Steve McCrea, Sam Plover, and lcostanzo, I am so glad that you like the idea of the brochure. I have a lot on my plate right now, but if I did set up a gofundme page to raise the few thousand dollars that would be needed to create the brochure, write the text, get artwork created, and pay for a website and domain name to “house” the brochure, can each of you please write to me through my paulajcaplan.net website, sending me your email addresses if I don’t have them, and I will let you know once the link is up. It would be great if you could help spread the word, because I cannot do it through MIA, so if you know anyone else who might chip in (donations will be tax deductible), please ask them, too, to contact me and send me their email addresses. I will post about it on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, too. It’s so good to feel so supported. And I really think this little project could have considerable impact, because people can do a lot if they have the right information.
It is wonderful that in Peter Simons’ article he writes about the wonderful Power Threat Meaning framework (though he mistakenly described it as a diagnostic system) created by Dr. Lucy Johnstone.
However, please note the following:
Re the reference to people who are now criticizing the DSM as “major figures in psychiatry, such as Allen Frances, the chair of the fourth edition Task Force and a key figure in the creation of modern psychiatric diagnoses, and Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 to 2015,” and later to “two of the biggest names in psychiatry, Thomas Insel and Allen Frances.”
PLEASE NOTE:
(1)Insel uttered not a peep against the DSM until years into his tenure at NIMH, after overseeing the giving of grants for research based on DSM categories. Did Insel suddenly realize how bad it was at that late moment? Insel’s credibility must be challenged, given that when trashing the DSM, he proposed the hugely expensive (and ultimately fruitless, as Insel admits now that it is too late) RDoC, which was based on the biological/medicalized model of so-called “mental illness.” Where is the heroism in that?
(2) Relevant to the mentions of Allen Frances, while royally trashing DSM-5, Frances has consistently and falsely claimed that HIS DSM-IV was “scrupulously scientific.” A great many people have shown that nothing could be farther from the truth about the DSM-IV. Readers would be helped by knowing to take whatever Frances says with a grain of salt (or a ton of salt), given that he so blatantly misrepresents what he did with DSM-IV (as documented, often with quotations directly from Frances himself, in https://www.amazon.com/They-Youre-Crazy-Paula-Caplan/dp/0201488329/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KTW5B3UVU8WU&dchild=1&keywords=they+say+you%27re+crazy&qid=1609862207&sprefix=They+Say+You%27re+Crazy%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1
(3) Also relevant is that Gary Greenberg, in his excellent, The Book of Woe, as in his article in Wired magazine, reported his conversation with Frances in which Frances acknowledged freely that psychiatric diagnosis “is bullshit.” In light of this, it makes no sense to consider Frances as a reliable authority in the light of Frances both claiming that his DSM was scientific and admitting that psychiatric diagnosis is bullshit. (4)Further of relevance is Frances’s key role in the biggest conflict of interest scandal in the history of the modern mental health system, which has actually been written about here in MIA https://www.madinamerica.com/2015/10/diagnosisgate-a-major-media-blackout-mystery/ as well as initially in https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ottawa/index.php/aporia/article/view/3486 This scandal resulted in the pseudoscientific and clearly false but vigorous marketing campaign Frances and two colleagues designed — and were paid nearly $1 million for by Jansen (of Johnson & Johnson) — to sell the exceedingly dangerous drug Risperdal. This omission is all the more disturbing, given the extensive inclusion in this article of Frances daring to attack the APA for ITS conflict of interest in selling the DSM-5. (Simons writes: “Frances also called out a massive financial conflict of interest—the DSM is the APA’s biggest money-maker since every professional in the mental health field must purchase the expensive, massive manual each time it is updated in order to stay abreast of the newest diagnoses and criteria changes.”) Yet Frances breathes not a word about such a conflict of interest during the many years he was heading the DSM-IV Task Force. It’s not believable that Frances somehow evaded his own conflict of interest when he was in that role. Does anyone believe that Frances suddenly, as soon as DSM-5 was in the works, was struck by the realization that there was such a conflict of interest and that he had been in that very position as head of DSM-IV? And given Frances’s scandalous conduct with the Risperdal conflict of interest, he certainly should not be assumed to speak from expertise and from the integrity that warrants paying attention when he calls out someone else’s conflict of interest.
People who would like to read my future essays may want to friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, where I will be announcing my publications, or on my Authors Guild website, which is paulajcaplan.net, since I no longer write for MadInAmerica.
Lcostanzo, your kind words mean the world to me — and I am sure also to Peter and Steve. This is what we hope will happen increasingly if we (this includes you) all keep trying to get the truth out. What is so tragic is that most people who turn to the System for help don’t even have enough of the facts to know what questions to ask or how/when to challenge what some professional says. I have long wanted to get a small grant to put together a brochure that would summarize some of the crucial info and have a list of questions to ask/things to consider when seeing a mental health professional AND some alternatives to seeing professionals…and then make it available at no cost online for people to download.
Thank you for the kind words, Sam Plover! And you are so right to say the diagnosis itself constitutes iatrogenic harm!
To l_e_cox, I want to say a couple of things. One is that the diagnosis is THE FOUNDATION STONE of everything bad in the mental health system. It is getting someone labeled “mentally ill” that makes it possible for the professionals to do almost anything to the person in the name of “treatment.” And although some of the professionals may be guilty of intent to harm, in a way what I find more disturbing is that the vast majority actually think they are helping…and are so invested in seeing themselves as helpful and caring that they are not open to seeing when the truth is that they are causing harm (so they think things like, “She just needs to be on a higher dose of meds” or “Maybe I gave her the wrong label, and she is not bipolar but is schizoaffective, and thus I should stop doing X and do Y instead).
Incidentally, for those who want to keep up with my essays in the future, I will not be writing for MadInAmerica, but I will announce and/or post my work at paulajcaplan.net and on my Facebook and Twitter and Instagram pages.
I cannot see where to reply to jonathanledlarsen’s last comment, so I will do it here. I was not saying that I had tried to find out where to file complaints about harm from psych drugs. That is totally different. I was saying that I had tried to find out from the ICD people where to file complaints about harm from PSYCH DIAGNOSIS! Everything bad in the mental health system starts with diagnosis, since the diagnoses have no scientific validity, and they so often cause vast harm. But neither the WHO (re ICD) nor the APA (re DSM) has the least concern about the damage that their diagnoses cause. They have made that very clear. I think it is crucial not to write as though the only harm that comes from psych diagnosis is what psych drugs do. If you go to psychdiagnosis.weebly.com, you can see a number of very brief videos that are about various kinds of harm that all started with psych diagnoses. They are devastating. Please help spread the word. In addition, this might possibly be of some interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y It is a lecture about this with some performance.
Jonathanledlarsen, Steve McCrea is right when he says (below) that the ICD people try very hard to coordinate with the DSM people, and the ICD psychiatry section differs very little from the DSM. However, when you say that the ICD is not commercial, well, I tried to find out what they do with their profits from sale of the ICD, and they would not even reply to the question. I also asked them what is the route for people to file claims when they have been harmed by use of the psych labels in the ICD, and they did not reply to that either. We do know that Allen Frances’s DSM-IV brought in more than $100 million in sales, and there is no evidence that they spent a single penny of that money to redress any of the harm done by the labels in their manual. In fact, they dismissed with no attention to the merits the nine ethics complaints we filed about that harm. Not surprising.
Hello, Evanhaar,
I was supposed to write a series of articles for MadInAmerica but will not now be doing that. I appreciate your interest in my essays. The closest I got to a series was the two-part essay about suicidal thoughts and behavior being pathologized and what to do instead, so both of those were published on MIA. If you are asking if one can sign up for my blog on my Authors Guild website at paulajcaplan.net, I actually don’t know the answer to that. It is so recently that the matter of publishing primarily on my own website (and I am exploring the possibility of publishing on a couple of other sites whose editors have kindly invited me) that I will need to check with the Authors Guild to see if there is a way for people to sign up to be notified when I post a new essay. Again, it is kind of you to care about this work. If you want to send me an email through my website, I will have your email address and can let you know what I find out.
Hello, Someone Else,
I have greatly appreciated your comments on essays I have written here and on other people’s essays. I don’t know who you are, but I wanted to invite you to contact me (anonymously if you wish) via my Authors Guild website, which is paulajcaplan.net I will no longer be writing essays for MadInAmerica but will from time to time be posting my essays on my own website (there is a Blog section) and have been invited to post them elsewhere. I would love to continue to learn from you.
Paula
This is such important work … and beautifully reported by Peter Simons. Thank you, Peter.
What a shame that even in the context of doing such important work, the authors (according to Peter) wrote that outcomes for people with “severe mental illness” have worsened over the last 50 years and that people with schizophrenia continue to die up to 25 years younger than do their peers.
So they are trying to make some important steps forward, yet even they erroneously use the terms “severe mental illness” and “schizophrenia” as though they were clearly defined, scientifically supported, and innocuous constructs. They most definitely are not! I continue to marvel at how so many otherwise progressive thinkers in this field either actively use such terms in ways that reify them, present them as though they were valid and as though they were not damaging terms that have destroyed people’s lives. Why do people think that is the case?
THANK YOU for writing this! Decades ago when I wrote the book, The Myth of Women’s Masochism, this was just the kind of reason I wrote it! And as you show, it is still all too relevant. It still sickens me when I hear an abuse victim described as having “brought it on herself, because she needs to suffer.” And if she says she hates the suffering and the fear, the traditional mental health professional (and too often, family and friends who are misguided) reply, “Well, if she doesn’t consciously enjoy it, then obviously UNCONSCIOUSLY she does, or it wouldn’t happen.” So the abuser is totally absolved of responsibility. If you haven’t read Dr. Lenore Walker’s classic book, The Battered Woman, do not miss it! And in my most recent edition of The Myth of Women’s Masochism, I have a section in the new preface about emotional/psychological/verbal abuse and how it is even more insidious than physical abuse because it doesn’t leave visible evidence and because it is too easily dismissed as “He was just kidding” and “You are way too sensitive,” so I include guidelines about how to recognize this kind of abuse.
(2)You mention women taking hormone “replacement therapy” as though it were a healthy thing. You seem not to be aware that taking that kind of hormone has been extremely dangerous for huge numbers of women. I hope you can perhaps edit out that bit of your article so as not to mislead women.
(3)I wish you had addressed the fact that “ADHD” — see the brilliant work especially by Dr. David Cohen — is an utterly unscientific entity. So all these people who say they studied treatments for “ADHD” are talking about an entity that has no validity.
Just want to mention these things: (1)I have heard from a huge number of people (including but not limited to military veterans) who have been “informed” by therapists: “You have PTSD. And you always will.” When people have — as someone suggested in a comment — given themselves that label, it is usually because (A)They are misinformed and believe it is a synonym for “I have been traumatized,” and no one has explained to them that they are calling themselves “mentally ill” and all the dangers that can follow from that….or (B)There are benefits or “services” (some of which are actually harmful to them, but they don’t know that until they try) that they want and deserve but cannot get unless they agree to accept a psychiatric label. For people in the latter group, I usually say, “I wish I could change the system so it wouldn’t be necessary to accept a label to get what you want. But at the very least, I want you to understand the huge array of risks of harm to which you may or will be exposed once you get just about any psychiatric label. However, I understand that you want the benefits or services that accepting the label will get you. So it’s your decision, but if you decide to accept a psychiatric label, just know deep in your heart that you are not ‘mentally ill,’ not ‘crazy.'”
I have gotten rather lost in the extremely lengthy comments about who makes laws, and I have no expertise about laws outside the U.S. But a major reason I have been pushing for Congressional Hearing about psych diagnosis for decades is that that would help expose why FEDERAL legislation for oversight is needed.
I have gotten rather lost in the extremely lengthy comments about who makes laws, and I have no expertise about laws outside the U.S. But a major reason I have been pushing for Congressional Hearing about psych diagnosis for decades is that that would help expose why FEDERAL legislation for oversight is needed.
To everyone! One thing you can do is go to http://www.psychdiagnosis.weebly.com and watch the videos there and read the various entries under Solutions.
Sam Plover, which of my videos did you send to your sons? I hope they are helpful. Have you seen this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=21s I love what you aid to your sons about your grandchildren! So important to make these efforts!
Lametamor, I hope you will make happen what you say should happen. I have been working on this in a rather exhausting variety of ways since the late 1980s and am working on other things IN ADDITION now and have MAJOR family responsibilities. So I can only do so much, and that includes responding to comments.
Lametamor, sorry if I don’t respond as often as you post here. But perhaps you missed what I posted about the various solutions suggested at psychdiagnosis.weebly.com and the request I made about the two petitions. Hope you will have a look.
To Someone Else, I thank you for your comment and totally agree that reducing the massive drugging of trauma survivors — and it doesn’t happen only at the VA but in many other places! — would reduce suicides.
TO EVERYONE,
CAN YOU HELP? I had long ago posted two petitions on change.org I cannot find the links and want to post them here. One is called Call for Congressional Hearings about Psychiatric Diagnosis. The other is Boycott the DSM or Boycott Psychiatric Diagnosis. If anyone can find these and figure out why I cannot find them, please let me know! And if you can post the links here, I hope everyone will sign and share them!
Lametamor, people are busy, and it can be very hard to follow and try to keep up with extremely lengthy and complicated comments. I do the best I can, given the commitments I have.
Lametamor, which issues are you asking about pushing in Congress? Do you mean my long-standing attempts (see psychdiagnosis.weebly.com) to get Congressional hearings about psych diagnosis or something else? I don’t know of anyone else trying to get such hearings.
Audrey, the VAST majority of people who hear you (as you CAREFULLY say) remark that you “were given diagnosis X” will hear it as “Audrey HAS X mental illness.” What I urge you to do is to say instead, “I was given Diagnosis X, which has absolutely NO scientific basis or validity, that is, it doesn’t actually exist, and then I want you to hear the details of the hell I went through, all of which was “justified” on the basis of that diagnosis. And let me tell you in ordinary and accurate words what was REALLY happening to me at that time.” It is a way for you not just to speak your truth but to make sure people hear it instead of horribly misconstruing it and thus not seeing YOU. It is also a way to make them stop and think when they hear other such labels. Warmly, Paula
Dear Joanna,
The press release was sent to me in an email, so I suggest you write to the APA’s press office and request a copy. Would love to hear the results of your research when it is completed. So glad you are doing this!
