Psychosis Risk Weasels Its Way Into The DSM-5

Allen Frances in his ten worst changes to the DSM list misses one psychiatric label that has got to be as bad as many of those that did make his list.

Remember “psychosis risk syndrome? “Psychosis risk syndrome” is still there, only now it’s called “attenuated psychosis syndrome”.

Although I’ve seen websites saying, oh, “attenuated psychosis disorder” was thrown out of the DSM. (Allen Frances says as much in his post, DSM-5 Guide is Not Bible-Ignore It’s Ten Worse Changes.) This is untrue. It’s still there, and it’s still a problem.

“Attenuated psychosis syndrome” will be in section 3 of the new revision. Section 3 is for diagnoses requiring more research.

It won’t be reimbursed by insurance companies, but it will be there, and this is ominous. It means the possibility that it will be reimbursed by insurance companies in a future edition of the DSM is extremely high.

75 % of the people tagged pre-psychotic never go psychotic, and so this diagnostic label is extremely dangerous, and potentially contagious.

“Attenuated psychosis syndrome” is in the same section that includes “internet addiction”, the “behavioral addiction” some professionals want included so badly.

If it’s in the DSM at any place, from page one to the appendix, it is going to be applied to living human beings. Given this reality, the danger of increasing the “serious mental illness” rate substantially through the use of such a bogus diagnostic tag is very real, and it should be a major cause for concern.

The DSM-5 is only a dead sea scroll and not the fully approved Allen Frances version

I hear a constant buzzing. No, wait. It’s only Allen Frances.

The chief editor of the DSM-IV is posing as the chief critic of the DSM-5, if that makes any sense. The problem is that the criticisms this retired psychiatry professor applies to the DSM-5 apply to the DSM-IV as much as they do to anything, and I’m still waiting for a major display of remorse over that document.

If we look at his latest in a catalogue of complaints against the upcoming DSM revision, DSM-5 Is A Guide, Not A Bible—Simply Ignore Its 10 Worst Changes, some of his criticisms are right on target.

His numero uno is a real humdinger, Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD) or temper tantrum disorder. This is the DSM revision teams way to try to deal with an artificially created epidemic that isn’t even in the DSM. A Harvard psychiatrist developed this notion that a number of these kids diagnosed ADHD were actually bipolar, and thus began the pediatric bipolar disorder boom. The DSM revision team has simply created a third diagnosis with which to compound the prior two diagnoses. When ADHD and bipolar disorder are at epidemic proportions, this is certainly paving the way for a third wave. Just wait, perhaps in 10 or 20 years they will come up with an adult DMDD diagnosis.

His second and ninth complaints we can skip over. Sadness, grief, and anxiety aren’t illnesses, or diseases, or disorders, or whatever you want to call them. They are emotions known to all of us. The distinction between clinical and “normal” is a distinction between the everyday and the psychiatrized. If you want one, go about your business, it will come. If you want the other, see a shrink. He or she has their “help” to contribute.

Number 3 is Neurocognitive Disorder or old folks disease. Oh, yeah. Age happens to everybody. I kind of think it redundant as when the brain breaks you have dementia or Alzheimer’s. If we had a ready trash can we could scrap number 3, too, but, of course, psychiatrists must to make a…I dunno…Is it a living, or is it a killing? Anyway, it’s bread, bacon, and a big house in an upscale neighborhood.

Number 4 is adult ADHD. I think I covered the subject sufficiently with number 1. There was a time when there was absolutely no ADHD. A few unruly children popped up, and the editors of the DSM-III put it in the DSM. ADHD babies grow up. 30 years on and, it’s epidemic among children, while the revisers of the upcoming edition are making it an adult “disease”. Pill popping babies grow up to be pill popping adults. Although the drug companies know this, they aren’t letting on. Why nip a good thing in the bud.

Number 5 over eating isn’t a disorder any more than over drinking is a disorder. Alcohol poisoning, with attendant headaches, on the other hand, bellyaches, diarrhea, and vomit, are major concerns. If you’re going to over indulge, learn to under indulge, er, or moderate your appetites. If you need a shrink to do so, well, you’re probably pretty gullible when it comes to a number of these other disorders. Excess in anything could be “co-occurring”, lay talk for “co-morbid”, with any human trait, negatively labeled a disorder, under the sun, moon, and stars. Psychiatrists tend to think “mental disorders” lead to “substance abuse” and vice versa. What a racket!

