again, it appears that reductionism has the last word on (almost) all the important questions of science, unlike T.Nagel

“Of course, as Szasz said, if all mental diseases were shown to have a biological cause then psychiatry would cease to exist”

Right. But the most biological of psychiatrists would agree with that. The only difference is that Szasz thought it wouldn't happen in the great majority of cases… but who's to say? My point is, neuroscience is still young, we're still discovering plenty of new neurological disorders. Why assume the process won't continue?

Good point.

Also I forgot to say in the post, this is one of the arguments I made in my UPenn talk Brain Rumors; I didn't use this example but I made the point that neuroscience doesn't know everything, far from it, so the idea that only what we can measure in the brain is 'real' is a misunderstanding (and also vice versa).

Your case summary opens the door to the entire world of organic psychiatric syndromes, which are important not as oddities but because they mimic those of presently unknown cause. Indeed, these secondary organic cases provide salient leads to the likely mechanisms/anatomy of the so-called functional psychiatric syndromes. Down through history, syphilis on the brain has been known to present with clinical pictures indistinguishable from classical mania or psychosis or depression or personality change: it was called the great mimic. Then we have the psychoses associated with temporal lobe epilepsy; we have vascular depression; we have mood change and psychosis in Huntington disease and Parkinson disease; and more – the list is surprisingly long. My generation of psychiatrists was steeped in these diagnostic considerations.

We often hear people assert that psychiatric diseases are fictive because no diagnostic tests exist for them. That position has always seemed illogical to me. The existence of disease is not predicated on having a laboratory test for it. The laboratory test is developed in response to the fact of disease.

Kisely et al recently made the point that cancer patients diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder had a much higher mortality rate than patients without a psychiatric diagnosis.

The authors stated that the patients did not have the same access to specialized care – perhaps because if someone has been labeled with a psychiatric disorder (correctly or not) it is assumed they can't possibly have a severe medical disease instead or as well.

Although the mind/body ideology has many good points, too often there is a backlash against “reductionist” thinking and it is the patient that suffers.

The assumption that because medical and psychiatric knowledge hasn't advanced enough to accurately diagnose some patients means they do not have a disease is limiting and once again it is the patient that suffers.

As Szasz has pointed out drapetomania, masturbatory insanity and homosexuality were once psychiatric diseases. Who is to say that ADHD is not just the reaction of that individual child to the prison that is called a school. Brain differences may be found but it is a society's morality that determines 'harm'. Neuroscience may in the future discover the 'abnormality' in the brain that makes someone gay. Does, as a previous poster suggested, alcoholism behave like a true disease? The danger here is that all 'unwanted' behaviour becomes subject to medical therapeutic treatments.

“No. The original diagnosis of a mental disorder was totally wrong.”

The diagnosis of bipolar means, in effect, 'a disease, of unspecified nature, that causes depression and mania'.

Which was right.

Now if Szasz had come along and diagnosed a 'problem in living', on the other hand…

'The diagnosis of bipolar means, in effect, 'a disease, of unspecified nature, that causes depression and mania'

Depression and mania may also be caused by abuse and trauna. Treating this as a disease and undermining that person's life experience may be devastating to some. Medical science such as neurology and psychosocial 'talk' therapy are more valid than psychiatric pseudoscience – the only medical discipline that does not actually examine the physical organ in question.

@Anonymous — if that were actually accurate, we would expect something like Deplin to actually work well…

'Saying mental illness doesn't exist because there is no test, is like saying colon cancer didn't exist before the invention of the colonsoscopy.'

As far as I know, the mind, unlike the colon, is not a physical object and cannot be examined using a microscope etc and cannot therefore be subject to a biological disease.

Anonymous: “As far as I know, the mind, unlike the colon, is not a physical object”

The Mind(TM) is a brand name for what's generically called the brain.

From a less scientific point of view I had written something similar to this post
http://the-transhuman.blogspot.com/2011/12/sick-or-sage.html
+
Your blog is one of my favorites. Keep up the good work.

Nice piece, thanks! A small, but important proportion of psychotic presentations are likely to be autoimmune in nature and as this story develops we will get better at spotting them.

I think however there is another important point in your post. As you note, on neurological examination, this 44 year old man had asymmetrical parkinsonism. While antipsychotics (APs) do cause these side effects, amisulpride and quetiapine are not the typical offenders and drug induced parkinsonism is usually bilateral.