Warmly,
Paula
Sadie and Lucy, my earlier article in MIA, “Is COVID-19 Making Everybody Crazy?” https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/07/covid-19-making-everybody-crazy/ (of course, the answer is “Upset, yes, but mentally ill, no”) is a good pair with this one. One of the points I made was that calling people’s upset “mental health problems” is WRONG and DANGEROUS precisely because it conveys to many people that “mental health problems=psych disorders.” Instead, we should use old-fashioned, accurate terms for these feelings, like “scared,” “angry,” “disoriented,” “hopeless,” “grieving,” etc.
CODA to my essay:
The American Psychiatric Association issued a press release on Wednesday, in which they crowed about the House of Representatives’ Veterans Committee removing from its Veteran Suicide Prevention legislation the permission for psychologists at the VA to prescribe psychiatric drugs. They tried to make this seem like a good move on the grounds that so many veterans kill themselves and need excellent mental health care, which, they believe, comes from psychiatrists but not from psychologists being able to prescribe drugs. Though I personally am in favor of having the smallest number of people in ANY discipline prescribe psychiatric drugs — including because so many such drugs increase suicide rates — it is important to note that psychiatrists have no evidence that their drug prescriptions are any more responsible than those of psychologists, nor that they do more careful follow-up of patients they put on drugs than would psychologists.
Nijinsky, what a nightmare was your encounter with those people! I wonder if contacting a warm line would have been more helpful — I am guessing it would!
Boans, you can find the references you asked for in this article: Caplan, Paula J. (2005) Sex bias in psychiatric diagnosis and the courts. In Wendy Chan, Dorothy Chunn, & Robert Menzies (Eds.), Women, mental disorder, and the law. London: Cavendish, pp. 115-26. I don’t have the chapter in my computer, but your local library can no doubt order it via interlibrary loan if they don’t have the book itself.
Dear “Someone Else”:
You can contact me directly and send me your email address through paulajcaplan.net When I get some time, I am wanting to do a zoom call for people interested in this issue to see what kinds of action to take. Fiddling a bit with the DSM will do no good — the book must be thrown out, which begins with all of us making the truth about it known.
Also, you might be interested in the annual “Battered Mothers Custody” conference, which you can learn about at https://www.batteredmotherscustodyconference.org
Dear Mr. Ruck,
Your message is heartbreaking. Since I know nothing about you except what you wrote here, I was trying to think of what kinds of things people who said similar things were feeling was preventing them from having hope for a better life…or a better life, and two that come to mind right away are people who were in miserable or even abusive marriages but whose religion forbid divorce and people whose sexual orientation or gender identity led their religions to cast them out and call them sinners. Many of the latter found a film called “For the Bible Tells Me So” to be immensely helpful. There are people in most religious denominations who are helpful for people who want to get a divorce or who have sexual orientations or gender identities that are condemned by the religion’s leadership. It may be that religion is not what is preventing you from doing what would make your life better. If you are inclined to say more, please do, and I will see if I can think of anything that might be of use to you.
Peter Simons, I am a HUGE admirer of your work, and there is so much of great interest in this article. I would like to point out some things I wish had been included — any chance it could be added?. It goes like this: Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that, like all DSM diagnoses, “Autism” has no scientific validation, so it should simply never be used. Instead, people trying to help a child or adult who is struggling (or who has been identified as “a problem”) should carefully try to get to know as much as possible about the person, who considers the person problematic, does the person consider themselves to need help and if so, what kind of help, what HAS been helpful (if anything) and what HAS made things worse, etc. etc.
Another thing is about something you wrote, which was, “for every 100 toddlers who screen positive for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), only about 18 of them will go on to receive a diagnosis. The other 82 toddlers will be referred out for further assessment, told that they “may” have ASD, and potentially be exposed to drugs such as antipsychotics (often used for behavioral control in children with autism), all without even meeting the criteria for an ASD diagnosis.” That helps reify “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” which also is not a scientifically supported category. That quotation does, however, go a long way toward showing how pointless the whole endeavor is — that is, most of the toddlers who appear to have “Autism Spectrum Disorder” on the screening instrument never even get the ASD diagnosis, but the whole endeavor is also dangerous, because it greases the skids, getting huge numbers of kids into the traditional mental health system, where they may miraculously get a helpful therapist and not get put on harmful drugs but most likely will suffer great harm.
I just now read some of the later comments and find it frightening that people are saying Fauci is lying or just wants to control people! I hope you will look at the GOOD science that proves that wearing masks and social distancing really do reduce the spread. Have a look, PLEASE, at the areas where covid increased when masks and social distancing were NOT used and the areas where covid decreased when they were used. I don’t want people reading comments after my article to end up believing that covid is all a hoax and a plot! People are dying at a scary rate from this. We cannot render them and their loved ones invisible, please!
Audrey, I am happy for you that you found your way so well without the mental health system. However, I am saddened that you continue to use psychiatric terms like “Bipolar Disorder” and “Complex PTSD” instead of using this essay as a chance to teach others that psychiatric diagnoses have NO scientific basis and cause massive harm of a vast array of types. I guess someone told you that you “have” “Complex PTSD,” but what you really “have” is your own way of having reacted to and tried to cope with the trauma you experienced. You do not need to use such a damaging system’s language to refer to yourself. I urge you to use ordinary words that will help you stop pathologizing yourself and others who have been traumatized. I wish you well.
Peter, like so much of your work, this is an important article. I agree with Oldhead, though, that to report the 0.5% statistic is a good start, but then to continue on to say what the rest of a totally in-valid entity called “schizophrenia” consists of undercuts the quotation marks used around the term in the headline. It makes it seem suddenly as though “schizophrenia” were a real entity BUT that only a tiny bit of it is accounted for by genetics. In fact, NO PERCENT can be accounted for by anything, since it has no scientific basis supporting the claim that it is a real entity…I hope people will read Robert Whitaker’s book, Mad In America, and Jeffrey Poland’s chapter called “Bias and schizophrenia” in the book Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis. These make it clear that the category itself is a godawful mess. And we know it does massive harm.
This is about a post way up the line. I wanted to respond to Steve McCrea’s comment that terms like “narcissistic” are different from “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” I TOTALLY agree! Nearly every head of every DSM Task Force and nearly every president of its publisher, the American Psychiatric Association, which is officially registered as a lobby group, has either said nothing publicly about the DSM or has proclaimed that psych diagnosis is scientific! Nothing could be further from the truth. Steve is right that terms like “narcissistic” have long been used by the novelists, the poets, and ordinary people to describe people who are totally self-absorbed, etc. But to use a term like “NPD” that comes from the DSM is to become complicit with the DSM authors and marketers and profiteers who benefit from the false claim that such labels represent scientifically validated entities…and from further false claims that, because they “are” scientific, therefore whatever “treatments” they recommend inevitably follow from the diagnostic label.
Diana, Michael Enright interviewed me when I lived in Canada (I am a Canadian and a U.S, citizen), and if you write to him, please let him know I would be happy to speak with him again if he wishes.
Anyone who believes Trump is not dangerous can start by reading about his history, which is available online in many reliable places. And of course there’s the Access Hollywood tape of him describing his sexual assaults, but I thought everyone already knew about that.
I had stopped reading the comments to this post when it looked like they were slowing down, so I was surprised to check in just now and see how many more were posted. I haven’t yet read them all and am also surprised to see how many veer WAY away from the subject of my article but will try at least to read the relevant ones. However, I need to point out a libelous statement I noticed by someone who won’t use their real name but signs on as “Berserk.” That person alleged, among other offensive and totally uninformed comments, that I was paid to be a consultant on DSM-IV. That is completely untrue, and the idea that I did it for money is libelous. If “Berserk” or anyone else is genuinely interested in why I agreed to be a consultant and stayed for two years (I hoped to have a role in encouraging their Task Force to be honest about the relevant research and to take steps to prevent harm from psychiatric diagnosis, and I resigned when it became clear that both were hopeless), as well as learning about how the DSM process looks from the inside, it’s all described in https://www.amazon.com/They-Youre-Crazy-Paula-Caplan/dp/0201488329/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AQJEHVRUMWX6&dchild=1&keywords=they+say+you%27re+crazy&qid=1592498360&sprefix=They+Say+You%27re%2Caps%2C127&sr=8-1
Will, thank you for this extremely important article!
I have been terrified by discussion by media people and politicians who think it’s a good solution to replace police with “mental health professionals,” given the oppressive and even violent ways that the latter have treated people who are suffering. And Will, I agree that NONPATHOLOGIZING, NONCOERCIVE approaches are needed, but how do you think, in a practical way, anything can be done to make sure that groups calling themselves “mental health advocates” and such but that are Big Pharma-funded and focus on labeling don’t increase their access to and power over those who are suffering? What steps can be taken to make sure that the compassionate groups and individuals are the ones who are called when someone is frightened and/or menacing?
Thank you for this important article, which I hope people will read with Dr. Lauren Tenney’s recent, devastating article about electroshock that was also published in MadInAmerica!
I do wish that EVERYONE would stop calling it ECT, as the late Leonard Roy Frank — himself a victim of electroshock — used to plead with people to do, because, as he pointed out, the “T” stands for “therapy,” which is dead wrong for something that wipes out people’s memories, as they did to him. Also, to say “ECT” means not coming right out and saying “electroshock.” Even the “C” in “ECT” is a bit of whitewashing, since it stands for “convulsive,” which sounds more clinical and less horrible than “shock” or “seizures.” We can all help educate people about what this involves, and one of the ways to do this is always to call it “electroshock.” Make people hear those words and know what it is.
Steve McCrea, I cannot see a way to REPLY to your comment, which was this:
Of course, that begs the question of how any person could be determined to “have a mental illness” when these “illnesses” are clearly subjective judgments about a person’s behavior or character, without any objective way to determine who does and doesn’t “have” these spurious “disorders.”
But I want to note that the term “beg the question” (which is a term of rhetoric) doesn’t mean “raises the question” (despite its mistaken use frequently) but actually means “avoids the point.” So I know what you mean is that this RAISES the question, and then I totally agree with your comment. 🙂
So many lawyers who work within the Protection and Advocacy domains are goodhearted people. However, I have gotten NOWHERE when I have said to individual lawyers and to the heads of major organizations who try to protect the rights of people who are diagnosed with mental illness that “EVERYTHING bad begins with psych diagnosis, so instead of saying that your client ‘with mental illness’ deserves to have rights, you could save vastly more people if you filed a lawsuit about the false advertising of psych labels as scientific and failure of the APA and its DSM honchos to warn of the huge array of kinds of harm that all start with the diagnosis.”
So glad you wrote this, Jim Gottstein, and so glad that Evan has you trying so hard to help him. Is there no legal clinic (Harvard Law, for instance) that will take his case?
One other point — you said that you feel lucky that mistreatment by the system did not end up making you “mentally ill,” but I don’t know what that means, since that term is meaningless and so misused by the very system we despise. I assume you mean that mistreatment by the system can intensify and multiply the manifestations of a person’s suffering, yes? 🙂
I am so sorry about what you went through. You deserved to have people make you comfortable telling about your suffering a long, long time ago. It is tragic that that failed to happen. It is also tragic that people have given you psychiatric labels, and I hope you have not accepted them as either scientific (NO psych diagnostic label is scientific) or helpful or safe for you to have attached to your name. In fact, I know there are people who will read your brave article and be dismissive on the grounds that you “have” these various “disorders.” You don’t really “have” these made-up, unscientific entities. You have suffered in a number of ways and have coped in a number of ways, and finding out what is helpful in alleviating your suffering is what really matters. Diagnoses tend to get in the way of that. And they expose everyone who is diagnosed to a vast array of kinds of harm. Wishing you all the best. You might want to have a look at https://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Youre-Crazy-Psychiatrists/dp/0201407582/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=They+Say+You%27re+Crazy&qid=1554486859&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=9114cba73496ff5f388235a3586c6299&language=en_US which you might find of some help.
Thank you for this scrupulous study of the effects of neuroleptic or “antipsychotic” drugs on death rates. This is so important to have all this work carefully described and critiqued.
Happily, I note that you refer to people diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder rather than to “schizophrenics” and “people with bipolar disorder.”
Since I know you and I and many others agree that there are all sorts of horrible and dangerous reasons that people are given psychiatric diagnoses, I want to reread your article, considering what other thoughts would have come to mind if instead of calling people “seriously mentally ill” some other kinds of terms had been used.
Psychiatric diagnosis is the First Cause of EVERYTHING bad that ever happens in the mental health system. If they don’t diagnose you, they are not supposed to “treat” you, but once they give you any diagnosis, they can justify almost anything and be held blameless, on the grounds that it is “treatment.” More about that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=24s
Magdalene, since it appears that you are an attorney and are asking why the law and legal systems have failed to scrutinize and curb the damage caused by the DSM, please contact me at paulajcaplan.net, because as a psychologist who has done a great deal of work in the legal system, I have been working and writing extensively on that very thing for decades. I assume you are not in the U.S. (you use the spelling “scrutinise”), and wherever you are located, I hope to hear from you.
Miranda, this is a terrific article! I would like to add a few things.
(1)Even saying lots of people are experiencing “anxiety” and “depression” (whether psychiatrically labeled or not) can impede the path to feeling better. This is because both words are so vague and give little guidance toward how to cope. If anyone tells me they feel either of those, I ask what words they would use if they were NOT going to use those. The answers are far more helpful. What’s called “anxiety” is usually “fear,” and calling it that helps the person identify the fear’s source and set about figuring out how realistic the fear is and how to protect oneself. What’s called “depression” is used in a staggering array of ways, as David Cohen’s and David Jacob’s classic article about tests of “anti-depressants” shows, and it helps if one can recognize that they are feeling loneliness and isolation or helplessness or hopelessness or nostalgia or fearfulness.
(2)I urge EVERYONE to put quotation marks around every term ever used to pathologizes people. It’s a very important form of educating others and reminding ourselves that they have no scientific basis and therefore are usually useless and often VERY harmful.
(3)Since suicidal thoughts were mentioned, I want to say that I addressed this in my MIA webinar last week (which people can sign up to watch, including Bob Whitaker’s brilliant opening webinar and the ones that will follow), and good heavens, what could be more natural than thinking about suicide when death feels close to us (in our death-phobic and death-denying society) than in a long time?
