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COMMENT
A patient looks through a window of the door in the Serbsky State Scientific Centre for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow. Could modern psychiatry treaments be doing more harm than good, asks Des Spence. (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images)
Modern psychiatry has lost its way. Mental health issues and chronic mental health should be a priority for all societies and stigma challenged at every level. But, according to the US Centres for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), a staggering 25 per cent of the population are considered to have a “mental illness”.[1]
This is a figure so large that the only conclusion is psychiatry is medicalising normality and engaged in rampant overdiagnosis.
Psychiatric diagnosis
Psychiatry is also intentionally complicit in the medication of hundreds of millions of men, women and children. Much of the responsibility for mass production mental illness rests with the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) used to make psychiatric diagnosis, owned and written by the American Psychiatric Association. This publication has loosened diagnostic criteria and defined highly questionable “new” conditions.
The mental health field is a profit nirvana—Dr. Des Spence
The DSM mental health model is biological, with all behaviours simply explained away as some biochemical neurotransmitter “chemical imbalance”. Of course it then follows that these can be treated with lucrative branded pharmaceutical drugs. And America’s DSM is assuming a worldwide cultural dominance in mental health policy.
Now this mental health industrial complex is aggressively exporting these ideas to the developing world by “Big Pharma” marketing gunboats.
There is a new version DSM in the pipeline, DSM-5. So what to expect?
The definition of mental illness is opinion and not hard facts. And these defining opinions are drawn from a small group of psychiatric oligarchs who author the DSM. Yet this opinion is tainted, for many psychiatrists have financial links to the pharmaceutical industry. For example, the diagnosis of ADHD exploded in the USA in recent decades and in some States 15 per cent of children are labelled and 5.6 per cent of children forced to take psychoactive medications, according to the CDC.[ 2] Despite the fact that there is little long term data about the potential negative consequences of these addictive medications.
Big business
Today, ADHD is big business. A report by industry analysis specialists, GlobalData, currently assesses the market’s worth at $4 billion (£2.4 billion) and set to double in the next decade [3]. Yet in 2008 it was revealed in the British Medical Journal that the world’s ADHD experts for Harvard had received $4.2 million (£2.5 million) in undisclosed payments.[4] The mental health field is a profit nirvana, with vast number of “patients” on multiple and life long medications. Yet an essay in March 2012 in PLOS Medicine journal identified that 70 per cent of the authors of the new DSM have links and conflicts of interest. Should we really trust their opinions? [5]
Will the new DSM-5 in any way challenge overdiagnosis and over treatment of mental illness? No. New proposals seem intent on ever loosening diagnosis and recatagorising normal behaviour as illness. Even gambling, internet pornography and sex were considered for on inclusion as behavioural addictions. Also, new proposals will see the natural pain of bereavement reclassified as clinical “depression” should it last longer than two weeks. [6]
Read on … But has the march of the medicalisation of mood and the ubiquitous prescription of antidepressants improved mental health in the USA?
