WHAT MEDICAL AND OTHER EXPERTS SAY

  • In 1991, during hearings against private-for-profit psychiatric hospital corporation, National Medical Enterprises (NME), Texas Senator Mike Moncrief stated, "We're the first state to turn the rock over, and it's frightening to see what's crawling out from underneath."3 The following year he told Congress, "...we have uncovered some of the most elaborate, creative, deceptive, immoral, and illegal schemes being used to fill empty hospital beds... This is not just unreasonable. It is outrageous. And it is fraudulent."

  • In a 1997 article about psychiatric fraud, Mark Schlein, the Director of Florida's Medicaid Insurance, stated: "What we've discovered is that the extent of the fraud is limited only by the imagination. We've discovered a huge variety of fraudulent schemes."

  • Paul McDevitt, a Massachusetts mental health counselor, sums it up when he says, "These people have no ethics at all. They’re morally bankrupt. They're like the grave robbers in old England who provided cadavers for the medical schools."

  • The insurance company, Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wisconsin, in the United States, says there are as many types of health insurance fraud – which includes mental health – as "the criminal mind can invent."

  • Psychiatrist Matthew Dumont also wrote about DSM's hollow pretensions to scientific authority: "The humility and the arrogance in the prose are almost indistinguishable, frolicking like puppies at play. They say: '...while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder...no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept...' [APA, 1987]...They go on to say: '...there is no assumption that each mental disorder is a discrete entity with sharp boundaries between it and other mental disorders or between it and no mental disorder' [APA, 1987]."

  • Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist, psychiatrist and author of A Dose of Sanity, says that the DSM has "led to the unnecessary drugging of millions of Americans who could be diagnosed, treated, and cured without the use of toxic and potentially lethal medications."

  • Charles B. Inlander, president of The People's Medical Society, and his colleagues write in Medicine on Trial, "People with real or alleged psychiatric or behavioral disorders are being misdiagnosed – and harmed – to an astonishing degree... Many of them do not have psychiatric problems but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a limbo from which they may never return..."

  • "The low level of intellectual effort was shocking. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so let's go to a cafeteria. Then it's typed into the computer."
     - Psychologist attending a DSM-III-R hearing

  • In an April 2003 article in the Psychiatric Times, titled "Dump the DSM!" The author, himself a psychiatrist, states: "The American Psychiatric Association's DSM diagnostic system has outlived its usefulness by about two decades. It should be abandoned, not revised. ... Consider the fact that your clinical practice is governed by a diagnostic system that:

    "is a laughingstock for the other medical specialties; requires continual apologies to primary care doctors, medical students, residents, and the occasional lawyer or judge; most of our thoughtful colleagues privately rail against; insists upon rigid categories that often serve only to confuse and misinform patients and their clinical workers (sometimes abetted by televised drug advertising); is so intellectually incoherent as to raise eyebrows among the well-educated, critical thinkers in our own psychotherapy clientele; persuades the world at large that psychiatry no longer has anything of interest to say about the human condition.

    "If it were within your power to do so, wouldn't you get rid of this system?"
  • A February 19, 2003 article in The Times (London) titled, "It's time to stop taking the tablets – you're not ill, you're just alive," medical doctors and psychiatrists themselves spoke out against the DSM.  Per psychiatrist, Peter Tyrer, professor of community psychiatry at Imperial College, London, "I always say that DSM stands for the Diagnosis of Simple Minds; it provides what Americans call 'operational criteria' for the diagnosis of conditions. Basically, if you have a certain quota then you have the condition. It has led to a tickbox mentality. Well, you are a bad clinician if you have to do that. Doctors should be finding out about the person."

  • A July 18, 2003 news article in the Connecticut Post quotes Edward Shorter, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Toronto in Canada. "We need to take all of our copies of the DSM and throw them into the sea," ... "There are such fundamental flaws that the whole thing needs to be rethought.

    		•

    Go to Articles of Interest