An Enabling Debility

I was watching mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. on You Tube the other day, and he made a point that I don’t think a lot of people are catching. The mental health consumer represents a failure on the part of psychiatry to restore mental patients to health. Where we used to have a mental health movement, now we have what has been referred to as a mental health consumer movement.

Nash also noted that the basic difference between a person said to be mentally ill and a person said to be mentally well was that the latter earned a living and the former didn’t earn a living. This is what the whole idea of functionality is all about, the ability to make a good wage slave on the jobs market.

Of course, now we’ve got this idea of “high functioning mental illness” where the old rules don’t apply. Seeing that “high functioning” coupled with “mental illness” is basically a contradiction in terms, how do we explain this phenomenon? A few mental patients, aka mental health consumers, have managed through “compliance” to advance in professional, often academic, careers.

I would say you have about three things going on here at once. A bright and resourceful individual. A person who has a great deal of support–legal, emotional, and social–perhaps more than people who are not so “handicapped” by impugned disease. On top of which you also have someone who would tend to be less heavily drug dose disabled than many people in treatment due to the achievement (as opposed to troubling behavior) that the person had displayed.

It must be remembered here that the idea is not to produce a better quality consumer, the idea is produce a healthy individual, a non-patient. The “high functioning mentally ill” person also suggests a failure of the system to restore that person in particular to his or her right mind. One is also left with the question, are we making “illness” in cases like these a form of “success”?

There are other people who have been fully restored to “sanity”, but there is little glory in recovering one’s mental health as long “notoriety” comes of not recovering. Anonymity may be noble, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Acclaim, in one instance, must prove as much of a disincentive to recovery as federal benefits prove in another. How much of this is a matter of our cracked actor or actress making the most of his or her crack?

Acclaim seldom comes of recovery. More often than not what you have is a mental health worker who was a former patient, and as such represents the worst of two worlds. Your prisoner has become a warder, and your penitentiary system has grown exponentially. I suppose it represents job security on his or her part, but still this means the streets have gotten a little bit meaner, and the neighborhoods have gotten a little less secure.

The Numbers Of US Children On Neuroleptic Drugs Rises

Rueters in a news release, Antipsychotic use growing in U.S. kids and teens, reports the use of neuroleptics on children and teenagers up from less than 10 % of the youths who visited a psychiatrist in the 1990s to fully 1/3 of the youths who visit a psychiatrist in the 2000s.

Antipsychotic drugs are prescribed during almost one in three of all visits kids and teens make to psychiatrists in the United States, according to a new study, up from about one in eleven during the 1990s.

This rise is attributed chiefly to the entirely fraudulent, or off label, practice of prescribing drugs for purposes for which they haven’t been approved by the FDA. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and its attendant disruptive behavior, are one of the labels that these drugs are mentioned as being falsely prescribed for.

[Columbia University Professor Mark] Olfson and his colleagues, who published their work Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that for kids and teens, roughly 90 percent of the antipsychotic prescriptions written during office visits between 2005 and 2009 were “off label,” which means the drugs are being prescribed for something other than for what they’re approved.

90 % is 10 % less than 100 %, and so that’s gotta be a whole lotta kids who are being prescribed pills for fraudulent reasons.

Kids taking atypical neuroleptics, off label or not, are at risk for a metabolic syndrome that involves massive weight gain and attendant physical ill health conditions.

Last year, a large study of children, from the University of Massachusetts, found that kids who took antipsychotic drugs were four times more likely to develop diabetes than their peers who were not taking the medications. (See Reuters Health story of November 22, 2011: http://reut.rs/MtH5dB.)

Overall this study found that neuroleptic drug use increased across the board but especially among children and adolescents.

The numbers of kids on these drugs increased from 0.24 of 100 between 1993 and 1998 to 1.83 of 100 between 2005 and 2009. The numbers of teens went from 0.78 in 100 in the 1990s to 3.76 in 100 in the 2000s.