His complaint number 6 is a little weird coming from a psychiatrist. This has to do with the switch from Autism and autism related disorders to a general Autism Spectrum Disorder.

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.

Alright. Should you be talking to the nation’s shrinks or the nation’s educators on this score, and then how does this effect other controversial juvenile diagnoses (say, ADHD, conduct disorder, etc.)? If your talking about the collusion between this nation’s educators, law enforcement officers, government officials, mental health workers and psychiatrists that is an even bigger issue than we’ve got time to cover right here and now.

Number 7 is certainly a valid complaint, and number 8 follows close behind. If recreational illicit substance use is abuse, habit and indulgence equals abuse, too. Although hypersexuality was not included in the upcoming revision, internet addiction is going to be there, and internet addiction is a behavioral addiction. Behavioral addiction opens up the flood gates for any fad or trend to be classified an addiction. If internet addiction makes this edition, you can bet other behavioral addictions are coming, and sexual addiction, however you spell it, is way up there at the top among the candidates for inclusions in future editions.

What he ignores is that these “worst changes”, as he puts it, are the result of a process and an idea that is thoroughly unscientific from beginning to end. You don’t find real diseases by inventing them, and voting them into common parlance. You only find fanciful diseases that way.

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.

We, in the psychiatric survivors movement, have been something similar for decades. What follows from this sacred tenet is my next question directed at Professor Frances. Why, given this basic tenet, do you need a guide book for doing harm to people at all?

This harm starts with the psychiatric label. The label is a category in the DSM. All further harm follows from this labeling of human beings as flawed or pathologically affected or unworthy. This labeling represents the beginning of a downward slide in perception from discourse between equals to that of discourse between designated authorities and sub-human second class citizens. Even if you’re using a bamboo pole and string rather than a rod and reel, a few of us still aren’t taking the bait.

Mutants are taking over? Really? You think…

Psychiatry is full of it, and some of the latest “discoveries” in the field indicate just how full of it psychiatry happens to be. Take this report, New Genetic Mutations May Keep Some Mental Disorders From Dying Out, at PsychCentral. The post concerns a study suggesting that because mental patients have fewer children and “mental illness”, the label, isn’t dying out, we’re seeing genetic mutations…

People with certain mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, tend to have fewer children than the average person, suggesting that these disorders persist not because of heredity, but because of new genetic mutations, according to a new study.

Or, and this isn’t stated, because we’re not dealing with a heritable condition. In other words, it’s a matter of the decisions people make in their lives and not so much the genes their parents gave them.

People in the psychiatric system exist within a social context, and it’s this social context that is not being looked at so much.

The findings shed light on a longstanding puzzle in psychiatry: How do the genes linked with some mental health disorders persist in the human population, if people with those disorders tend to have fewer children?

I would suggest that the issue is a matter of supply and demand. If mental health professionals had fewer children, there wouldn’t be such a demand for nut cases.

No doubt some Swedish researcher somewhere along the way was impacted by the SciFi movie The Andromeda Strain, and nothing can be the same since.

For example, schizophrenia is extremely heritable, so it would make sense that it becomes more rare over time. But the disorder seems to persist in 1 percent of the population, which suggests that new mutations are occurring quickly enough for it to remain consistent, said [researcher Robert] Power.

Correction, bias has it that schizophrenia is extremely heritable despite all the evidence that would indicate otherwise. If it’s not genes, it must be genes. This is biological psychiatry to the core. Nobody is saying look to social and environmental factors, nobody is saying that, but maybe somebody should.

When you are selling disease it is convenient to pretend you are selling something else, like health, because people wouldn’t tend to buy disease on its demerits alone.

The researchers note that some people with mental disorders may take medication that affects fertility, or they may have been hospitalized at some point during their reproductive years, and these factors may have influenced the results.

Or they may be facing prejudice in what is referred to as the competition for suitable, if desirable is too strong a word, partners. One scapegoat doesn’t reproduce. Two scapegoats do reproduce, but they hardly do so well as the goat with his harem in the herd.

A Little Bit of Discretion, Please

Bad advice remains bad advice. Bad parents are gullible parents. Skepticism, given the amount of nonsense floating about in the world today, is a virtue.

