Certainly, there are plenty of problems that we all have and a myriad of peculiar ways that we struggle...to cope with them. But could life be any different? Far too often, the psychiatric bible has been making us crazywhen we are just human.

While psychiatrists have managed for years to make it look, feel, and sound convincingly scientific, their diagnoses are being
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seen for the dangerous frauds that they really are. Far more than just marketing tools or harmless billing codes for treatment, in the hands of psychiatrists these manuals can literally be used to decide the fate of any individual. Experts Debunk the DSM The scientific validity of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has come under increasing attack from medical professionals and scientific experts such as Herb Kutchins of California State University and Stuart A. Kirk of UCLA, who found that there is ample reason to conclude that the latest versions of DSM as a clinical tool are unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system. Often tagged junk science, according to an international poll of mental health experts conducted in England in 2001, the DSM-IV was voted one of the 10 worst psychiatric papers of the millennium. The truth is when we try to fit psychiatry into the definition of a true science, it fails the test. The lack of science behind the DSM gives a clear idea of why it has earned such critics as the following small sample. Loren Mosher, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry: DSM-IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document... DSM-IV has become a bible and a money making bestsellerits major failings notwithstanding. It confines and defines practice, some take it seriously, others more realistically. And, It is the way to get paid. Diagnostic reliability is easy to attain for research projects. The issue is what do the categories tell us? Do they in fact accurately represent the person with a problem? They dont, and cant, because there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a
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blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder. Margaret Hagen, author of Whores Of The Court, summarily dismisses the DSM: Given their farcical empirical procedures for arriving at new disorders with their associated symptoms lists, where does the American Psychiatric Association get off claiming a scientific, research-based foundation for its diagnostic manual? This is nothing more than science by decree. They say it is science, so it is. Dr. Thomas Dorman, internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom: In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of disease, formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough. Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D.: The notion of scientific validity, though not an act, is related to fraud. Validity refers to the extent to which something represents or measures what it purports to represent or measure. When diagnostic measures do not represent what they purport to represent, we say that the measures lack validity. If a business transaction or trade rested on such a lack of validity, we might say that the lack of validity was instrumental in a commitment of fraud. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) published by the American Psychiatric Association and used by licensed psychotherapists throughout the country is notorious for low scientific validity. Yet it is instrumental in securing insurance reimbursement for psychotherapy services.... Herb Kutchins of California State University, Sacramento, and Stuart A. Kirk of the University of California, Los Angeles, authors of Making Us Crazy: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders:

The developers of DSM assume that if a group of psychiatrists agree on a list of atypical [new] behaviors, the behaviors constitute a valid mental disorder. Using this approach, creating mental disorders can become a parlor game in which clusters of all kinds of behaviors (i.e. syndromes) can be added to the manual. there is ample reason to conclude that the latest versions of DSM as a clinical tool are unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system. There are indeed many illusions about DSM and very strong needs among its developers to believe that their dreams of scientific excellence and utility have come true. The bitter medicine is that DSM has unsuccessfully attempted to medicalize too many human troubles. [DSM] cannot be used to distinguish mental disorders from other human problems. In practical terms, this means that many people who do not have any mental disorder (although they may have other difficulties) will be inappropriately labeled as mentally ill and those who have a mental disorder will not have it recognizedIf the unreliability of diagnosis were widely recognized and if there were no scientific patina [surface appearance] to it, the use of everyday behaviors as indicators of mental disorder would be more rigorously questioned by the public. The illusion that psychiatrists are in agreement when making diagnoses creates the appearance of a united professional consensus. Professor Edward Shorter, author of A History of Psychiatry: Rather than heading off into the brave new world of science, DSM-IV-style psychiatry seemed in some ways to be heading out into the desert.