There is more than a great danger, indeed you can be quite certain in many cases, that some of this excessive and fraudulent drugging is going to lead to neurological damage, and a lifetime on federal benefits in the mental health system, for some of the children and adolescents put on these pills.

Brain Change In “Schizophrenia” Not Genetic

A report at PsychCentral on a Dutch study indicates brain changes in people labeled “schizophrenia” are not the result of “bad” or defective genes. The heading this article carries is Brain Abnormalities in Schizophrenia Due to Disease, Not Genetics.

The brain differences found in people with schizophrenia are mainly the result of the disease itself or its treatment *, as opposed to being caused by genetic factors, according to a Dutch study.

* Emphasis added.

Theory had it that “schizophrenia” came in families, and therefore, unaffected family members should have brain “abnormalities”, too. The familial link was thought to be as much as 81 %. (How do they arrive at these figures? I dare say…wishful thinking.) The results of this research do not support that theory.

For the current study, Heleen Boos and a team from University Medical Center Utrecht performed structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) whole-brain scans on 155 patients with schizophrenia, 186 of their non-psychotic siblings, and 122 healthy controls (including 25 sibling pairs).

As I pointed out in a post a few days back these studies are notorious for not factoring in psychiatric drugs. As psychiatric drugs have not been factored in, it is just as reasonable to assume that the differences found in the patients brains were caused by treatment as it is to assume that they were caused by disease. The true cause, and the extent to which it is caused by one or the other, can only be ascertained through testing that does factor in psychiatric drugs.

Compared with healthy controls, participants with schizophrenia had strong reductions in total brain, gray matter, and white matter volumes, and significant increases in lateral and third ventricle volumes after taking into account age, gender, intracranial volume, and left or right handedness.

There was no difference found between the siblings and the healthy controls.

Cortical thinning, the very thing I blogged about in a recent post, and decreased gray matter, were found in the patients, and not in the siblings of patients or the healthy controls. I would say researchers need to start factoring in psychiatric drugs. If this damage is iatrogenic, factoring in psychiatric drugs would involve also having a group of patients that were treated without drugs, and comparing their brain scans with the brain scans of patients treated on drugs to determine that possibility.

Let me guess. Researchers are not prone to do so because of their fervent belief in “mental illness”, and because of their close financial ties to drug manufacturers?

Free ADHD testing goes the way of free lunches at UF

If you thought “stigma” was the only obstacle to seeking mental health treatment, think again, there is also the little matter of costs. The University of Florida, which previously had given free ADHD tests, will soon start charging. Diagnosis is going to cost students money starting this fall.

The story is in the latest edition of the Independent Florida Alligator, under the heading, UF will charge students in Fall for currently free ADHD testing.

The new four-step process will take seven hours and will cost $175 per student.

That’s right! It may now cost you $175 to acquire an ADHD. Consider, too, that this is only the price for purchasing the disorder. Feeding, maintenance, and vet costs follow close behind. An ADHD, with the advent of ADHDs for adults, can last well beyond the lifetime of a single individual.

These tests, despite being more elaborate than previous tests, are designed to determine the aptitude and dedication an individual might display in caring for an ADHD.

First students must be screened because you wouldn’t want a student with an ADHD that couldn’t properly care for that ADHD.

Students will go through two 90-minute screening sessions, one of which costs $25.

As you can see ADHD is a very peculiar animal.

The third step is a three-hour, $150 evaluation including an IQ test, a personality test, an achievement test and a specific test for ADHD.

Reportedly this deal at UF is a very good one as an alive and kicking ADHD can run you as much as 2Gs from a private collector.

ADHDs have gained increasing popularity over the years, especially among school age boys. It is estimated that almost 10 % of the male children in this country are the proud owners of ADHDs.

Those students without the necessary funding to purchase an ADHD may be able to get around this shortcoming by applying for financial aid.

