I wrote about the DSM-5 before:
and mentioned ME agenda's fine site about it
Incidentally, here is "the other side", so to speak - and I quote their
own title as well:
As the term "Development" suggests, they are not humble about
their own outstanding merits:
Top of page : "DSM-5: The Future of
Psychiatric Diagnosis"
Bottom of page: "Representing 38,000 physician leaders in
mental health
© 2010 American Psychiatric Association. All Rights
Reserved."
(Note the "physician leaders" and "mental health": Do these 38.000
psychiatrists really believe that? "Physician leaders"? "38,000", no
less?!)
As I mentioned also before in
the chief editors of the previous two DSMs, doctors Spitzer and Frances,
strongly disagree with the DSM-5, for what seem to me both intellectually
cogent and morally honorable reasons.
And now there is an interesting article in the Washington Examiner under
the main title Corrupting Psychiatry:
It is by one Max Borders, and starts like so:
There was a time when we could be more charitable
about the vagaries in the APA’s Bible, the DSM. But
not anymore. If you’ve never heard of the DSM, it’s
the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
series the APA publishes. Psychiatrists all over the
world use the DSM as a guidebook for treating people
with some form of mental illness. But the APA may test
credulity with its upcoming edition.
I refer specifically to proposed changes in the DSM-V
due out in 2013. It’s no accident these changes
reflect new political realities about how psychiatric
medicine gets paid for and by whom. Consider
this
from Reuters back in July:
Leading mental health experts [in Britain] gave a
briefing on Tuesday to warn that a new edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM), which is being revised now for publication in
2013, could devalue the seriousness of mental illness
and label almost everyone as having some kind of
disorder.
Citing examples of new additions like "mild anxiety
depression," "psychosis risk syndrome," and "temper
dysregulation disorder," they said many people
previously seen as perfectly healthy could in future
be told they are ill.
"It's leaking into normality. It is shrinking the pool of
what is normal to a puddle," said Til Wykes of the
Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.
Mild anxiety?
Temper dysregulation? Risk syndrome? Reuter’s clearly forgot the lesson
of Watergate: Follow the money.
Here Mr Borders - and Mrs Wykes as well - seems to me to be quite right:
Spot on, in fact - Yes, the new DSM-5 is "shrinking
the pool of what is normal to a puddle", and yes: The all
important questions are not so much about 'evidence based
medicine' (*), as about Cui Bono?
That is: Who will benefit from the DSM-5?
The psychiatrists themselves, first and foremost, most of all,
most definitely: All that limbering up of categories, all that giving up
of such preciseness as there was left, will enable them to brand
far more people as "dysfunctional believers", from which their
brotherhood of noble healers then will cure them, for money. And besides,
it will enable them to get away with virtually anything, in the name of
'evidence based medicine' also, for their system of diagnosing seems
designed to be irrefutable.
The health insurance companies, next: Many more patients with real
diseases, both explained and unexplained, can now be manipulated into cognitive behavorial therapy instead of medical research, medicines,
operations, treatments or health benefits, namely because they "thought
themselves ill" or because they have "inappropriate coping behaviour", have
"too much interest" in their own health, "care too much" for the moral and
intellectual qualities of their medical healers, or what not:
somatoformers all.
The state and state bureaucracies: Parts of the DSM-5 read as
Soviet psychiatry, in that everyone who fails to be ill according to
correct, bureaucratic APA-approved, health-insurance supported, State
approved ways, will therefore and thereby be declared a "dysfunctional
believer", "somatoformer" ("complex" or "simple", and that e.g. because
while having cancer you are, according to your kind psychiatrists or his
nice bureaucratic stand in, "overly concerned with your health", which
makes you think you need an operation: Not so, you need to learn to cope
with your psychological problems, at a much lesser cost for the insurance
and the bureaucracy also.)
Besides, the APA has very conveniently dreamed up all manners of
psychiatric disorders - "alcohol use disorder", "marihuana use disorder"
a.s.o - that seem to be intended to make the US State maintain the laws
by conveniently making anything the state forbids some form of
"disorder", Soviet style.
I cannot see any patients being benefitted by the pseudoscience of the
APA - but then the patients have hardly any voice in the APA or the
DSM-5, though they will have to pay the bills and suffer the
consequences.
Mr Borders agrees, and ends his piece as follows - with which I again
quite agree:
I don't agree with everything psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has to say.
But I agree with this:
For centuries the theocratic State exercised authority and used
force in the name of God. The Founders sought to protect the
American people from the religious tyranny of the State. They did
not anticipate, and could not have anticipated, that one day
medicine would become a religion and that the alliance between
medicine and the State would then threaten personal liberty and
responsibility exactly as they had been threatened by the alliance
between church and State.
The ongoing blurring between psychiatry and the state is a means to
an end. But it is not and end you and I share. It is collusion
between guild and government for mutual gain -- only we pick up the
tab.
Quite so. Unfortunately, Mr Borders, who seems American, in the middle of
his article is mostly concerned with what seem to be Libertarian or
Republican ideas about health care and the State.
As it happens, theoretically I can see, as the phrase is, "where he's
coming from" - but in empirical fact I am European, and I know full well
that a fine and fair health care system is quite possible
under full capitalist conditions as existed in the Netherlands in the
1950ies and 1960ies, which also were poor conditions compared with later
European riches.
But yes: It existed; it was fair; everybody paid premiums;
everybody was insured for most treatments; and it worked. For decades -
until it got corrupted and then sold out and destroyed by Dutch
politicians and bureaucrats, largely - it seems - to their very own
nephews and nieces or at least fellow party members in Dutch NGOs, who
then privatized it all appealing constantly to the blessings of The Free
Market Forces - since when the premiums have tripled, the medical care
given halved, the health bureaucracy quadrupled, all talking with medical
doctors set to strict time limits, and a part of the poorest cannot
afford the premiums.