Are you dealing with Turbulent teens or mental illness? this article in the The Gleaner from Jamaica would deceptively appear to ask. The article is actually selling “mental illness”. It suggests that any reader’s child could be “sick”. First thought. Read on, and damn your kid to a diminished life as a social and human failure in the mental sickness system if you want to do so, or think better of the matter, and go, “Wait a minute, maybe pegging my kid with a psychiatric label isn’t the best way to proceed at all”.

The article answers the question, “What should parents do?” with the following 7 alarmist answers that were probably dreamed up by a pharmaceutical company advertising team.

1. Be vigilant. 2. Seek professional help. 3. Do not be afraid to seek psychiatric care. 4. Do not shove it under the carpet. 5. There is danger in delay.

My response to this orange alert approach to problems in living is to reply, “Bullshit!” He or she who seeks to find “sickness” in a child will find it, and he or she who seeks to find “wellness” in a child will find that. This approach would hunt for “illness” rather than for “health”. To paraphrase gospel, “Let he or she who is without error attach the first label”.

The article supplies its own “mental illness” screening test of sorts. It gives 8 warning signs of “mental illness”. Now you’ve got a “mental illness” checklist if you are really desperate to have a child labeled, disposed of in the loony bin, locked away and abandoned. The message is clear. You, too, given this checklist, can bear a brood of loony birds.

1. Change in behavior. 2. Decline in school performance. 3. Drug use. 4. Poor self-care. 5. [Change in pattern of] Social interaction. 6. Communication is reduced. 7. Family breakdown. 8. Strange behavior.

I’ve got news for you. Each of the items on this checklist is a “symptom” of being a teenager. Adolescent rebellion is not a disease. Mom, Dad, get over it! Junior has to grow up. Mental health treatment or no mental health treatment, you shouldn’t try to hang onto your kid forever. Your child is merely testing his or her wings. Some parents will suffocate their kid rather than accept the simple truth that the kid needs more independence.

I could draw up a checklist for kids to use in diagnosing parents, too, but this is all about power, and we don’t give kids that kind of power until they are deemed old enough to use it. Unfortunately, some grown up kids never get old enough to use it wisely.

Saying Yes To Health By Saying No To Labels And Drugs

I don’t have a “mental illness”. I see it as a revolutionary act to proclaim myself free of “mental illness”. It is a revolutionary act because psychiatrists had diagnosed me with a number of different “disorders of the mind” in the past. These same psychiatrists readily give negative prognoses’ for certain diagnoses’, among them some of the diagnoses’ they’d given me. I call it a revolutionary act because I have found that it is an act many people find themselves too cowardly to make. I don’t need a doctor to circumscribe terms for living my life, and I don’t need to pretend I need a doctor to do such.

In a mental hospital setting, where one has been involuntarily committed, by a hearing and not by a trial, one is expected to admit to having an “illness”. If one doesn’t admit to being “ill”, a prequisite for discharge, while one at one time would have been said to be using a defense mechanism, and being ‘in denial’ about the severity of his or her “disease”, now one is more likely to hear that one has ‘anosogosia’, a brain defect, that causes one to ‘lack insight’ into the nature of his or her “disease”. Non-admission of “illness” is seen as a further “symptom of illness”, or a further indication of the more serious nature of the impugned “illness”. This is the game, you go along, or you rot in a psychiatric facility.

It must first be remembered that one has been convicted of acting insane not by a jury, but by a judge, a few psychiatrists, and probably a public defender who was only pretending to defend his client. The suspect, in other words, is presumed to be “sick”, and no proof need be offered, for as long and until a mental health professional declares him or her otherwise. The thing is mental health professionals don’t hand out certificates of mental health or sanity. If they are going to verify anything, on paper, it’s usually to the instability that they would find in their captives. Of course, the appearance of “improvement” can open doors.

I am not a high functioning schizophrenic. I am not a high functioning person with bipolar disorder. I am not a high functioning depressive person. High functioning, in combination with “mental illness”, is an oxymoron. People are gauged by the DSM, the shrink’s label bible, according to levels of functionality, and people so labeled are not expected to be able to function at the level of people who bear no labels. I am, therefore, high functioning precisely because I am not schizophrenic, nor bipolar, nor depressed. The high functioning exception to the rule of low functioning is a ruse.

