Occupy the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5 protests)

[Jackpine Radical]

Note to mods: This is a freely available press release, not subject to quoting restrictions.

There is currently a huge battle being waged over certain aspects of the proposed new Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, with many psychologists and other mental health professionals, as well as a number of psychiatrists, opposing what they consider overreach in including new diagnoses with poor scientific support, reclassifying grief as a mental disorder, expanding the Attention Deficit diagnosis, including certain "pre-psychotic" conditions as mental illnesses, etc. If you are particularly interested in this topic, see also Allen Frances' recent writings. Dr. Frances was the chief editor of the last DSM, and is highly critical of this one. You can trak down a lot of his writing from this link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress
-Jackpine

http://www.mindfreedom.org/release/occupy-apa-news


PHILADELPHIA (3/6/12) – On Saturday, May 5, 2012, as thousands of psychiatrists congregate in Philadelphia for the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Annual Meeting, individuals with psychiatric labels and other supporters will converge in a global campaign to oppose the APA’s proposed new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), scheduled for publication in May 2013.

Occupy the APA will include distinguished speakers from 10 a.m. to noon at Friends Center (1515 Cherry Street, Philadelphia). A march at 1 p.m. from Friends Center will lead to the Pennsylvania Convention Center (12th and Arch Streets), where the group will protest beginning at 1:30 while the APA meets inside.

“This peaceful protest exposes the fact that the DSM-5 pushes the mental health industry to medicalize problems that aren’t medical, inevitably leading to over-prescription of psychiatric drugs – including for people experiencing natural human emotions, such as grief and shyness,” said David Oaks, founder and director of MindFreedom International (MFI), which has worked for 26 years as an independent voice of survivors of psychiatric human rights violations. “We call for better ways to help individuals in extreme emotional distress.”



Other speakers criticizing the revised manual, considered the psychiatric industry’s bible, include Brent Robbins, Ph.D., (photo on right) Secretary of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, which has gathered more than 8,000 signatures from mental health professionals calling for “developing an alternative approach” to the DSM.

Jim Gottstein, Esq., (photo right) founder and president of the Alaska-based Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), will cross the country to speak. “The public mental health system is creating a huge class of chronic mental patients through forcing them to take ineffective yet extremely harmful drugs. As the APA gets ready to do even more harm with its proposed expansion of what constitutes mental illness, I want to be there in person to participate in the protest.”

Occupy the APA will begin at 10 a.m. at Friends Center (1515 Cherry Street, Philadelphia), where the speakers will also include:

Dr. Paula Caplan, (photo on right) a psychologist, playwright and activist from California;
Dr. Al Galves, director of the International Society for Ethical Psychology & Psychiatry (ISEPP);
Joseph Rogers, chief advocacy officer of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania (MHASP); and
Dr. Stefan P. Kruszewski, a whistleblower who was fired by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare after he reported the abuse and deaths of Pennsylvania children as a result of systemic physical and psychiatric malfeasance. His subsequent federal lawsuit was successfully settled in 2007.
“We will promote humane alternatives to the traditional mental health system, such as peer support, which evidence proves is effective in helping individuals recover from severe emotional distress,” Oaks said. “Our protest is about choice, and everyone is welcome.”

# # #

Contact: David Oaks, MFI, [e-mail], 541-345-9106

[jberryhill]

1. Oppositional Defiant Disorder

The child must exhibit 4 out of the 8 signs and symptoms listed below in order to meet the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic threshold for ODD

Actively refuses to comply with majority's requests or consensus supported rules

Performs deliberate actions to annoy others

Angry and resentful of others

Argues often

Blames others for his or her own mistakes

Has few or no friends or has lost friends

Is causing constant trouble at school

Spiteful or seeks revenge

Touchy or easily annoyed

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Occupying Defiant Disorder?

Mental health Dx's can readily be politicized, which is a recurrent danger. The old Soviet Union proved that by hospitalizing their dissidents, whom they deemed too crazy to realize the perfection of the Soviet system.

ODD, of course. lies at the mildest and developmentally earliest point on a spectrum that ranges through Conduct Disorder to Antisocial Personality Disorder. The Personality Disorders are already being used as a pretext for preventive detention of certain offenders who are held in confinement in "treatment facilities" for years beyond the expiration of their criminal sentences.

[meow2u3]

7. Dealing with Oppositional Defiant Disorder is not pretty

especially if you're on the business end of their attitude.

