Your Kids Aren’t Sick—Towards the Death of Psychiatry

First Date: Meeting a Live Psychiatrist — About a year later we received a call from the Department Head at the psychiatric hospital located in the UCLA Medical Center. Pretty big stuff. The doctor said he had a boy there, Mark, who has been with them for about four months, and would I be interested in meeting with him to see if he would be an appropriate placement in our home. Sure, I said. Bring him out. Mark was 15 and overweight. He had gained 40 pounds while at UCLA. This was common in psychiatric settings. There were still some “psyche hospitals” for kids back in the ’70’s in California and I was familiar with several. They all looked the same. Locked doors everywhere, little if any outside recreation areas or equipment – nor the inclination to provide any – locked rooms where “crafts” and groups occurred, always populated by unhappy children and unhappy professionals, with all those new medications leading the way. They weren’t treated as kids in these places. God help them, they were treated as patients with diseases. They still are.

The Illegitimacy of the “Psychiatric Bible” by Thomas Szasz, M.D.

Particular psychiatric diagnoses have not escaped professional criticism. Wishing to make a name for themselves as psychiatrists, “critics” object to one or another diagnosis (homosexuality)—or to “overdiagnosis” (ADHD)—but continue to respect the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a scientific organization and regard the various incarnations of the DSM as respectable legitimating documents. This is dishonest. Confronted with the DSM, the challenge we face is to delegitimize the authenticators, the APA and DSM, not distract attention from their fundamental phoniness by ridiculing one or another “diagnosis” and trying to remove it from the magical list.

I have consistently rejected this piecemeal approach. In my essay “The Myth of Mental Illness,” published in 1960, and in my book with the same title that appeared a year later, I stated my view forthrightly. I proposed that we view the phenomena conventionally called “mental diseases” as behaviors that disturb others (or sometimes the self), reject the image of “mental patients” as helpless victims of patho-biological events outside their control, and refuse to participate in coercive psychiatric practices as incompatible with the foundational moral ideals of free societies. In short, I rejected the authority of the APA as a legitimating organization and of the DSM as a legitimating document. I believe nothing less can undo the mischief wrought by the successive editions of the “psychiatric bible.”

“Sunshine: Best Rx for good medicine” by U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley

In the past few years, congressional investigations and state gift disclosure laws have raised eyebrows about these financial connections, especially where the amount that has been publicly reported is vastly less than what has actually been paid. For example, a congressional review I led from my position on the Senate Finance Committee revealed a troubling financial link between a drug maker and a child psychiatrist at Harvard, whose work led to a significant spike in diagnoses of pediatric bipolar disorders and prevalent use of antipsychotic medicines for children. Separately, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Wisconsin received more than $19 million from a medical device company, although he reported only receiving “more than $20,000” per year on his financial disclosure records to the university.

Drug Industry Settlements In 2010 Largest Ever—$2.5 Billion

The Justice Department has collected a whopping $3 billion in settlements this year with help from whistleblowers and a powerful law known as the False Claims Act, Assistant Attorney General Tony West announced this morning. And guess where $2.5 billion of that $3 billion came from? Big Pharma. This year’s biggest hauls under the False Claims Act include $669 million of the record-shattering $2.3 billion total the government took from Pfizer over its improper promotion of the painkiller Bextra, $302 million from Astra Zeneca over the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel, and $192 million from Novartis.

South Carolina Doctors Under Fraud Investigation After Writing Thousands of Antipsychotic & Painkiller Prescriptions

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, requested data from each state this year listing which doctors write the most prescriptions for eight common drugs covered by Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor. The reports were intended to “ensure that taxpayer dollars are appropriately spent,” Grassley wrote in a letter to state officials. The report detailed the top prescribers of the following drugs:Abilify, Geodon, Oxycontin, Risperdal, Roxicodone, Seroquel, Xanax, Zyprexa. Among the doctors getting the most reimbursements were a Columbia psychiatrist who wrote about 3,900 prescriptions for the drugs in question in 2008 and 2009. The doctor billed about $1.3 million to Medicaid, according to a Post and Courier review of the data.

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