The Church of Biological Psychiatry and its Discontents

The collusion of business interests, academic stuffed shirts, and a media elite has ensured that the public gets the views of compliant converts to the Church of Biological Psychiatry much more frequently than it hears from non-compliant, and completely recovered, survivors of psychiatric human rights violations and oppression.

The goody two shoes of psychiatry are multiple, and the deception is deep. Your step and fetch it wierd Aunt or Uncle Tom of the treatment world is not the only animal around. She or he is just the media‘s, and the media that is courting psychiatric industry interests and corporate drug company money, darling. Drool on yourself for the camera, dear.

The Church of Biological Psychiatry includes a loose confederation of interested parties seeking to ward off funding cuts, independent examination, criticism and free thought. These parties include mainstream psychiatry organizations, torture advocacy organizations, institutions of high education, law enforcement officials, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, plus a bunch of dumb hacks that don‘t know shit.

The God of the Church of Biological Psychiatry goes by the name of chronic and irreparable “mental illness”. The Church of Biological Psychiatry asserts that a certain percentage of the population have been chosen to express the genes fashioned expressly by this God of Madness. Here, “mental illness” is a noun and never a verb. Furthermore, “mental illness” is possessive. If it’s not what you are, it’s what you have, and it’s not what you do.

The belief in “mental illness” genes has not put us one iota closer to developing a “mental illness” litmus test. After all this time, this “mental illness” bug or defect, just like the Gods of the Greeks, the Romans, and the God of the Christians, has eluded capture. Converts and evangelicals alike, despite being certain that “mental illnesses” are caused by defective, inferiority, or submission genes, readily admit that they don’t know the source of “mental disturbances”.

The great God “mental disorder” demands further research and development into the potent capacity chemicals have to maintain, contain, and otherwise control the more unruly select among his flock. Without these pills and potions they would be lost forever. Sorry fuckers who can’t cope with the world outside of an institution. These chemical compounds were created expressly in order to correct the mistakes of nature. The church has an expression for its solution to these mistakes, “In pharmaceuticals, and the profits they pull in, we trust.”

For decades a small but growing band of heretics have defied the dictates and decrees of the Church of Biological Psychiatry despite, if not total silence, irritation on the part of the illuminati. You must know your place, the clergy preach, and that place is either in receiving treatment, or in providing treatment, or in agreeing with everything we say. Stay tuned, although evangelicals and corruption have guaranteed that the Church of Biological Psychiatry is growing at a much faster rate than heresy, there is no room for improvement in the perfect doctrine.

Honey, The Kids Have Anger Sickness

According to Harvard researchers 8 % of teenagers are “sick” with anger.

The blog entry at canada.com bears the heading, The age of rage: psychiatrists battle over teen anger diagnosis.

Harvard Medical School researchers, in a study based on in-person interviews with more than 10,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17, found that about eight per cent met the criteria for intermittent explosive disorder, or IED.

No. You are not super gullible if you believe this to be true. It’s true.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — psychiatry’s official catalogue of mental illness, now undergoing its first major revision in nearly two decades — IED’s central feature is impulsive aggression grossly out of proportion to the situation. People lose control, break or smash things and attack or threaten to hurt someone.

In other words, they go through their terrible twos or their teenage years.

This post didn’t speculate on the number of teenagers who might have oppositional defiant disorder, or conduct disorder, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or even I’m hotter than you disorder. You know teens. It’s all about attitude.

But there isn’t agreement on just how many “episodes” or outbursts of aggression are necessary for a diagnosis of IED. As well, some have proposed broadening the criteria to include outbursts that don’t involve threatened or actual violence, but do involve verbal aggression — insults or arguments “out of proportion to provocation.”

We will deal with the bruiser verb at another time if we ever deal with it.

I think the moral of this tale can safely be said to be, “Nice kids don’t get IED.” Also, they are good with barbeque sauce.

