Greetings, MIA readers. Would you like to write your own review of the DSM-5 (even if you haven’t read it, never mind bought it.) I’ve done neither, but I’ve read, talked, written enough about it to have an opinion. One of our Boycott Committee members, Wendy Langacker, thought of this, so we’ve posted it on our Facebook pages and tweeted it to all our “followers.” You can do the same.
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Write your own review of the DSM-5 on Amazon …
courtesy Zen Wendi
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If you need some inspiration, here’s a copy of the review I posted on Amazon …
The DSM-5, similar to the several DSMs that preceded it, is a problemmatic text. Contrary to the claims made by the American Psychiatric Association, it has no scientific grounding; further, the extent to which practitioners agree with one another about what diagnoses actually mean has declined from one DSM to the next. Finally, if taken literally — the tendency of most who use it — it reduces human experience to a series of codes that bear little relation to most individuals’ lived experiences. It encourages the use of psychoactive medications as psychiatrists’ default treatment recommendation and derogates the use of psychotherapy to help persons in distress. Why buy it or use it? Only because you mistakenly believe that insurance companies require its codes for billing purposes. Actually, they don’t. All requests for third party reimbursement must use the ICD-9 not the DSM codes. Why buy it or use it? Only to help the APA to defray the costs of producing it and bridge their organizational budget gaps. So why but it or use it?
Dr. Jack Carney, Clinical Social Worker and National Coordinator, Committee to Boycott the DSM-5.
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Amazon began sending out its pre-orders on May 27. I know another of our Committee members, John Caccavale, had his review posted, as did at least one of our FB “friends”. Others may have done so without informing us. When your review has been posted, Amazon will inform you via e-mail. Amazon will also let you know when someone has utilized your review to make a decision.
So write away and have fun. Amazon might wind up being sorry it took on the role of the DSM’s principal distributor.
Remember Joe Hill — Don’t mourn! Organize and resist!
Naughty, provokative, brilliant!
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My review has been submitted.
One day we will no longer have to do this, because it won’t be published anymore.
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Don’t miss the opportunity to click the “Was this review helpful to you?” Yes / No button.
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I’m curious what makes you think that that the DSM:
“encourages the use of psychoactive medications as psychiatrists’ default treatment recommendation and derogates the use of psychotherapy to help persons in distress” ?
I understand some of the points being made about DSM, but it is a diagnostic manual not a treatment manual. I wonder about the wisdom of stating that you have never read it and then reviewing the book in a way that seems to misinterpret the nature of the text.
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Scott,
Everyone knows that the bogus, voted in diagnosis is given for the sole, soulless purpose of pushing toxic drugs by psychiatrists in bed with BIG PHARMA. Many bogus stigmas and expanded ones have been created and added especially to push the latest lethal drugs on patent as is the case with the latest bipolar fad fraud explained in Dr. David Healy’s MANIA: A SHORT HISTORY OF BIPOLAR DISORDER. Social phobia was another gem to push useless, dangerous SSRI’s. Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, and author of ADHD FRAUD, exposed the bogus ADHD epidemic to push kiddie cocaine that harmed and even killed many children like the child bipolar fraud with the infamous case of Rebecca Riley. Dr. Baughman states that every DSM label is 100% fraud and constitute the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. And he is a real brain expert. No need for him to read DSM5 to reach the same conclusion as he did for DSM IV.
This is thanks to the fact that psychiatry sold out to BIG PHARMA in the 1980’s to give them the bogus aura of being medical and real doctors when Freudian analysis waned in popularity with too much competition from others in the mental “health” system. The bogus DSM III created out of thin air and certainly not science by narcissist Robert Spitzer treating humans like rock specimens while ensuring context and environmental stressors would be totally ignored/disallowed was created to allow psychiatry to stress their so called medical status as doctors and their prescribing rights so they could hijack the entire mental “health” profession.
Whatever little therapy is left has been forced to revolve around the bogus medical model of bio-psychiatry and junk science DSM stigmas to everyone’s huge detriment. Cognitive therapy is another ploy to blame the victims for “faulty thinking” that must be corrected because they can’t be suffering from abuse, bullying, mobbing, oppression, poverty, injustice, racism, sexism and other ‘isms because they don’t exist per the DSM. Thus, the victims’ faulty brains must be at fault for giving them stress or trauma symptoms for which they must be blamed, stigmatized, drugged, silenced, discredited, disempowered, ostracized and destroyed.
