In case you haven’t noticed, European [and World] psychiatry is pulling away from American psychiatry at a fairly brisk pace. Reform of the alliance between the pharmaceutical giants and medicine is centered in Europe [the EMA, the British Journal of Medicine, AllTrials, etc]. Articles critical of the DSM-5 are common in the European journals, but almost absent in ours. The DSM-5’s failed attempt at a paradigm shift to a neuroscience base fooled no one on the other side of the pond, and the DSM is appropriately spoken of as an enterprise past its time.
A post-DSM-III wake-up call to European psychiatryby J. de LeonActa Psychiatrica Scanddinavica Article first published online: 12 SEP 2013
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An epistemology of psychiatry?Cambridge University’s German E. Berrios is an expert in the history of psychiatry. Berrios’s main contribution to the future of psychiatry is his focus on the hybridity of psychiatric symptoms, at a time when US psychiatry is intoxicated on neuroscience and European psychiatry mimics those intoxicated moves. At the beginning of the 20th century, Jaspers warned us of the precarious methodological position of psychiatry between the natural and social sciences. Almost no one paid attention to this bad methodological news for 100 years until Berrios reminded us that psychiatry deals with hybrid objects with different levels of difficulty of study using the traditional scientific methods employed in medicineEpistemology can be defined as the science that studies the origins and legitimacy of knowledge. Berrios proposes that the studies of epistemology and the history of psychiatry go hand in hand, using the same methods. He says not only that psychiatric disorders are very heterogeneous, as Jaspers proposed, but that psychiatric symptoms are also heterogeneous. When the psychiatric symptoms are closely related to brain signals, such as those in patients with ‘neurological’ disorders, a neuroscience approach and methods such as brain imaging make sense because the presence of a brain disorder explains these symptoms. Conversely, when psychiatric symptoms are related to ‘semantics’ (communication between human beings), a neuroscience approach and methods such as brain imaging make no methodological sense, because these symptoms can only be understood, in the sense of Jaspers, and not explained by brain disturbances. These relatively simple concepts are bad news for psychiatric researchers. Berrios also describes the difficulty of developing new elements in psychiatric language, such as new symptoms, because experienced clinicians reinterpret them using known psychiatric symptoms defined according to 19th century language.
Jaspers was ignored when he proposed that psychiatric disorders are heterogeneous and some should be studied with social science methodology. Berrios may also be ignored when he emphasizes that psychiatric symptoms/signs are heterogeneous and some of them are in ‘semantic space’ (a concept entering the cognitive sciences) and cannot be ‘explained’, in Jaspers’s sense, by neuroscience. Berrios is proposing that 21st century European psychiatrists must develop a 21st century language for descriptive psychopathology to build a new psychiatric nosology.
The DSM-III wasn’t intended to be a call to a not-yet-defined neuroscience. It was shepherded by psychiatrists who had rejected psychoanalytic hegemony from within – Melvin Sabshin, Robert Spitzer, Allen Frances, all trained in psychoanalysis. To put it crudely, "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy." The more humanistic case-oriented focus remained. But the DSM-5 was turned over to a different breed – and they blew it in a major way. And so the ball is passed back to Europe. This time, when they send it back at some point in the future, I hope they’ll send us an eclectic Karl Jaspers version instead of two warring factions to fight it out in the now not-so-new world:
The fate of psychoanalysis is an interesting sidelight. About the time of the DSM-III, the psychiatric captivity of American psychoanalysis was also ended by a monopoly suit won by the psychologists against the Institute that trained Drs. Spitzer and Frances [and me]. Psychoanalysis is now a multidisciplinary discipline. And speaking of hegemony, it’s no longer frozen in time with the ego psychology of the early American founders or the exact methods of Freud. Our institutes are, as always, financially stretched, but are well populated with all kinds of mental health types as students, some of whom are psychiatrists, and teach the full breadth of psychoanalytic thinking about human mental life and psychotherapeutic approaches to change. It’s comforting. I didn’t care too much for the way it was either. I’m pleased to say that I’ve finally been relieved from teaching the once marginalized British schools’ theories by some very competent non-physicians – some ten years after retiring.