Much research has stirred up much confusion about so called “mental illnesses” and the direct effects of the drugs used to “manage” so called “symptoms“. When it comes to schizophrenia and neuroleptic drugs, a worsening condition is more often the result of the drugs than it is of the disease itself. Neuroleptic drugs reduce brain mass, induce apathy, and ultimately produce cognitive decline in the individuals who take them. Each of these conditions has been attributed to the progress of the disease. You would have to factor psychiatric drugs into the equation before you begin to figure out whether this is so or not, and this is not done in much research today precisely because it is driven by drug company marketing efforts.

I don’t take psychiatric drugs. I don’t need a psychiatrist to prescribe psychiatric drugs to me. I have recovered from any “mental disability” that I may have been said to have suffered from, and I did so without recourse to excessive psychiatric counseling. Usually this counseling involves little more than a script for a chemical agent to be ingested periodically. I don’t take psychiatric drugs because of the ill effects they have on my person, and because I have some knowledge as to how these drugs actually affect the brain and the body. I, in fact, attribute my continuing physical and mental well being to my aversion to taking psychiatric drugs. I think when you connect the “illness” with the drug you can begin to see the virtue in coming off.

We live in a prescription drug culture that has left many casualties in its wake, and you can read the names of some of the more notable cadavers in the dailies. I am proud, for the moment, to count myself among the survivors of psychiatric labeling, psychiatric drugging, and standard psychiatric malpractice. This survival would not have been the case had I passively concurred with some psychiatrist’s low opinion of myself and my chances. We need to change the predominate paradigm in mental health treatment today from one that relies so heavily on chemical sedation to one that deals with the problems of real people before we can advance. One sure sign that a person is mentally healthy is that they don’t rely upon drugs. I encourage others to do as I have done, in the name of saving lives, and to say no to psychiatry and psychiatric drugs.

Undemonizing The Little Monsters

My view is that we simply shouldn’t saddle children with psychiatric labels. Why? The reasons are multiple. Labeled children grow up to be labeled adults, label A often comes with label B and label C or label D, and minor labels develop into major labels. With these labels come powerful and physical health destroying pharmaceuticals. Just look at the outcomes if you want to know why we shouldn’t label. Labeling a child isn’t putting that child on a success track. Labeling a child is actually harming that child.

When I was a kid attention deficit hyperactivity disorder didn’t exist, and conduct was a mark on a report card. Things have changed in this regard since then, but those changes have all been for the worse. Today misbehavior, healthy behavior from another perspective, is being medicalized, and mildly misbehaving children are growing into permanently “disturbed” and “disabled” adults.

I’m using the 6th part of the 7 part series Matters In Mind, Psychiatric labels and kids: benefits, side-effects and confused published recently in the journal In Conversation to draw The Behavior Key that follows.

The Behavior Key

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD – ‘hyperactive or inattentive’
Obedient defiant disorder – ODD – ‘particularly naughty’
Conduct disorder – CD – ‘seriously nasty’
Major depressive disorder – MDD – ‘down in the dumps’
General anxiety disorder – GAD/ Obsessive compulsive disorder – OCD/ Social anxiety disorder (or social phobias) – SAD/ Panic disorder – PD/ etc. – ‘nervous’

Forget the label, and you’ve merely got an adjective with which to describe a child, accent on child.

On the coattails of transforming ADHD into childhood bipolar disorder, and manufacturing an epidemic, we know what’s coming, and it is more of the same.

The DSM-5, due out next year, is likely to unleash a new epidemic – DMDD (disruptive mood dysregulation disorder), which has been strongly criticised by the former DSM-IV task force head Professor Allen Frances.

Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder – DMDD (could more aptly be described as) – temper tantrums.

In psychiatric training, we learn that what really counts is a biopsychosocial (biological, psychological and social) formulation. This is a few paragraphs which accompanies the diagnosis, summarising the main relationships, genetic inheritance, stressful events, temperament and psychological coping style of the person. The biopsychosocial formulation seeks to uncover and put in perspective all the causes of their symptoms and point to what help is needed, even if not readily available.

