http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=alsZ7mq45sM

And from The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/dsm-5
“Why is the controversy so important? Eleven percent of American school-age children have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Astonishingly, one in five boys aged 14-17 have been thus classified. Among those currently labelled as having ADHD, two-thirds are on prescription drugs.

The DSM is likely to lead to even more ADHD diagnoses, particularly for teenagers and adults. The prior DSM, published in 1994, required symptoms to be present before the age of seven. The new version raises that to 12. Adults no longer have to present six symptoms to be diagnosed. The new threshold is five.

This will have a big impact on drug sales. On May 21st Express Scripts, a pharmacy-benefit manager, published its annual report on American drug trends. The company expects broad drug spending for common ailments, such as asthma and hypertension, to fall by 4% over the next three years. However, sales of attention-disorder drugs will jump by 25% over the same period. The spike is due not to the arrival of expensive new treatment, but to a spike in prescriptions among adults. The use of attention drugs is highest in America’s south.

This underscores something most psychiatrists know well. Neither a rise in drug sales nor geographic variation can be explained purely by prevalence of a mental disorder. Rather, these shifts reflect changes in diagnostic practice. Some of the newly diagnosed patients may have been unjustly neglected to date. Many will be the result of more relaxed diagnostic rules.

This is problematic, not least because the over-treatment of some mental disorders coincides with the under-treatment of others. Public services for the mentally ill declined during the recession. Instead of receiving proper treatment, many end up in prison. More than half of America’s prison population has some kind of mental illness.”

I have never said that people do not experience stress or problems of living. Please point me to the place where you think I claimed that those problems are non existent. What I claim, and I stand by it, is that labeling those problems as “disease”, absent a biological cause, is totally arbitrary and politically/morally biased. I don’t think that my position is very difficult to understand. I mentioned Soteria. But that was just an example. Religion also provides for many people solace when those problems arise.

“But you can’t argue that there is not a need to treat nervous system dysfunction that lacks a known biological marker”

Actually I do, because absent a biological marker, “nervous system dysfunction” is in the eye of the beholder, in this case, in the eye of DSM-5 committee members own biases. There isn’t any science to back DSM invented disorders. They are there because DSM committee members decide so. When Allen Frances was explicitly asked by the Al Jazeera host above about who decides “what’s normal”, Allen Frances dodged the question.

The most profound irony of your explanation, and please correct me if I am wrong, is that you seem to say that when it comes to pathologizing behavior that has no known biological cause, a scam (ie psychiatry) is better than nothing. What’s wrong with “nothing” I ask? And this is ironic because I am sure that you, like the average so called “skeptic” has a huge problem with “God of the gaps” type of theories to explain nature. Now, when it comes to the human mind, you seem to be perfectly comfortable with a “psychiatry of the gaps” type of theory, meaning, we don’t have the slightest clue as to why some people behave some way but it must be “pathological” because psychiatry says so in total absence of scientific evidence . “Psychiatry of the gaps”… I am going to begin to use this nickname for people who argue along your lines.

What we can take from this is that a biological agent can cause nervous system dysfunction, and that this dysfunction can manifest as behavioral symptoms. So, then, if a patient presents with behavioral symptoms, it is reasonable to conclude that there is nervous system dysfunction. If all tests turn up negative for biological factors, however, then doctors must make a diagnosis of exclusion.

This happens all the time in medicine. Doctors often can’t identify the cause of chronic headaches, but it’s nevertheless reasonable to conclude that something is responsible for a headache. That is, there must be some nervous system dysfunction responsible for chronic headaches, even though we can’t identify it.

Similarly, it’s reasonable to conclude that there must be some nervous system dysfunction responsible for psychotic behavior, even if we can’t identify a biological cause. You also agree that people who have psychotic episodes should receive some kind of treatment. Psychiatry aims to treat people who manifest nervous system dysfunction without a known biological cause. That’s all.

You can believe that psychiatry is not very good at this. You can believe it has used bad tactics, poor treatments, and coercive behavior, all of that. But you can’t argue that there is not a need to treat nervous system dysfunction that lacks a known biological marker. So you shouldn’t want to destroy psychiatry. You should want to make it better. You should want psychiatry to focus on finding the specific causes of nervous system dysfunction that lead to behavioral symptoms.

But seriously, the Younger Dryas Boundary was created on The Third Day. Irreducible Complexity (or whatever pseudonym one of humanity’s plethora of one-true-gods is hiding behind this week) told me so.
.

“in short, she had developed a psychiatric illness”

Only if you consider “psychiatric illness” as a metaphor to problems of living. No biological test whatsoever diagnosed her brain as diseased in the was a pancreas is diseased when it doesn’t produce enough insulin.

With respect to alternatives to forced drugging (or drugging for life), there are, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteria . But the guy who proposed the concept, and who painstakingly showed it to work, was pushed away from his position at the NIMH by Big Pharma pressure.

“It is not anecdotal evidence, it is an example of a psychiatric illness.”

In fact, no matter how you spin the matter, providing the example of 3 people you think were helped by the drugs, it’s anecdotal evidence. Second, as I mentioned above, the reliability of a “schizophrenia” label is 0.46 in DSM-5. So I am not questioning they were labelled, I am saying that they were labelled with something that is bogus and invented, and not reliable.

And yes, even neuroleptics have a strong placebo response http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/722736 .

ccbowers,

My experiences are anecdotal, but so are claims of “millions of people helped by psychiatry”. I always ask people, particularly shrinks, to provide a scientific evidence to support such outrageous claim. I am still waiting.

