If
this country were a patient in one of our horrifically insufficient
mental institutions the entire nation would be diagnosed as beyond
severely disturbed.
Today
the latest article which describes the Dangerous New Psychiatric
Bible (DSM-5) was finalized for 2013. It is against this background
that one must come to see this place as an open-air psyche ward,
where the inmates are running the institutions and the government of
this country.
The
Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association has given
its final approval to a deeply flawed DSM-5 containing many changes
that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound. My best advice
to clinicians, to the press, and to the general public -- be
sceptical and don't follow DSM-5 blindly down a road likely to lead
to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication. Just ignore
the 10 changes that make no sense.
“1)
Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder: DSM-5 will turn temper
tantrums into a mental disorder -- a puzzling decision based on the
work of only one research group. We have no idea how this untested
new diagnosis will play out in real life practice settings, but my
fear is that it will exacerbate, not relieve, the already excessive
and inappropriate use of medication in young children. During the
past two decades, child psychiatry has already provoked three fads --
a tripling of Attention Deficit Disorder, a more than 20-times
increase in Autistic Disorder, and a 40-times increase in childhood
Bipolar Disorder. The field should have felt chastened by this sorry
track record and should engage itself now in the crucial task of
educating practitioners and the public about the difficulty of
accurately diagnosing children and the risks of over-medicating them.
DSM-5 should not be adding a new disorder likely to result in a new
fad and even more inappropriate medication use in vulnerable
children.
2)
Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder, thus medicalizing
and trivializing our expectable and necessary emotional reactions to
the loss of a loved one and substituting pills and superficial
medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends,
religion, and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance
of the limitations of life.
3)
The everyday forgetting characteristic of old age will now be
misdiagnosed as Minor Neurocognitive Disorder, creating a huge false
positive population of people who are not at special risk for
dementia. Since there is no effective treatment for this 'condition'
(or for dementia), the label provides absolutely no benefit (while
creating great anxiety) even for those at true risk for later
developing dementia. It is a dead loss for the many who will be
mislabelled.
4)
DSM-5 will likely trigger a fad of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder
leading to widespread misuse of stimulant drugs for performance
enhancement and recreation and contributing to the already large
illegal secondary market in diverted prescription drugs.
5)
Excessive
eating 12 times in 3 months is no longer just a manifestation of
gluttony and the easy availability of really great tasting food.
DSM-5 has instead turned it into a psychiatric illness called Binge
Eating Disorder.
6)
The changes in the DSM-5 definition of autism will result in lowered
rates -- 10 percent according to estimates by the DSM-5 work group,
perhaps 50 percent according to outside research groups. This
reduction can be seen as beneficial in the sense that the diagnosis
of autism will be more accurate and specific -- but advocates
understandably fear a disruption in needed school services. Here the
DSM-5 problem is not so much a bad decision, but the misleading
promises that it will have no impact on rates of disorder or of
service delivery. School services should be tied more to educational
need, less to a controversial psychiatric diagnosis created for
clinical (not educational) purposes and whose rate is so sensitive to
small changes in definition and assessment.
7)
First time substance abusers will be lump definitionally in with
hard-core addicts despite their very different treatment needs and
prognosis and the stigma this will cause.
8)
DSM-5
has created a slippery slope by introducing the concept of
Behavioural Addictions that eventually can spread to make a mental
disorder of everything we like to do a lot. Watch out for careless
over-diagnosis of Internet and sex addiction and the development of
lucrative treatment programs to exploit these new markets.
9)
DSM-5 obscures the already fuzzy boundary been Generalized Anxiety
Disorder and the worries of everyday life. Small changes in
definition can create millions of anxious new 'patients' and expand
the already widespread practice of inappropriately prescribing
addicting anti-anxiety medications.
10)
DSM-5 has opened the gate even further to the already existing
problem of misdiagnosis of PTSD in forensic settings.
DSM-5
has dropped its pretension to being a paradigm shift in psychiatric
diagnosis and instead (in a dramatic 180 degree turn) now makes the
equally misleading claim that it is a conservative document that will
have minimal impact on the rates of psychiatric diagnosis and in the
consequent provision of inappropriate treatment. This is an untenable
claim that DSM-5 cannot possibly support because, for completely
unfathomable reasons, it
never took the simple and inexpensive step of actually studying the
impact of DSM on rates in real world settings.
Except
for autism, all the DSM-5 changes loosen diagnosis and threaten to
turn our current diagnostic inflation into diagnostic hyperinflation.