This story highlights the reason why all people with psychosis should be getting good physical exams, to spot these rarer but important causes.

@L. Paul Strait

I think you were replying to me. L5-methyltetrahydrofolate, methylcobalamin, etc., do work. I have personal experience with them. Anyone who has discovered that they don't work clearly doesn't know what they are doing.

People who have organic illness due to vitamin deficiency aren't just deficient in folate, B12, etc. They are typically suffering from serious malnutrition, gut problems, infections, etc. Simply giving the aforementioned substances simply isn't enough. The whole person needs to be treated.

Well, you could sit someone with cholera down, and talk them through their intestinal conflicts and 'problems in absorbing water'. And they'd eventually get better in most cases.

Talk therapy cures cholera!

Not to mention prayer, people thought prayer cured everything for about 5,000 years, for the same reason.

So Neuroskeptic, you think that 'mental illness' is actually a brain disease and thus talk therapy is therefore useless. Does science agree?

You wrote:

“There's a theory that 'psychiatric diseases' like depression and schizophrenia aren't diseases because they're not diagnosed on the basis of any kind of biological abnormality, but purely on symptoms”

From my point of view they are labels. Those labels come from groups of responses (similar in their topography but not necessarily in their function).

In a circular reasoning way those labels “magically” become “the cause” of the behaviors they were “discovered” and therefore acquiring the capacity of explaining those behaviors.

Then, before we consider “the symptoms”, it is necessary to address the notion of mental illness itself. If we consider seriously the idea that mental illnesses are invented constructs without base, perhaps we would understand why after decades of study, no chemical imbalance has been found in the brain for any mental illness, no single breakthrough and no “cure” has been found for any of the mental pathologies proclaimed by psychiatry.
No wonder why due to the lack of evidence, mental pathologies only exist thanks to the vote of a group of specialists (nothing to do with Science)in a “democratic” manner.

Back to the point, I stated in my twitter account that the article contains a big non sequitur fallacy.
For the author:
“Sometimes, disorders diagnosed on the basis of psychiatric symptoms do turn out to have had a clear biological cause. So the original diagnosis of a psychiatric disease was correct: there was indeed a disease.”

There are several problems with the above reasoning:

-First: Just because “sometimes” something happen that does not mean that psychiatry is correct here. As a matter of fact it seems to me, and based on the article, it is more anecdotical or due to serendipity that we discover a real illness through psychiatric symptoms.

-Second: If we discover a real disease then, by logic, the mental diagnostic was plainly wrong, not “correct”. As the author say “seems like a fairly typical case of bipolar. However, it turned out that…”

-Third: Whatever treatment we try, no matter how unscientific is, if it leads to a real disease then we will be tempted to state that that treatment “works in some way”. This is a non sequitur argument and clearly wrong.

Neurological diseases differ from mental diseases. That's why the article example would never be treated by psychiatry: There is no objective test (no fMRI, no blood test, etc) that can give us a real diagnostic for a mental illness.

Finally, let us not forget that not all behaviors are symptoms of something. Behavior concerns the organism as a whole with his past and his environment. Behavior is about interactions, not about minds, ghosts in the machine, brains and similar locationist philosophies.

“the diagnosis of bipolar means 'a disease, of unspecified nature, that causes depression and mania',..”

No, no, no, that is the fallacy!!!
Bipolar disorder is nót the cause of depression and mania. It is just the descríption of it!!!

Hi Neuroskeptic,

what you are trying to argue in favor of psychiatry we see every day with interdisciplinary teams.
Psychologist, speech language therapist, paediatricians, etc., refer their cases to other specialist when they cannot figure out was going on and when they suspect their cases have other reasons to happen.
And still, that doesn't mean at all that what they do in their day to day practice is either correct or incorrect.

Anonymous said too:
“Bipolar disorder is not the cause of depression and mania. It is just the description of it!!!”

and I have to agree and go further down on that:
Bipolar, depresion or mania, they are still labels for certain behaviors we see.
To say that those behaviors are caused by their label, is, at least, puzzling.
Just because we cannot always figure out why the person behaves in a certain manner, that doesn't mean it has a disease, and even worse, that that disease explains those behaviors.

In the example you use (a rare case, as I stated):

The person received the wrong diagnose and the wrong treatment. Please notice that his depression is not at all explained in the example: we do not feel sad because we are depressed, and also we are not depressed because we feel sad.
We feel depressed or we feel sad because a friend of us died, our girlfriend left us or because we didn't pass the SAT exam.