(4)Miranda included this from some media coverage:“difficulty sleeping, changes in eating patterns, rapid changes in mood, inability to carry out required or necessary tasks, [and] self-medication using alcohol.” These were being used to signal “mental illness.” So somebody tell me, do we really want to believe that in the face of this pandemic and all the unknowns about it and the fact that death is its ultimate outcome, we should have NO new difficulties in eating, sleeping, emotions, carrying out tasks, and trying to find ways to help us calm down? So what IS the “normal” way we should all be coping?
Finally, I don’t think the word “grief” was mentioned here, but grief is something so many of us are feeling — grief that we cannot hug loved ones or help them in person, grief that we cannot go to the grocery store for potato chips even WITH a mask and gloves and not feel tense and watchful, grief about so much that is unavailable to us now, and perhaps grief that we are not handling this with as much serenity and resourcefulness as we would have hoped.
Great essay! You are way ahead of your time! Since most people STILL don’t recognize that psych diagnosis is the first cause of everything bad in the mental health system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=24s I wonder how many people will grasp the great importance of what you are saying…but I hope many will!
Anthony Murray, I know that good lawyers for this kind of situation are few and far between. I urge you to read Jim Gottstein’s new, brilliant book, The Zyprexa Papers, because one thing he does is to lay out exactly how he tried to prevent a client from being forcibly drugged. And a lot of this applies also to being committed against one’s will. It might be helpful to you in trying to work with a lawyer who might do better by seeing what Jim Gottstein did. He is a great role model! Good luck to you.
Hi, Kindred Spirit,
I agree with you. In the article I wrote here, I didn’t spend much time on the kinds of things you are describing, because I have written so extensively about that elsewhere so many times, and this article was intended specifically to be a critique of a couple of pieces of research that function to cover up exactly the kinds of things you mention. So at one point I listed some of the real causes of veterans’ trauma, and I think you missed my mention of moral anguish in the above article (as just one of many causes of their trauma), but that is the term that came to me when I was writing my book https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US about veterans, before I had heard Jonathan Shay’s term “moral injury.” I like that he highlights the importance of the kinds of things you describe in your comment, but I continue to use my term “moral anguish,” because anguish is a less neat-and-clean term than injury, and anguish is what veterans themselves told me about.
I am glad you mentioned Veterans for Peace. I am a longtime Associate member of Veterans for Peace and winner of a Friend to Veterans Award from them, at least in part because I have for more than a decade been calling out the entities and individuals who keep trying to conceal the real causes of servicemembers’ and veterans’ trauma, including being in a war and being sexually assaulted in the military.
Thank you for writing.
Hello, Someone Else,
If you will listen to the podcast again and look at the website at listentoaveteran.org you will see that we do NOT have veterans as listeners. Please note that the project is called Listen to a Veteran! We have nonveterans who are not therapists listen to veterans.
As for having listeners for people who were abused as children or adults, I hope you will set up listening sessions for them. My approach as described on the above website is easily used for listening to anyone who is suffering. I don’t arrange for listening sessions for anyone other than veterans or servicemembers or their loved ones, because I have no staff, no assistance of any kind, and no funding. But I encourage you to do as you suggest.
And yes, I certainly agree that all sorts of nonpathologizing approaches are the right things to use for people who are suffering in any way. The more than two dozen examples of such approaches can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51E99E866B9D735E from a conference I organized that is for veterans, but the approaches are useful for everyone. And I beg people, as noted in the podcast, to stop using terms like “art THERAPY” and “music THERAPY” and just call them art and music, etc.
Thank you for your comment.
Hello, Someone Else,
Thank you for the kind words. The link should be listentoaveteran.org I will ask that it be corrected in the above. Thank you for catching that.
So glad to see the topic of this article. Dr. Phyllis Chesler indeed deserves massive praise and respect, and her book — which is not mentioned in Lucas’s article — WOMEN AND MADNESS — is THE pioneering classic of feminist critique of the mental health system and remains all too true today. So do her MANY other courageous books (do google her and see the vast array of important subjects).
And Chesler was one of the dynamic founders of the Association for Women in Psychology, which was an intensely activist organization whose activist roots are currently being revived — see awpsych.org and especially the information about its Activism Caucus.
The recently deceased Dr. Bonnie Burstow has also been a tireless and inventive critic of the traditional mental health system and deserves mention.
This is a brilliant and courageous article! I so admire how bravely you are putting yourself out there and how skillfully you have pulled together so much relevant information! I will be amazed if you even hear back from Wilkie. He has ignored the letter I sent to him, even though I met him, he gave me his card, and he said to write to him.
Amy Smith, thank you so much for pointing out this other cause of eating problems and so courageously doing it by telling your nightmare of a story!
Thanks, too, for pointing out that Jo’s name as co-author of this essay disappears when you go to print it! She MUST get credit!
So glad to see this article. It’s something that’s been close to my heart for more than a decade. In my book,When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans, which was published in 2011 and won three top national awards for nonfiction. https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US
there is an entire chapter about “What the VA Is Doing and Why It’s Not Enough,” and Chapter 6 (much different in the revised version and more up-to-date) is all about the importance of JUST LISTENING to veterans and how anyone can do it. Readers might also want to check out listentoaveteran.org, especially the very brief video at the top of the page, where I describe what the listening sessions are, why/how I conceived of them, and a bit about outcomes. We have a lot of data on outcomes in addition to that. It would be great if the VA were to bring Listen to a Veteran! which is extremely simple and nonpathologizing and helpful to the VA. And it costs nothing. But so far, no VA people have been willing to bring this to their facility.
Our film about this, “Is Anybody Listening?” isanybodylisteningmovie.org was screened on Capitol Hill in D.C. and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, had 140 showings on PBS stations across the U.S., had many endorsements from highly respected veterans’ entities and veterans, and has won numerous awards.
Veterans interested in having a nonveteran (NOT a therapist, just a person!) listener or in learning more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via listentoaveteran.org
How kind of you, Jim! It was a joy to read Jim Gottstein’s book and to write about it. I hope you will read it. It is remarkable and so powerful. And please do help spread the word! Thank you.
Hughmass, it is heartbreaking to hear what the VA and the state hospital put you through. Occasionally I hear of someone who got real help from the VA, but is far more often that I hear nightmarish stories like yours. You deserved so much better! I invite you and other veterans to go to listentoaveteran.org and see if you are interested in having a totally private, nonjudgmental, free listening session from our Listen to a Veteran! Program.
Thank you, Don, for this wonderful essay about Bonnie.
I had heard about Bonnie Burstow — and Don Weitz — many decades ago and found the revolutionary work that each of them did individually and together to be stunning, courageous, and inventive. Over the years, Bonnie and I were in touch about the work, and I was always struck by how hard she worked, how varied were the kinds of ideas she had, how knowledgeable she was, how she put together the pieces of information in revelatory ways, how she combined intelligence with compassion, how her determination to make a better world never flagged. With regard to this last matter, we rarely communicated with each other, for no reason other than that both of us were busy, but awhile back, I called her after learning that she was struggling with terrifying vision problems. I made some suggestions, but she explained there were reasons she could not try them. I was thinking how scary and difficult it must be to try to continue working, as she had said she was doing, while losing one’s sight. And then after awhile, I learned that she had written a novel! A woman with a passion to reduce human suffering and who worked to do that in so many ways — writing nonfiction articles and books, writing a novel, and creating an anti psychiatry scholarship — there has never been anyone like Bonnie Burstow. The world is impoverished by her death but forever enriched by her spirit and her work, which will live on.
The following quotations from your article so clearly suggest that she has suffered a lot from being in a “mental health facility” and from being on psychiatric drugs and/or having dosages changed, not from having a “mental illness”:
“The conservatorship continues, her manager told the Post, because earlier this year she had been struggling to adjust to changes in her medication regimen and became ‘rattled and destabilized.’
“Having defended the conservatorship, the Post article then turned its attention to the #FreeBritney movement. In this arena, noted TMZ in one of its articles, Spears did have a voice. “There are indications that Spears herself craves more freedom. At the hearing, she reportedly told a judge that ‘her father . . . committed her to a mental facility a month ago against her will and also forced her to take drugs.”
Just repeating here what Irit Shimrat wrote in her comment above, because it is just what I was going to write!! She wrote:
They write, “The DSM is not simply a scientific manual, but a social laboratory where political, sociological, ethical and psychological issues are discussed and confronted.”
imho, this article could have been replaced (and readers’ time thus not wasted), by the sentence “The DSM is not a scientific manual.”
Bob and Derek, great work in pulling together these various sources of data.
(1) As you know, in my 2011 book, When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans, https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US I spent three entire chapters writing about this very thing…and much more. Chapter 3 includes detailed analysis of the problems with not only “PTSD” but other psychiatric labels being harmfully applied to servicemembers and veterans whose deeply human reactions to war trauma, military rape trauma, and so on were thereby pathologized and about the harmful use of psych drugs as a result of that pathologizing; Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, are about what the military has been doing and “why it’s not enough” and what the VA has been doing and “why it’s not enough.” In Chapters 4 and 5, I track the DOD’s and VA’s press releases, showing a pattern of their expressions of dismay about suicide rates, bewilderment about their causes (usually avoiding any mention of numbers of deployments, the moral anguish coming from lies they had been told about how the military was being used and what was really happening, trauma from participating in or witnessing acts of war, and military sexual assault), and claims that they were introducing new initiatives to try to prevent suicides…followed by similar press releases with “new approaches” and continuing avoidance of real causes the next time. A long time ago, I met with the two top people in the Army who were then in charge of what they called suicide prevention, and they said their two main initiatives were to emphasize that “Army strong” includes acknowledging when one needs help and trying to get people more “mental health care” sooner. They were clearly totally uninterested in the serious problems I pointed out (politely) about each.
(2) Many years ago, Col. (Ret.) David Sutherland and I wrote an article about the four main reasons veterans kill themselves, and two of the reasons were those you mention: the diagnosing of them as mentally ill and the use of psych drugs. (Sutherland, Col. (Ret.) David, and Caplan, Paula J. (2013). Unseen wounds. Philadelphia Inquirer. http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20130210_Unseen_wounds.html )
(3)The long-famous “22 veterans commit suicide every day” statistic was based on VA data from only 21 states, not including California and Texas, whose veteran populations are huge. It would be good to find out — if it is in fact possible to do so — whether the VA’s current claim of “20 a day” is based on all states reporting, as well as how they defined “suicide,” since sometimes causes of death are mistakenly applied as cover-ups.
(4)A great addition to your article would be description of what truly does help, and so I refer you and your readers to the Listen to a Veteran! Project, which has definitely been shown to reduce veterans’ isolation, which is of course a major cause of suicide. listentoaveteran.org This is a completely free service, in which a veteran from any era (combat or noncombat, woman or man) is paired with a nonveteran who is NOT a therapist and who truly JUST listens with their whole heart to whatever the veterans wants to say. Data from a Harvard Kennedy School study and subsequent data have shown these simple, private, unrecorded sessions to be stunningly helpful for the veterans and life-changing for the nonveteran listeners. I also refer you to the 28 nonpathologizing, non drug, low-risk or no-risk approaches to helping veterans and their loved ones that are presented in extremely brief (10 minutes or less) videos filmed at the conference I organized in 2011 at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance. It was called “A Better Welcome Home,” and the videos can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51E99E866B9D735E Several Pentagon higher-ups have requested this information, and we urge not only veterans and their families but also anyone who is suffering to go to that site, find a few approaches that resonate for you, watch the videos, and try those approaches.
(5) Yesterday I posted the following to mark Veterans Day on my Facebook pages and on Twitter:
Easy, wonderful things anyone can do to mark Veterans Day (before, during, and/or after):
(1)LISTEN TO A VETERAN! Truly, just listen…with your whole heart. listentoaveteran.org
(2)Go to https://whenjohnnyandjanecomemarching.weebly.com/listen-to-a-veteran-psas.html and watch any or all of the 9 very short (10 to 45 seconds each) “Listen to a Veteran!” Public Service Announcements that won a Telly Award — and see whom you recognize and if you have a favorite one.
(3)Order and watch — or give as a gift to a veteran or veteran’s loved ones or a caring nonveteran — the 50-minute, awardwinning film, “Is Anybody Listening?” isanybodylistening.org is the film’s website, and you can order the film at https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07ZMJBPM1/ref=share_ios_movie
So glad you wrote this, Will! One thing I urge people to do is to avoid using the term “bullying.” Why? Because it really is abuse, and calling it “abuse” I think makes it clearer how serious and soul-destroying it is, whereas “bullying” seems to minimize it somewhat.
How troubling to see that MIA is again — and this time in a major way! — publishing a piece in which “PTSD” is used without the least mention of the unscientific nature of the category, the way it pathologizes people who are having deeply human reactions to trauma, and the devastating harm the label has caused. Do some people say they want the label applied to them? Yes. That is nearly always because (1)It’s the only time anyone has ever tried to convey, ‘I believe you’re suffering,’ but that could be done by using those nonpathologizing words instead; (2)The labeled person BELIEVES that getting a label represents something scientific that will pave the way to relief from their suffering; and/or (3)They cannot get certain benefits unless they accept a label. Re: (3), I tell people that since the system providing benefits is intractable, if accepting the label gets them what they need, they should nevertheless know in their hearts that they are not mentally ill for being upset by trauma. I address these problems in a couple of my books. Most importantly, I have heard the devastating stories of people who have suffered because of getting this label.
