The Los Angeles Times ran an article last week from, of all persons, a UCLA psychiatrist and philosopher named Dr. Irwin Savodnik. In it Dr. Savodnik details how the American Psychiatric Association has been inventing psychiatric “diseases” since 1952, by voting them into existence at their annual meetings. In 1994, the manual (DSM-IV) that details these diseases had grown to 886 pages and listed 365 conditions, which is a 340% increase in the number of “diseases” listed in the manual during the last 42 years. Are that many more people “mentally ill” or have psychiatrists just been stretching the limits of the government pocketbook through chicanery?
Funny thing is — Psychiatrists don’t get paid by insurance companies for treatment of these bogus diseases they make up, if the diseases aren’t listed in the DSM manual. So if you as a psychiatrist were to treat, for instance, someone witha mild form of shyness, you wouldn’t get paid as it isn’t in the manual. But wait until next year, and “viola!” the disease will be in there and you can get paid. Now, because it is in the manual, more people can be diagnosed with it, and more people are “mentally ill”. The same people who weren’t mentally ill last year are now mentally ill if they meet your subjective requirements for the disease.
The great thing about Dr. Savodnik’s analysis of the situation (and I can hardly believe that the LA Times ran this article, seeing as they are usually just another mouthpiece for the APA!) is that he actually comes out and says:
“Pathology has replaced morality. Treatment has supplanted punishment. Imprisonment is now hospitalization. From the moral self-castigation we find in the writings of John Adams, we have been drawn to Woody Allen-style neuroses. Were the psychiatric association to scrutinize itself more deeply and reconsider its expansionist diagnostic programs, it would, hopefully, make a positive contribution to our culture…”
Now there I think he’s a bit off the mark. Psychiatry is nothing but a liability in our culture. It should be forcibly extirpated from our schools, our justice system, and our health and human services systems at all levels of local, state and federal government. Then we’d see some accountability. And the first ones to be held accountable should be those self-serving, pseudo-scientific, psycho-babble speaking, falsely-insightful psychiatrists and psychologists dispensing drugs to millions of children in America, as well as the drug companies lobbying their forced drugging programs into existence. People left to their own devices won’t pay for psychiatry because they instinctively know that it doesn’t work — that’s why they always go after federal funds. And don’t think that psychiatrists don’t know psychiatry and their drugs don’t work. Of course they know, they see it not working every day.
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