Now that Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has validated what many betrayed by the mental death profession already know by admitting that the DSM is totally INVALID without any science or medicine to back it up, it should be harder to justify psychiatry’s bogus stigmas and useless, lethal drugs. NOT! Of course, Dr. Insel only admitted that the DSM is pseudoscience because it’s become so well known especially with the absurd overreach of the DSM 5. You claim that the DSM does not recommend treatments, but the APA does publish so called treatment guidelines to go with their bogus DSM. This is pathetic given the limited toxic drugs in psychiatry’s arsenal that have no specific effect on any of their bogus disorders per Dr. Joanna Moncrieff in the book, THE MYTH OF THE CHEMICAL CURE, Dr. Timothy Scott in AMERICA FOOLED, Dr. Peter Breggin in TOXIC PSYCHIATRY and YOUR DRUG MAY BE YOUR PROBLEM, 2nd ed., Dr. Grace Jackson, RETHINKING PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS and many others.
The DSM5 is now online for anyone who wishes to consult it, but many aspects of this bogus manual have been exposed and fought in the media and web sites like PSYCHOLOGY TODAY and books like THE BOOK OF WOE, SAVING NORMAL, CRACKED and many others. For example, people can now be stigmatized and drugged if they grieve over the loss of a loved one for over two weeks. This was not added to give great support and therapy to grieving widows or mothers losing loved ones. Middle aged people can now be stigmatized with a cognitive defect if they misplace their keys. It is absurd that psychiatry has included real neurological problems like Alzheimer’s in their bogus manual to give their invented, fraudulent brain disorders a pretense of neuroscience. Real brain diseases are part of neurology and not psychiatry. Once again, the bipolar fraud fad has been expanded to even more ridiculous levels so that now just increased emotion and activity can make you “severely mentally ill” with bipolar to push a lethal cocktail of toxic drugs and rob the victim of all human, civil, democratic, constitutional rights and due process based on this pseudoscience. Nobody had better dare fall in love, get excited about their work or show any enthusiasm or excitement about anything or just being alive because the DSM5 has outlawed it and stigmatized it as a mental illness. We must all be robotic slaves for the capitalist crony power elite. There is the new bogus alternative for child bipolar to push lethal antipsychotics and other poisons on them with the pretense that paid J&J shill Joseph Biederman’s betrayal of children with his child bipolar fad fraud epidemic has been corrected. Aspberger’s has been subsumed into Autism with many complaints and on and on. But, I am sure there are many more dirty tricks and gross expansions in the DSM5 guaranteeing tons more toxic drugs per many critics, so we will have to check it out like taking safety precautions against any criminal or con artist.
As for your claims that critics here haven’t read the DSM, see forced drugging, commitment advocate Sally Satel’s infamous admission in her article on MIA that those in the field don’t read or use the DSM either. Rather, they just use their own very subjective self serving opinions to inflict their favorite stigmas to prescribe their toxic drugs by whim or according to which BIG PHARMA rep saw them most recently per the enlightening book, PSYCHIATRY UNHINGED by psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Carlat. Dr. Carlat exposes the total lack of science, knowledge and reason behind decisions made by psychiatrists in their bogus stigmas and toxic drug pushing as they delude themselves that they are helping people like Dr. Carlat who admits he doesn’t have a clue as to how and why he is “helping.”
Anyway, your pretense that you are so much better informed than psychiatric survivors is dubious at best and I doubt you have read the bogus DSM5 yourself since it just came out. But, given it is just an expansion of DSM IV, I won’t hold my breath for any improvement when even Dr. Allen Frances, ed. of DSM IV has warned us about the horrors that await us in DSM5 expansions when he was the greatest DSM expander in history until the DSM5!
Does this help at all to satisfy your curiosity?
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Here’s an idea. Why not, whilst you are at it, also purchase a copy of Mad in America, so that it appears as ‘most people looking at this book bought Mad in America`. Give it away if you already have it.
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So far so good Jack! Those negative (one star) reviews are predominating.
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