Dawn, is that you replying as “ArmyWife”? I appreciate the clarification. If someone can tell me how to correct that mistaken phrase in my comment, I am happy to do so! I did of course read the article but did not see a mention of VCPA (Veteran’s Center for the Performing Arts). I know Stephan has done work combining Shakespeare and his own military experiences in his brilliant, one-man show, CRY HAVOC! which I have seen praised to the skies and urged everyone I know to go see. When I learned about DE-CRUIT and saw the performances of some of the veteran/students participating in Stephan’s Shakespeare class, it was the night that it was done in conjunction with Bedlam Theatre, and Stephan and Bedlam’s founder Eric Tucker (also a veteran, who I believe directed CRY HAVOC! at least at some point) and I talked that night about disseminating the work and the principles of it as widely as possible. It now strikes me that Bedlam is not mentioned anywhere in the MIA article, so are DE-CRUIT and Bedlam no longer connected? I am very much aware of and a great admirer of Alisha Ali’s work in general and with DE-CRUIT, and she and I are longtime colleagues and friends. In fact, after Stephan came with Alisha to the NYC premiere of my film about the tragic and unhealthy divide between veterans and nonveterans, “Is Anybody Listening?”, isanybodylisteningmovie.org, I was delighted to meet Stephan, and Alisha and a number of my other friends and colleagues talked at length afterward, which was when I began to learn about her work with Stephan on DE-CRUIT. I continue to wish that there could be this glorious use of theatre for veterans — and indeed for other traumatized or otherwise suffering people — everywhere! And Dawn, if you are the one who wrote that above comment, I had the pleasure of meeting you at an LA performance of CRY HAVOC! and know how crucial a part of the work you are.
Drew and MIA, I am thrilled that you have featured the phenomenally wonderful DE-CRUIT program here! In DE-CRUIT, the brilliant Stephan Wolfert has conceived, created, and implemented with so much art and heart a way of helping veterans without pathologizing them, without using risky approaches like psych drugs or forced “treatment,” and with a way of using theatre and other literature to reconnect with aspects of themselves, with the arts, and with the humanity of themselves and others, as well as — importantly — with Stephan and with their DE-CRUIT classmates. The work that Stephan and Dr. Alisha Ali have done in documenting the powerful effectiveness of DE-CRUIT and _why_ it works is also tremendously important.
I had the privilege of attending an event at which DE-CRUIT participants performed Shakespearean monologues and poetry they had written themselves, and what was stunning was that, both those veterans who are or want to be actors and those who are/do not, the depth into which they dove in exploring or creating the material and presenting it and the honesty and integrity with which they did it were all too rare onstage and in life. This is a tribute both to Stephan and to the veterans. The night I attended that event, I said I wished that every veteran could have the chance to participate in DE-CRUIT and urged that they — and Eric Tucker’s BEDLAM Theatre Co. in which DE-CRUIT was born — create a video to help spread the word.
I have two other comments. One is that I hope that the nonpathologizing, even DE-pathologizing nature of DE-CRUIT comes through strongly enough in Drew’s article that the use a number of times of the dangerously pathologizing term “PTSD” is understood by readers to mean “people who have been traumatized by military experiences and/or by homecoming experiences and have wrongly been given the pathologizing ‘PTSD’ label when instead their reactions are deeply human ones that should never be pathologized.” Although many MIA readers would automatically make that translation in their heads each time they see a term for a psychiatric “disorder,” for some, there is the danger that any mention of one of these labels without a reminder that such labels are unscientific and expose the labeled person to a wide array of kinds of harm runs the risk of perpetuating the harm of such diagnoses.
My other comment is based on my experience when I blogged for Psychology Today. There, I wrote about a great variety of such subjects. I found that any time I wrote about veterans, the number of readers ranged from 30% to under 3% of the number who read about any other topic. As I wrote in my book, https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US, nonveterans — who represent 93% of the U.S. population — don’t like even to _think_ about veterans, as those percentages show. As an experiment, after I saw those figures, the next time I wrote an essay about veterans for Psychology Today, I made sure the headline did not reveal that veterans were the subject. Within about three days, that essay received as many hits as my other articles that were not about veterans. I see a similar pattern here. I think it is wonderful that MIA plans to publish articles about veterans and trust that they will be about depathologizing them, but it is poignant that so few comments have been posted in response to Drew’s article, and I hope that that is not a reflection of low readership. Nonveterans who have been pathologized and otherwise harmed in the traditional system would do well to make common cause with veterans, because the system has done them harm in so many of the same ways to people in both groups, and people who have not been labeled and “treated” are often frightened by appalling stereotypes of both “mental patients” in general and of veterans as Other and as dangerous.
Thank you for posting this. I did not see anything confusing about what James wrote. It seems to me he was saying to avoid TAKING OUT her sad/upset feelings on others and also to speak openly about what she is feeling.
LavenderSage, I wish I could answer your question, but I believe this varies from one school district to another, not just from state to state. I assume that whatever the school district’s rules, there is no harm in a parent asking that a child not be labeled with a diagnosis, and that could be a good teaching moment for school personnel, but I suspect the reply will be that if they don’t get diagnosed, they cannot get the help they need. Another way to approach it would be to ask if there is ANY way for the child to get the needed help without getting a diagnosis. I wish that parents might band together and start advocating for changes, but parents who are trying to get help for their children are often too exhausted to get politically involved. That is why others need at least to help with this kind of action.
Eric Coates, there is absolutely no reason for, as you say, the MIA editors “to spend thousands upon thousands of hours teaching the webzine’s various writers how to talk about psychiatric issues with any clarity while at the same time lacking the kind of consensually agreed-upon language that I have been advocating.” I have been happily stunned by the huge number of comments posted in response to my essay, about 99.9% of them positive. It seems that the wide variety of people posting comments had no trouble grasping the principles of my concerns or the extremely simple solutions I suggested. It only takes a few minutes to read my whole essay. I would be totally comfortable if the MIA editors wanted to ask all writers to read the essay…or if they just lifted the various solutions that I proposed — two of which were suggested to me by Amy Smith — and posted them in an “Instructions for Written Submissions” section that would be there permanently.
With regard to what you said about Allen Frances saying psych diagnosis “is bullshit,” (1)If you look in Gary Greenberg’s important and fascinating book, The Book of Woe, you will see that Frances was enraged that Gary made it public that he had said that, and (2)Frances has repeatedly ALSO said that HIS (only his) Task Force’s work on the DSM was “scrupulously scientific,” something I, having been on two of his committees before I resigned in horror at how they operated, can attest could not be farther from the truth. Hmm, what to make of Frances saying two totally opposite things about psych diagnosis…and having the nerve to title his absurd book about it, “Saving Normal,” when he more than anyone in history was responsible for a greater increase per year in DSM categories (even more than in DSM-5) and has continued in many ways to reify categories of “mental illness”?
s_randolph, I do hope that what I wrote will be helpful to any human beings. But you misrepresent me by implying that the only reason I totally dissociate myself from Scientology and its so-called Citizens Commission on Human is that “once upon a time a different Scientologist lied” to me. They are dangerous and alarming for a vast number of reasons, some of which I experienced directly and many others of which are well-documented in publicly available places.
Julie Greene, I do object to the word “disorder” in “eating disorder,” because it pathologizes it. I know you do not consider eating problems to be brain diseases, but to say “it” (there are actually various kinds of eating problems) is a nutritional disorder is a statement that does not include consideration of the ways that intolerable pressures on girls and women about their appearance being hugely important in determining their worth, and those pressures definitely do contribute in major ways to many girls’ and women’s frightened, often extreme ways of dealing with food. These factors can certainly lead to serious nutritional problems…I agree.
Julie Greene, I was surprised that in the recent MIA piece you wrote, you described yourself as having had an eating “disorder.” I don’t understand why you used that term. What’s wrong with “eating problem”? Why do you continue to use such terms when you object to MIA’s allowing them?
I have repeatedly expressed my concerns to MIA when they continue to publish pieces in which psychiatric diagnostic terms are used without a single mention of the fact that they are NOT scientific, that it is NOT helpful to use these terms (including ADHD) when trying to alleviate suffering or help people change their behavior IF THEY WANT TO, and that getting ANY psych label exposes one to a vast array of kinds of harm, and that there are MANY other approaches that do NOT involve pathologizing or drugging and that have few or no risks and are shown to be effective. I would like to know which person or people at MIA are currently in charge of overseeing such things, and I beg MIA yet again to stop helping with the reification of these labels!
Julie, so glad you are conveying this important message and glad your parents were so clear-sighted. I had an email address for you but cannot find it now and would like to send you a private message. Can you please email me, or if you don’t have my email address, then — though I usually avoid Facebook messenger consistently — please send me your email address through a Facebook message. Thank you.
Peter Gotzsche, you are so courageous and have so much integrity! It is appalling what Cochrane did to you, and it does show how corrupt and dishonest they have become. I am thrilled to hear about your new Institute and wish you all the best with it! When you have a moment, please email me about an idea I have for a very simple and potentially very powerful thing your Institute could do.
Thank you for writing this. I assume you have not seen my “Diagnosisgate” article about how Allen Frances the very year after his DSM-IV was published (so that he was the world’s most powerful psychiatrist) secretly joined with two other psychiatrists to earn about half a million dollars from Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of the evil Johnson & Johnson (the company that knowingly sold baby powder filled with talc and asbestos, which caused deaths due to ovarian cancer and heaven knows what else), to produce a “practice guideline” that would help Janssen promote the extremely dangerous drug Risperdal. You can see the article at http://www.oa.uottawa.ca/journals/aporia/articles/2015_01/commentary.pdf
What stunning writing about your brave and inspiring approach to getting your diagnosis removed from your records, Krista! I am so glad to see the phenomenally positive responses you are getting here! Clearly, people NEED what you have to offer!
This book so richly deserves to be published! Don’s work and your work, Irit, have changed so many people’s lives for the better. All gratitude to you both.
Since Bipolar Disorder, like virtually everything in the three or four most recent editions of the DSM, lacks scientific grounding, lacks even interrater reliability and stability and therefore cannot have validity, a more appropriate question to headline this article might have been “Can ANYONE ‘Have’ ‘Bipolar Disorder’?” Although the author makes some crucial and interesting and helpful points, in troubling ways she reifies the notion that Bipolar Disorder for anyone is a valid or helpful and not harmful category.
Treating “bipolar disorder” throughout this essay as though it were real is alarming!
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Great article, Peter Simons! And I LOVE so many of the comments here from sam plover, lcostanzo, and steve mccrea, among others!
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Readers of this essay might find my latest one of interest. It is just up today at https://www.madintheuk.com/2021/01/dont-believe-everything-you-read-words-matter-desperately/
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Steve McCrea, Sam Plover, and lcostanzo, I am so glad that you like the idea of the brochure. I have a lot on my plate right now, but if I did set up a gofundme page to raise the few thousand dollars that would be needed to create the brochure, write the text, get artwork created, and pay for a website and domain name to “house” the brochure, can each of you please write to me through my paulajcaplan.net website, sending me your email addresses if I don’t have them, and I will let you know once the link is up. It would be great if you could help spread the word, because I cannot do it through MIA, so if you know anyone else who might chip in (donations will be tax deductible), please ask them, too, to contact me and send me their email addresses. I will post about it on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, too. It’s so good to feel so supported. And I really think this little project could have considerable impact, because people can do a lot if they have the right information.
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It is wonderful that in Peter Simons’ article he writes about the wonderful Power Threat Meaning framework (though he mistakenly described it as a diagnostic system) created by Dr. Lucy Johnstone.
However, please note the following:
Re the reference to people who are now criticizing the DSM as “major figures in psychiatry, such as Allen Frances, the chair of the fourth edition Task Force and a key figure in the creation of modern psychiatric diagnoses, and Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 to 2015,” and later to “two of the biggest names in psychiatry, Thomas Insel and Allen Frances.”
PLEASE NOTE:
(1)Insel uttered not a peep against the DSM until years into his tenure at NIMH, after overseeing the giving of grants for research based on DSM categories. Did Insel suddenly realize how bad it was at that late moment? Insel’s credibility must be challenged, given that when trashing the DSM, he proposed the hugely expensive (and ultimately fruitless, as Insel admits now that it is too late) RDoC, which was based on the biological/medicalized model of so-called “mental illness.” Where is the heroism in that?
(2) Relevant to the mentions of Allen Frances, while royally trashing DSM-5, Frances has consistently and falsely claimed that HIS DSM-IV was “scrupulously scientific.” A great many people have shown that nothing could be farther from the truth about the DSM-IV. Readers would be helped by knowing to take whatever Frances says with a grain of salt (or a ton of salt), given that he so blatantly misrepresents what he did with DSM-IV (as documented, often with quotations directly from Frances himself, in https://www.amazon.com/They-Youre-Crazy-Paula-Caplan/dp/0201488329/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KTW5B3UVU8WU&dchild=1&keywords=they+say+you%27re+crazy&qid=1609862207&sprefix=They+Say+You%27re+Crazy%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1
(3) Also relevant is that Gary Greenberg, in his excellent, The Book of Woe, as in his article in Wired magazine, reported his conversation with Frances in which Frances acknowledged freely that psychiatric diagnosis “is bullshit.” In light of this, it makes no sense to consider Frances as a reliable authority in the light of Frances both claiming that his DSM was scientific and admitting that psychiatric diagnosis is bullshit. (4)Further of relevance is Frances’s key role in the biggest conflict of interest scandal in the history of the modern mental health system, which has actually been written about here in MIA https://www.madinamerica.com/2015/10/diagnosisgate-a-major-media-blackout-mystery/ as well as initially in https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ottawa/index.php/aporia/article/view/3486 This scandal resulted in the pseudoscientific and clearly false but vigorous marketing campaign Frances and two colleagues designed — and were paid nearly $1 million for by Jansen (of Johnson & Johnson) — to sell the exceedingly dangerous drug Risperdal. This omission is all the more disturbing, given the extensive inclusion in this article of Frances daring to attack the APA for ITS conflict of interest in selling the DSM-5. (Simons writes: “Frances also called out a massive financial conflict of interest—the DSM is the APA’s biggest money-maker since every professional in the mental health field must purchase the expensive, massive manual each time it is updated in order to stay abreast of the newest diagnoses and criteria changes.”) Yet Frances breathes not a word about such a conflict of interest during the many years he was heading the DSM-IV Task Force. It’s not believable that Frances somehow evaded his own conflict of interest when he was in that role. Does anyone believe that Frances suddenly, as soon as DSM-5 was in the works, was struck by the realization that there was such a conflict of interest and that he had been in that very position as head of DSM-IV? And given Frances’s scandalous conduct with the Risperdal conflict of interest, he certainly should not be assumed to speak from expertise and from the integrity that warrants paying attention when he calls out someone else’s conflict of interest.
People who would like to read my future essays may want to friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, where I will be announcing my publications, or on my Authors Guild website, which is paulajcaplan.net, since I no longer write for MadInAmerica.