Back to the case:
The person was prescribed first with 100mg of quetiapine. It seems it worked but it didn´t since the amount was increased ten times! to 1000mg.
That didn´t work either at the end so, the patient was treated with, what it seems, “all they have”:

quetiapine, aripiprazole, lithium, valproate and escitalopram

So finally, the person got a neurological examination where they discovered the NMDAR antibodies.

To me, that's called “experimenting with all types of drugs in a patient since we have no clue”.

Do we really need to stuff a patient with drugs to see if they produce any change on that person?
How a failure like that can be considered positive for psychiatry.
How it can be linked to the right diagnosis? under what conditions?
Why the patient didn't get a scanner in the first place to discard illnesses of a different nature instead of being drugged at first?

And still, my points from my first message remain unanswered.

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/i-got-a-break-from-reality-for-christmas/

///(…) I realized for the first time how completely blind and unaware that even “leading” mental health professional were about the problems with labels and medications.

I often think of what they are doing as genocide, but my friend Ken Braiterman says genocide needs to have “intent.”

(…). During the day I was still working on my entrepreneurial approach to providing effective mental health care that completely bypasses labels and medications.

I had the beginning of a spiritual emergency where I realized I was still connected with my friend, Al Henning, who had been killed by psychiatry and I was trying to send him home.

At the end of the month, I started feeling good about a possible $25,000 grant that I could get if I got enough comments and online votes.
(…)
I decided that helping people with spiritual emergencies was one more powerful tool in solving the mental health puzzle.(…)///

No comment needed!

“Bipolar, depresion or mania, they are still labels for certain behaviors we see. To say that those behaviors are caused by their label, is, at least, puzzling.”

But that's not what psychiatry says. As I've said twice in this thread already, a diagnosis of bipolar means that a disease of unspecified nature is causing the symptoms.

Now, that theory of the causation of the behaviour may be wrong in any particular case. Like you say someone could feel sad because of a life event and then a diagnosis of depression would be wrong.

But the disease theory could be right. In this case, it was (as I said – the diagnosis of bipolar was correct but incomplete insofar as the guy had a disease, causing depression and mania.)

The point is, you can't just say that all psychiatric diagnoses are wrong and there's no such thing as a disease causing psychiatric symptoms because there are in fact loads of them (anti-NMDA being just one).

At best, you could say that if you don't have one of the neurological disorders we currently know about and can test for, then you don't have a disease.

But that assumes that we know everything about neurology which we don't.

NS said just now “… that assumes that we know everything about neurology which we don't.” I would say it a little differently… we don’t know everything about clinical neuroscience. We do, though, know enough about clinical neuroscience that we can recognize show stopper psychiatric diseases as mediated through altered brain function. I refer to mania, melancholic depression, catatonia, personality change in dementia, things like that. A good illustration in the clinical neuroscience/experimental medicine of major psychiatric disorders is the effect of lorazepam in reversing the signs of catatonia. The symptoms may have persisted for days or weeks, they are thought to be driven by abnormal circuit activity, and the drug activates inhibitory GABAergic receptors. The clinical effect is rapid and dramatic. Something similar occurs with aspects of mania in response to the cholinesterase inhibitor physostigmine, as David Janowsky and John Davis described 40 years ago.

George Orwell will not have approved of a bunch of sectarian antipsychiatrists unable to think straight but awfully good at selling simplistic dreams to mental illnesses sufferers!

Those who claim that psychosis is simply and only the results of abuses and difficult life situations have just not got anything really scientific to back it up.

The big Pharma scandal helps them thrive and get an audience and
those demagogues oppose medicine and psychiatry as if medicine had not suffered from dishonest Pharma marketing…

Those sectarian demagogues gain money since they sell their supposed expertise and take power over gullible sufferers.

Anonymous: “I'm living proof that mental illness is not a brain disease: I'm mentally ill, and I have no brain.”

You don't seem to be able to read, so there's no point my saying anything in response, I've already answered that about three times.

'I've already answered that about three times.'

Define the 'that' you have explained. Ta.

ano 27 December 2012 10:22

As is psychiatry – the new astrology.

