Media

If Bipolar Disorder Is Over-Diagnosed, What Are The Actual Diagnoses?

Fri, 18 May 2012 20:53:29 +0000

If Bipolar Disorder Is Over-Diagnosed, What Are The Actual Diagnoses?

ScienceDaily (July 29, 2009) — A year ago, a study by Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University researchers reported that fewer than half the patients previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder received an actual diagnosis of bipolar disorder after using a comprehensive, psychiatric diagnostic interview tool --the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID). In this follow-up study, the researchers have determined the actual diagnoses of those patients.

Their study is published in the July 28 ahead of print online edition of The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Under the direction of lead author Mark Zimmerman, MD, director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, the researchers' findings indicate that patients who received a previous diagnosis of bipolar disorder that was not confirmed by a SCID, they were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder as well as impulse control disorders.

Click If Bipolar Disorder Is Over-Diagnosed, What Are The Actual Diagnoses? to read the article, and here to read the paper from which the article was drawn.

Fox News: Take diagnosis manual away from American Psychiatric Association

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:04:52 +0000

Columnist Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist, attacks the American Psychiatric Association for being on the wrong side of truth and patient safety.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/05/14/be-wary-american-psychiatric-association/

Be wary of the American Psychiatric Association
By Dr. Keith Ablow May 14, 2012 FoxNews.com

The American Psychiatric Association (from which I resigned in protest, some time ago) is at it again—making up, then retracting, new diagnoses that their committees generate and debate.....

In this case, while preparing to publish its big seller (and huge profit center), the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (DSM-V)—organized psychiatry’s compendium of known psychiatric illnesses—the powers that be at the APA have decided to remove from its latest revision of the manual a few diagnoses they thought they would include: “attenuated psychosis syndrome” and “mixed anxiety depressive disorder.” They are, however, sticking with their notion of jettisoning from the DSM-V, the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, while picking up one they call, “Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

This would be really funny, if it weren’t really dangerous. The DSM-V will be used by hundreds of thousands of clinicians who may think that they are understanding their patients better, or treating them more expertly, by labeling them with one of 300 or so disorders listed in it, then matching medications to those supposedly genuine labels. But those labels aren’t driven just by science, but by political, economic and commercial forces within the American Psychiatric Association that may have nothing to do with the wellbeing of patients – or with reality.

The labels in the DSM-V (like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals that came before it) have really become little more than the roadmap by which psychiatrists chase both insurance reimbursement and applause from special interest groups who lobby—sometimes very effectively—for one diagnosis to be included, or another to be removed.

....Without a numbered diagnosis, pharmaceutical companies can’t get an FDA indication to use a particular medicine for that diagnosis. And without a numbered diagnosis, psychiatric wards can’t get paid to treat patients who hear voices or see visions or are dependent on heroin.

Never mind that splicing and dicing the range of human experience into a recipe book of contrived illnesses does damage to the miraculous healing power of empathy, which just happens to be psychiatry’s birthright. Never mind that creating a constantly-evolving dictionary of disorders wrenches the wonderful tools of psychotherapy and psychiatric medications into a realm of fiction that can paralyze them—like, for instance, the time that the American Psychiatric Association removed Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality from the DSM, essentially making the case that people who have sexual impulses they themselves dislike and wish to resist need no help at all and are pretty much normal. Similarly, now, for those with Asperger’s Disorder, which no longer exists as a distinct entity because someone on some committee convinced other people on that committee that it just doesn’t.

....
Mind you, this is the same organization purporting to represent American psychiatrists while refusing to say just what percentage of those psychiatrists belong to it. It is the same organization that has presided over the near decimation of insight-oriented psychotherapy—still far-and-away the best technique, in capable hands, that we have to truly heal those suffering with mental disorders.

We in America face an epidemic of fiction—manipulations of the truth on a scale never before known, fueled by technology and media. This epidemic threatens to rob us of ourselves—what we truly think and truly feel and truly know as fact. And this epidemic has clearly infected the American Psychiatric Association, which puts them on the wrong side of Truth, and puts patients at needless risk.

Big Pharma Wants YOU!

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:39:58 +0000

Among them are the antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzos (see bottom third of story):

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/05/14/mercks-adhd-drugs-unsafe.aspx?e_cid=20120514_DNL_art_1

Video: Dr. Allen J. Frances on the Overdiagnosis of Mental Illness

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:00:34 +0000

http://castroller.com/Podcasts/BigIdeasVideo/2874570

Quote

Psychiatrist and author, Allen J. Frances, believes that mental illnesses are being over-diagnosed. In his lecture, Diagnostic Inflation: Does Everyone Have a Mental Illness?, Dr. Frances outlines why he thinks the DSM-V will lead to millions of people being mislabeled with mental disorders. His lecture was part of Mental Health Matters, an initiative of TVO in association with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Allen Frances editorial in NY TImes: Diagnosing the DSM V

Sun, 13 May 2012 03:53:02 +0000

New York Times Op Ed:

At its annual meeting this week, the American Psychiatric Association did two wonderful things: it rejected one reckless proposal that would have exposed nonpsychotic children to unnecessary and dangerous antipsychotic medication and another that would have turned the existential worries and sadness of everyday life into an alleged mental disorder.

But the association is still proceeding with other suggestions that could potentially expand the boundaries of psychiatry to define as mentally ill tens of millions of people now considered normal. (emphasis mine)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/opinion/break-up-the-psychiatric-monopoly.html?src=me&ref=general

This should be quite a boon to Big Pharma. Just think of all the senseless and dangerous drugs they can invent to cure normal people of being normal! WOW!!!

Now More of Us Are Addicts, Per the DSM V

Sun, 13 May 2012 03:44:02 +0000

WASHINGTON — In what could prove to be one of their most far-reaching decisions, psychiatrists and other specialists who are rewriting the manual that serves as the nation’s arbiter of mental illness have agreed to revise the definition of addiction, which could result in millions more people being diagnosed as addicts and pose huge consequences for health insurers and taxpayers." (emphasis mine)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/dsm-revisions-may-sharply-increase-addiction-diagnoses.html?src=me&ref=general

"Behavioral addiction, not otherwise specified"...Oh, PUH-LEEZE!!! This reminds me of the catch-all diagnosis that was in vogue in my therapist days - chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia. Say what?