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Lcostanzo, your kind words mean the world to me — and I am sure also to Peter and Steve. This is what we hope will happen increasingly if we (this includes you) all keep trying to get the truth out. What is so tragic is that most people who turn to the System for help don’t even have enough of the facts to know what questions to ask or how/when to challenge what some professional says. I have long wanted to get a small grant to put together a brochure that would summarize some of the crucial info and have a list of questions to ask/things to consider when seeing a mental health professional AND some alternatives to seeing professionals…and then make it available at no cost online for people to download.
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Thank you for the kind words, Sam Plover! And you are so right to say the diagnosis itself constitutes iatrogenic harm!
To l_e_cox, I want to say a couple of things. One is that the diagnosis is THE FOUNDATION STONE of everything bad in the mental health system. It is getting someone labeled “mentally ill” that makes it possible for the professionals to do almost anything to the person in the name of “treatment.” And although some of the professionals may be guilty of intent to harm, in a way what I find more disturbing is that the vast majority actually think they are helping…and are so invested in seeing themselves as helpful and caring that they are not open to seeing when the truth is that they are causing harm (so they think things like, “She just needs to be on a higher dose of meds” or “Maybe I gave her the wrong label, and she is not bipolar but is schizoaffective, and thus I should stop doing X and do Y instead).
Incidentally, for those who want to keep up with my essays in the future, I will not be writing for MadInAmerica, but I will announce and/or post my work at paulajcaplan.net and on my Facebook and Twitter and Instagram pages.
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I cannot see where to reply to jonathanledlarsen’s last comment, so I will do it here. I was not saying that I had tried to find out where to file complaints about harm from psych drugs. That is totally different. I was saying that I had tried to find out from the ICD people where to file complaints about harm from PSYCH DIAGNOSIS! Everything bad in the mental health system starts with diagnosis, since the diagnoses have no scientific validity, and they so often cause vast harm. But neither the WHO (re ICD) nor the APA (re DSM) has the least concern about the damage that their diagnoses cause. They have made that very clear. I think it is crucial not to write as though the only harm that comes from psych diagnosis is what psych drugs do. If you go to psychdiagnosis.weebly.com, you can see a number of very brief videos that are about various kinds of harm that all started with psych diagnoses. They are devastating. Please help spread the word. In addition, this might possibly be of some interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y It is a lecture about this with some performance.
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Jonathanledlarsen, Steve McCrea is right when he says (below) that the ICD people try very hard to coordinate with the DSM people, and the ICD psychiatry section differs very little from the DSM. However, when you say that the ICD is not commercial, well, I tried to find out what they do with their profits from sale of the ICD, and they would not even reply to the question. I also asked them what is the route for people to file claims when they have been harmed by use of the psych labels in the ICD, and they did not reply to that either. We do know that Allen Frances’s DSM-IV brought in more than $100 million in sales, and there is no evidence that they spent a single penny of that money to redress any of the harm done by the labels in their manual. In fact, they dismissed with no attention to the merits the nine ethics complaints we filed about that harm. Not surprising.
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Glad you wrote this essay, Megan! A few notes:
(1)My first book was about the importance of women’s friendships with each other and what a misogynist society does to try to set us up against each other. It is https://www.amazon.com/Between-women-Lowering-Paula-Caplan/dp/0920510205/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=Between+women:+Lowering+the+barriers&qid=1554487600&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=15dcf99d1d073ab58bfe4dd940563396&language=en_US
(2)My most recent book is about military veterans and how isolated they often are from their wider communities. https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US A major point of that book is that instead of sending vets to therapists who DIAGNOSE them as mentally ill with “PTSD” (which is, yes, in the DSM) and put them on drugs and say they will never get “well,” we should be telling them that the traumas of war, military rape, racism and homophobia in the military, etc., are upsetting, and that is a deeply human reaction, not a disorder, and I hosted a conference at Harvard in 2011 at which the more than two dozen NONPATHOLOGIZING, EFFECTIVE ways to help reduce their suffering were presented. Each of these is shown at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51E99E866B9D735E in a video a few minutes long. They may seem too “easy” and ineffective because they are not part of the medical model of reducing suffering. But they work powerfully!
(3)It is helpful to have a brief list of guidelines that tell how to distinguish someone from “just being angry” to actually being emotionally/psychologically abusive. That list is in the preface of this version of another book, which is https://amzn.to/3apBeTR
Finally, I have been touched to receive many messages from readers of Mad In America saying kind things about my essays, so I want to mention that I will no longer be writing essays for MIA. People interested in keeping up with my essays can go to the home page of paulajcaplan.net, where I will post links to new essays I write, and to the blog page of that same site, where I will post many of my essays. I am invited to publish on two other wonderful sites, and if I do that, I will post that information at paulajcaplan.net also.
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Hello, Evanhaar,
I was supposed to write a series of articles for MadInAmerica but will not now be doing that. I appreciate your interest in my essays. The closest I got to a series was the two-part essay about suicidal thoughts and behavior being pathologized and what to do instead, so both of those were published on MIA. If you are asking if one can sign up for my blog on my Authors Guild website at paulajcaplan.net, I actually don’t know the answer to that. It is so recently that the matter of publishing primarily on my own website (and I am exploring the possibility of publishing on a couple of other sites whose editors have kindly invited me) that I will need to check with the Authors Guild to see if there is a way for people to sign up to be notified when I post a new essay. Again, it is kind of you to care about this work. If you want to send me an email through my website, I will have your email address and can let you know what I find out.
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Hello, Someone Else,
I have greatly appreciated your comments on essays I have written here and on other people’s essays. I don’t know who you are, but I wanted to invite you to contact me (anonymously if you wish) via my Authors Guild website, which is paulajcaplan.net I will no longer be writing essays for MadInAmerica but will from time to time be posting my essays on my own website (there is a Blog section) and have been invited to post them elsewhere. I would love to continue to learn from you.
Paula
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This is such important work … and beautifully reported by Peter Simons. Thank you, Peter.
What a shame that even in the context of doing such important work, the authors (according to Peter) wrote that outcomes for people with “severe mental illness” have worsened over the last 50 years and that people with schizophrenia continue to die up to 25 years younger than do their peers.
So they are trying to make some important steps forward, yet even they erroneously use the terms “severe mental illness” and “schizophrenia” as though they were clearly defined, scientifically supported, and innocuous constructs. They most definitely are not! I continue to marvel at how so many otherwise progressive thinkers in this field either actively use such terms in ways that reify them, present them as though they were valid and as though they were not damaging terms that have destroyed people’s lives. Why do people think that is the case?
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THANK YOU for writing this! Decades ago when I wrote the book, The Myth of Women’s Masochism, this was just the kind of reason I wrote it! And as you show, it is still all too relevant. It still sickens me when I hear an abuse victim described as having “brought it on herself, because she needs to suffer.” And if she says she hates the suffering and the fear, the traditional mental health professional (and too often, family and friends who are misguided) reply, “Well, if she doesn’t consciously enjoy it, then obviously UNCONSCIOUSLY she does, or it wouldn’t happen.” So the abuser is totally absolved of responsibility. If you haven’t read Dr. Lenore Walker’s classic book, The Battered Woman, do not miss it! And in my most recent edition of The Myth of Women’s Masochism, I have a section in the new preface about emotional/psychological/verbal abuse and how it is even more insidious than physical abuse because it doesn’t leave visible evidence and because it is too easily dismissed as “He was just kidding” and “You are way too sensitive,” so I include guidelines about how to recognize this kind of abuse.
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Patrick, some important writing you’ve done in this article! Just a few comments:
(1)Biederman was massively helped in his diagnosing and drugging of children by Johnson & Johnson working with Allen Frances. See https://www.madinamerica.com/2015/10/diagnosisgate-a-major-media-blackout-mystery/
(2)You mention women taking hormone “replacement therapy” as though it were a healthy thing. You seem not to be aware that taking that kind of hormone has been extremely dangerous for huge numbers of women. I hope you can perhaps edit out that bit of your article so as not to mislead women.
(3)I wish you had addressed the fact that “ADHD” — see the brilliant work especially by Dr. David Cohen — is an utterly unscientific entity. So all these people who say they studied treatments for “ADHD” are talking about an entity that has no validity.
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Sam Plover, you are so right!
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Just want to mention these things: (1)I have heard from a huge number of people (including but not limited to military veterans) who have been “informed” by therapists: “You have PTSD. And you always will.” When people have — as someone suggested in a comment — given themselves that label, it is usually because (A)They are misinformed and believe it is a synonym for “I have been traumatized,” and no one has explained to them that they are calling themselves “mentally ill” and all the dangers that can follow from that….or (B)There are benefits or “services” (some of which are actually harmful to them, but they don’t know that until they try) that they want and deserve but cannot get unless they agree to accept a psychiatric label. For people in the latter group, I usually say, “I wish I could change the system so it wouldn’t be necessary to accept a label to get what you want. But at the very least, I want you to understand the huge array of risks of harm to which you may or will be exposed once you get just about any psychiatric label. However, I understand that you want the benefits or services that accepting the label will get you. So it’s your decision, but if you decide to accept a psychiatric label, just know deep in your heart that you are not ‘mentally ill,’ not ‘crazy.'”
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I have gotten rather lost in the extremely lengthy comments about who makes laws, and I have no expertise about laws outside the U.S. But a major reason I have been pushing for Congressional Hearing about psych diagnosis for decades is that that would help expose why FEDERAL legislation for oversight is needed.
Please everyone go to this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=21s and sign and share the petition calling for Congressional hearings about psych diagnosis.
Then please everyone go to this link https://www.change.org/p/boycott-the-dsm-a-human-rights-issue/dashboard?source_location=user_profile_started and sign and share the petition calling for a boycott of the DSM.
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Please everyone go to this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=21s and sign and share the petition calling for Congressional hearings about psych diagnosis.
Then please everyone go to this link https://www.change.org/p/boycott-the-dsm-a-human-rights-issue/dashboard?source_location=user_profile_started and sign and share the petition calling for a boycott of the DSM.
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I have gotten rather lost in the extremely lengthy comments about who makes laws, and I have no expertise about laws outside the U.S. But a major reason I have been pushing for Congressional Hearing about psych diagnosis for decades is that that would help expose why FEDERAL legislation for oversight is needed.
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To everyone! One thing you can do is go to http://www.psychdiagnosis.weebly.com and watch the videos there and read the various entries under Solutions.
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Sam Plover, which of my videos did you send to your sons? I hope they are helpful. Have you seen this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=21s I love what you aid to your sons about your grandchildren! So important to make these efforts!
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Lametamor, I hope you will make happen what you say should happen. I have been working on this in a rather exhausting variety of ways since the late 1980s and am working on other things IN ADDITION now and have MAJOR family responsibilities. So I can only do so much, and that includes responding to comments.
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Lametamor, sorry if I don’t respond as often as you post here. But perhaps you missed what I posted about the various solutions suggested at psychdiagnosis.weebly.com and the request I made about the two petitions. Hope you will have a look.
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To Someone Else, I thank you for your comment and totally agree that reducing the massive drugging of trauma survivors — and it doesn’t happen only at the VA but in many other places! — would reduce suicides.
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Sam Plover, I am very touched by your kind words. Thank you.
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TO EVERYONE,
CAN YOU HELP? I had long ago posted two petitions on change.org I cannot find the links and want to post them here. One is called Call for Congressional Hearings about Psychiatric Diagnosis. The other is Boycott the DSM or Boycott Psychiatric Diagnosis. If anyone can find these and figure out why I cannot find them, please let me know! And if you can post the links here, I hope everyone will sign and share them!
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Thank you for the kind words, Rosalee Dr.
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Lametamor, people are busy, and it can be very hard to follow and try to keep up with extremely lengthy and complicated comments. I do the best I can, given the commitments I have.
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Lametamor, which issues are you asking about pushing in Congress? Do you mean my long-standing attempts (see psychdiagnosis.weebly.com) to get Congressional hearings about psych diagnosis or something else? I don’t know of anyone else trying to get such hearings.
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Audrey, the VAST majority of people who hear you (as you CAREFULLY say) remark that you “were given diagnosis X” will hear it as “Audrey HAS X mental illness.” What I urge you to do is to say instead, “I was given Diagnosis X, which has absolutely NO scientific basis or validity, that is, it doesn’t actually exist, and then I want you to hear the details of the hell I went through, all of which was “justified” on the basis of that diagnosis. And let me tell you in ordinary and accurate words what was REALLY happening to me at that time.” It is a way for you not just to speak your truth but to make sure people hear it instead of horribly misconstruing it and thus not seeing YOU. It is also a way to make them stop and think when they hear other such labels. Warmly, Paula
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Krista Hartmann, you are too kind! Thank you. I hope you are doing well, and I wish you all the best.
Paula
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Lametamor, for suggestions about forms of activism about psych diagnosis, please see psychdiagnosis.weebly.com
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Thank you so much, Magdalene! I agree it is great they are doing this!
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Dear Joanna,
The press release was sent to me in an email, so I suggest you write to the APA’s press office and request a copy. Would love to hear the results of your research when it is completed. So glad you are doing this!
Warmly,
Paula
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Sadie and Lucy, my earlier article in MIA, “Is COVID-19 Making Everybody Crazy?” https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/07/covid-19-making-everybody-crazy/ (of course, the answer is “Upset, yes, but mentally ill, no”) is a good pair with this one. One of the points I made was that calling people’s upset “mental health problems” is WRONG and DANGEROUS precisely because it conveys to many people that “mental health problems=psych disorders.” Instead, we should use old-fashioned, accurate terms for these feelings, like “scared,” “angry,” “disoriented,” “hopeless,” “grieving,” etc.
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https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/07/covid-19-making-everybody-crazy/ Guess you missed this.
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CODA to my essay:
The American Psychiatric Association issued a press release on Wednesday, in which they crowed about the House of Representatives’ Veterans Committee removing from its Veteran Suicide Prevention legislation the permission for psychologists at the VA to prescribe psychiatric drugs. They tried to make this seem like a good move on the grounds that so many veterans kill themselves and need excellent mental health care, which, they believe, comes from psychiatrists but not from psychologists being able to prescribe drugs. Though I personally am in favor of having the smallest number of people in ANY discipline prescribe psychiatric drugs — including because so many such drugs increase suicide rates — it is important to note that psychiatrists have no evidence that their drug prescriptions are any more responsible than those of psychologists, nor that they do more careful follow-up of patients they put on drugs than would psychologists.
