Experts Debunk DSM Cont.

Thomas Szasz, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus: The Internationally renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Szasz, writes, “The ostensible validity of DSM is reinforced by psychiatry’s claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases—a claim supposedly based on recent discoveries in brain imaging techniques and pharmacological agents for treatment. This is not true.” He also says, “There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases. If such a test were developed, then the condition would cease to be a mental illness and would be classified, instead, as a symptom of a bodily disease.”

Dr. Sydney Walker, III, psychiatrist, neurologist:

“[The DSM] has led to the unnecessary drugging of millions of American children who could be diagnosed, treated, and cured without the use of toxic and potentially lethal medications.”

“The nonscientific approach used to create DSM leads to irrational and constantly changing diagnostic criteria: a patient might be perfectly normal according to one version of DSM and mentally ill by the standards of the next. (For instance, ‘narcissistic personality disorder’—used to describe vain people who are self-centered and frequently take advantage of others—was a DSM ‘diagnosis’ until 1968. It was eliminated from the version used between 1968 and 1980, when it was reinstated. Thus, a self-centered, vain person was ‘mentally ill’ before 1968, normal for the next twelve years, and then ‘mentally ill’ again after 1980.)” 

Dr. Harold Pincus, Vice Chairman of the DSM-IV task force admitted, “There has never been any criterion that psychiatric diagnoses require a demonstrated biological etiology (cause).”

Paul R. McHugh, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore:

“... In the absence of validating conceptions like the six mechanisms of disease in internal medicine, American psychiatry has turned to “committees of experts” to define mental disorder. Membership on such committees is a mater of one’s reputation in the APA—which means that those chosen can confidently be expected to manifest not only a requisite degree of psychiatric competence but, perhaps more crucially, some talent for diplomacy and self-promotion.

“The new DSM approach of using experts and descriptive criteria in identifying psychiatric diseases has encouraged a productive industry. If you can describe it, you can name it; and if you can name it, then you can claim it exists as a distinct “entity” with, eventually, a direct treatment tied to it. Proposals for new psychiatric disorders have multiplied so feverishly that the DSM itself has grown from a mere 119 pages in 1968 to 886 in the latest edition; a new and enlarged edition, DSM-V, is already in the planning stages. Embedded within these hundreds of pages are some categories...that are dubious, in the sense that they are more like the normal responses of sensitive people than psychiatric “entities”; and some that are purely the inventions of their proponents.” 

Paul Genova, M.D., writing in Psychiatric Times, said: the “DSM diagnostic system has outlived its usefulness by about two decades. It should be abandoned, not revised.” 

Psychiatrist Matthew Dumont: “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].” 

Psychologist Renee Garfinkel, a staff member of the American Psychological Association, said of the DSM-III-R work group: “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.” 

David Healy, psychiatrist, director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine and author of The Anti-Depressant Era: “There must inevitably be a struggle, or a dialectical process, to determine the meaning of physical symptoms and where the boundaries of health and disease lie.” 

J. Allan Hobson and Jonathan A. Leonard, authors of Out of Its Mind, Psychiatry in Crisis, A Call For Reform: “...DSM-IV’s authoritative status and detailed nature tends to promote the idea that rote diagnosis and pill-pushing are acceptable.” 

Psychiatrist Al Parides: DSM is “a masterpiece of political maneuvering.” He also observed that “what they have done is medicalize many problems that don’t have demonstrable, biological causes.

Elliot S. Valenstein, biopsychologist, author of Blaming the Brain: “DSM-IV is not an exciting document. It is purely descriptive and presents no new scientific insights or any theories about what causes the many mental disorders it lists.”

Lawrence Diller, M.D., author of Running on Ritalin: “…[The] search for a biological marker is doomed from the outset because of the contradictions and ambiguities of the diagnostic construct of ADHD as defined by the DSM…I liken the efforts to discover a marker…to the search for the Holy Grail.”

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