DSM: PSYCHIATRY’S DEADLIEST SCAM
By cchr naTIonaL oFFIce
If Australia’s famous bushranger Ned Kelly was alive today, psy-chiatrists would most likely label him with “oppositional defiant dis-order.” In fact, psychology-inspired eugenicists claim Kelly was a “mental defective.” Under a planned fifth revision of psychiatry’s research and insurance “billing bible,” The Diagnos-tic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Kelly’s diagnosis could change to “Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder” which sup-posedly describes people who can’t let go of grudges.
Yet to others, Kelly’s fight against oppressive British rule cast him as an Australian Robin Hood – a legendary “archetypal Australian challenging authority.”1 Right now, the challenge against psychiatrists’ self-proclaimed authority over all things mentally wrong with us has reached an all time high, with international criticism – even from peers – about DSM-5.
An online petition originated by the British Psychological Society and supported by the American Psycho-logical Society challenges the pro-posed revisions to DSM-5 and has accrued more than 12,000 signatures from health professionals.
The Age says the DSM-5 review has been branded a “dangerous public experiment” that could turn normal human experiences into an epidemic of mental illness with healthy people being drugged un-
necessarily.
Citing examples The Age report-ed: “If a mother in a custody battle tries to turn a child against the father, it might create ‘parental alienation disorder’.” If a widow grieves for more than a fortnight she might be diag-nosed with “major depressive disor-der” and what was once considered
a child’s temper tantrum could be labelled “disruptive mood dysregula-tion disorder.”2 Then there’s excessive shopping, exercise or interest in diet recipes and odd food choices and hoarding – all of which are earmarks of Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Disorders.
Unlike for medical conditions, there are no physical tests, including x-rays or MRIs that can confirm these or any other psychiatric disorder. “We do not know the causes [of any men-tal illness],” Dr. Rex Cowdry, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health told Congress. While former president of the World Psychiatric Association, Norman Sartorius, de-clared, “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone.”3
The iconic Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus and founding Commissioner of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) points out that psychi-atric diagnoses are opinion. Medical diseases, he says, “are discovered; [psychiatric] diagnoses are created. Diseases cannot be manufactured, but diagnoses can be.” Depression, he adds, “is a diagnosis, recognised as a disease only if it is authorita-tively interpreted as such.”
Clinical psychologist Craig Newnes says that consumers and families are mostly unaware that “The way the system works in terms of diagnosis is that every few years a group of psychiatrists and psy-chologists sit around in a room and vote on new diagnoses.” Newnes is among expertsinterviewed in an award-winning CCHR documentary, DSM: Psychiatry’s Deadliest Scam.
Also interviewed is Professor Robert Spillane, a lecturer at Mac-quarie University who says that DSM is a “book which catalogs mental ill-nesses for which no medical sign has ever been discovered… Childhood has now become itself an illness. In the case of almost every other condition from academic disorder to mathematics disorder, any performance that is in some way seen to be less than satisfactory has now become medicalised.”
Dr. Allen Frances, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, who chaired the DSM4 Task Force, admits that the manual created “fad diagnoses” like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disor-der (ADHD), causing a false epidemic, especially in children, and causing massive increases in dangerous drugprescription.4 When his taskforce reduced the number of symptoms needed to qualify a person as hav-ing ADHD, they thought the preva-lence of the disorder might increase by 15% among children. Instead, it increased by 200%. At the same time, autism diagnoses increased by 2,000%.5.
If Australia’s famous bushranger Ned Kelly was alive today, psy-chiatrists would most likely label him with “oppositional defiant dis-order.” In fact, psychology-inspired eugenicists claim Kelly was a “mental defective.” Under a planned fifth revision of psychiatry’s research and insurance “billing bible,” The Diagnos-tic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Kelly’s diagnosis could change to “Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder” which sup-posedly describes people who can’t let go of grudges.
Yet to others, Kelly’s fight against oppressive British rule cast him as an Australian Robin Hood – a legendary “archetypal Australian challenging authority.”1 Right now, the challenge against psychiatrists’ self-proclaimed authority over all things mentally wrong with us has reached an all time high, with international criticism – even from peers – about DSM-5.
An online petition originated by the British Psychological Society and supported by the American Psycho-logical Society challenges the pro-posed revisions to DSM-5 and has accrued more than 12,000 signatures from health professionals.
The Age says the DSM-5 review has been branded a “dangerous public experiment” that could turn normal human experiences into an epidemic of mental illness with healthy people being drugged un-
necessarily.
Citing examples The Age report-ed: “If a mother in a custody battle tries to turn a child against the father, it might create ‘parental alienation disorder’.” If a widow grieves for more than a fortnight she might be diag-nosed with “major depressive disor-der” and what was once considered
a child’s temper tantrum could be labelled “disruptive mood dysregula-tion disorder.”2 Then there’s excessive shopping, exercise or interest in diet recipes and odd food choices and hoarding – all of which are earmarks of Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Disorders.
Unlike for medical conditions, there are no physical tests, including x-rays or MRIs that can confirm these or any other psychiatric disorder. “We do not know the causes [of any men-tal illness],” Dr. Rex Cowdry, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health told Congress. While former president of the World Psychiatric Association, Norman Sartorius, de-clared, “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone.”3
The iconic Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus and founding Commissioner of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) points out that psychi-atric diagnoses are opinion. Medical diseases, he says, “are discovered; [psychiatric] diagnoses are created. Diseases cannot be manufactured, but diagnoses can be.” Depression, he adds, “is a diagnosis, recognised as a disease only if it is authorita-tively interpreted as such.”
Clinical psychologist Craig Newnes says that consumers and families are mostly unaware that “The way the system works in terms of diagnosis is that every few years a group of psychiatrists and psy-chologists sit around in a room and vote on new diagnoses.” Newnes is among expertsinterviewed in an award-winning CCHR documentary, DSM: Psychiatry’s Deadliest Scam.
Also interviewed is Professor Robert Spillane, a lecturer at Mac-quarie University who says that DSM is a “book which catalogs mental ill-nesses for which no medical sign has ever been discovered… Childhood has now become itself an illness. In the case of almost every other condition from academic disorder to mathematics disorder, any performance that is in some way seen to be less than satisfactory has now become medicalised.”
Dr. Allen Frances, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, who chaired the DSM4 Task Force, admits that the manual created “fad diagnoses” like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disor-der (ADHD), causing a false epidemic, especially in children, and causing massive increases in dangerous drugprescription.4 When his taskforce reduced the number of symptoms needed to qualify a person as hav-ing ADHD, they thought the preva-lence of the disorder might increase by 15% among children. Instead, it increased by 200%. At the same time, autism diagnoses increased by 2,000%.5.
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