This is bio-babble. I’ve seen articles that estimate biology to be 70 % – 80 % the source of any one “mental disorder”. Biological medical model psychiatry is the predominate school of psychiatry today, and thus, “disorders” have to be primarily biological in origin. This leaves 30 % – 20 % of any “disorder” attributable to psychology and social environment. If biology wasn’t the primary basis for “mental disorders”, the theory is wrong. Well, chances are the theory is wrong. This 70 % – 80 % figure is based entirely on speculation. It represents a type of negative wishful thinking with very little, if any, real science behind it.

This draws us to the final question, who’s minding baby? Let’s not leave child-rearing practices up to the pill bottle. Psychiatric drugs, if anything, make wholly inadequate parents. Labeled children, as the statistic’s show us, are doomed children. Now what kind of parent would consciously sentence his or her child to hell on earth? Not a good parent, surely. Let’s get back to the practice of producing good children through producing good parents, and vice versa. Care about your child, and don’t send that child to the boogie-psychiatrist for labeling, drugging, and the eternal curse of diagnostic sorcery.

ADHD Growing Up! Drug Companies Thrilled.

Attention Deficit Disorder Needs Life-Long Treatment, Study Says shrieks Bloomsbury News.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder doesn’t disappear as children grow older, according to a study that found harmful life-long effects that suggest treatment needs to continue into adulthood.

Anyone want to guess who’s paying for this treatment?

Oh, and what treatment? Why, of course, speed. Junior is running on junior’s little helper. Perhaps, it would be better to refer to it as junior’s caretaker’s little helper. Who needs a meth lab when you’ve got a shrink?

The study, reported in today’s Archives of General Psychiatry, followed 271 patients for 33 years, the longest any research has tracked the disorder, the authors wrote. Men diagnosed with ADHD as children had less education as adults, higher rates of divorce and substance abuse, and they spent more time in jail, the research found

Alright. Maybe the best thing to do, if you’re going to be given an ADHD diagnosis, is to be female.

About 31 percent of those with ADHD didn’t finish high school, compared with 4.4 percent in the comparison group. They made about $40,000 a year less on average in their jobs, and they were about three times more likely to have been divorced, be involved in substance abuse or to have spent time in jail, according to the study.

Economic hardship is a disease in today’s world, but unfortunately wealth is not the prescription drug used to treat this new plebian class.

Let’s go to another source for a little enlightenment on the subject. Let’s go to Psychiatric Times for a 2011 article on what a amounts to an epidemic, Problems of Overdiagnosis and Overprescribing in ADHD.

Before 1970, the diagnosis of ADHD was relatively rare for schoolchildren and almost nonexistent for adolescents and adults. Between 1980 and 2007, there was an almost 8-fold increase of ADHD prevalence in the United States compared with rates of 40 years ago. Considering the prevalence of school-administered stimulants as synonymous with the prevalence of ADHD, Safer and colleagues estimated the prevalence of ADHD in American schoolchildren as 1% in the 1970s, 3% to 5% in the 1980s, and 4% to 5% in the mid to late 1990s. In 2007, using data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, Visser and colleagues reported that 7.8% of youths aged 4 to 17 years had a diagnosis of ADHD and 4.3% reported current use of a medication for the disorder.

I can imagine a time when we will be saying, “Remember when ADHD was a children’s disorder rather than a illness of the impoverished.”

In the future there will be two classes of people, the wealthy and the sick.

Iatrogenic Damage As Treatment

Despite attempts to dismiss and discredit his contribution, psychiatrist RD Laing’s position in the pantheon of twentieth century thinkers is relatively secure. I was reading recently where somebody claimed R.D. Laing’s reputation needed rehabilitating. I don’t think this is so. The spirit of R.D. Laing is always there lingering in the background. He can’t go away, establishment or anti-establishment. He is present, cultural icon or counter-cultural guru. The same cannot be said of some of his associates, for example, David Cooper. I’ve seen his Wikipedia page grow less informative over the course of time. David Cooper’s reputation, if anyone had the interest or inclination, could probably use some serious rehabilitating.