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Nijinsky, what a nightmare was your encounter with those people! I wonder if contacting a warm line would have been more helpful — I am guessing it would!
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Rebel, I am so sorry to hear what you went through. That never should have been done to you.
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Someone Else, good for you for refusing to stigmatize people!
Here is a link to some of what the APA is spouting about Black people — and other people of color “needing” more “mental health care.” https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/cultural-competency/education/mental-health-facts
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Sam, you are so right about the importance of these various forms of connection. They mean the world.
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YES, dfk!
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Beokay, your point is excellent. My heart goes out to you.
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I appreciate your comment, Sam Plover! I, too, wish you had known then what you know now. That is why we need to keep working to spread the word!
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Robert Nikkel, thank you so much for your kind words!
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Boans, you can find the references you asked for in this article: Caplan, Paula J. (2005) Sex bias in psychiatric diagnosis and the courts. In Wendy Chan, Dorothy Chunn, & Robert Menzies (Eds.), Women, mental disorder, and the law. London: Cavendish, pp. 115-26. I don’t have the chapter in my computer, but your local library can no doubt order it via interlibrary loan if they don’t have the book itself.
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Sam Ruck, I will reply to your email when I get enough time, I assure you.
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Dear “Someone Else”:
You can contact me directly and send me your email address through paulajcaplan.net When I get some time, I am wanting to do a zoom call for people interested in this issue to see what kinds of action to take. Fiddling a bit with the DSM will do no good — the book must be thrown out, which begins with all of us making the truth about it known.
Also, you might be interested in the annual “Battered Mothers Custody” conference, which you can learn about at https://www.batteredmotherscustodyconference.org
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Dear Mr. Ruck,
Your message is heartbreaking. Since I know nothing about you except what you wrote here, I was trying to think of what kinds of things people who said similar things were feeling was preventing them from having hope for a better life…or a better life, and two that come to mind right away are people who were in miserable or even abusive marriages but whose religion forbid divorce and people whose sexual orientation or gender identity led their religions to cast them out and call them sinners. Many of the latter found a film called “For the Bible Tells Me So” to be immensely helpful. There are people in most religious denominations who are helpful for people who want to get a divorce or who have sexual orientations or gender identities that are condemned by the religion’s leadership. It may be that religion is not what is preventing you from doing what would make your life better. If you are inclined to say more, please do, and I will see if I can think of anything that might be of use to you.
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Peter Simons, I am a HUGE admirer of your work, and there is so much of great interest in this article. I would like to point out some things I wish had been included — any chance it could be added?. It goes like this: Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that, like all DSM diagnoses, “Autism” has no scientific validation, so it should simply never be used. Instead, people trying to help a child or adult who is struggling (or who has been identified as “a problem”) should carefully try to get to know as much as possible about the person, who considers the person problematic, does the person consider themselves to need help and if so, what kind of help, what HAS been helpful (if anything) and what HAS made things worse, etc. etc.
Another thing is about something you wrote, which was, “for every 100 toddlers who screen positive for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), only about 18 of them will go on to receive a diagnosis. The other 82 toddlers will be referred out for further assessment, told that they “may” have ASD, and potentially be exposed to drugs such as antipsychotics (often used for behavioral control in children with autism), all without even meeting the criteria for an ASD diagnosis.” That helps reify “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” which also is not a scientifically supported category. That quotation does, however, go a long way toward showing how pointless the whole endeavor is — that is, most of the toddlers who appear to have “Autism Spectrum Disorder” on the screening instrument never even get the ASD diagnosis, but the whole endeavor is also dangerous, because it greases the skids, getting huge numbers of kids into the traditional mental health system, where they may miraculously get a helpful therapist and not get put on harmful drugs but most likely will suffer great harm.
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I just now read some of the later comments and find it frightening that people are saying Fauci is lying or just wants to control people! I hope you will look at the GOOD science that proves that wearing masks and social distancing really do reduce the spread. Have a look, PLEASE, at the areas where covid increased when masks and social distancing were NOT used and the areas where covid decreased when they were used. I don’t want people reading comments after my article to end up believing that covid is all a hoax and a plot! People are dying at a scary rate from this. We cannot render them and their loved ones invisible, please!
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Audrey, I am happy for you that you found your way so well without the mental health system. However, I am saddened that you continue to use psychiatric terms like “Bipolar Disorder” and “Complex PTSD” instead of using this essay as a chance to teach others that psychiatric diagnoses have NO scientific basis and cause massive harm of a vast array of types. I guess someone told you that you “have” “Complex PTSD,” but what you really “have” is your own way of having reacted to and tried to cope with the trauma you experienced. You do not need to use such a damaging system’s language to refer to yourself. I urge you to use ordinary words that will help you stop pathologizing yourself and others who have been traumatized. I wish you well.
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Peter, like so much of your work, this is an important article. I agree with Oldhead, though, that to report the 0.5% statistic is a good start, but then to continue on to say what the rest of a totally in-valid entity called “schizophrenia” consists of undercuts the quotation marks used around the term in the headline. It makes it seem suddenly as though “schizophrenia” were a real entity BUT that only a tiny bit of it is accounted for by genetics. In fact, NO PERCENT can be accounted for by anything, since it has no scientific basis supporting the claim that it is a real entity…I hope people will read Robert Whitaker’s book, Mad In America, and Jeffrey Poland’s chapter called “Bias and schizophrenia” in the book Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis. These make it clear that the category itself is a godawful mess. And we know it does massive harm.
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Peter, this is SUCH an important article and should make everyone stop and think before accepting claims to “prove” connections between emotions or thoughts and the brain! In our book, my co-author (an HONEST neuroscientist!) and I have a whole chapter about this! The book is short and very accessibly written, by the way. https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Critically-about-Research-Gender/dp/0205579884/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=53MOHQIZFIJ&keywords=thinking+critically+about+research+on+sex+and+gender&qid=1554487275&s=gateway&sprefix=Thinking+Critically+about+Research,aps,115&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=f7e069369609c5b0095adc0c20cf1c49&language=en_US
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This is about a post way up the line. I wanted to respond to Steve McCrea’s comment that terms like “narcissistic” are different from “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” I TOTALLY agree! Nearly every head of every DSM Task Force and nearly every president of its publisher, the American Psychiatric Association, which is officially registered as a lobby group, has either said nothing publicly about the DSM or has proclaimed that psych diagnosis is scientific! Nothing could be further from the truth. Steve is right that terms like “narcissistic” have long been used by the novelists, the poets, and ordinary people to describe people who are totally self-absorbed, etc. But to use a term like “NPD” that comes from the DSM is to become complicit with the DSM authors and marketers and profiteers who benefit from the false claim that such labels represent scientifically validated entities…and from further false claims that, because they “are” scientific, therefore whatever “treatments” they recommend inevitably follow from the diagnostic label.
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Thank you so much, Rosalee and madmother13!
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I in fact wrote exactly about why it is wrong/bad to call Trump “mentally ill” and why the whole enterprise of psych diagnosis is unscientific and harmful in the article (which I guess Sera missed) I wrote about this for Huffington Post well over three years ago. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-truth-about-trump-and-psychiatric-diagnosis-the_b_58abb3b0e4b0417c4066c22b?guccounter=2
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Diana, Michael Enright interviewed me when I lived in Canada (I am a Canadian and a U.S, citizen), and if you write to him, please let him know I would be happy to speak with him again if he wishes.
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Anyone who believes Trump is not dangerous can start by reading about his history, which is available online in many reliable places. And of course there’s the Access Hollywood tape of him describing his sexual assaults, but I thought everyone already knew about that.
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Berserk, I hope you will cease imputing things to me that I did not write and that are offensive.
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Right, Steve!
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I had stopped reading the comments to this post when it looked like they were slowing down, so I was surprised to check in just now and see how many more were posted. I haven’t yet read them all and am also surprised to see how many veer WAY away from the subject of my article but will try at least to read the relevant ones. However, I need to point out a libelous statement I noticed by someone who won’t use their real name but signs on as “Berserk.” That person alleged, among other offensive and totally uninformed comments, that I was paid to be a consultant on DSM-IV. That is completely untrue, and the idea that I did it for money is libelous. If “Berserk” or anyone else is genuinely interested in why I agreed to be a consultant and stayed for two years (I hoped to have a role in encouraging their Task Force to be honest about the relevant research and to take steps to prevent harm from psychiatric diagnosis, and I resigned when it became clear that both were hopeless), as well as learning about how the DSM process looks from the inside, it’s all described in https://www.amazon.com/They-Youre-Crazy-Paula-Caplan/dp/0201488329/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AQJEHVRUMWX6&dchild=1&keywords=they+say+you%27re+crazy&qid=1592498360&sprefix=They+Say+You%27re%2Caps%2C127&sr=8-1
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Will, thank you for this extremely important article!
I have been terrified by discussion by media people and politicians who think it’s a good solution to replace police with “mental health professionals,” given the oppressive and even violent ways that the latter have treated people who are suffering. And Will, I agree that NONPATHOLOGIZING, NONCOERCIVE approaches are needed, but how do you think, in a practical way, anything can be done to make sure that groups calling themselves “mental health advocates” and such but that are Big Pharma-funded and focus on labeling don’t increase their access to and power over those who are suffering? What steps can be taken to make sure that the compassionate groups and individuals are the ones who are called when someone is frightened and/or menacing?
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Thank you for this important article, which I hope people will read with Dr. Lauren Tenney’s recent, devastating article about electroshock that was also published in MadInAmerica!
I do wish that EVERYONE would stop calling it ECT, as the late Leonard Roy Frank — himself a victim of electroshock — used to plead with people to do, because, as he pointed out, the “T” stands for “therapy,” which is dead wrong for something that wipes out people’s memories, as they did to him. Also, to say “ECT” means not coming right out and saying “electroshock.” Even the “C” in “ECT” is a bit of whitewashing, since it stands for “convulsive,” which sounds more clinical and less horrible than “shock” or “seizures.” We can all help educate people about what this involves, and one of the ways to do this is always to call it “electroshock.” Make people hear those words and know what it is.
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Steve McCrea, I cannot see a way to REPLY to your comment, which was this:
Of course, that begs the question of how any person could be determined to “have a mental illness” when these “illnesses” are clearly subjective judgments about a person’s behavior or character, without any objective way to determine who does and doesn’t “have” these spurious “disorders.”
But I want to note that the term “beg the question” (which is a term of rhetoric) doesn’t mean “raises the question” (despite its mistaken use frequently) but actually means “avoids the point.” So I know what you mean is that this RAISES the question, and then I totally agree with your comment. 🙂
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So many lawyers who work within the Protection and Advocacy domains are goodhearted people. However, I have gotten NOWHERE when I have said to individual lawyers and to the heads of major organizations who try to protect the rights of people who are diagnosed with mental illness that “EVERYTHING bad begins with psych diagnosis, so instead of saying that your client ‘with mental illness’ deserves to have rights, you could save vastly more people if you filed a lawsuit about the false advertising of psych labels as scientific and failure of the APA and its DSM honchos to warn of the huge array of kinds of harm that all start with the diagnosis.”
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Right on, oldhead! Do I know you? I wish you and others would use your names, especially those of you who post such important things!
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So glad you wrote this, Jim Gottstein, and so glad that Evan has you trying so hard to help him. Is there no legal clinic (Harvard Law, for instance) that will take his case?
One other point — you said that you feel lucky that mistreatment by the system did not end up making you “mentally ill,” but I don’t know what that means, since that term is meaningless and so misused by the very system we despise. I assume you mean that mistreatment by the system can intensify and multiply the manifestations of a person’s suffering, yes? 🙂
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Very good list in this article, but I wish you had added that psychiatric diagnosis is utterly unscientific, rarely helpful (except for requirements for “services” the person might want and need), and appallingly harmful. https://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Youre-Crazy-Psychiatrists/dp/0201407582/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=They+Say+You%27re+Crazy&qid=1554486859&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=9114cba73496ff5f388235a3586c6299&language=en_US
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Dr. Lauren Tenney, thank you for another extremely important initiative that shows your usual brave, brilliant, scrupulously documented approach!
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I am so sorry about what you went through. You deserved to have people make you comfortable telling about your suffering a long, long time ago. It is tragic that that failed to happen. It is also tragic that people have given you psychiatric labels, and I hope you have not accepted them as either scientific (NO psych diagnostic label is scientific) or helpful or safe for you to have attached to your name. In fact, I know there are people who will read your brave article and be dismissive on the grounds that you “have” these various “disorders.” You don’t really “have” these made-up, unscientific entities. You have suffered in a number of ways and have coped in a number of ways, and finding out what is helpful in alleviating your suffering is what really matters. Diagnoses tend to get in the way of that. And they expose everyone who is diagnosed to a vast array of kinds of harm. Wishing you all the best. You might want to have a look at https://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Youre-Crazy-Psychiatrists/dp/0201407582/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=They+Say+You%27re+Crazy&qid=1554486859&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=9114cba73496ff5f388235a3586c6299&language=en_US which you might find of some help.
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Thank you for this scrupulous study of the effects of neuroleptic or “antipsychotic” drugs on death rates. This is so important to have all this work carefully described and critiqued.
Happily, I note that you refer to people diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder rather than to “schizophrenics” and “people with bipolar disorder.”
Since I know you and I and many others agree that there are all sorts of horrible and dangerous reasons that people are given psychiatric diagnoses, I want to reread your article, considering what other thoughts would have come to mind if instead of calling people “seriously mentally ill” some other kinds of terms had been used.
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-truth-about-trump-and-psychiatric-diagnosis-the_b_58abb3b0e4b0417c4066c22b?guccounter=2
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Dr. Hickey, thank you once again for your scrupulous, incisive, brilliant presentations of the important truths in this whole, horrid field!
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Psychiatric diagnosis is the First Cause of EVERYTHING bad that ever happens in the mental health system. If they don’t diagnose you, they are not supposed to “treat” you, but once they give you any diagnosis, they can justify almost anything and be held blameless, on the grounds that it is “treatment.” More about that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=24s
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Magdalene, since it appears that you are an attorney and are asking why the law and legal systems have failed to scrutinize and curb the damage caused by the DSM, please contact me at paulajcaplan.net, because as a psychologist who has done a great deal of work in the legal system, I have been working and writing extensively on that very thing for decades. I assume you are not in the U.S. (you use the spelling “scrutinise”), and wherever you are located, I hope to hear from you.
