1 Boring Old Man

It’s not too late to save ‘normal’
Opinion
^{Psychiatry’s latest DSM goes too far in creating new mental disorders}
LA Times
By Allen Frances
March 01, 2010

^{As chairman of the task force that created the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), which came out in 1994, I learned from painful experience how small changes in the definition of mental disorders can create huge, unintended consequences. Our panel tried hard to be conservative and careful but inadvertently contributed to three false "epidemics" – attention deficit disorder, autism and childhood bipolar disorder. Clearly, our net was cast too wide and captured many "patients" who might have been far better off never entering the mental health system.}

^{The first draft of the next edition of the DSM, posted for comment with much fanfare last month, is filled with suggestions that would multiply our mistakes and extend the reach of psychiatry dramatically deeper into the ever-shrinking domain of the normal. This wholesale medical imperialization of normality could potentially create tens of millions of innocent bystanders who would be mislabeled as having a mental disorder. The pharmaceutical industry would have a field day – despite the lack of solid evidence of any effective treatments for these newly proposed diagnoses…}

As the revelations of all the ways that the pharmaceutical industry co-opted academic and organized psychiatry have become increasingly apparent, the involved parties have either remained silent or spit back defensively. Drs. Nemeroff and Schatzberg attacked POGO [enter the lawyers…] when the evidence of the ghost-writing of their 1999 textbook was revealed. But they were silent when Phyllis Vine of MIWatch.org found their book advertised as a product on the ghost-writing firm’s old web site. To my knowledge, no one implicated in the revelations along the way has stepped up to the plate and said the simple truth – "I did it. I’m sorry."