What we know from the metastudies/aggregate data is this: antidepressants are not better than placebos, they increase risk of violence towards those taking the antidepressants and others and the rate of suicide has been positively correlated with an increase in use of psychotropic drugs in the US. So from a pure scientific analysis, the conclusion is inescapable: psychiatry does more damage than good.

With respect to the Insel statement, it is not irrelevant. In fact, it is not very difficult to show that it is not irrelevant. Novella might have spared his apprentices from it, but the APA was forced to issue a statement in response, statement in which they conceded the point that psychiatry has no biomarkers to detect presence or absence of their bogus, invented disorders. So only the true believers (that would be you) would think that it is irrelevant. In your dogmatic worldview, you could have all the members of the APA signing a statement that psychiatry is bogus and you would still try to show otherwise. This is the problem with being a “skeptic zealot”, you are no different than the dogmatic religious people you so much despise. Only your dogmas are different. That promise of a “better understanding in the future” is what psychiatry has been promising for 200 years without delivering. They have been delivering scam after scam.

“You also like to reference decades old problems, while unfortunate, were more refective of the time in which they occured. The fact that the practice changed is reflective of progress, but you just want to stay hung up on past wrongs. ”

Actually, forced ECT and forced drugging still happen today in the Western World. In Europe, because their European Court of Human Rights is more friendly to psychiatric abuse than our SCOTUS, more frequently than in the US. You can pretend that these abuses do not happen, but for those who have been abused, many of us, the abuse is 100% real. What is more insulting is to have people like you who want to pretend that they don’t happen just you you feel better with your dogmatic worldview.

““This ‘everybody is wrong but me’ would warrant you a “paranoid schizophrenia” diagnosis if go tell your psychiatrist.”

Completely untrue, and is reflective of your level of intellectual honesty.”

Watch the conversation above between Frances and Whitaker. Even Frances concedes that DSM-IV caused several false epidemics despite the fact that, according to him, DSM-IV was conservative (some people question that). What people do not question is that DSM-5 is DSM-IV on steroids. You can try to repeat the Rosenhan experiment. Ie, go to an ER and start to speak nonsense. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get labelled. And that label stays for you for the rest of your life (a point that was also brought in by Frances in the video above).

Yes, and they are just as unreasonable as before, and personally motivated. You are extrapolating your personal experiences outwards, and there is a danger in this because 1. you are biased and have a skewed view based upon how personal these experiences are to you and 2. your experiences may not be representative of others’ experiences. Your personal experiences are anectdotal, so reflect very little on this broad topic.

“What has changed is that now the director of the NIMH and the chair of the DSM-5 have accepted the criticism as valid.

Irrelevant, and untrue depending on what you mean by criticism. At best this is a nonsequitur, but you keep referencing these quotes as if they extremely compelling. It reminds me of the Young Earth Creationist that Steve interviewed that kept referencing other people’s quotes as if they were in support of his view, when they were not.

No one is denying that there are challenges of diagnosis and areas in psychiatry which we need substantially more information, but that is not a valid criticism of the existence of that area of medicine. This is a limitation that all sciences and applications of science have at all times, to varying degrees. In the case of psychiatry, it has a tougher job by the nature of the subject, because human thoughts and behaviors are very complex. Also there is much more to learn about the brain. You want to take these limitations and use them to throw out all of psychiatry, which is absurd. You also like to reference decades old problems, while unfortunate, were more refective of the time in which they occured. The fact that the practice changed is reflective of progress, but you just want to stay hung up on past wrongs.

“This ‘everybody is wrong but me’ would warrant you a “paranoid schizophrenia” diagnosis if go tell your psychiatrist.”

Completely untrue, and is reflective of your level of intellectual honesty.

Against my better judgement, I feel compelled to respond…

“Even the example that BillyJoe7…shows that personal struggles can push people to a lot of distress”

This person was not “in a lot of distress”. In fact, she was not in distress at all. She felt perfectly normal in herself. She had escaped from being “in a lot of distress” by shutting it out. Unfortunately, as a result, she was unable to communicate, unable to work, and became a danger to her own safety. In short, she had developed a psychiatric illness.
If you don’t think so, please tell me how you would have managed her – and, remember, that you cannotsay “I’m not a psychiatrist”.

“(which BTW, it’s pure anecdotal evidence)”

It is not anecdotal evidence, it is an example of a psychiatric illness.
One the other two cases I mentioned was someone who was aslo under similar extreme stress in her personal life which went unrecognised by all those around her until she lapsed into a catatonic state, unable to speak, staring blankly into space, paying no attention to her young children. She was also admitted to a psychiatric hospital and treated with anti-psychotic medication. And she recovered though, in this case, she remains on medication, a least for the moment, to keep her from relapsing.
How would you have managed her? Or perhaps you cannotsay.

“This idea that “drugs work for some people” has a name: placebo effect. In fact, the most rigorous studies performed on the most widely used class of drugs, antidepressants, show very convincingly that they are basically active placebos”

And anti-psychotics?
Are they also “active placebos” as you call them?

And are you just talking about the complexity of the cell or evolution in total?

Woes comments don’t have anything to do with common descent or the basic idea of evolution. He is talking about the relative contributions of various mechanisms. Citing that as reason for serious doubt is absurd – a classic denialist strategy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=alsZ7mq45sM

In Al Jazeera. The real shame is that none of the large networks is willing to host a similar debate (actually it was more like a conversation).

“In light of this data, it is very hard to argue that psychiatry does more damage than good.”

I meant

“In light of this data, it is very hard to argue that psychiatry does more GOOD than DAMAGE”