Allen Frances And The DSM-5

Allen Frances, Duke University psychiatry professor emeritus, isn’t so much a critic of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as he is a critic of the DSM revision process. Apparently he has a love/hate relationship with the manual itself. He doesn’t object to the DSM, psychiatry’s label bible, so much as he objects to what he sees as a rushed and flawed job that could result in a shoddy product. He objects to a process that he thinks will produce a lower quality product than a more thorough going process would produce.

He himself was one of the architects of the DSM-IV. The DSM-IV was notorious for raising the “mental illness” rate throughout the world. The DSM-5 is expected to smooth out a few more of the wrinkles in the DSM-IV. Although current criticism of the DSM revision process may make the DSM-5 less of an open Pandora’s Box, or contagion zone, than no criticism whatsoever would, the publication of the DSM-5 is expected to raise the rate of mental illness around the world substantially again. Make no mistake about it; what is going on here, with the hoopla surrounding the revision and publication of this manual, is the selling of “mental illness”!

His latest jabs at this process on his Huffington Post blog have been aimed at the price tag. A recent blog post of his bore the title, DSM-5 Costs $25 Million, Putting APA in a Financial Hole. The DSM-5 has cost 5x the amount already that the DSM-IV cost. The APA is in the hole right now because of this price tag.

The American Psychiatric Association just reported a surprisingly large yearly deficit of $350,000. This was caused by reduced publishing profits, poor attendance at its annual meeting, rapidly declining membership, and wasteful spending on DSM-5. APA reserves are now below “the recommended amount for a non-profit (reserves equal to a year’s operating expenses).”

$350,000 in the hole to be exact because of a multi-million dollar revision process owing in part to the objections of critics such as Allen Frances.

APA has already spent an astounding $25 million on DSM-5. I can’t imagine where all that money went. As I recall it, DSM-IV cost about $5 million, and more than half of this came from outside research grants. Even if the DSM-5 product were made of gold instead of lead, $25 million would be wildly out of proportion. The rampant disorganization of DSM-5 must have caused colossal waste. One obvious example is the $3 million spent on the useless DSM-5 field trial, with its irrelevant questions, poorly conceived design, and embarrassing results.

The DSM-5 was due to be published in 2012. Because of the objections of many psychologists and the likes of Allen Frances publication was suspended for a year. The revisers of the DSM-5 are also going out of their way to get input from interested parties. Actually, and to be more precise, the revisers are busy at damage controll by giving the appearance of giving an ear to critics for public relations purposes. The upper echelon of the APA don’t want democracy. Dialogue is not what coming up with “mental disorder” labels is all about. There is, for example, no No Mental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified category in the manual.

If stage one were field testing, stage two is quality control. Stage one a disaster, in his view; he sees quality control as the issue in a more recent post, Follow The Money, on these monetary difficulties lost to the DSM-5 revision process.

APA was faced with 2 choices: 1) go ahead with Stage 2 to clean up the mess; or 2) declare Stage 2 unnecessary and publish a poorly edited, unreliable, and untested DSM-5. APA chose the second option and is rushing toward a forced, premature birth of DSM-5.

Actually, as pointed out above, publication had been suspended earlier, and so this would entail suspending publication yet again. This suspension proposed by Allen Frances also begs the issue of the rising tab and the debt. If the DSM-5 revision has cost $25,000,000 already, continuing to haggle over the minutae and specifics of “mental disorder” labels is not going to bring this tab down.

Since there is no pressing need to publish the DSM-5 quickly, let’s follow the money. The APA budget depends heavily on the huge publishing profits generated by its DSM monopoly. APA needs the money badly. It is losing paying members; other sources of funding are also on a downward trend; and its budget projections require a big May 2013 injection of DSM-5 cash.

Is there a pressing need to publish the DSM-5 at all? Oh, yeah! The money! The patients? Well, they’re going to rot anyway, and so we might as well take advantage of them and their plight. What can they do?

