Home » Issues » Psychiatric Drugs » Psychiatry's "Diagnostic" System

Psychiatry's "Diagnostic" System

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatry’s “billing bible” of so-called mental disorders. With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific/medical validity to the “disorders,” the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody battles, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening “treatments” based solely on opinion.

  • Dr. Thomas Dorman, an internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, wrote, “In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.”

  • Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, authors of Making Us Crazy, conclude: “The public at large may gain false comfort from a diagnostic psychiatric manual that encourages belief in the illusion that the harshness, brutality, and pain in their lives and in their communities can be explained by a psychiatric label and eradicated by a pill. Certainly, there are plenty of problems that we all have and a myriad of peculiar ways that we struggle...to cope with them. But could life be any different? Far too often, the psychiatric bible has been making us crazy—when we are just human.”

While medicine’s scientific credentials are undisputed, psychiatry’s lack of any systematic approach to mental health has contributed greatly to its poor reputation, both among professionals and the population as a whole.

Click here for more information on the DSM and ADHD

Go to Psychiatric Drugs