“DSM-5: Caught between Mental Illness Stigma and Anti-Psychiatry Prejudice”

May 21, 2013

Jeffrey Lieberman, incoming president of the APA, responds to criticism of the DSM and psychiatry, saying “it’s important to understand the difference between thoughtful, legitimate debate, and the inevitable outcry from a small group of critics – made louder by social media and support from dubious sources — who have relentlessly sought to undermine the credibility of psychiatric medicine and question the validity of mental illness.”

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Obesity in Men Diagnosed With ADHD as Children

May 20, 2013

A 33-year controlled, prospective study conducted as a collaboration by researchers in New York, Mexico, and Verona, Italy found that men diagnosed with ADHD as children had significantly higher rates of obesity as adults. The causal link, however – whether a common neurobiological dysfunction underlies both ADHD and obesity, or a tendency toward impulsiveness, or an effect of ADHD medication – is unclear.

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Schizophrenia Subtypes Disappearing From the Literature

May 20, 2013

Schizophrenia Bulletin publishes a review of published articles that finds the use of schizophrenia subtypes (Catatonic, Disorganized, Paranoid, Residual & Undifferentiated), “while widely used in the past,” has declined over the last 20 years to the point that they should be eliminated from research and “evolving knowledge” on the topic.

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APA President-Elect Proclaims “Our Time is Now”

May 20, 2013

As demonstrators outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco protested the invalidity of the just-released DSM-5, and the harm they assert has been done in its name, the APA’s incoming president proclaimed psychiatry’s imminent legitimacy as a medical specialty, saying (paraphrasing John F. Kennedy), “‘On this day let the word go forth from this time and place,’ to consumers to clinicians, to policymakers and providers, to advocates and stakeholders, and to all the members of the APA, that for the field of psychiatry and for the patients that we serve, ‘our time has come.’”

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NPR’s Marketplace on DSM-5′s Problematic Rollout

May 18, 2013

NPR’s Marketplace covers the DSM-5′s rollout, with Allen Frances noting that “financial pressures – like dwindling membership – are forcing the APA to treat the DSM like a cash cow, not a public trust”, and psychiatrist (and MIA blogger) Sandra Steingard commenting that she has advised her agency against buying it. Regardless, Marketplace notes, the APA already has more than $150 million in pre-orders.

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Depression Screening Lacks Strong Evidence, Say Canadians

May 17, 2013

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has reversed its 2005 recommendations, finding methodological flaws, possible bias, and uncertain generalizability in a review of the literature. “In the absence of a demonstrated benefit of screening, and in consideration of the potential harms, we recommend not routinely screening for depression in primary care settings, either in adults at average risk or in those with characteristics that may increase their risk of depression,” the task force writes in a forthcoming edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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A Critical Analysis of the Validity, Utility & Effects of the Biomedical Model

May 17, 2013

MIA reader/commenter Brett Deacon’s article in the prominent Clinical Psychology Review says that despite “widespread faith in the potential of neuroscience”, the biomedical era has produced poor mental health outcomes. He calls for an open and critical dialogue of the model, asking whether it is ethical to propound the “chemical imbalance story” in order to increase the credibility of antidepressant medication, when there isn’t “even one instance in which neurobiology alone can explain a psychological experience,” and when the model has failed to produce two of its prime objectives; the reduction of stigma, and good long-term outcomes. He calls for critical examination of the biomedical model’s effects, and mentions the vigorous dialogue taking place on madinamerica.com, among other venues.

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“Science Isn’t Golden”

May 22, 2013

Paula Caplan’s Psychology Today blog on the “existential nausea” associated with seeing the recent controversy over the DSM and psychiatric diagnosis. This is a fight, she writes, she’s been engaged in for 25 years; against powerful people who get away with “distortions and even lies, lies that hurt the people they profess to help.”

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“Are Mental Illnesses Such as PMS and Depression Culturally Determined?”

May 20, 2013

Britain’s Guardian discovers, in light of the DSM controversy, that a “growing number of psychiatrists suspect mental conditions are ‘culture-bound syndromes’ rather than exclusively biological” illnesses.

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“Closed Thinking: Without Scientific Competition and Open Debate, Much Psychology Research Goes Nowhere”

May 20, 2013

Science News offers an excellent review of the the perils and pitfalls of the scientific method as it is practiced in psychology today, concluding with the story of Clever Hans, the horse that could count.

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“Temple Grandin on DSM-5: ‘Sounds Like Diagnosis by Committee’”

May 18, 2013

Salon publishes and excerpt from Temple Grandin’s “The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum”, saying it “anticipated much of the thinking in the new edition” of the DSM-5.

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The Green Shadow Cabinet and a Mental Health Declaration of Independence

Bruce Levine, Ph.D.

