In daily life, we all observe other people doing what we consider weird or abnormal things, whether at work, school or while out and about. Our opinions are based on what we collectively agree is normal and that can vary from culture to culture, within any age group, religion, race, class, etc. For example, the way you dress and act can be normal and welcomed among your peers but shunned by everyone else. Ask any teenager. But is something totally different from the “norm” necessarily a personality disorder that needs treatment?

Per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (a reference book written by psychiatrists to diagnose patients), personality disorders are a type of mental disorder diagnosed using certain symptoms of behavior as a guideline. If you are a narcissist, a loner or have reckless disregard for the law and rights of others, then those qualify as disorders. There are many different kinds of personality disorders and if your symptoms don’t seem to fall into any one category, then there is one called “Borderline” Personality Disorder to cover all those miscellaneous symptoms as well.

The problem is, these are merely subjective opinions without any scientific evidence to prove they even exist. In conventional medicine there are tests and x-rays and the like to determine what is wrong with you when you don’t feel your best. Those tests will find the cause of your illness because there is something going on in your body that wasn’t happening before. In psychiatry, there are no tests, just opinions. They can’t provide a blood test, urine test, MRI or anything else to show you have a mental disorder. They have theories for sure, but none of them are backed up by any scientific evidence.

Psychiatry has taken behavior and made it into a disease. Judging from the fact that the number of disorders have almost tripled over the years, we are supposedly becoming more and more mentally ill. How does this happen? If there are no regulations as to what constitutes a mental illness, then psychiatrists can make up as many personality disorders as they please.

Medical doctors do not fabricate things like the measles and cancer because these illnesses and many others actually exist in the body shown by legitimate tests. On the other hand, psychiatry just votes on the latest personality disorders and even occasionally decides to remove something from the DSM.

For example, one of the personality disorders, narcissistic personality disorder, is under consideration right now to be deleted from DSM-5. The newest edition is scheduled to be released in another year or so. In 1968, narcissistic personality disorder was removed from the DSM and reinstated in 1980. Does that mean they made a mistake? They put a disorder in the DSM that wasn’t really a disorder?  Psychiatrists claim disorders are as valid as any medical condition. So, is narcissistic personality disorder real or not? If not, what are they going to tell all those people that have been misdiagnosed and took the medication? If it gets removed again, it certainly further lessens psychiatry’s credibility.

Homosexuality is another example of a disorder that was removed from the DSM.  In the past, being gay was not accepted by the general public for quite awhile and at the same time was consistently thought of as a mental illness by the psychiatric community. Obviously, times have changed and somewhere along the line when gay rights began to grow, homosexuality was removed from the DSM as a disorder. Does that mean that public acceptance is a factor in deciding if a disorder is “real” or not?

Legitimate science does not work this way. There are no surveys or discussions regarding the existence of any medical condition. It’s either there or it’s not. It’s not swayed or slanted by opinions and views. When you get a blood test and it shows a high white cell count, that verifies the existence of an infection. A specific treatment is prescribed to handle the condition. Not so in diagnosing personality disorders, or, in general, within the field of psychiatry.

Before you start taking dangerous mind-altering psychiatric drugs with life threatening side effects, it would be wise to ask for the science to verify the diagnosis of the personality disorder. It doesn’t exist.

Personality disorders are not the only diagnosis that is being questioned. You may also be interested in reading Experts Debunked DSM.

Photo Credit: Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

The first reason for this is what constitutes a “mental illness” has been broadened dramatically to create a larger consumer market for these drugs. It used to be only the guys walking down the street talking nonsense to themselves were considered mentally ill. Today, normal emotions and undesirable behaviors are now mental disorders. Shy? Don’t sit quietly enough in your classroom chair? Anxious in social situations? These are just a few examples of what are now termed mental disorders which didn’t exist way back when.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known as DSM), was first published in 1952 listing around one hundred disorders. This is the psychiatrist’s bible used for diagnosis. The most current version published in 1994, DSM-IV, listed almost four hundred disorders. DSM-V is due out in a few years and will undoubtedly have even more disorders. It’s not that people are increasingly becoming “mentally ill.” Since the mental health industry heavily markets drugs as the solution to these so-called disorders, more disorders are made up to create a larger consumer market for psychiatric drugs.

The second reason the use of psychiatric drugs has increased so much is that the drugs themselves cause adverse side effects which call for taking more drugs. Psychiatric drugs can create adverse side effects such as mania, psychosis, convulsions, diabetes, metabolic diseases, violence, suicide or even premature death. These side effects provide a further opportunity to diagnose another mental disorder which in turn produces another reason to prescribe yet another drug. For example, one could start off by taking an antidepressant for depression which then causes a mania perhaps, so one is then diagnosed with bipolar and put on an additional drug.