Tom Szasz was also very pessimistic about the possibility of a natural evolution in the USA. It was almost the only thing I ever disagreed with him about. America is the one vital nation for the future of human kind. We MUST rescue it, the social democracies will not run with the ball on their own.
Thank you for your brilliant historical point.
Wow!
Steve Lucas
Given that many, many studies and just plain common sense show that when so called normal people are led to believe the fraudulent claims that psychiatry or neurology have proven the genetic and/or biological causes of bogus DSM stigmas like bipolar, schizophrenia, ADHD and many others, the fact that this causes increased social distance, increase beliefs that the supposed genetically/biologically permanently disordered are dangerous and lack control or agency over themselves, and so called normals are more apt to refuse to help or accept them, shows that the ongoing evil eugenics theories of the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel are the worst enemies of those with the diverse symptoms of probable trauma or other life crises/oppression saddled with these life destroying stigmas declared invalid even by Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of NIMH though decades too late. Though Allen Frances when exposed for his contribution to the fraudulent DSM IV claimed “the collective fantasy of science behind the DSM was good for patients and psychiatry,” showing his malignant narcissism by refusing to consider the many lives he helped destroy as exposed by those like Dr. Paula Caplan in her books and web sites, a growing number of people including his target believe the opposite including Gary Greenburg in his book, The Book of Woe, and countless others exposing this fraud.
Thus, those in positions of power insisting that they still “believe or think” that these bogus disorders are biological, genetic or even due to faulty brain circuits are not only perpetrating fraud, but they are acting as the worst enemies of the so called “mentally ill” they profess to help or support. Also, they are talking about unproven ideology and not science at all whatsoever. They are also creating a hopeless paradigm from which recovery is all but impossible if one is among the supposed biologically or genetically unfortunate used for such purposes of social control, ethnic cleansings and other horrific human rights abuses as even exposed by many psychiatrists like Dr. Peter Breggin, Dr. Joanna Moncrieff and many others.
http://www.madinamerica.com/2013/09/genetic-attribution-schizophrenia-leads-desire-social-distance/
Given that bipolar is the new “sacred symbol” of biopsychiatry replacing schizophrenia and applied to the most dangerous and violent among us as well as their victims with the latter, often women and children, far more likely to be objects of such biopsychiatry predation, this article applies to all such garbage can stigmas used to demonize and defame a huge number of people with opposite symptoms or traits.
The following web site exposes this sham of the new bipolar fad fraud epidemic if you scroll down to the orange box with the title:
“Just How Flimsy Are Psychiatric Diagnoses?”
http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/401
The horrors of psychiatric profiling in the U.S. today
http://www.madinamerica.com/2013/10/psychiatric-profiling-blood-libel/
“The Successful Creation of A Scientific Delusion and The Increase In Stigma It Has Spawned” by Robert Whitaker
http://www.madinamerica.com/2010/11/%ef%bb%bfthe-successful-creation-of-a-societal-delusion-and-the-increase-in-stigma-it-has-spawned/
One could go on ad infinitum about the huge amount of evil done via prejudice, racism, misogyny and other scapegoating, stigmatizing oppression. Experts have described them as degradation rituals that are done by most if not all groups or societies to certain scapegoats while some believe DSM stigmas constitute defamation given this amounts to the type of unproven slander that destroys many lives. Thus, when anyone continues to claim that they believe or think that bogus DSM stigmas are genetic or biological without any evidence whatever especially now that Dr. Insel has declared the DSM invalid for this very reason, they are merely demonstrating their inhumanity, deadly eugenics beliefs and their own prejudicial tendencies used to target, discredit, scapegoat and profile certain people they obviously hate, despise and wish to destroy/eliminate from humanity in the guise of help or science.
In recent times, prejudiced people have at least been forced to give up their hate speech against blacks, gays, Jews, certain religions and others. Hopefully, in not so distant future times those spewing out dangerous eugenics hate speech that has already led to the worst evils and atrocities ever done by the human race, will be exposed enough by being shamed like others before them in the public sphere or if they have a conscience, they will see the evil they are perpetrating and stop it.
Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2773484?uid=3739952&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102692551221
http://www.amazon.com/Stigma-Notes-Management-Spoiled-Identity/dp/0671622447
http://www.amazon.com/Being-Mentally-Ill-Sociological-Problems/dp/0202305872/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380743860&sr=1-1
http://www.exzellentforschen.de/(en)/ZIF/FG/2004Emotions/members/Scheff-Shame+Conformity.pdf
From the recent 1bom post,”a limit”: “For readers who come here frequently, you’ll have guessed that this post is partially about the onslaught of contentious comments in the recent weeks. I finally lost patience. It wasn’t the Szasz, so much as it was using the comment section here as a private, agenda-driven blog. So for only the third time in eight years, I did something I didn’t want to do and blocked that commenter. And this particular post is to say that while this blog is mainly about corruption in medicine and specifically in psychiatry, I obviously talk about what’s on my mind like in this post and enjoy reading about what’s on your minds as well, even the negative stuff. But I apparently have a limit to my willingness to be endlessly preached at…” – http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2013/09/23/a-limit/
For a time I used the comments section this way (so I can understand the temptation) and then thought better of it. Primarily because I felt that it was impeding commentary on the nuances present in the posts. And, because when a set of comments take only the most general inspiration from a post, and really could just as easily have been placed under almost any other post, then the comments start to look more like a blog on to themselves. In contrast to, for example: http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2013/10/02/back-at-you-eu/#comment-249793
My sense is that this 1bom’s quote, from “off the cuff,” is also relevant: “But here in his opening gambit before he even begins his rant, he goes all ad hominem by simplifying and attacking his designated enemies. There are indeed such people scattered among the critics that he’s about to lambast. But he appears to be oblivious to the fact that what makes that small group of “ideologues and self-promoters” he’s going after “misguided and misleading” is that they are doing exactly the same thing that he, Jeffrey Lieberman MD President of the American Psychiatric Association, is doing in this very piece he’s writing. They are depersonifying their targets….”
I should add that I am not suggesting that you cease commenting on the site. I neither wish to suggest it nor is it my place. Plus, 1bom and his audience showed patience with my phase of “blogging” in the comments section (I also occasionally fall off the wagon). Speaking for myself, I am overall experiencing your comments more like an independent blog. Which I find somewhat affects the flow of this section being comments on a specific post. I also experience a level of vitriol in the phrasing you are choosing that makes it less likely for me to try to take in the content.
Anonymous,
I regret that you find my comments offensive, but offensiveness is in the eyes of the beholder. I guess you have appointed yourself as the type of judge who said when having to decide what is obscene, “I know it when I see it,” just as biopsychiatry does with so called “mental illness.” I find many comments here offensive as well, but often remain silent except for trying to expose the most dangerous ones that can cause great harm to fellow humans though probably not deliberate with full insight. Most people know better than to use the former well known comment, “I jewed him down” now that we are more enlightened. Same with terms like nigger, spics, homos, lesis and others I don’t dare include like the names of body parts and other choice words to insult/degrade people.
