The Lying Liars Who Lie About Psychiatry

May 13, 2013

7 May (JON RAPPAPORT) These days, we are witnessing an acceleration in the use of psychiatry to target Americans, to label them as dangerous, to take away guns they own, to blame gun violence in the US on mentally ill people. (see also this story by Dan Roberts). It’s a winning strategy, because most Americans don’t have a clue about the way psychiatry actually works or its pose of being a science.  The public hears techno-speak and nods and surrenders.  If psychiatrists are experts on the human mind, mice can navigate the Arctic in canoes. But psychiatrists are educated to be able to talk a good game.  And politicians are more than happy to mouth vagaries, and consign the problems of society to “mental-health professionals.”  It turns out that the phrase “mental health” was invented by psyops specialists, who needed to create an analogy to physical well-being.  The needed to, because the mind was (and is) a mystery to psychiatrists.  An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER

And along with that:

It’s a winning strategy, because most Americans don’t have a clue about the way psychiatry actually works or its pose of being a science.  The public hears techno-speak and nods and surrenders.  If psychiatrists are experts on the human mind, mice can navigate the Arctic in canoes.  But psychiatrists are educated to be able to talk a good game.  And politicians are more than happy to mouth vagaries, and consign the problems of society to “mental-health professionals.”

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.   Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.” Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

Dr. Allen Frances

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.   His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).  Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.  Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances

“Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”

BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking,  Well, I knew there would be a problem.”     After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg,

“These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:

“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”

Translation: Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they’ll believe it because psychiatrists place a name on their problems…

Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.  If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s. but it’s still important,” I think I’d make room on the front page.  If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear more room above the fold. If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.

I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.  I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.  And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.  Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.  And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.

Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM-IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.

ADVERSE EFFECTS OF VALPROATE (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:  acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas; brain damage.

ADVERSE EFFECTS OF LITHIUM (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include: intercranial pressure leading to blindness; peripheral circulatory collapse; stupor and coma.

ADVERSE EFFECTS OF RISPERDAL (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include: serious impairment of cognitive function; fainting; restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).

Dr. Frances’ label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of toxic Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.

SO WHAT ABOUT RITALIN?

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841]. Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.  For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:       For complete list and article go to Jon Rappoport.