So it seems to me I have decades worth of evidence that Mr Borders
is quite mistaken about the solution of the sick US health care problem -
but then he is quite right about the tendencies and motives of the sick
American Psychiatric Association, which seem best summarized as:
Medical fraud in the names of science and patients' interests.
Indeed, one finds this on the APA opening pages. I sow some numbers for
my comments that follow - and let me note that I speak as a psychologist
and a philosopher of science in these notes:
The DSM-5 Task
Force and Work Group members are working to develop criteria for
diagnoses that not only reflect new advances in the science and
conceptualization of mental disorders, but also reflect the needs of
our patients. [1] We encourage you to delve into
the wealth of information contained within this site to become
familiar with some of the advancements in scientific and clinical
knowledge that will assist in making diagnoses more accurate, valid,
and clinically useful. [2] We also hope that this
knowledge will pave the way for further research in these important
areas. [3]
Your input, whether
you are a clinician, a researcher, an administrator, or a
person/family member affected by a mental disorder, is important to
us. [4] We thank you for taking part in this
historic process and look forward to receiving your feedback.
David J. Kupfer,
M.D., DSM-5 Task Force Chair
Darrel A. Regier,
M.D., M.P.H., DSM-5 Task Force Vice-Chair [5]
[1] No, you are not, and you are lying, knowingly: What
you advance is not real science but pseudoscience. What you are trying to
do is to redefine psychiatry in such a way that what psychiatrists do
will be more paid and more selected as therapies by insurances and
states.
[2] No, you are not: you're doing this not on the
basis of real science but on the basis of self-interest and verbal and
statistical flimflam, and your changes will not assist the making of
honest and rational diagnoses in clear unambiguous language, but will
enable enormous amounts of psychobabble and nonsense to pose as 'evidence
based medicine'.
[3] No, you do not: What you hope is to save the
financial interests of an essential unscientific group of psychobabblers,
by making real rational science in their fields impossible, namely by
limbering up terminology, fudging methodology, and making statistics
meaningless because of vague terms:
Soon one's diagnosis will depend on whether the mood of one's consultant
psychiatrist dictates whether one is oneself "too much", "overly" or
"very" something or other the APA frowns upon, somehow, somewhere in the
DSM-5, or indeed whether one's family-members are "too much" or "overly"
concerned with one's health, for this is then what the APA now calls a
"Factitious Disorder", for which one's kind psy can section or legally
persecuted one's "overly" worried mom. (She thinks you are ill; the psy
thinks that will cost the State and the Insurance too much money, so you
and she have "Disorders": You are a "Simple Somatoformer"; your mom is
"Factitiously Disordered" - she thinks you're ill, and the kind psy says
no - and both of you are thinking yourself ill at out fine society's
financial costs. You see? No? Then you ought to be in court.)
[4] No, you are evidently lying: It is extremely
difficult for almost anyone, including the chief editors of the DSM-III
and DSM-IV, to be seriously involved in whatever is happening besides the
scenes, and any "person/family member" who is
not personal friends with messrs Kupfer and Regier will get updates on
the progress of the DSM-5 only in unpredictable driblets.
[5] Sorry gentlemen: Either everything I learned the
last 40 years about psychology, psychiatry, logic, statistics,
methodology and philosophy of science was benighted nonsense, falsehood
and delusions, all thought up by people that are far inferior
intellectually and morally to messrs. Kupfer and Regier - or else what
you're cooking up, mostly in effective secrecy, mostly in small
committees of some obscure group of anyway financially much involved
persons of your very own financially strongly interested professional
group, is mostly fraudulent redefining, obfuscating, fudging,
ambiguating of psychiatric research and terminology.
As far as I can see, with the DSM-5 the APA has shown itself morally,
medically and scientifically incompetent, and dangerous to the public,
who will be judged in its terms: Already for the DSM-IV, as published in
the
Brit. Jn. Psychiatry: 78% of the British are not
sane, and who also, once having been smeared, have to pick up the
bill for getting cured from the imputations they have been smeared with:
Top of page : "DSM-5: The Future of
Psychiatric Diagnosis"
Bottom of page: "Representing 38,000 physician leaders in
mental health
© 2010 American Psychiatric Association. All Rights
Reserved."
Well...." physician leaders " :
pseudoscientific con men but indeed, one must kindly assume, in
present and future fine " mental health " :
financial health.
In brief... what the APA is now, in so far as it implements the DSM-5, is
a society of pseudo-scientists
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented
as
scientific, but which does not adhere to a
valid
scientific methodology, lacks supporting
evidence or plausibility, cannot be
reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status. Pseudoscience
is often characterized by the use of vague, exaggerated or
unprovable claims, an over-reliance on
confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at refutation, a lack of
openness to evaluation by other experts, and a general absence of
systematic processes to rationally develop theories.
Note
(*) Maybe I should add clearly that manipulative
propaganda terminology like "evidence based science" and "evidence
based medicine" are pleonasms in real science and real medicine, and
therefore are only, but then indeed ad nauseam, used by
pseudoscientists.
My strongly evidence based finding about "evidence based science" is that
- in modern times - all and only pseudoscientists insist that the
pretentious bogosity they peddle is "evidence based science".
Indeed, I know of no work of real science - physics, chemistry,
mathematics - that insists it is "evidence based science".
It is quite like honesty: If it is so, it goes without saying; if honesty
is insisted upon, it likely is not honest.
And so with the pseudosciences - clinical psychology, psychiatry - that
insist they are 'evidence based': The reader is consciously lied to.
P.S. Corrections may have to be made later.
