WEB SITES and ARTICLES

Mad in America. ( www.madinamerica.com ). There is no better resource for the facts and personal stories on the topic of the truly unnecessary harm that is being caused by the wrongful diagnosis and profit-driven medicating of children and adults who experience either real problems that deserve healthy solutions, as well as those who should never have been diagnosed with a psychological disorder to start with.

Proposal to abandon DSM. The January 2018 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology is devoted to articles by various psychologists who propose that psychology abandon the use of the DSM altogether. Click here to view the contents of this issue.

Brain Scans Cannot Differentiate Between Mental Health Conditions. Simons, P. (2017 January). (www.madinamerica.com/2017/01/brain-scans-cannot-differentiate-mental-health-conditions/). “A new study, published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, questions previous findings that specific brain regions are implicated in particular mental health conditions. Instead, according to the researchers, biased study design and the difficulty of publishing negative findings may have led to inaccurate results. While the researchers did find some differences in brain activation between people with mental health conditions and people without mental health conditions, they were not able to discriminate between specific diagnoses. The current study suggests that there are few, if any, differences in brain regions activated by specific mental health conditions. That is, there is still no brain scan that can tell whether a person has depression, social anxiety, or schizophrenia, for example.”

A Dry Pipeline for Psychiatric Drugs. ( NYTImes, Aug 19, 2013 ). Dr. Richard A. Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. “After a series of failed clinical trials in which novel antidepressants and antipsychotics did little or no better than placebos, the companies seem to have concluded that developing new psychiatric drugs is too risky and too expensive.”…”we don’t yet understand the fundamental cause of most psychiatric disorders,” … “…knowing how a drug works in the brain doesn’t necessarily reveal the cause of the illness. For example, just because an S.S.R.I. antidepressant increases serotonin in the brain and improves mood, that does not mean that serotonin deficiency is the cause of the disease; many depressed patients get better with medications that have no effect on serotonin.”

Unreality Star (www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/unreality-star) “Nancy Andreasen, the psychiatrist who once heralded the “biological revolution,” feels that the revolution went too far. “You can’t treat a person as a purely biological creature,” she says. Antipsychotic drugs are blunt instruments, and are often administered on a trial-and-error basis; prolonged exposure at high doses can cause brain damage.”

Joel Gold, psychiatrist, argues that “both biological and social factors contribute to psychosis. Studies show that residents of cities have a higher risk for schizophrenia, as do immigrants. Psychotic people are several times more likely than nonpsychotics to have been sexually abused. Mental illness … is rarely reducible to brain chemistry.” “Think back a few hundred years,” Joel Gold says. “The idea of walking into Times Square would have been crazy-making to absolutely anyone. For most of human history, there weren’t strangers bumping into you. You lived in a place where there were fifty people, and you knew all of them intimately.” Now such collisions are constant: a smartphone is a Times Square that we carry around in our pocket.”

BOOKS

Frances, A. (2014). Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

Gotzsche, P. (2013). Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. London: CRC Press.

Gøtzsche, P. (2015). Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial. Copenhagen, DK: People’s Press.

Greenberg, G. (2010). Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Greenberg, G. (2013). The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. New York, NY: Blue Rider Press.

Wedge, M. (2015). A Disease Called Childhood: Why ADHD Became an American Epidemic. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

Whitaker, R., & Cosgrove, L. (2015). Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Whitaker, R. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York, NY: Crown Publishing.