Actually the antipsychiatry manipulative nonsenses one can read on Mr Robert Whitaker's Mad on America website under the signature of his co-runner of the website Laura Delano would shame any decent astrologer. Problem is that those antipsychiatrists are socially irresponsible since their aim is to prevent psychotic persons and family to seek psychaitric help.

Thanks ano for the links to “A challenge to I am Adam lanza 's mother”

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/a-challenge-to-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/

and to “i got a break of reality for Christmas”.

I red a comment to this:”Corinna, that’s well said. It seems to me, you have a great intellectual grasp of what you went through. In particular, you are aware that a lot of your angst was triggered by (well-founded) fear of having the mental health system intervene, as it did in the past.(…)The hair off my dog in the back seat kept blowing into my face like bullets from a death squad, and the morning sunlight on the horizon was burning holes in my windshield.” Wow. (So beautifully descriptive.)Also, I love that you conclude, “there is so much of this process that was not just scary, but glorious and giganticly interdimensional and impactful…””

I am waiting for Mrs Delano to write a post congratulating the dead sister of the recent arsonist and killer of two firemen for not seeking help for him after their mother he doted on so much had died. Mrs Delano and follower will tell the world that no doubt that man liked to kill because psychiatry does exist…

The shame is also that that this dangerous website is run under the moral protection of a famous USA journalist , Robert Whitaker…

I received an e-mail from Mr Robert Whitaker in response to my protesting the Laura Delano post bullying Mrs Liza Long “A challenge to I am Adam lanza's mother by his dear Mrs Delano, I want to share:

///Dear Dr. xxxxx,

I certainly believe autism exists. I believe Laura Delano believes autism exists. She is writing in response to a blog that was posted in the U.S., in which a mother said her son, with some apparent unknown mental illness, could be a mass murderer because of his mental illness.

She is challengel the medical model of mental illness here, which says that these disorders are due to chemical imbalances, which are then fixed by the brain. She is not saying that autism doesn't exist. You are misreading her post.

Sincerely,

Bob Whitaker///

“Can cancer be overdiagnosed?”

Er, yes, and some forms of it are. It's a matter of public record, Google it. Or read blackbook's comments.

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/a-challenge-to-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/

Ano :
“Oh dear Blackbook doc. You suffer from delusions”

I would not even call that a projection since I can easily find a kindred spirit of yours on the crazy comments of “A challenge to I am Adam lanza 's mother” from Mrs Dealano on Mad in America website:

“Copy_cat on December 19, 2012 at 12:39 pm said:
The origninal “I am adam lanza” was reputation management spam to cover all the keywords like school shooting psychiatric drug links from google index.

If no one pointed that out already , great reply Laura !”

Neurosceptic you are wrong. Cancer is not overdiagnosed. It is the conditions that may result in a harmful cancer that are over diagnosed. From wiki 'Thus, another definition of overdiagnosis is simply the detection of pseudodisease.' Which is exactly what psychiatry deals with. But I am not a medical doctor so I leave you with the last word.

Neuroskeptic wrote:

“a diagnosis of bipolar means that a disease of unspecified nature is causing the symptoms.”

Perhaps that's the meaning for psychiatry and for you, but I’m sorry to say I would adscribe that meaning better to wishful thinking rather than reality.

A diagnosis of bipolar really means that the subject states (or the observation made by others) that he feels sad or empty, that he has diminished interest or pleasure in activities, etc., etc.

Those definitions come from psychiatry themselves. They are not mine.

If you meet their subjective criteria, then you are considered to be bipolar.
As I said before, the behaviors were there first and then, later on, we invented a name for certain clusters of them.
It is irrational (and tautological as somebody say ) to think that the label causes the behaviors (your “disease causing the symptoms”) specially when those labels where invented based on those behaviors.

The problem is to consider that certain behaviors necessarily occult a disease behind.

Do not let me wrong, we have the right to, and we must, study how stimuli interacts with the organism . That's the case of behavioral pharmacology or physiology for example. However, I believe we do not have the right to create fictitious illnesses based solely in how we behave and even worse, create treatments for those fictions (mainly drugs) and think they will work.

Please notice that up to date nobody has objectively demostrated any of the diseases created by psychiatry. Neither have we found a “cure” for any mental disease. And let's not forget what happened with “ilnesses” as “idiocy”, “hysteria” or “homosexuality” for different reasons.
Definitely, mental illnesses are not, and never have been, scientific in any sense.

