Overdiagnosis Resources

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.”

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.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Ioannidis, J. P. (2008). Effectiveness of antidepressants: an evidence myth constructed from a thousand randomized trials? Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 3, 14. https://doi.org/10.1186/1747-5341-3-14

Kirsch, I. (2014). Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect. Zeitschrift Fur Psychologie, 222(3), 128–134. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000176

Kirsch, I., Deacon, B. J., Huedo-Medina, T. B., Scoboria, A., Moore, T. J., & Johnson, B. T. (2008). Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. PLoS Medicine, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045

Lacasse, J. R., & Leo, J. (2005). Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature. PLOS Medicine, 2(12), e392. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392

VIDEOS

Robert Whitaker:

Psychiatric Drugs: Do They Fix Imbalances or Do They Create Them – Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep1ODxCoYlI

Psychiatric Drugs: Do They Fix Imbalances or Do They Create Them – Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgMaxx0dbv8&t=11s

Robert Whitaker and Peter Gøtzsche discuss the facts about the medicalization of mental illness.

Gary Greenberg (author of “The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry”) on the history of the DSM and treatment of mental illness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUpZW1K5tFE&t=1553s

Allen J. Frances (Saving Normal) on the overdiagnosis of mental illness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuCwVnzSjWA

60 Minutes Episode with Irving Kirsch: Treating Depression: Is there a placebo effect?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zihdr36WVi4&t=5s

Dr. Irving Kirsch – The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidressant Myth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5RZRG7-QQ