Every time I mention so called anti-psychiatry I have misgivings. I feel I am going to be misunderstood. I am not so called pro-psychiatry in the slightest. The problem is biological medical model psychiatry. This school of psychiatry dominates the entire profession. Biological psychiatry is responsible for an epidemic of iatrogenic damage done to people in the mental health system. Biological psychiatry is behind an increased mortality rate among that population. Biological psychiatry is intimately tied to, and in bed with, the pharmaceutical industry. We need a dramatic paradigm shift away from this chemical quick fix approach to social and personal problems to an approach that realizes drugs aren’t solutions, problems aren’t illnesses, and drugs are a part of the problem. We have created a prescription drug culture today that is killing people.

If 95 % of psychiatrists are bad, and I believe that crediting the profession with 5 % good doctors is probably an over estimation, then there is not a whole lot of good to be said about that profession. We would not be in any worst state if the profession of psychiatry were eliminated altogether. People would actually be more likely to improve, given psychiatry’s cozy relationship to the drug industry, without the profession altogether rather than with it. The fact of the matter is that people labeled ‘schizophrenic’ recover, and do a lot better, more frequently where they have never been introduced to the pharmaceutical products used to treat the condition than where they are given drugs. The drugs are impediments to recovery, and worse, they are damaging in themselves. There have, in fact, been instances where the point of no return has been crossed.

This domination of biological psychiatry has meant tragedy on a worldwide scale. This tragedy is the result of confusing intended “help” with actual harm. Real assistance has human features, and it doesn’t come in liquid and capsule forms. Conceive throw away people, and throw away people end up thrown away. One way to throw them away is to contain them in places where they will only receive custodial care. Another way is to make the custodian a chemical substance. So long as so few people are doing anything about it, this tragedy can only continue to grow. Many people think they are actually doing something good when they are harming other people. This harming of people is not a good thing, and it is a point that must be made again and again. Loving people are not hurting people. Right now it is essential to change directions, we need more concern and less harm shown to those whom we so often scapegoat.

R.D. Laing and David Cooper were trail blazers. They were experimenters in a field that permitted very few experiments. These experiments pointed the way to a better approach to the problem than compounding it. Without their experiments, the later more successful experiment of Loren Mosher, the Soteria Project, might never have gotten off the ground. Some of us are hopeful that more encouraging signs are in the wind. I am aghast at all the people, given psychiatric labels, with physical injuries that came of the treatment they received for those labels. No injury of the body is the solution to an injury in the mind. No amount of fantasizing otherwise is going to make thought organic. Poison, on the other hand, will give the wounded thought an injured body, just as a cessation of poison may, but not always, return the body to health. I understand that some people are receiving money for tending the wounds of mind and body. I think a career of healing people vastly preferable to a career of keeping people in ill health. What we need today is more of the former and less of the latter.

Living My Life Without ‘Mental Illness’

I don’t have a “mental illness”. I don’t have multiple “mental illnesses”. I don’t see a doctor who says I have any “mental illness”. If I did see such a doctor, it would still be my big secret. I think there are some things you should never discuss with a member of the psychiatric profession, and that is just one of those things. If I felt I had a “mental illness”, or if I wanted a “mental illness”, as some people seem to do, the situation would be different. Psychiatrists dispense “mental illness” labels, and the pills used to treat such labels, as if they were candy. Doing so, I would imagine, fits the psychiatrist job description as it is defined today pretty much to a tee.

The literature these days seems to suggest that there is a “stigma” against seeking treatment for a “mental” condition. What this literature seldom goes into is that much of the treatment going on today, as it was yesterday, is unsought and unwanted. It is coercive treatment given by way of court order to a person who somebody found annoying, and who doesn’t want that mental health treatment imposed on him or her. Unfortunately there aren’t so many people saying that we should end forced treatment so that the only people in treatment are those who want to have such treatment. This leaves the person who disagrees with forced treatment with a limited number of choices. Released from confinement he or she can either join the chorus of people crying for more and more treatment reputedly to end “stigma”, he or she can vanish into a quiet but unmolested and ignoble obscurity, or he or she can speak out on behalf of all those who are treated against their will and wishes.

The first path was always out of the question for me on account of the fact that I could never be so dishonest. I know there is much incentive, after forced and life disrupting psychiatric interventions, for choosing the second path, but I have chosen the third, and I would imagine more arduous path. Why? I think the value of one brave soul surpasses that of a thousand cowardly souls when it comes right down to it. A number of us feel that that violence that the state uses on people deemed to be of unsound mind is quite literally torture. This torture amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in a circumstance where no crime has been committed. Persuading the victim of this torture that torture is treatment, and that treatment is a necessary “good”, gives the torturer quite an edge over his detractors I would say. It cannot, for instance, as in this case, be said that oppression takes place without the acquiescence of the oppressed. I, for my part, aim to acquiesce as little as possible.