What is most alarming about this drug induced mental illness is that these drugs are supposed to correct your brain chemistry. This is far from the truth as they actually do just the opposite. There is no evidence whatsoever that a mental disorder occurs from something abnormal in the brain. However, there is evidence that these drugs disrupt and distort normal brain function and create an abnormal condition that could be irreversible.

While the mental health industry has found its cash cow, millions of children and adults are taking dangerous mind-altering psychiatric drugs without being told the truth. Get informed and find out for yourself.

The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association. It is THE book used by those in the psychiatric profession to describe classifications and diagnosis of mental illness.

But is the information in this psychiatric bible valid?

Jerome Burne of The Daily Mail wrote an entertaining and informative article called “Psychiatrists want to call Being Angry a Mental illness. How Utterly Mad!”

In this article he refers to some of the newly invented mental illnesses: ¹

“If you find it hard to throw out things of limited or no value, you could be suffering from hoarding disorder.

“Other new conditions identified as possibly needing professional help include binge eating – which is said to affect many people who are seriously obese – and ‘cognitive tempo disorder’, which seems very like laziness (symptoms include dreaminess and sluggishness).

“There’s also ‘intermittent explosive disorder’, which involves occasionally becoming very angry suddenly.

“Most bizarre of the proposed additions is one defined as ‘getting a thrill at being outraged by pornography’.

“It was also described as Whitehouse syndrome after the campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who objected to sexual content on TV.”

In the video, Psychiatry Exposed! not only is the validity of the DSM examined, but the hidden purpose behind such excessive psychiatric evaluation is made clear.

Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior became a Sickness, is a literary critic and intellectual historian. He is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to study psychopharmacology and ethics. ²

In an interview on the blog Writer Interviews, Mr. Lane states, “In 1980, social anxiety disorder and 111 other newly created mental disorders were added in a haphazard, unscientific fashion to psychiatry’s “bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short). My research uncovers why so many new disorders were established in the first place. It also considers what the effect has been on us, as a society, of having so many common behaviors redefined as disorders that need some kind of treatment (invariably drug-related).

“The book is provocative, as quite a few reviews have noted, because it reprints confidential memos from drug company execs advising colleagues to withhold or tilt discussion of drug-related side effects — in effect, to mislead the public about them so they wouldn’t seem so severe. Shyness also reprints several highly embarrassing proposals, including for a disorder called “chronic complaint disorder” that was meant to present as mentally ill people who complain too much about the weather and worry about their taxes.

“First, readers get to see experts making up a lot of things as they go along. They also witness psychiatrists squabbling over very dubious changes to the diagnostic manual, and how their opponents questioned what they were doing, unfortunately with little effect. Finally, they also see that more experts have since come forward, admitting the amount of hard science they were going on was minimal, at times painfully so. The net effect is that the DSM, a manual that has sold in the millions and is routinely touted today as a pristine scientific document that just gets better with each edition, is in fact full of the most amazing language, guesswork, and questionable judgments you could imagine.”

The old adage “Don’t believe everything you read,” is especially apropos when it comes to the authority of the DSM.

In recent years, one hears teenagers casually diagnose their friends’ behaviors with bywords from psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  Now in its fourth edition, the DSM has categorized more and more behaviors as disorders, commonly recommending treatment by drugs:  ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) for children who won’t sit still and listen;  “BiPolar” for those who get really sad, but also get really happy;  Eating Disorder; Reading Disorder, Gender Identity Disorder, Mathematics Disorder as well as “OCD” (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) for those who think too much, or need to (over)achieve — behaviors so common that we all may be “disordered”.  Or perhaps it’s psychiatry who has “OCD” — for continually Over-the-Counter Diagnosing of the rest of mankind.

The claim that “brain imbalances” underly such disorders, making them treatable by drugs, is being challenged.  Three noted psychiatrists speak out against treating the mind with medication.  Fred Baughman, MD, a child neurologist, writes: 

“Psychiatry is NOT a Medical Practice!

Dr. McLaren further states:

It is the case that . . . psychiatry fails to meet the minimal criteria for a science. . . .  The psychiatric publishing industry is both corrupt and incompetent, a prisoner of its own myths, while the general public sees only a profession that can’t make up its mind about anything except that everybody is mentally ill and need lots of expensive drugs.