As someone with a history of activism in the psychiatric survivor movement, I have objections to the DSM-I through 5. Our problem stems precisely from the fact that these psychiatrists, with their medical degrees, and their drug company ties, are putting professional interests ahead of their patients’ health. These medical doctors are putting their own standing above the health of their patients to the detriment of their patients’ health. Allen Frances, the retired psychiatry professor, is as guilty as any of them.

Allen Frances is playing a double game. If he has to settle for a shoddy product, to him it’s better than no product at all. This product could be “medicalizing normal”, as he puts it, right and left. This represents a glitch the next edition can potentially clear up. He can immediately start projecting his wishes onto a revision of the DSM-6. He may not be alive then, but his followers can continue to opt for a little more rigor in the revision efforts. I just don’t see how any amount of rigor is going to resolve the basic lack of real science you’ve got in the DSM. There is no real science involved in the selection of “disease” labels by committee.

We don’t really have a potentially bad edition of a good book going on here. We just have another bad edition of a bad book that was a bad idea to start with. The DSM should be scrapped altogether for other approaches that don’t owe so much to biological bias and drug industry profiteering. Lives are on the line, and as long as the current toxic paradigm, supported by the DSM, is in operation, more of those lives are going to be lost. The APA can find other ways to fund its nefarious activities. The DSM is basically fraud, but unfortunately it’s a fraud that it appears is going to continue for some time to come. Again, and emphatically, it should be scrapped entirely!

Child Drugging Increases In Australia

According to the Sydney Morning Herald a psychiatry professor at the University of Adeliade, Jon Jureidini, is raising the issue of the increased use of psychiatric drugs on children in Australia. The article in question bears the heading, Concern at psychiatric drugs used on children.

This article points out that after the addition of black box warning labels to anti-depressant bottles in the USA there was a 58 % drop in the use of those drugs on children in that country.

Yet between 2007 and 2011 in Australia antidepressant prescriptions increased from nearly 22 prescriptions per 1000 children aged below 16 to nearly 27, data provided to the Herald by the Department of Human Services under freedom of information laws shows.

The use of antidepressant drugs on children in Australia is increasing while the use of neuroleptic drugs on children has doubled in little more than 5 years time.

Last year there were about 14 antipsychotic prescriptions for every 1000 children, compared with seven in 2007.

Professor Jureidini points out that this increased usage has occurred despite the fact that the rate of psychosis among children has not increased so significantly. He offers a prescription of his own.

Professor Jureidini said more monitoring of the drugs and their side effects was needed, along with training for GPs on non-pharmacological treatments.

I’d say that the situation of Australian represents an object lesson that doctors and mental health professionals in other countries would do well to learn from.

The NIMH: Using A Scientific Pretext To Fund Harm

Some research studies should be criminal. A good case in point is this study in an article found in Phys.Org, UC San Diego to study accelerated aging in schizophrenia.

Researchers at the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California, San Diego have received a $4 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health, to study accelerated biological aging in schizophrenia.

Accelerated biological aging? They’re not really studying accelerated aging, are they? The short answer to this question is no. Poor health is often attributed to the psychiatric label that is actually the result, as is the case here, of the drugs given to treat the label. The researchers attribute this poor health falsely to the label as a method of getting more funding and of better deceiving the general public.

Scientists have long observed that schizophrenia is more than a brain disease, as it also affects a wide range of physical functions and entails more rapid biological aging. A number of studies have suggested that physiological changes seen throughout the body occur at an earlier age in people with schizophrenia. For example, young adults suffering from this mental condition are prone to diseases associated with growing older, such as diabetes and cardiovascular problems.

Suddenly we’re expected to digest the oxymoronic suggestion that there are old young people running around in the mental health system. Actually it is a well known fact that a metabolic condition associated with the use of the atypical neuroleptic drugs developed in the 1990s is the culprit. These drugs have a tendency to cause an excessive weight gain which accompanies the diseases mentioned in the article and results in early mortality. What these researchers will actually be studying is the iatrogenic ill health that doctors are directly responsible for causing. This is the research equivalent of poisoning somebody so that you can observe him or her in the process of dying.