You also wrote:
“But the disease theory could be right. In this case, it was (as I said – the diagnosis of bipolar was correct but incomplete insofar as the guy had a disease, causing depression and mania.)”
I am afraid you are jumping to conclusion too fast. What we know is: The subject behaved in a certain manner. The subject received drugs which didn't change his behavior. Somehow, he got an objective test and got a different diagnostic. And wee do not know how one wrong diagnostic led to the right one.

Notice also that what we called mental diagnosis is just: “the subject behaved in certain ways”. To say that the diagnosis is correct is to add really nothing to it:
If you are not interested in anything, or pleasured anything I can say that you are bipolar (let's say “depressed”), but this is just a label. Now that I have that label I am not supposed to go the other way around and say that you are not interested in anything because you are depressed.

So, what is the diagnose adding to why the person feels sad?
Let's consider another case: a person that has lost his legs in an accident. Does not he would feel sad and, let's say “depressed”? Probably.
Is “depression” explaining its sadness? Is his sadness explained by his depression?
How on earth the diagnosis of depression in this person explains the fact he has lost his legs and that is the real reason why he feel depressed ?

Hi blackbook, the below sentence wasn't mine, but I agreed with it:

///”Bipolar disorder is not the cause of depression and mania. It is just the description of it!!!”

Back to your message:
the world of pathologies and mental pathologies are quite different and if we are not able to see how radically they differ from each other we are certainly in trouble.

The conceptual background of mental illnesses, their treatments and results, unequivocally ask for a revision of the model but at its roots.
To believe that better diagnose is the solution is, quite frankly, delusional. Instead of persisting in the same mistake over and over (the DSM-V continues on that sense) it is time to change, not to perfectionate the mistake.

Where do I belong?
Clearly in the side of science.

Precisely because the scientific community didn't take seriously the flaws of psychiatry, others, like Scientology, New Age, etc. did and were quite sucessful in transmiting the wrong message: “Since psychiatry is not right, we have the answer”.

It is time the scientific community begins to look closely at psychiatry. Some already have done so and some, are at least, considering to do so.

As B. F. Skinner used to say:
“Regard no practice as immutable. Change and be ready to change again. Accept no eternal verity. Experiment.”

“But what happens is that a very rare case (such as presented in this blog) is used to illustrate that perhaps in the future more and more of such causes could be revealed. That's called wishful thinking.”

You're just not paying attention. I didn't say that. All I was saying is that this case proves that anyone who says that psychiatric disorders never have a biological cause – i.e. you – are verifiably wrong.

Actually, I can see why you're not paying attention, because if you did you'd be admitting your mistake.

NS, I didn't pay attention because I have add, so please don't blame, it's because of my disease

Of course, sometimes there is a specific physical cause in psychiatry. But this is so very rare, that you cannot build your theory of everyday psychopathology on that. Even less can you decide which therapy to choose on this. A very good rule of thumb for every day psychiatric work is: there is nothing wrong with your patient's brain. It's the least likely place to search for things out of order.
But: never say never, I agree with you on that. Sometimes pigs can fly.

Hi again Jorge,

Reading your own website, you are selling ABA therapies.

Pr Mottron from Montreal is reputed to say that the persons with autisms and their families fall under the rule of the stalinists of ABA -and you are one of those for sure reading your own website- when they are lucky enough to escape the tzars of psychoanalysis.

ABA is not a miracle, it doesn't work at all for some autistic children and the ABA practitionners are wrong in asking for very costly and intensive ABA therapies for every autistic children.

The only proven advantage of intensive ABA -without any stats needed – is that it makes a lot of work and then money for disonest psychologists who fail to tell the parents that TEACH and other techniques work better for some autistic children and that aspies do not like too much ABA when they accept it at all.

-see Pr Gillberg MD and team latest work showing that half intensive autism therapy works as nicely as very intensive autism therapy and some children do not gain anything from it-

You wrote to me :

///Hi blackbook, the below sentence wasn't mine, but I agreed with it:

“Bipolar disorder is not the cause of depression and mania. It is just the description of it!!!”///

To believe that a psychiatric label is the main cause of psychiatric symptoms you need to have your intelligence and critical senses washed away by antipsychiatrists of the worst sort like the scientologists or many of Mr Robert Whitaker 's bloggers on his website “Mad in America” Corinna West and Laura Delano between others-see the links to their outragous posts in this discussion.