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Miranda, this is a terrific article! I would like to add a few things.
(1)Even saying lots of people are experiencing “anxiety” and “depression” (whether psychiatrically labeled or not) can impede the path to feeling better. This is because both words are so vague and give little guidance toward how to cope. If anyone tells me they feel either of those, I ask what words they would use if they were NOT going to use those. The answers are far more helpful. What’s called “anxiety” is usually “fear,” and calling it that helps the person identify the fear’s source and set about figuring out how realistic the fear is and how to protect oneself. What’s called “depression” is used in a staggering array of ways, as David Cohen’s and David Jacob’s classic article about tests of “anti-depressants” shows, and it helps if one can recognize that they are feeling loneliness and isolation or helplessness or hopelessness or nostalgia or fearfulness.
(2)I urge EVERYONE to put quotation marks around every term ever used to pathologizes people. It’s a very important form of educating others and reminding ourselves that they have no scientific basis and therefore are usually useless and often VERY harmful.
(3)Since suicidal thoughts were mentioned, I want to say that I addressed this in my MIA webinar last week (which people can sign up to watch, including Bob Whitaker’s brilliant opening webinar and the ones that will follow), and good heavens, what could be more natural than thinking about suicide when death feels close to us (in our death-phobic and death-denying society) than in a long time?
(4)Miranda included this from some media coverage:“difficulty sleeping, changes in eating patterns, rapid changes in mood, inability to carry out required or necessary tasks, [and] self-medication using alcohol.” These were being used to signal “mental illness.” So somebody tell me, do we really want to believe that in the face of this pandemic and all the unknowns about it and the fact that death is its ultimate outcome, we should have NO new difficulties in eating, sleeping, emotions, carrying out tasks, and trying to find ways to help us calm down? So what IS the “normal” way we should all be coping?
Finally, I don’t think the word “grief” was mentioned here, but grief is something so many of us are feeling — grief that we cannot hug loved ones or help them in person, grief that we cannot go to the grocery store for potato chips even WITH a mask and gloves and not feel tense and watchful, grief about so much that is unavailable to us now, and perhaps grief that we are not handling this with as much serenity and resourcefulness as we would have hoped.
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Great essay! You are way ahead of your time! Since most people STILL don’t recognize that psych diagnosis is the first cause of everything bad in the mental health system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIQqRl94_Y&t=24s I wonder how many people will grasp the great importance of what you are saying…but I hope many will!
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Anthony Murray, I know that good lawyers for this kind of situation are few and far between. I urge you to read Jim Gottstein’s new, brilliant book, The Zyprexa Papers, because one thing he does is to lay out exactly how he tried to prevent a client from being forcibly drugged. And a lot of this applies also to being committed against one’s will. It might be helpful to you in trying to work with a lawyer who might do better by seeing what Jim Gottstein did. He is a great role model! Good luck to you.
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I second that, l_e_cox!!!!
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Thank you for the kind words, Sam Plover! And the points you make are right on the mark!
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Hi, Kindred Spirit,
I agree with you. In the article I wrote here, I didn’t spend much time on the kinds of things you are describing, because I have written so extensively about that elsewhere so many times, and this article was intended specifically to be a critique of a couple of pieces of research that function to cover up exactly the kinds of things you mention. So at one point I listed some of the real causes of veterans’ trauma, and I think you missed my mention of moral anguish in the above article (as just one of many causes of their trauma), but that is the term that came to me when I was writing my book https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US about veterans, before I had heard Jonathan Shay’s term “moral injury.” I like that he highlights the importance of the kinds of things you describe in your comment, but I continue to use my term “moral anguish,” because anguish is a less neat-and-clean term than injury, and anguish is what veterans themselves told me about.
I am glad you mentioned Veterans for Peace. I am a longtime Associate member of Veterans for Peace and winner of a Friend to Veterans Award from them, at least in part because I have for more than a decade been calling out the entities and individuals who keep trying to conceal the real causes of servicemembers’ and veterans’ trauma, including being in a war and being sexually assaulted in the military.
Thank you for writing.
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Hello, Someone Else,
If you will listen to the podcast again and look at the website at listentoaveteran.org you will see that we do NOT have veterans as listeners. Please note that the project is called Listen to a Veteran! We have nonveterans who are not therapists listen to veterans.
As for having listeners for people who were abused as children or adults, I hope you will set up listening sessions for them. My approach as described on the above website is easily used for listening to anyone who is suffering. I don’t arrange for listening sessions for anyone other than veterans or servicemembers or their loved ones, because I have no staff, no assistance of any kind, and no funding. But I encourage you to do as you suggest.
And yes, I certainly agree that all sorts of nonpathologizing approaches are the right things to use for people who are suffering in any way. The more than two dozen examples of such approaches can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51E99E866B9D735E from a conference I organized that is for veterans, but the approaches are useful for everyone. And I beg people, as noted in the podcast, to stop using terms like “art THERAPY” and “music THERAPY” and just call them art and music, etc.
Thank you for your comment.
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1Wayfarer, you are so right!
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Hello, Someone Else,
Thank you for the kind words. The link should be listentoaveteran.org I will ask that it be corrected in the above. Thank you for catching that.
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So glad to see the topic of this article. Dr. Phyllis Chesler indeed deserves massive praise and respect, and her book — which is not mentioned in Lucas’s article — WOMEN AND MADNESS — is THE pioneering classic of feminist critique of the mental health system and remains all too true today. So do her MANY other courageous books (do google her and see the vast array of important subjects).
And Chesler was one of the dynamic founders of the Association for Women in Psychology, which was an intensely activist organization whose activist roots are currently being revived — see awpsych.org and especially the information about its Activism Caucus.
The recently deceased Dr. Bonnie Burstow has also been a tireless and inventive critic of the traditional mental health system and deserves mention.
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This is a brilliant and courageous article! I so admire how bravely you are putting yourself out there and how skillfully you have pulled together so much relevant information! I will be amazed if you even hear back from Wilkie. He has ignored the letter I sent to him, even though I met him, he gave me his card, and he said to write to him.
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Amy Smith, thank you so much for pointing out this other cause of eating problems and so courageously doing it by telling your nightmare of a story!
Thanks, too, for pointing out that Jo’s name as co-author of this essay disappears when you go to print it! She MUST get credit!
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So glad to see this article. It’s something that’s been close to my heart for more than a decade. In my book,When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans, which was published in 2011 and won three top national awards for nonfiction. https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US
there is an entire chapter about “What the VA Is Doing and Why It’s Not Enough,” and Chapter 6 (much different in the revised version and more up-to-date) is all about the importance of JUST LISTENING to veterans and how anyone can do it. Readers might also want to check out listentoaveteran.org, especially the very brief video at the top of the page, where I describe what the listening sessions are, why/how I conceived of them, and a bit about outcomes. We have a lot of data on outcomes in addition to that. It would be great if the VA were to bring Listen to a Veteran! which is extremely simple and nonpathologizing and helpful to the VA. And it costs nothing. But so far, no VA people have been willing to bring this to their facility.
Our film about this, “Is Anybody Listening?” isanybodylisteningmovie.org was screened on Capitol Hill in D.C. and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, had 140 showings on PBS stations across the U.S., had many endorsements from highly respected veterans’ entities and veterans, and has won numerous awards.
Veterans interested in having a nonveteran (NOT a therapist, just a person!) listener or in learning more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via listentoaveteran.org
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Totally agree with you, Sam Plover!
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Irit Shimrat, I appreciate your kind words!
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How kind of you, Jim! It was a joy to read Jim Gottstein’s book and to write about it. I hope you will read it. It is remarkable and so powerful. And please do help spread the word! Thank you.
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Hughmass, it is heartbreaking to hear what the VA and the state hospital put you through. Occasionally I hear of someone who got real help from the VA, but is far more often that I hear nightmarish stories like yours. You deserved so much better! I invite you and other veterans to go to listentoaveteran.org and see if you are interested in having a totally private, nonjudgmental, free listening session from our Listen to a Veteran! Program.
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Thank you, Patrick Hahn, for this thoughtful and important article! If people are interested in empirical research that is a documentation of the vast extent of mother-blame, I refer them to:
Caplan, Paula J., & Hall-McCorquodale, Ian. Mother-blaming in major clinical journals. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 55, 1985, 345 353.
Caplan, Paula J. & Hall-McCorquodale, Ian. The scapegoating of mothers: A call for change. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 55, 1985, 610 613.
I followed this research with a wider-ranging book about mother blame, https://www.amazon.com/New-Dont-Blame-Mother-Mother-Daughter/dp/0415926300/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1L22HU54YO9O5&keywords=the+new+don%27t+blame+mother&qid=1555285317&s=gateway&sprefix=THE+NEW+Don%27t+Blame,aps,112&sr=8-1-spell&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=ebbdc31e3728055aed59ab0b60631dc4&language=en_US in which, among much else, I address the myth of the schizophrenogenic mother.
Later, I wrote:
Caplan, Paula J. (2007). Mocking Mom: Joke or hate speech? RejectedLettersToTheEditor.com, Vol. 1, No. 4. http://rejectedletterstotheeditor.com/ June 23.
And as for the whole, absurd and dangerous concept of “schizophrenia” itself, you’ll find this insider’s story about how all psychiatric diagnostic categories are invented and then falsely claimed to be scientific in https://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Youre-Crazy-Psychiatrists/dp/0201407582/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=They+Say+You%27re+Crazy&qid=1554486859&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=9114cba73496ff5f388235a3586c6299&language=en_US
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Thank you, Don, for this wonderful essay about Bonnie.
I had heard about Bonnie Burstow — and Don Weitz — many decades ago and found the revolutionary work that each of them did individually and together to be stunning, courageous, and inventive. Over the years, Bonnie and I were in touch about the work, and I was always struck by how hard she worked, how varied were the kinds of ideas she had, how knowledgeable she was, how she put together the pieces of information in revelatory ways, how she combined intelligence with compassion, how her determination to make a better world never flagged. With regard to this last matter, we rarely communicated with each other, for no reason other than that both of us were busy, but awhile back, I called her after learning that she was struggling with terrifying vision problems. I made some suggestions, but she explained there were reasons she could not try them. I was thinking how scary and difficult it must be to try to continue working, as she had said she was doing, while losing one’s sight. And then after awhile, I learned that she had written a novel! A woman with a passion to reduce human suffering and who worked to do that in so many ways — writing nonfiction articles and books, writing a novel, and creating an anti psychiatry scholarship — there has never been anyone like Bonnie Burstow. The world is impoverished by her death but forever enriched by her spirit and her work, which will live on.
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Bob Nikkel, what a terrifically important, powerful essay! I wish that everyone everywhere could read this! I will post it right now!
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Terrific article, Miranda Spencer!
The following quotations from your article so clearly suggest that she has suffered a lot from being in a “mental health facility” and from being on psychiatric drugs and/or having dosages changed, not from having a “mental illness”:
“The conservatorship continues, her manager told the Post, because earlier this year she had been struggling to adjust to changes in her medication regimen and became ‘rattled and destabilized.’
“Having defended the conservatorship, the Post article then turned its attention to the #FreeBritney movement. In this arena, noted TMZ in one of its articles, Spears did have a voice. “There are indications that Spears herself craves more freedom. At the hearing, she reportedly told a judge that ‘her father . . . committed her to a mental facility a month ago against her will and also forced her to take drugs.”
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Just repeating here what Irit Shimrat wrote in her comment above, because it is just what I was going to write!! She wrote:
They write, “The DSM is not simply a scientific manual, but a social laboratory where political, sociological, ethical and psychological issues are discussed and confronted.”
imho, this article could have been replaced (and readers’ time thus not wasted), by the sentence “The DSM is not a scientific manual.”
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Bob and Derek, great work in pulling together these various sources of data.
(1) As you know, in my 2011 book, When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans, https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US I spent three entire chapters writing about this very thing…and much more. Chapter 3 includes detailed analysis of the problems with not only “PTSD” but other psychiatric labels being harmfully applied to servicemembers and veterans whose deeply human reactions to war trauma, military rape trauma, and so on were thereby pathologized and about the harmful use of psych drugs as a result of that pathologizing; Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, are about what the military has been doing and “why it’s not enough” and what the VA has been doing and “why it’s not enough.” In Chapters 4 and 5, I track the DOD’s and VA’s press releases, showing a pattern of their expressions of dismay about suicide rates, bewilderment about their causes (usually avoiding any mention of numbers of deployments, the moral anguish coming from lies they had been told about how the military was being used and what was really happening, trauma from participating in or witnessing acts of war, and military sexual assault), and claims that they were introducing new initiatives to try to prevent suicides…followed by similar press releases with “new approaches” and continuing avoidance of real causes the next time. A long time ago, I met with the two top people in the Army who were then in charge of what they called suicide prevention, and they said their two main initiatives were to emphasize that “Army strong” includes acknowledging when one needs help and trying to get people more “mental health care” sooner. They were clearly totally uninterested in the serious problems I pointed out (politely) about each.
(2) Many years ago, Col. (Ret.) David Sutherland and I wrote an article about the four main reasons veterans kill themselves, and two of the reasons were those you mention: the diagnosing of them as mentally ill and the use of psych drugs. (Sutherland, Col. (Ret.) David, and Caplan, Paula J. (2013). Unseen wounds. Philadelphia Inquirer. http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20130210_Unseen_wounds.html )
(3)The long-famous “22 veterans commit suicide every day” statistic was based on VA data from only 21 states, not including California and Texas, whose veteran populations are huge. It would be good to find out — if it is in fact possible to do so — whether the VA’s current claim of “20 a day” is based on all states reporting, as well as how they defined “suicide,” since sometimes causes of death are mistakenly applied as cover-ups.