Painful experience with previous DSMs teaches that if anything in the
diagnostic system can be misused and turned into a fad, it will be.
Many millions of people with normal grief, gluttony, distractibility,
worries, reactions to stress, the temper tantrums of childhood, the
forgetting of old age, and 'behavioral addictions' will soon be
mislabelled as psychiatrically sick and given inappropriate
treatment.
People
with real psychiatric problems that can be reliably diagnosed and
effectively treated are already badly short changed. DSM-5 will make
this worse by diverting attention and scarce resources away from the
really ill and toward people with the everyday problems of life who
will be harmed, not helped, when they are mislabelled as mentally
ill.
Our
patients deserve better, society deserves better, and the mental
health professions deserve better. Caring for the mentally ill is a
noble and effective profession. But we have to know our limits and
stay within them.” (1)
DSM-5
violates the most sacred (and most frequently ignored) tenet in
medicine -- First Do No Harm! That's why this is such a sad moment.”
From
Holland comes this “news”.
“Amsterdam
is to create "Scum villages" where nuisance neighbors and
anti-social tenants will be exiled from the city and re-housed in
caravans or containers with "minimal services" under
constant police supervision.
The
new punishment housing camps have been dubbed "scum villages"
because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of
a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with
persistent troublemakers.
"Repeat
offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighborhood and sent
to a village for scum," he suggested last year. "Put all
the trash together."
Whilst
denying that the new projects would be punishment camps for "scum",
a spokesman for the city mayor stressed that the special residential
units would aim to enforce good behavior.
The
Thought POLICE made it BIGTIME in Holland - k
"The
aim is not to reward people who behave badly with a new five-room
home with a south-facing garden. This is supposed to be a deterrent,"
he said.
The
tough approach taken by Mr van der Laan appears to jar with
Amsterdam's famous tolerance for prostitution and soft drugs but
reflects hardening attitudes to routine anti-social behavior that
falls short of criminality.
There
are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands,
including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been
set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision
from social workers and police.
(k)
Ah Yes, but who will watch the perverted watch-dogs?
Under
the new policy, from January next year, victims will no longer have
to move to escape their tormentors, who will be moved to the new
units.
A
team of district "harassment directors" have already been
appointed to spot signals of problems and to gather reports of
nuisance tenants.
Apparently
spy-cameras are just NOT ENOUGH for the sanctimonious Dutch – (k)
The
Dutch Parool newspaper observed that the policy was not a new one. In
the 19th century, troublemakers were moved to special villages in
Drenthe and Overijssel outside Amsterdam. The villages were rarely
successful, becoming sink estates for the lawless.
The
whole point of having a society is to communicate with one another,
not to dictate to anyone who differs from your own way of seeing the
world. If these people were over here, maybe they could be charged by
Psychiatric-police with being psychotic for wanting to CONTROL all
aspects of everyone else’s life. (k)
"We
have learned from the past," said the mayor's spokesman. "A
neighborhood can deal with one problem family but if there are more
the situation escalates."” (2)
Between
the collapse of psychiatry and the death of society here, as well as
in ‘other places’ it seems that people have lost the ability to
even tend to themselves or to others without resorting to any of the
various “STATE APPROVED METHODS” whenever anyone is troubled by
anything now. Every single aspect of life is now monitored,
regulated, charged and punished or PROSECUTED for attempting to live
a routinely unusual but happy life,,,
The
longer this goes unchecked, the worse it will get wherever you live
and no matter what you believe in (because there will ALWAYS BE
SOMEONE WHO WILL VEHEMENTLY DISSAPROVE OF WHATEVER YOU END UP DOING.
It
used to be that countries only had one police force. Today we have
virtually all kinds of POLICE for every known or suspected
imaginary-crime, in every category of daily life. This is being done
in such a way that there can be NO ESCAPE FROM THE POLICE STATE no
matter where you are or how you want to live…
Billions
of People are now living in Police-States all around the planet: What
would happen if those people begin to FIGHT BACK?
But
what happens to the planet if they don’t!
kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net
1)
Dangerous
New Psychiatric Bible (DSM-5) Finalized for 2013
http://www.jeffpolachek.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=290:dangerous-new-psychatric-bible-dsm-5-finalized-for-2013&catid=45:weaponized-psychiatry&
2)
Amsterdam to Create Scum Villages
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/9719247/Amsterdam-to-create-scum-villages.html
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