Dr. Dina Panagiotopoulos, a pediatric endocrinologist at BC Childrenâs Hospital, says âsecond-generationâ antipsychotics are being prescribed to two- and three-year-olds for aggression.
The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM, finally has been outed for the fraud it is. The National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, has declared the “the weakness of the manual is its lack of validity.” That’s the good news.
The bad news is that while the nation’s premier mental health agency has finally admitted the uselessness of psychiatry’s manual, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, still is using the DSM criteria to lend credence to mental illnesses that are not based in science.
Thomas Insel, director of the U.S. Institute of Mental Health â essentially the countryâs top psychiatrist â has announced that his agency is âre-orientingâ its research away from the DSM over the bookâs âlack of validityâ while it pursues its own alternative diagnostic system, which Insel promises will be more firmly anchored in brain science.
âPretty soon everyone’s going to have a mental disorder or two or three, and it’s time we reconsider how we want to define this and whether the definitions should be in the hands of the drug companies, which is very much what’s happened in recent years,â
Once again the military and mainstream press are searching for all the reasons for troop suicides except for the quadrupling of drugs being prescribed that cause suicide. Before, during and after deployment, today’s military personnel are subject to a stew of drugsâantidepressants, antipsychotics and anticonvulsantsâthat carry clear suicide warnings.
No other major branch of medicine has such a single text, with so much power over peopleâs lives. And that is worrying. Because in no other branch of medicine is the scientific reality underpinning the pronouncements of doctors so uncertain.