Citizens Group Calls The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders a Fraud

Citizens Group Calls The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders a Fraud

Every psychiatric “expert” involved in writing the DSM standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has called psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders into question naming it a fraud perpetrated on society for the sole purpose of enormously increasing their income base by labeling and drugging individuals, particularly helpless little children, for profit. Furthermore, they are calling this fraudulent labeling and drugging of little children a gross violation of human rights and child abuse.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the book that contains names and descriptions of 374 so-called mental disorders (including everything from depression to “caffeine withdrawal disorder”).  Doctors, psychiatrists and other medical and mental health practitioners use the DSM to diagnose patients.  Each DSM mental disorder description carries a code that clinicians can use to substantiate claims for health insurance reimbursement. 

Across Canada, pharmacies last year dispensed 61.2 million prescriptions for psychotherapeutics, worth nearly $2.4 billion.

Some of the most potent, mood-altering drugs are going to children. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of prescriptions for “atypical” or second-generation anti-psychotics for children under 13 more than doubled.

Every psychiatric “expert” involved in writing the DSM standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses.

British Columbia psychologist, Dr. Tana Dineen, the author of Manufacturing Victims, a book that debunks the DSM, says “unlike medical diagnoses, DSM disorders are ‘voted’ into existence by APA members.  They can also be removed if they are too much trouble.  In 1973, the APA voted—5,584 to 3,810—to cease calling homosexuality a mental disorder after gay activists picketed an APA conference”. 

The fifth edition of DSM is planned for release in 2013.  Since the announcement in 2007 of the individuals chosen to lead each DSM “work group” (groups which concentrate on a single category of disorders, such as depressive disorders), it has been garnering continuous criticism for the widening inclusion of a new series of so-called behavioral addictions to shopping, sex, food, videogames, the Internet and so on.  The contention of many is that the DSM’s developers are seeking to label all manner of normal emotional reactions or human behavioral quirks as mental disorders—thereby falsely increasing the numbers of “mentally ill” people who would then be prescribed one or more drugs that carry all manner of serious warnings and, of course, substantially increase their income base.

Brian Beaumont, President of the British Columbia chapter of CCHR said “The ‘disorders’ in the diagnostic manual are invented by psychiatrists and placed in the DSM for the sole purpose of increasing the numbers of diagnosis that can be made, thereby enormously increasing their income base (unearned cash) and the income of their natural allies, the drug companies. The whole process is done intentionally for the pure and simple purpose of labeling and drugging more and more adults and children for more and more profit. No other reason. The ADHD ‘diagnosis’ (label) has been one of the biggest money makers in psychiatry’s whole history of invented disorders and is a 100 percent fraud”.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.