IMO, the DSM's definition doesn't describe the half of what a kid with ODD does to his or her family and others around him or her. It's not just the kids' refusal to comply with the requests and/or demands of adults who have legitimate authority over them, e.g., parents, teachers, nor does it entail a healthy discernment between legitimate and illegitimate authority, reasonable and unreasonable demands made by authority figures. ODD describe an extreme, automatic, knee-jerk kind of defiance, to the point of mental and emotional abuse on the part of the kid towards their families (including, and especially, younger siblings).

To put the symptoms in lay terms:

Actively refuses to comply with majority's requests or consensus supported rules

Defies common-sense regulations (more often seen in the conduct of politicians, banksters, unelected corporate tyrants, and corporate hit men)

Performs deliberate actions to annoy others

Acts like a jerk for no other reason than to piss off the people

Blames others for his or her own mistakes

Self-explanatory. Rethugs, banksters, and corporate psychopaths have elevated this into an art form.

Spiteful or seeks revenge

Touchy or easily annoyed

In other words, they can dish it out, but can't take it. Fits bully-boy rethugs to a T.


Occupiers, progressives, radical moderates, and the people in general have to deal with the Oppositional Defiant Disorder of the organized crime ring better known as unelected corporate rulers; corporate bag men, a.k.a., bank and industry lobbyists; the politicians, regulators, and judges tarnished by dirty money; and the cops whom these international gangsters turned into their own private mercenaries. The authority against which they're rebelling, with violent disregard for any sense of common decency, are the Constitution, the rule of law, and the people as a whole.

So, 1%, who's calling whom oppositional and defiant?

[arthritisR_US]

8. Reminds me of a bloated bellicose radio host who

also has weeny deficit disorder.

[Posteritatis]

16. Given the context of this thread do we really need to go around medicalizing political foes? (nt)

[Still Blue in PDX]

3. I would think that lack of an appropriate grief reaction would be more of a mental illness. nt

[bart95]

4. 'grief as a mental disorder'?!?

wow - when normal behavior is 'classified' as something 'abnormal' requiring 'treatment', you open the door for every abuse possible

[Jackpine Radical]

5. Exactly.

It would be very easy to declare various aspects of political protest as "abnormal" and you can start locking away the dissenters.

[bart95]

6. psychiatry has a notorious and dishonorable record in it's classifications

for instance, it's position on gays, has been purely political

both it's inclusion *and it's removal* of gay as a disorder classification, have been purely political

a wet political thumb in the air, and nothing more, determined whether someone got 'classified' - or not

[meow2u3]

9. Isn't that what the Commies did in the old Soviet Union?

Smear dissenters as mentally ill, effectively abusing psychiatry for political purposes and silencing those who disagree with the PTB?

Now, corporate usurpers want to pull a Stalin on Occupy?! WTH?

[maximusveritas]

11. This press release is obviously over-simplifying the issue

The proposal would not reclassify all grief as a mental disorder. It would try to identify people suffering from grief outside the norm, severe enough to be considered major depression. I personally feel this is almost impossible to do in a structured way given the massive cultural and personal differences that come into play with grief. My experience is that people can tell when their grief is too much for them, but I've seen many people who think their grief is abnormal when its not.

[Jackpine Radical]

12. The point remains that the proposed expansion of various mental disorder classifications is enormous

and they have not been careful about issues like reliability or validity--or even in some cases that what they are proposing as mental disorders make any sense. For example, they propose adding hebephilia as a sexual disorder despite evidence that many people have strong attractions to post-pubescent members of the opposite sex.

I'm not coming from the information in the article I cited, BTW. I've been actively following this since the beginning of the revision process, and both know a number of the principals in the debates and have made public statements in professional fora about these matters.

[newspeak]

14. this reminds me of my psychology class in the eighties

I remember my teacher stating, "what you must be concerned about is who is sitting on the board making the decisions for the list." The list has grown significantly since first being introduced.

In germany, during the hitler regime, it is prominent members of the psychiatric community that suggest doing away with some of the so called mentally disabled. PBS has a good documentary on it. One woman interviewed was a little girl and remembers being taken with other children to a room and told to strip. She refused. A woman asked her to count to ten, she could. It saved her life. The other children were murdered.

They started out with those they deemed mentally defective (that included deaf people), but then they started killing those in sanitariums who were there for things like mental exhaustion (breakdowns). Families would go visit their loved ones and they wouldn't be there. After so many complaints from german families, hitler supposedly put a stop of the purging. But, the psychiatric community still continued on a lower level. Now, I ask. Who were the REAL mental deviants? I see psychopaths.