May 21, 2013

Americans have increasingly lost community and autonomy, and have acquired instead the tyranny of institutionalization: domination by gigantic, impersonal, bureaucratic, standardized entities — visible in large corporations, the workplace, health care, schools, and much of our lives. This institutionalization has made many Americans feel small, isolated, helpless, scared, inattentive, bored, angry, alienated, and depressed.
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Foreign Correspondent

Enough with the Questions!

Jay Watts, DClinPsy

May 21, 2013

For several decades, since the days when I was a patient, I have seen and heard how an obsession with questions damages psychiatry. Many of us have been asked the same questions day after day, year after year: ‘Do your thoughts seem faster than normal?’, ‘Do you ever have thoughts in your mind which are not your own?’, ‘Do you feel anxious?’, and so on. Hearing only what a patient says under questioning when frozen by paralysis, or subject to the hyper-arousal of anxiety, the professional misses the opportunity to hear the threads of something new, the possibility of weaving with the patient a narrative of hope and recovery.
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When “Recovery” Feels Like a Trap

Sean Donovan

May 20, 2013

People in roles of power in the mental health system often don’t realize how much complicity they have in actually creating the symptoms they claim are biologically-based in individuals with psychiatric labels.
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Foreign Correspondent

Hearing Voices Network Launches Debate on DSM-5 and Psychiatric Diagnoses

Jacqui Dillon

May 20, 2013

The recent furore surrounding publication of the new DSM has provided a much-needed opportunity to discuss and debate crucial issues about how we make sense of, and respond to, experiences of madness and distress. Many psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals have expressed their dismay about the dominance and inadequacy of a biomedical model of mental illness. Whilst we share these concerns, welcome these debates and support colleagues that are willing to take a stand, The Hearing Voices Network believes that people with lived experience of diagnosis must be at the heart of any discussions about alternatives to the current system.

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Thoughts on the Meaning of Neuroscience

Sandra Steingard, M.D.

May 19, 2013

For me there are at least four separate questions to be addressed. The first is whether neuroscience is capable of understanding human emotion and higher level cognitive experiences. The second is the extent to which that understanding – even if it is achievable – is critical to our being able to help people in distress. The third is whether is it is correct to assume, as many people seem to do, that if we come to some basic understanding of brain function as it pertains to core human emotion and suffering that this will automatically translate into treatments that are commonly thought of as “biological,” such as drug treatment. The fourth relates to the limitations and relevance of studying the brain in isolation when we are constantly in interaction with our environment.
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Occupy APA in San Francisco: Joined in Spirit

Jack Carney, DSW

May 17, 2013

Tomorrow, May 18, the American Psychiatric Association kicks off its 166th annual conference. That same day, its new DSM-5 will be officially published. Given the occurrences of the past couple of weeks, which I’ll review briefly below, some members of the APA might wish tomorrow’s events would go unnoticed. But they won’t.
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Taking down the Giant: A Call for Increased Community Outreach

Paris Williams, Ph.D

May 16, 2013

I think it’s helpful to see the psychiatric/pharmaceutical complex as being somewhat analogous to one of those large inflatable giants that you sometimes see hovering over car lot sales. Sure, it looks big and powerful, and it really is so long as “we the people” buy its propaganda and its drugs and continue feeding it billions of dollars and continue “bowing down” to its “almighty wisdom.” But its entire foundation consists of a model that simply doesn’t fit the research evidence at all, and quite frankly is propped up by many outright lies.
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Recovering Myself

Amanda Back

May 7, 2013

I have known altered states of consciousness since I was a child.  I clearly remember staring into the mirror in my mother’s bathroom and thinking that I was not who I appeared to be and that I was separate from …
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Did Electroshock Save my Life?

Loretta Wilson

April 20, 2013

In July 2006, I wrote about Electroconvulsive Therapy and stated, “If I had the opportunity to have another series of treatments I would do it!”  I had been compelled to believe the shocks had saved my life.

My Place in the Crisis

Mary Anne

April 2, 2013

Editor’s Note: To ensure the security of her job, the author has opted to use only her first name. My relationship with the mental health crisis laid out in Robert Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, is deeply personal. Not only have …
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Leonard Roy Frank:
Activist and Pioneer

May 15, 2013

Leonard Roy Frank, an early pioneer of the Psychiatric Survivor movement, discusses his lived experience including forced insulin treatments, ECT, and the relationship between non-conformity and psychiatric diagnosis.
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“Voices Matter”

May 2, 2013

“Voices Matter” is the first full production to emerge from the Open Paradigm Project, a collective dedicated to heeding the voices and perspectives that accompany the diverse and changing realities we all share. This documentary about the Hearing Voices Movement was filmed over the course of three days at the 2012 World Hearing Voices Congress in Cardiff, Wales.
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Psychiatry’s Grand Confession

Jonathan Leo, Ph.D. / Jeffrey Lacasse, Ph.D.

January 23, 2012

The psychiatric profession has finally come clean and confessed on a national media outlet that there is no evidence to support the Serotonin Theory of Depression. Today, on NPR’s Morning Edition there is a segment about the chemical imbalance theory, and …
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