1. Bio Essays and Papers Bibliography Contact

Modern biological psychiatry is a materialistic religion masquerading as a science.

How can I say that my profession of psychiatry is a materialistic religion? Because modern psychiatry makes believe that psychological and spiritual problems, such as anxiety and depression, are caused by mechanical failures in the physical brain, and because psychiatry then attempts to correct these psychological and spiritual problems with physical interventions such as drugs and electroshock. Modern biological psychiatry takes these views and implements these interventions on faith and it has won a lot of converts with the help of billion-dollar marketing campaigns.

Dr. Peter Breggin

What has changed in the past 50 years?  It used to be you were considered insane or just a regular person and that was the extent of it, with nothing in between.  There was no such thing as bipolar, ADHD, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), SAD (social anxiety disorder), RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) and there wasn’t a host of psychiatric drugs to treat each one of these disorders.  Psychiatric drugs were unheard of except perhaps in mental institutions.

TV, radio and magazine ads bombard us to ask our doctor about the drug being advertised yet there is no diagnostic or medical test for any “mental illness” to even prove it exists.Unfortunately, many people walk into doctors’ offices with symptoms they have heard on the TV or radio and imagine they need the drugs.   It follows that if you can’t detect it in the body you can’t treat it.  I ask you, is that normal?

A recent article exposes there are factions within the psychiatric community of educated experts who have somehow escaped party line brainwashing and refuse to go lock-stepped over a professional cliff but rather have filed formal protests strongly questioning whether psychiatry as a whole has lost its collective mind.

 “Mental health experts ask: Will anyone be normal?”

“(Reuters) – An updated edition of a mental health bible for doctors may include diagnoses for “disorders” such as toddler tantrums and binge eating, experts say, and could mean that soon no-one will be classed as normal.

The scientists gave examples from the previous revision to the DSM, which was called DSM 4 and included broader diagnoses and categories for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism and childhood bipolar disorders.

This, they said, had “contributed to three false epidemics” of these conditions, particularly in the United States.

“During the last decade, how many doctors were harangued by worried parents into giving drugs like Ritalin to children who didn’t really need it?,” their statement asked.

Millions of people across the world, many of them children, take ADHD drugs including Novartis’ Ritalin, which is known generically as methylphenidate, and similar drugs such as Shire Plc’s Adderall and Vyvanse. In the United States alone, sales of these drugs was about $4.8 billion in 2008.

Wykes and Callard published a comment in The Journal of Mental Health expressing their concern about the upcoming DSM revision and highlighting another 10 or more papers in the same journal from other scientists who were also worried.”

If one would step far enough off the social curb deep into the sewer to study psychiatry closely and learn their language, it might be fitting to suggest they are suffering from a severe case of ESMAD Exposed Social Menace Anxiety Disorder.

“A vital consideration we learn in medicine is that continuing life support for a moribund (being at the point of death) patient past a certain point is harmful to the lives of all concerned. We have reached that point with DSM5.

He goes on to state,

“It is difficult and time-consuming to produce reliable new knowledge; it cannot be accomplished by committee fiat, as Drs Kupfer, Schatzberg and Regier seem to be believe. Dr Frances has mentioned the damage to psychiatric research that several new, ill-conceived categories in DSM5 could inflict. He also pointed out that changing nomenclature and diagnostic standards in the absence of compelling scientific justification will severely damage psychiatric research as well as clinical practice….Moreover, the sloppy thinking and language in the proposed revision will be apparent to any educated layman. The “field trials” and timetables proposed for new categories are laughable to any statistically trained psychologist. The inevitable public exposure of the gross defects in DSM5 will bring our entire field into disrepute and diminish public support for the research we need.

There have been no research advances that demand new diagnoses and syndromes. Despite many intriguing findings, no psychiatric disease can be diagnosed by a biological or psychological test.”

Source: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/1576554

Comments from Dr. Dan Edmunds, psychologist, on the fraud of psychiatry’s bible (DSM V)

“The current revision process of the American Psychiatric Association regarding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is lacking in any objective science. It appears that the creation of new ‘disorders’ and the re-classification of some existent disorders are fueled by political machinations and not by any true desire to aid distressed persons. It is evident that these revisions are also heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry’s excessive involvement in the psychiatric system. Each edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual includes ‘newly found’ disorders, to the point where almost all persons could be fit into one of these labels. With true medicine, we see that new drugs are developed to help with existing, objectively defined, organic problems. Not so with psychiatry where existing drugs are used for subjectively defined ’disorders’.”

Read the full article “DSM V Release Date Changed to 2013”