(4)A great addition to your article would be description of what truly does help, and so I refer you and your readers to the Listen to a Veteran! Project, which has definitely been shown to reduce veterans’ isolation, which is of course a major cause of suicide. listentoaveteran.org This is a completely free service, in which a veteran from any era (combat or noncombat, woman or man) is paired with a nonveteran who is NOT a therapist and who truly JUST listens with their whole heart to whatever the veterans wants to say. Data from a Harvard Kennedy School study and subsequent data have shown these simple, private, unrecorded sessions to be stunningly helpful for the veterans and life-changing for the nonveteran listeners. I also refer you to the 28 nonpathologizing, non drug, low-risk or no-risk approaches to helping veterans and their loved ones that are presented in extremely brief (10 minutes or less) videos filmed at the conference I organized in 2011 at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance. It was called “A Better Welcome Home,” and the videos can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51E99E866B9D735E Several Pentagon higher-ups have requested this information, and we urge not only veterans and their families but also anyone who is suffering to go to that site, find a few approaches that resonate for you, watch the videos, and try those approaches.
(5) Yesterday I posted the following to mark Veterans Day on my Facebook pages and on Twitter:
Easy, wonderful things anyone can do to mark Veterans Day (before, during, and/or after):
(1)LISTEN TO A VETERAN! Truly, just listen…with your whole heart. listentoaveteran.org
(2)Go to https://whenjohnnyandjanecomemarching.weebly.com/listen-to-a-veteran-psas.html and watch any or all of the 9 very short (10 to 45 seconds each) “Listen to a Veteran!” Public Service Announcements that won a Telly Award — and see whom you recognize and if you have a favorite one.
(3)Order and watch — or give as a gift to a veteran or veteran’s loved ones or a caring nonveteran — the 50-minute, awardwinning film, “Is Anybody Listening?” isanybodylistening.org is the film’s website, and you can order the film at https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07ZMJBPM1/ref=share_ios_movie
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So glad you wrote this, Will! One thing I urge people to do is to avoid using the term “bullying.” Why? Because it really is abuse, and calling it “abuse” I think makes it clearer how serious and soul-destroying it is, whereas “bullying” seems to minimize it somewhat.
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How troubling to see that MIA is again — and this time in a major way! — publishing a piece in which “PTSD” is used without the least mention of the unscientific nature of the category, the way it pathologizes people who are having deeply human reactions to trauma, and the devastating harm the label has caused. Do some people say they want the label applied to them? Yes. That is nearly always because (1)It’s the only time anyone has ever tried to convey, ‘I believe you’re suffering,’ but that could be done by using those nonpathologizing words instead; (2)The labeled person BELIEVES that getting a label represents something scientific that will pave the way to relief from their suffering; and/or (3)They cannot get certain benefits unless they accept a label. Re: (3), I tell people that since the system providing benefits is intractable, if accepting the label gets them what they need, they should nevertheless know in their hearts that they are not mentally ill for being upset by trauma. I address these problems in a couple of my books. Most importantly, I have heard the devastating stories of people who have suffered because of getting this label.
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Dawn, is that you replying as “ArmyWife”? I appreciate the clarification. If someone can tell me how to correct that mistaken phrase in my comment, I am happy to do so! I did of course read the article but did not see a mention of VCPA (Veteran’s Center for the Performing Arts). I know Stephan has done work combining Shakespeare and his own military experiences in his brilliant, one-man show, CRY HAVOC! which I have seen praised to the skies and urged everyone I know to go see. When I learned about DE-CRUIT and saw the performances of some of the veteran/students participating in Stephan’s Shakespeare class, it was the night that it was done in conjunction with Bedlam Theatre, and Stephan and Bedlam’s founder Eric Tucker (also a veteran, who I believe directed CRY HAVOC! at least at some point) and I talked that night about disseminating the work and the principles of it as widely as possible. It now strikes me that Bedlam is not mentioned anywhere in the MIA article, so are DE-CRUIT and Bedlam no longer connected? I am very much aware of and a great admirer of Alisha Ali’s work in general and with DE-CRUIT, and she and I are longtime colleagues and friends. In fact, after Stephan came with Alisha to the NYC premiere of my film about the tragic and unhealthy divide between veterans and nonveterans, “Is Anybody Listening?”, isanybodylisteningmovie.org, I was delighted to meet Stephan, and Alisha and a number of my other friends and colleagues talked at length afterward, which was when I began to learn about her work with Stephan on DE-CRUIT. I continue to wish that there could be this glorious use of theatre for veterans — and indeed for other traumatized or otherwise suffering people — everywhere! And Dawn, if you are the one who wrote that above comment, I had the pleasure of meeting you at an LA performance of CRY HAVOC! and know how crucial a part of the work you are.
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Drew and MIA, I am thrilled that you have featured the phenomenally wonderful DE-CRUIT program here! In DE-CRUIT, the brilliant Stephan Wolfert has conceived, created, and implemented with so much art and heart a way of helping veterans without pathologizing them, without using risky approaches like psych drugs or forced “treatment,” and with a way of using theatre and other literature to reconnect with aspects of themselves, with the arts, and with the humanity of themselves and others, as well as — importantly — with Stephan and with their DE-CRUIT classmates. The work that Stephan and Dr. Alisha Ali have done in documenting the powerful effectiveness of DE-CRUIT and _why_ it works is also tremendously important.
I had the privilege of attending an event at which DE-CRUIT participants performed Shakespearean monologues and poetry they had written themselves, and what was stunning was that, both those veterans who are or want to be actors and those who are/do not, the depth into which they dove in exploring or creating the material and presenting it and the honesty and integrity with which they did it were all too rare onstage and in life. This is a tribute both to Stephan and to the veterans. The night I attended that event, I said I wished that every veteran could have the chance to participate in DE-CRUIT and urged that they — and Eric Tucker’s BEDLAM Theatre Co. in which DE-CRUIT was born — create a video to help spread the word.
I have two other comments. One is that I hope that the nonpathologizing, even DE-pathologizing nature of DE-CRUIT comes through strongly enough in Drew’s article that the use a number of times of the dangerously pathologizing term “PTSD” is understood by readers to mean “people who have been traumatized by military experiences and/or by homecoming experiences and have wrongly been given the pathologizing ‘PTSD’ label when instead their reactions are deeply human ones that should never be pathologized.” Although many MIA readers would automatically make that translation in their heads each time they see a term for a psychiatric “disorder,” for some, there is the danger that any mention of one of these labels without a reminder that such labels are unscientific and expose the labeled person to a wide array of kinds of harm runs the risk of perpetuating the harm of such diagnoses.
My other comment is based on my experience when I blogged for Psychology Today. There, I wrote about a great variety of such subjects. I found that any time I wrote about veterans, the number of readers ranged from 30% to under 3% of the number who read about any other topic. As I wrote in my book, https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US, nonveterans — who represent 93% of the U.S. population — don’t like even to _think_ about veterans, as those percentages show. As an experiment, after I saw those figures, the next time I wrote an essay about veterans for Psychology Today, I made sure the headline did not reveal that veterans were the subject. Within about three days, that essay received as many hits as my other articles that were not about veterans. I see a similar pattern here. I think it is wonderful that MIA plans to publish articles about veterans and trust that they will be about depathologizing them, but it is poignant that so few comments have been posted in response to Drew’s article, and I hope that that is not a reflection of low readership. Nonveterans who have been pathologized and otherwise harmed in the traditional system would do well to make common cause with veterans, because the system has done them harm in so many of the same ways to people in both groups, and people who have not been labeled and “treated” are often frightened by appalling stereotypes of both “mental patients” in general and of veterans as Other and as dangerous.
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Thank you for posting this. I did not see anything confusing about what James wrote. It seems to me he was saying to avoid TAKING OUT her sad/upset feelings on others and also to speak openly about what she is feeling.
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I am so sorry to read this tragic and all too common kind of story. I have been listening to veterans for more than a dozen years, and for people who want to read more about this, please see https://www.amazon.com/When-Johnny-Jane-Come-Marching/dp/150403676X/ref=as_li_ss_il?crid=1QTVHBGHEWJI&keywords=when+johnny+and+jane+come+marching+home&qid=1554480516&s=gateway&sprefix=When+johnny+and,aps,220&sr=8-1-fkmrnull&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=1dbd7dedc192a717801d8a2ccc9ed082&language=en_US and especially Chapter 3 about what is wrong with calling traumatized veterans mentally ill and putting them on psychiatric drugs, and Chapters 4 and 5 about what the military and the VA are doing and why it is at worst wrong and at least not enough.
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You are right, Rosalee, that they didn’t put DDPD (the Delusional Dominating Personality Disorder that Dr. Margrit Eichler and I created) in the DSM. It’s too much like the DS people themselves. So glad you are liking “They Say YOu’re Crazy.” https://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Youre-Crazy-Psychiatrists/dp/0201407582/ref=as_li_ss_il?keywords=They+Say+You%27re+Crazy&qid=1554486859&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=li1&tag=whejohandja0d-20&linkId=9114cba73496ff5f388235a3586c6299&language=en_US
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LavenderSage, I wish I could answer your question, but I believe this varies from one school district to another, not just from state to state. I assume that whatever the school district’s rules, there is no harm in a parent asking that a child not be labeled with a diagnosis, and that could be a good teaching moment for school personnel, but I suspect the reply will be that if they don’t get diagnosed, they cannot get the help they need. Another way to approach it would be to ask if there is ANY way for the child to get the needed help without getting a diagnosis. I wish that parents might band together and start advocating for changes, but parents who are trying to get help for their children are often too exhausted to get politically involved. That is why others need at least to help with this kind of action.
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Eric Coates, there is absolutely no reason for, as you say, the MIA editors “to spend thousands upon thousands of hours teaching the webzine’s various writers how to talk about psychiatric issues with any clarity while at the same time lacking the kind of consensually agreed-upon language that I have been advocating.” I have been happily stunned by the huge number of comments posted in response to my essay, about 99.9% of them positive. It seems that the wide variety of people posting comments had no trouble grasping the principles of my concerns or the extremely simple solutions I suggested. It only takes a few minutes to read my whole essay. I would be totally comfortable if the MIA editors wanted to ask all writers to read the essay…or if they just lifted the various solutions that I proposed — two of which were suggested to me by Amy Smith — and posted them in an “Instructions for Written Submissions” section that would be there permanently.
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With regard to what you said about Allen Frances saying psych diagnosis “is bullshit,” (1)If you look in Gary Greenberg’s important and fascinating book, The Book of Woe, you will see that Frances was enraged that Gary made it public that he had said that, and (2)Frances has repeatedly ALSO said that HIS (only his) Task Force’s work on the DSM was “scrupulously scientific,” something I, having been on two of his committees before I resigned in horror at how they operated, can attest could not be farther from the truth. Hmm, what to make of Frances saying two totally opposite things about psych diagnosis…and having the nerve to title his absurd book about it, “Saving Normal,” when he more than anyone in history was responsible for a greater increase per year in DSM categories (even more than in DSM-5) and has continued in many ways to reify categories of “mental illness”?
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s_randolph, I do hope that what I wrote will be helpful to any human beings. But you misrepresent me by implying that the only reason I totally dissociate myself from Scientology and its so-called Citizens Commission on Human is that “once upon a time a different Scientologist lied” to me. They are dangerous and alarming for a vast number of reasons, some of which I experienced directly and many others of which are well-documented in publicly available places.
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Julie Greene, I do object to the word “disorder” in “eating disorder,” because it pathologizes it. I know you do not consider eating problems to be brain diseases, but to say “it” (there are actually various kinds of eating problems) is a nutritional disorder is a statement that does not include consideration of the ways that intolerable pressures on girls and women about their appearance being hugely important in determining their worth, and those pressures definitely do contribute in major ways to many girls’ and women’s frightened, often extreme ways of dealing with food. These factors can certainly lead to serious nutritional problems…I agree.
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Julie Greene, I was surprised that in the recent MIA piece you wrote, you described yourself as having had an eating “disorder.” I don’t understand why you used that term. What’s wrong with “eating problem”? Why do you continue to use such terms when you object to MIA’s allowing them?
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I have repeatedly expressed my concerns to MIA when they continue to publish pieces in which psychiatric diagnostic terms are used without a single mention of the fact that they are NOT scientific, that it is NOT helpful to use these terms (including ADHD) when trying to alleviate suffering or help people change their behavior IF THEY WANT TO, and that getting ANY psych label exposes one to a vast array of kinds of harm, and that there are MANY other approaches that do NOT involve pathologizing or drugging and that have few or no risks and are shown to be effective. I would like to know which person or people at MIA are currently in charge of overseeing such things, and I beg MIA yet again to stop helping with the reification of these labels!
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Julie, so glad you are conveying this important message and glad your parents were so clear-sighted. I had an email address for you but cannot find it now and would like to send you a private message. Can you please email me, or if you don’t have my email address, then — though I usually avoid Facebook messenger consistently — please send me your email address through a Facebook message. Thank you.
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Peter Gotzsche, you are so courageous and have so much integrity! It is appalling what Cochrane did to you, and it does show how corrupt and dishonest they have become. I am thrilled to hear about your new Institute and wish you all the best with it! When you have a moment, please email me about an idea I have for a very simple and potentially very powerful thing your Institute could do.
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Krista Hartmann, your voice is SO sorely needed, and your ideas and perspective are so unlike much of what one hears elsewhere — PLEASE KEEP WRITING!
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Thank you for writing this. I assume you have not seen my “Diagnosisgate” article about how Allen Frances the very year after his DSM-IV was published (so that he was the world’s most powerful psychiatrist) secretly joined with two other psychiatrists to earn about half a million dollars from Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of the evil Johnson & Johnson (the company that knowingly sold baby powder filled with talc and asbestos, which caused deaths due to ovarian cancer and heaven knows what else), to produce a “practice guideline” that would help Janssen promote the extremely dangerous drug Risperdal. You can see the article at http://www.oa.uottawa.ca/journals/aporia/articles/2015_01/commentary.pdf
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What stunning writing about your brave and inspiring approach to getting your diagnosis removed from your records, Krista! I am so glad to see the phenomenally positive responses you are getting here! Clearly, people NEED what you have to offer!
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Gratitude to James Davies and John Read for your scrupulous, important work.
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This book so richly deserves to be published! Don’s work and your work, Irit, have changed so many people’s lives for the better. All gratitude to you both.
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Since Bipolar Disorder, like virtually everything in the three or four most recent editions of the DSM, lacks scientific grounding, lacks even interrater reliability and stability and therefore cannot have validity, a more appropriate question to headline this article might have been “Can ANYONE ‘Have’ ‘Bipolar Disorder’?” Although the author makes some crucial and interesting and helpful points, in troubling ways she reifies the notion that Bipolar Disorder for anyone is a valid or helpful and not harmful category.
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