The problem is about abuse of power and those in power who get to “define” others’ reality or invalidate them often using the pretense of science, medicine and other so called official entities backed by the state to do so. The Church defined witches and stigmatized various people, mostly women as is also true of psychiatry, to be subjected to all kinds of social stigma, ostracism, contempt, fear, hatred and related tortures. We no longer believe in witches, but that was the so called science/religion of those days. Here is the equivalent DSM for witches:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
Many so called scientists have claimed that blacks, women and other denigrated groups have inferior intelligence and other inferiority in books, journals and other sources and have gotten away with it in the past. However, such “scientists” or supposed experts are now more inclined to be called out for their prejudices when they defame certain groups like the above blacks and women with so called “science” that “proves” their inferiority.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
You may recall that Larry Summers’ great speech about women’s inferiority leading to less of them in engineering led to his demise and forced resignation at Harvard after the uproar he created among women and their supporters. He has recently been rejected as Head of the Federal Reserve Board with this hate speech coming back to haunt him especially when a very competent woman was (remains) in competition with him. Summer’s legacy of failing to promote women is quite egregious as well :
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/what-potential-fed-front-runner-lawrence-summers-said-about-women-20130724
Such hate speech is very dangerous as I said above and it appears the only main class left that can be subjected to any lies, hate speech, vilification, false accusation, eugenics, fraud, violation of all human, civil and democratic rights and other atrocities is those fraudulently stigmatized and medicalized as “mentally ill” by biopsychiatry when they have no evidence to prove their ongoing eugenics and other blaming the victims claims. The label of “drapetomania” has often been cited as an example since it defined the so called mental illness of runaway slaves who preferred freedom over slavery. The same holds true for all the other biopsychiatry stigmas for all human beings who prefer freedom and human dignity over psychiatric slavery as described by Dr. Thomas Szasz in his books including The Therapeutic State, Cruel Compassion and many others.
I don’t deny this makes me angry, but kindly read the articles I posted, and the responses to Larry Summers misogyny, and you will see that I am not alone in feeling angry about such blind, ignorant, all too typical abuses and human rights violations by the white old boy network in power who created the DSM and these other abuses. The Ku Klux Klan was invented to defend their Protestant religion supposedly, so one should always question such assumptions about seeming good intent and its consequences.
Dr. Nardo and others posting on this blog have expressed anger and disgust over what they find objectionable in biopsychiatry and other areas like politics.
Dr. Nardo exposed the Frances Texas Algorithm debacle and included the egregious report on it cited throughout the web, so I give him a great deal of credit for his fairness in reporting in this regard. Dr. Nardo expressed regret that those involved in this scandal were never called to account. Thus, to see Frances preening as some great hero is quite hard to stomach when one is all too well aware of all the harm he has blindly and arrogantly caused to so many victims despite his pretense of regret to further his cause.
So, I wonder why you are singling me out when I express my anger and concern about the typical horrible historical and current consequences of unfair prejudice with the pretense that some human beings are inferior to others in the guise of eugenics/genetics/brain research with no evidence whatever. Could that have something to do with my female name? Of course, as Larry Summers proved, such prejudices are still alive and well, but just perpetrated in a more subtle, sneaky manner. Because Summers failed to respect modern political correctness, he not only was forced to resign from Harvard, but has been rejected as a contender to head the Fed.
Again, the last bastion for such scapegoating are the so called “mentally ill,” which is why biopsychiatry is working hard to include every conceivable human problem to add to their predatory agenda to instigate all people against each other with such false accusations of being mentally ill while they miss the point that the psychopaths/narcissists orchestrating this horror show globally through what Naomi Klein has called The Shock Doctrine are profiting greatly from their usual social, global chaos and enjoying their power hungry and sadistic urges at the same time. See book and web site, Political Ponerology, about evil on a global, macro scale:
http://ponerology.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258
Most of us have gone through periods where we were blind about the impact of our words about certain groups of people like gays, blacks, Jews and others and had to learn the terms those groups preferred so that they did not feel attacked and degraded on a regular basis. Or we were appalled by the implications of our words once somebody pointed it out. Why is it that those falsely accused of being “mentally ill” rather than having life crises, problems and traumas are routinely tortured with degrading stigmas used to discredit them, make them appear subhuman, ostracize them, subject them to lethal torture in the guise of treatment and destroy their entire lives?
I cited several studies that prove society tends to despise, denigrate, ignore, ostracize, fear, avoid and demonize those stigmatized with so called genetic “mental illness” while viewing them as deranged and dangerous thanks to the likes of those like Fuller Torrey with his own Big Pharma/big money ties that caused him to abandon his Szaszian views and adopt biopsychiatry with a literal vengeance. He, too, had done huge harm with his lies and horrific agenda for more forced drugging and commitment when others in psychiatry who have advocated for this most in the past have admitted it causes much more harm than good.
