AAaC Worldwide | publications

"Future of Psychiatric Diagnosis."
Why is the Bush administration funding secret meetings
about globalizing psychiatric labeling?

Today an _Los Angeles Times_ essay copied BELOW blasts psychiatric labeling.

AT BOTTOM is news about the "Future of Psychiatric Diagnosis." Why is the Bush
administration funding secret meetings
about globalizing psychiatric labeling?

IT'S JAN. 1. Past time to get your inoculation against seasonal affective disorder, or SAD - at least according to the American Psychiatric Assn. As Americans rush to return Christmas junk, bumping into each other in Macy's and Best Buy, the psychiatric association ponders its latest iteration of feeling bad for the holidays. And what is the association selling? Mental illness. With its panoply of major depression, dysthymic disorder, bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, the association is waving its Calvinist flag to remind everyone that amid all the
celebration, all the festivities, all the exuberance, many people will "come down with" or "contract" or "develop" some variation of depressive illness.

The association specializes in turning ordinary human frailty into disease. In the last year, ads have been appearing in psychiatric journals about possible treatments for shyness, a "syndrome" not yet officially recognized as a disease.
You can bet it will be in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV, published by the association. As it turns out, the association has been inventing mental illnesses for the last
50 years or so. The original diagnostic manual appeared in 1952 and contained 107 diagnoses and 132 pages, by my count. The second edition burst forth in 1968 with 180 diagnoses and 119 pages. In 1980, the association produced a 494-page tome with 226 conditions. Then, in 1994, the manual exploded to 886 pages and 365 conditions, representing a 340% increase in the number of diseases over 42 years.

Nowhere in the rest of medicine has such a proliferation of categories occurred.
The reason for this difference between psychiatry and other medical specialties has more to do with ideology than with science. A brief peek at both areas makes this point clear. All medicine rests on the premise that disease is a manifestation of diseased tissue.
Hepatitis comes down to an inflamed liver, while lung tissue infiltrated with pneumococcus causes pneumonia.
Every medical student learns this principle. Where, though, is the diseased tissue in psychopathological
conditions?

Unlike the rest of medicine, psychiatry diagnoses behavior that society doesn't like. Yesterday it was homosexuality. Tomorrow it will be homophobia. Someone who declares himself the messiah, who
insists that fluorescent lights talk to him or declares that she's the Virgin Mary, is an example of such behavior.
Such people are deemed - labeled, really - sick by psychiatrists, and often they are taken off to hospitals against their will. The "diagnosis" of such "pathological behavior" is based on social, political or aesthetic values.

This is confusing. Behavior cannot be pathological (or healthy, for that matter). It can simply comport with, or
not comport with, our nonmedical expectations of how people should behave. Analogously, brains that produce
weird or obnoxious behaviors are not diseased. They are brains that produce atypical behaviors (which could include such eccentricities as dyed hair or multiple piercings or tattoos that nobody in their right mind could find
attractive).

Lest one think that such a view is the rant of a Scientologist, it is no such thing. Scientology offers polemic to
lull the faithful into belief. Doctors and philosophers offer argument to provoke debate.

It's a natural step from using social and political standards to create a psychiatric diagnosis to using them to
influence public policy. Historically, that influence has appeared most dramatically in the insanity defense.
Remember Dan White, the man who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978? Or John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan in 1981? Or Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon? White, whose psychiatrist came up with the "Twinkie defense" - the high sugar content of White's favorite junk food may have fueled his murderous impulses - was convicted and paroled after serving five years, only to commit suicide a year later.

The erosion of personal responsibility is, arguably, the most pernicious effect of the expansive role psychiatry has come to play in American life. It has successfully replaced huge chunks of individual accountability with
diagnoses, clinical histories and what turn out to be pseudoscientific explanations for deviant behavior.

Pathology has replaced morality. Treatment has supplanted punishment. Imprisonment is now hospitalization.
From the moral self-castigation we find in the writings of John Adams, we have been drawn to Woody Allen-style neuroses. Were the psychiatric association to scrutinize itself more deeply and reconsider its expansionist
diagnostic programs, it would, hopefully, make a positive contribution to our culture by not turning the good
and bad into the healthy and the sick.The last thing the United States needs is more self-indulgent,
pseudo-insightful, overly self-conscious babble about people who can't help themselves. Better, as Voltaire would put it, to cultivate our gardens and be accountable for who and what we are.

The USA government is helping to fund a series of private conferences throughout the world with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) about the "Future of Psychiatric Diagnosis."

One stated goal of this series of invite-only conferences is "to promote international collaboration in order to increase the likelihood of developing a future unified DSM/ICD."

DSM is the APA's psychiatric label book; ICD is the disease classification system used internationally.

In other words, these meetings are about the USA and the APA influencing a global system of classifying psychiatric disorders.

These closed-door meetings may impact the lives of some 450 million people all over the globe who the World Health Organization estimates qualify for a mental disorder label at any given time.

Unfortunately, those potentially impacted do not have a voice -- or even much information -- about these meetings.

Dr. Darrel Regier, Executive Director of the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education (APIRE) is in charge of the process.

APIRE is a research arm of the APA, and receives a large amount of the funding that the psychiatric drug industry gives the APA.

MindFreedom has written to Dr. Regier three times in four months about the need to include the voices of organized groups representing those affected by psychiatric diagnoses.

Since Dr. Regier is counting on the World Health Organization to adopt his proposals, then WHO may be another place to raise concerns about this process.

Dr. Regier is apparently trying to show the USA is sensitive to international involvement. The co-chairs of each meeting pair up a USA psychiatric leader with a non-USA leader.

Dr. Regier's next event is in Washington, D.C., 15 - 17 February 2006 on the topic of "Deconstructing Psychosis."

The co-chairs will be Drs. Carol Tamminga of Texas and Jim van Os of Netherlands.

Dr. Tamminga e-mailed to MindFreedom on 31 December 2005 that all inquiries ought to go to Dr. Regier who is
"administering and directing this effort."

For what little information there is on these "Future of Psychiatric Diagnosis" events see the APA's web site: http://www.dsm5.org/planning.cfm

This APA web site also has information about their plans to create the new DSM-5: http://www.dsm5.org/

** HELP INFORM those who may be impacted by these labels! Please copy and forward this alert to all appropriate places on and off the Internet.

** ASK THAT the World Health Organization file a complaint about the closed meetings funded by the Bush Administration.E-mail to: info@who.int

Sample message: "I object to the way the USA, the APA, and Dr. Daniel Regier of APIRE are trying to misuse the WHO by holding closed-door meetings to globalize psychiatric labeling."

This above news alert is forwarded as a free public service by the nonprofit human rights organization MindFreedom International.

* Win human rights campaigns in mental health.
* End abuse by the psychiatric drug industry.
* Support the voices of psychiatric survivors.
* Promote safe and humane options in mental health.

MindFreedom International unites 100 sponsor and affiliate groups with individual members, and is accredited by the United Nations as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) with Consultative Roster Status.

MindFreedom is one of the very few totally independent groups in the mental health field with no funding from governments, drug companies, religions, corporations, or the mental health system.

JUST IN: Refrigerator magnets let you invent hilarious new psychiatric labels!
For a MAD MARKET of these and other products to support human rights campaigns in mental health: http://www.madmarket.org

MindFreedom International
454 Willamette, Suite 216 - POB 11284
Eugene, OR 97440-3484 USA

Please forward this to all appropriate places on and off the Internet. Thank you!