Thomas Szasz, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus: The Internationally renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Szasz, writes, The ostensible validity of DSM is reinforced by psychiatrys claim that mental illnesses are brain diseasesa claim supposedly based on recent discoveries in brain imaging techniques and pharmacological agents for treatment. This is not true. He also says, There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases. If such a test were developed, then the condition would cease to be a mental illness and would be classified, instead, as a symptom of a bodily disease. Dr. Sydney Walker, III, psychiatrist, neurologist: [The DSM] has led to the unnecessary drugging of millions of American children who could be diagnosed, treated, and cured without the use of toxic and potentially lethal medications. The nonscientific approach used to create DSM leads to irrational and constantly changing diagnostic criteria: a patient might be perfectly normal according to one version of DSM and mentally ill by the standards of the next. (For instance, narcissistic personality disorderused to describe vain people who are self-centered and frequently take advantage of others was a DSM diagnosis until 1968. It was eliminated from the version used between 1968 and 1980, when it was reinstated. Thus, a self-centered, vain person was mentally ill before 1968, normal for the next twelve years, and then mentally ill again after 1980.)
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Dr. Harold Pincus, Vice Chairman of the DSM-IV task force admitted, There has never been any criterion that psychiatric diagnoses require a demonstrated biological etiology (cause). Paul R. McHugh, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore: ... In the absence of validating conceptions like the six mechanisms of disease in internal medicine, American psychiatry has turned to committees of experts to define mental disorder. Membership on such committees is a mater of ones reputation in the APAwhich means that those chosen can confidently be expected to manifest not only a requisite degree of psychiatric competence but, perhaps more crucially, some talent for diplomacy and self-promotion. The new DSM approach of using experts and descriptive criteria in identifying psychiatric diseases has encouraged a productive industry. If you can describe it, you can name it; and if you can name it, then you can claim it exists as a distinct entity with, eventually, a direct treatment tied to it. Proposals for new psychiatric disorders have multiplied so feverishly that the DSM itself has grown from a mere 119 pages in 1968 to 886 in the latest edition; a new and enlarged edition, DSM-V, is already in the planning stages. Embedded within these hundreds of pages are some categories...that are dubious, in the sense that they are more like the normal responses of sensitive people than psychiatric entities; and some that are purely the inventions of their proponents. Paul Genova, M.D., writing in Psychiatric Times, said: the DSM diagnostic system has outlived its usefulness by about two decades. It should be abandoned, not revised. Psychiatrist Matthew Dumont: The humility and the arrogance in the prose are almost indistinguishable, frolicking like puppies at play. They say: ...while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder...no definition adequately specifies precise
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boundaries for the concept... [APA, 1987]...They go on to say: ...there is no assumption that each mental disorder is a discrete entity with sharp boundaries between it and other mental disorders or between it and no mental disorder [APA, 1987]. Psychologist Renee Garfinkel, a staff member of the American Psychological Association, said of the DSM-III-R work group: The low level of intellectual effort was shocking. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so lets go to a cafeteria. Then its typed into the computer. David Healy, psychiatrist, director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine and author of The AntiDepressant Era: There must inevitably be a struggle, or a dialectical process, to determine the meaning of physical symptoms and where the boundaries of health and disease lie. J. Allan Hobson and Jonathan A. Leonard, authors of Out of Its Mind, Psychiatry in Crisis, A Call For Reform: ...DSM-IVs authoritative status and detailed nature tends to promote the idea that rote diagnosis and pill-pushing are acceptable. Psychiatrist Al Parides: DSM is a masterpiece of political maneuvering. He also observed that what they have done is medicalize many problems that dont have demonstrable, biological causes. Elliot S. Valenstein, biopsychologist, author of Blaming the Brain: DSM-IV is not an exciting document. It is purely descriptive and presents no new scientific insights or any theories about what causes the many mental disorders it lists. Lawrence Diller, M.D., author of Running on Ritalin: [The] search for a biological marker is doomed from the outset because of the contradictions and ambiguities of the diagnostic construct of ADHD as defined by the DSMI liken the efforts to discover a markerto the search for the Holy Grail.

There's No Science to DSM Arrived at by what psychiatrists call consensus, which in reality is no more scientific or sophisticated than a vote of insider hands, the DSM-IV contains a record 374 so-called mental disorders. Perhaps the best example of psychiatrys scientific pretension in creating and augmenting the DSM is the manner in which new illnesses are added to it. Psychiatrists literally vote on what constitutes a mental illness or disorder by raising their hands at a conference. There is no medical evidence presented, no brain scans, blood tests or any other medical criteria needed to establish a disorder in the DSM; it is 100% subjective. A psychologist attending a DSM hearing noted, The low level of intellectual effort was shocking. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so lets go to the cafeteria. Then its typed into a computer. In the absence of objective, scientific evidence, psychiatry has decreed the following to be mental illnesses:

Phonological Disorder Caffeine Related Disorder Conduct Disorder Mathematics Disorder Nicotine Use or Withdrawal Disorder Non Compliance With Treatment Disorder Separation Anxiety Disorder Sibling Rivalry Disorder Phase of life problem Sexual abuse of a child problem

and the all-encompassing

Unspecified mental disorder

The "Chemical Imbalance" Hoax From cradle to the grave, we are bombarded with information pushing us towards a chemical fix. But let's take a closer look at some very important aspects of this new psychoactive, drugcentered philosophy. Psychiatrists claim that a person needs a drug to combat their chemical imbalance in the brain which is causing a person's mental disorder. However, the concept that a brain-based, chemical imbalance underlies mental illness is false. While popularized by heavy public marketing, it is simply psychiatric wishful thinking. As with all of psychiatry's disease models, it has been thoroughly discredited by researchers. Diabetes is a biochemical imbalance. However, as Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen states, the definitive test and biochemical imbalance is a high blood sugar balance level. Treatment in severe cases is insulin injections, which restore sugar balance. The symptoms clear and retest shows the blood sugar is normal. Nothing like a sodium imbalance or blood sugar imbalance exists for depression or any other psychiatric syndrome. In 1996, psychiatrist David Kaiser said, ...modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness...Patients [have] been diagnosed with 'chemical imbalances' despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and...there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like. Today's brain imagery photos, said to prove mental illnesses are physical diseases, are deeply flawed. Indeed, prescribed psychotropic drugs most likely cause the changes seen in the brain. Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, admits that indiscriminate use of such brain scans produce pretty but inconsequential pictures of the brain.

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Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain, is unequivocal: [T]here are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person's brain. No biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs have been found that reliably distinguish the brains of mental patients. According to Valenstein, The theories are held on to not only because there is nothing else to take their place, but also because they are useful in promoting drug treatment.

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