Allen Frances committed the same type of fraud as Joseph Biederman with Johnson & Johnson to criminally market their dangerous neuroleptic drug in the guise of medicine and science. Biederman was torn apart in the media when he was exposed by Senator Grassley for his hidden millions for bogus NIMH studies for J&J to create the child ADHD and bipolar epidemics almost single handedly. Frances has never been widely exposed for his crimes in helping to push this lethal drug on Community Mental Health Centers for marketing purposes while passing it off as treatment guidelines for the Texas Medical Algorithms that has been widely condemned and despised by anyone familiar with this debacle per the articles I cited.
So, I regret bursting everyone’s feel good bubble when Frances condescended to damn the Hearing Voices Movement with his typical faint praise while pushing his stigmatizing and drugging fascist agenda he helped expand in the DSM IV to greatly expand the bipolar fad fraud and other categories to push the lethal neuroleptics from which he greatly profited with J&J and as a KOL in general. Any other citizen committing such crimes would have been jailed, but the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel is able to continue its crimes against humanity with impunity and no consequences as “too big to fail.”
Finally, I find your post very offensive because you attacked the messenger while not even considering the message I reluctantly keep trying to deliver.
Also, some psychiatrists and/or seeming mental health experts have been quire rude to me directly and indirectly, but I took it in stride and just try to stick to the evidence and results.
Thanks for your input.
Florence,
I’m in agreement with Annonymous,
6 of 9 comments on this article are yours, and 4 of those posts, in a row, contain only a link with no text description or explanation.
Please consider reducing the workload in your posts, and try not to be so overly broad. It is difficult to follow so many topics at once. I have been skipping reading your posts because they are often too long and too strongly worded. I’m not sure how well I could reply to them if I tried.
If you could instead focus on just one specific item per article, that would be greatly appreciated. Opportunities will arise to explore the others periodically, but often your comments are just too much to follow, and it disrupts the flow of the content delivered from this blog.
Florence, I am not trying to make assumptions about your identity. Including whether or not you, like your moniker, is female. I was not trying to speak to offensiveness. A lot of TinCanRobot’s description in the comment above could have applied to some of my early comments. His comment is perhaps more constructive than mine. And TCR is probably in a better position to give input than I given the avalanche of comments I have unleashed on the blog in the past.
TinCanRobot,
Thanks for your input and latest “marching orders.” When you called me on using a certain web site on another post, you told me you had already stopped reading my posts due to that so called infringement though the information on the site was quite accurate though I apologized for hurting your sensitive feelings. So, you need not tell my your ongoing reasons for not reading my posts. Keep up the good work.
Now, I am under your critique again. Actually, I have been reading your posts and see that since you seem to follow the main stream biopsychiatry agenda, I can see why I may be attracting your critical comments. I have been finding myself disagreeing with most of what you say lately, so I am skimming your long comments as well.
You are probably right in that those or their loved ones constantly subjected to such evils as scapegoating, misogyny and other psychological assaults and indignities tend to be on the offensive since they are subjected to plenty of offenses.
Anyway, I would like to say that this post by Dr. Nardo was very good overall and I especially appreciated the information about Jaspers on this post and another he cited, which was very enlightening. It was very interesting to learn that Jaspers was both a psychiatrist and a philosopher, a combination I find seems to create some of the best psychiatrists as I mentioned in another post.
The truth is I had an older brother who enjoyed teasing his sisters with comments he knew would get a “rise” out of them. I am feeling a sense of deja vu here, so I see I shouldn’t automatically “take the bait” of certain comments geared to get a “rise” out of me and others like claiming DSM stigmas are genetic when there is no evidence for it with lots against it, which is an odd claim for such a supposed “evidence-based” field.
Finally, you will notice that I don’t add any comments on many posts, so how come you did not notice that? I regret that my many citations to back up what I said annoyed you, so I will bear that in mind. In the meantime, you can enjoy all those posts free of my comments while ignoring mine that may wake your from your dogmatic slumber as Kant would say.