To unravel biological mechanisms underlying faster aging, [principal investigator Dilip V.] Jeste and colleagues will measure and analyze a panel of biomarkers associated with insulin dysregulation, inflammation, oxidative stress, and cell aging. The last study involves measuring the length of telomeres – regions of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes from deterioration and have been linked to longevity. In addition, researchers will investigate the effects of factors related to chronicity of schizophrenia, such as cumulative effects of medication.

There is an easy way to de-accelerate what these researchers are calling an aging process, and that is simply by reducing the dosage of neuroleptic drug that the research subjects are being given. The “cumulative effects of medication” are where the effects of the drugs have to be accumulated over the long-term in a subject. You could do the same thing with persistent low doses of potassium cyanine. “Chronicity” itself is related to the use of these drugs for what is termed “symptom management”. This “symptom management” takes place basically because the condition is thought to so severe in an individual as to place him or her beyond recovery.

The NIMH should have better places to put its money than into studies that damage people just so that damage can be studied. I can’t begin to express how unethical this sort of practice is. I would imagine that the impetus behind this research might be the development of a drug to de-accelerate the ill health that is brought on by psychiatric treatment that could be added to any drug cocktail a mental health consumer might be put on. This additional drug is proposed in order to rake in kickbacks from the drug industry that would not be there if the patient were detoxified. Detoxification, of course, comes with a reduction of drugs.

The Bogus Disease Industry Is Booming

Imaginary diseases are easy to over-diagnose. The mental health field is chock full of imaginary diseases. How can it not be? The DSM, the psychiatrist label bible, is loaded with diseases that were voted into existence by committee. Two of these imaginary diseases are attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Bogus diseases also have bogus criteria for diagnosis. Science 2.0 has released a story with the blunt but true headline, You Knew This: ADD And ADHD Over-Diagnosed.

The researchers surveyed altogether 1,000 child and adolescent psychotherapists and psychiatrists across Germany. 473 participated in the study. They received one of four available case vignettes, and were asked to give a diagnoses and a recommendation for therapy. In three out of the four case vignettes, the described symptoms and circumstances did not fulfill ADHD criteria. Only one of the cases fulfilled ADHD criteria based strictly on the valid diagnostic criteria. In addition, the gender of the child was included as a variable resulting in eight different case vignettes. As the result, when comparing two identical cases with a different gender, the difference was clear: Leon has ADHD but Lea does not.

Not only are boys more likely to be perceived as “having it”, but male doctors are more likely to diagnose it than female doctors according to the same study.

It looks like the drug companies have found many ways to profit from this ADHD and ADD misdiagnosis racket though.

As media attention increased, ADHD diagnoses also became inflationary. Between 1989 and 2001, the number of diagnoses in German clinical practice increased by 381 percent. The costs for ADHD medication, such as for the performance-enhancer Methylphenidate, have increased 9 times between 1993 and 2003. The German health insurance company, Techniker, reports an increase of 30 percent in Methylphenidate prescriptions for its clients between the ages of 6 and 18. Similarly, the daily dosage has increased by 10 percent on average.

ADHD labeling has increased in the USA as well. The Daily Northwestern from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has a story on research conducted at that University, NU study finds ADHD diagnoses on the rise.

From 2000 to 2010, the total number of national ADHD cases among children under 18 increased by 66 percent, from 6.2 million to 10.4 million, the study found.

This same article harks back to the German study mentioned above.

Others, however, have hypothesized that doctors are overdiagnosing ADHD in children. In February, researchers from Germany published data in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology showing that 16.7 percent of 1,000 psychiatrists diagnosed ADHD in non-ADHD patients.

I would suspect that the actual figure is much higher. If ADHD is as I have concluded an imaginary disease then 100 % of these children don’t have ADHD. In such case, it follows that diagnosing even a single example of the disorder would be a matter of over-diagnosis.