What I see in our country is more pill pushing. Over twenty years ago, I had depression and anxiety in public places. I took no pills. My psychologist helped me with the root of the problem and I practiced a form of self hypnosis when feeling an anxiety attack. His explanation was that my body had been acclimated to trigger the adrenaline rush and the solution was to stop the fear trigger. Within six months, my panic attacks had subsided. Today, they have medication for it-how does that aid anyone of stopping the attacks? It just makes one dependent on the drug to stop the attacks.

[Jackpine Radical]

15. It's getting much worse.

The ins. cos. don't want to pay for psychotherapy because it's too expensive when they can just have a family doc or a shrink prescribe a Benzo or an SSRI or something to suppress symptoms and shut you up until you get off their plan. Then you're someone else's problem. They like to do things like limiting you to 3 sessions and then require prior authorization for any additional session. Session by session. You can't begin to make a rational treatment plan under those circumstances. There has been this "brief therapy" kick for the past couple of decades. I once saw a cartoon that reduced brief therapy to its minimal configuration: The therapist slaps the client across the face and yells, "Get over it."

I practiced part-time in several small mental health clinics but bailed out and went into a straight forensic practice a couple of years ago to escape the insurance hassles.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

10. Enshrining new classifications is the first step to marketing new pills.

Once its legitimatized, how long before somebody develops "a pill for that". Does anyone do anything without some profit motive anymore?

[Jackpine Radical]

13. Yes. And most--MOST--of the psychiatrists on the DSM committee have ties

to Big Pharma. Hell yes, it's a pill-pushing move. And a political move.

The committee on Sexual Disorders has a prosecutor sitting on the board. He has no medical qualifications, but is there to help make sure the Sexual Disorders section is written in such a way as to be maximally useful in the post-sentence commitment of sex offenders, making it easier to establish that they have "mental disorders" that qualify them for commitment after the get out of prison. Medical "science" is being bent to fit prosecutorial needs.

I have known about this for a long time, but the true significance of it didn't hit me until I just wrote that. Holy shit.

[LadyHawkAZ]

17. Having spent 30 years being put through the mental-illness wringer:

and having read the responses in this thread, there's one observation I would like to make before I get to the main point of the article.

Recommending medication for mental illness is not necessarily a bad thing. I really wish people would take a small step back from the "Medication is EVIL!!" mindset for a moment and think about the people their attitude can affect. I see this here all the time: "Big Pharma just wants to sell you pills!".

Here's a perspective on that perspective. I lived through (barely) the 70s and 80s, when physical causes were the LAST thing checked for and medication was the LAST line of defense. At 8 they said I was just too smart for my own good. At 12 I was told I just needed to get over my shyness, learn to communicate and talk it out with someone. At 16 I was told I was perfectly normal for a teenager and just needed a little counseling. At 22 I was told I would be fine once I had kids and my hormones settled (this guy was actually close to being right). I was 29 years old before one therapist and one doctor- and a GP at that- finally decided there might be something really wrong with me, and 38 before they finally figured out what that was. The antidepressants I was finally put on-21 years after onset- did not work correctly or for very long, but to give them credit they kept me alive for a few extra years until they could find the problem and fix it. The "no medication" rule almost killed me several times, is the point I'm trying to make here. So please, please everyone: stop the knee-jerk, broad-brush condemnation of psych medications. Yes, they are overprescribed now, but they weren't always, and some of us can remember when they were barely prescribed at all. There are a lot of people out there that really need them.

/rant

Re the article: it certainly looks like a lot of new "disorders" are being added that are either clearly part of other disorders, part of completely normal behavior or just junk science. Mixed anxiety depression? Hypersexuality disorder? Behavioral addiction? Good grief. If we tried to avoid or treat all the new disorders- just the new ones- we would have no lives at all, and no basic human experiences. If we are all abnormal, as defined by this new release, then what exactly is their baseline of "normal"? The doctors are right- this needs a rewrite.

[Jackpine Radical]

18. Medications have their uses. This thread isn't about trashing meds, but

about the profiteering and politics that drive so much of what should be a rational and evidence-based classification enterprise. It isn't the meds themselves but the way they interact with the profit motives of the various players to produce distorted health care practices that is of concern here. The DSM is deeply entangled in this whole system, and will be a disaster when and if it arrives in anything like its currently proposed shape.

A lot of people are threatening to go to ICD-10 if DSM retains its problems.