When I was first introduced to psychiatric treatment I was wary of psychiatric drugs not because they were dangerous but because they made me feel miserable. Learning, as I have learned, that these drugs do damage to people, and that the misery I felt was indicative of their destructive nature, I have not become any less wary of their usage. I have in fact become an advocate for non-compliance to treatment plans because of the damage wreaked by these drugs. This is only the beginning though when it comes to my complaints about conventional psychiatry. Some of us, and I include myself in that category, have better things to do with our lives than waste our days in mental health limbo. Some of us had rather be leading a purposeful existence. When it comes to this purposeful existence, we don’t need a psychiatrist telling us just what that purpose should be. We can figure these things out for ourselves.

Imagine a psychiatric label. Imagine a pair of scissors. With a couple of snips from the scissors imagine the psychiatric label divorced from the human whose neck it hung around. Imagine this psychiatric label lying by its lonesome. Imagine freedom. I don’t have to imagine that freedom any more because that freedom is mine. The label had no magic hold over me, and it wasn’t attached by super(crazy)glue. It was only a matter of words in a text on some mental health professional’s bookshelf. I have my own words. I can put the dictionary to work for my own ends, too. I don’t need to be debilitated by language. I don’t need to be removed from any meaningful dialogue and social context. I don’t need to be exiled from the community at large. I am not logically challenged, nor am I communication dysfunctional. I don’t have a “major” or a “minor mental illness”. I don’t know about you, but me, hey, I’m Okay.

Thomas Stephen Szasz, 1920 – 2012

“I am probably the only psychiatrist in the world whose hands are clean,” Szasz told the newspaper. “I have never committed anyone. I have never given electric shock. I have never, ever, given drugs to a mental patient.”

~Update: Thomas Szasz, Manlius psychiatrist who disputed existence of mental illness, dies at 92, John Mariani, Wednesday, September 12, 2012, The Post-Standard, Saracuse, New York.

Saturday Morning I saw the close of the historic 30th Anniversary Nation Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA) conference in Cincinnati. The grand finale of this event was a rousing and invigorating talk by Bruce Levine lambasting corruption in psychiatry, and in his own profession of psychology. He was, in fact, calling for the abolition of the profession of psychiatry on the grounds of the extent to which it was contaminated by that corruption.

Sometime during the evening of the same day, a giant among giants as far as critics of mainstream psychiatry go, Dr. Thomas Stephen Szasz, passed away.

I flew back to Florida from Ohio on Sunday, September the 9th.

On the afternoon of Monday September 10th, during a teleconference, on a facebook page I ran across a report of Dr. Szasz passing. I immediately made mention of this comment to the people who were taking part in this teleconference. We did a quick Google news search, and decided it was probably nothing more than an internet rumor. There was nothing in Google news to indicate that he had died. Dr. Szasz, although 92 years of age, had just last year presented to an enthusiastic crowd at the International Society for Ethical Psychology & Psychiatry (ISEPP) conference in Los Angeles.

Tuesday I had more than enough reliable reports to conclude that he had expired. First there was an announcement on the ISEPP facebook page, and a link was provided to the article that sparked that announcement.

The New York Times on Wednesday reported on his death with an article that quoted E. Fuller Torrey and Edward Shorter, by no means friends of, nor friendly to, Dr. Szasz and his ideas. Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Human Alliance For Human Research Protection, uses the occasion to voice his differences in opinion from those expressed by Dr. Szasz rather than emphasizing any places where they might have been in agreement.

Usually when you are remembering a person, you turn to his friends rather than his enemies. Although it is curious that the New York Times should turn to Dr. Szasz’s enemies when remembering him, certainly Dr. Szasz’s legacy neither begins nor ends with the New York Times.

I think it goes without saying that some segments of the mainstream mass media are as corrupt as the psychiatrists they quote. A much more just and balanced appreciation, The Passing of Thomas Szasz, can be found in The New American.

Dr. Szasz’s distinctive voice, and his singular presence, will be sorely missed by many.