Bad Pharma marketing and mental illnesses stigmatization in the general population and unfortunatly in many of the mental health professionals- with misconducts of the worst sort in some psychiatric hospitals- make it easy to find believers and followers for the antipsychiatrists.

Idem for the psychoanalysts accusing the mothers's behavior to a child to be rersponsable for autism which makes parents becoming antipsyhiatrists and blind buyers of the most costly private ABA therapies.

For the Mrs Laura Delano and the worst of psychoanalysts -the lacanians to be precise- to declare a mother responsable for her children's behavior is a sure win since the silly Freudian influence in society is still strong when the man was a crook like Bruno Bettelheim was another to remain in your field of expertise,ie the autisms, dear Jorge.

(I know those were MD although Freud never was and never wanted to be a psychiatrist unlike Dr Szasz who became rich as a psychiatrist telling mental disease sufferers that they were OK with all the authority of a psychiatrist! DR Breggin is another sacred cow of the antipsychiatrists and both the later must have let some clients go to hell or a psychiatric hospital because reassurances are not a reasonable treatment of every psychosis.

Of course, the clinical description of any illness is never the cause of it and even lab tests are not always giving away a causality in medicine.

To give you an example: Even if I were to take a red or redish liquid out of your spinal canal through a lumbar puncture it will not means I would then knew the only one possible causation for your sudden very severe headache etc..!

( I will have the choice between trauma, vascular malformations, or bleeding diatheses that can be intramedullary, subarachnoid, subdural, or epidural.)

Plus the history of medicine is full of nice clinical description of the cluster of symptoms of disease long before the causation of it was found like from the ancient Greeks the diabetis type 1 acurate description with the sudden production of lots of sugary urines by young people who died quickly after loosing a lot of weight…

That's a weak response. First you assume – as I pointed out – that our current ability to detect neurological diseases by biological tests is perfect, and then you question why anyone would want to.

So not only are you claiming to be the ultimate neuroscientist, you're also claiming to be the ultimate psychologist.

While people throughout history have felt that some minority of behaviours are simply inexplicable in normal terms, and reached for supernatural or other explanations, you deny this… except in cases where you with your knowledge of neuroscience can detect a biological cause.

And yet, you'll claim that you're just being skeptical of psychiatry.

“And why keer searching for possible physical factors when psychosocial factors are so abundant?”

Why bother to do clinical examination and lab tests to diagnose coronary thrombosis or whatever physical pathologies when -as you stated- “psychosocial factors are so abundant” often in that kind of “somatic pathology”?

To improve present and future treatments and to rule out false diagnosis come to mind.

Sometimes I think we have to come back to the time where you couldn't qualify in France as a psychiatrist without qualifying as a neurologist as well before choosing to practice neurology or psychiatry.

Hmm. Good question.

Some misterious person wrote:
“can't you keep your attention on the important subject of your post?”

you mean “the stalinist behaviorists”? or perhaps how I get rich through ABA? to put just two examples.

If you want (at least) me to take you seriously, please:

1. Refrain your ad-hominem attacks
2. Stop jumping from subject to subject like a butterfly from flower to flower
3. Do not patronize thinking the rest are ignorant
4. Stop twisting other people words and think twice before you get that easy to certain conclusions.
5. Leave your anonymity aside
6. (The most difficult one) Try to explain what it is that produce all of the above and that desperate defense of psychiatry.

Best regards.

I'm pretty sure that “blackbook doc” is indeed Ivana Fulli. Her peculiarly incoherent rants and ad hominem attacks are easily recognizable. (She recently got kicked off of Mad In America for posting a barrage of personal attacks.) I wonder what her DSM Dx is, not that I think they have any validity beyond describing “unusual” behavior. Anyone care to flex some diagnostic muscle and venture a guess? What fun!

” I wonder what her DSM Dx is, not that I think they have any validity beyond describing “unusual” behavior. Anyone care to flex some diagnostic muscle and venture a guess? What fun!”

A manipulative antipsychiatrist in full rage proposing to use the DSM as an intimidation tool!

How fun and informative.

Not as informative as the content of Mrs Laura Delano psychopathic post against Mrs Liza Long 's “I am Adam Lanza 's mother” though:

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/a-challenge-to-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/

How can you say that a paychiatrist's “treatment” of a misdiagnosed “disease” is “better than nothing?” the drug treatment (with neuroleptics especially) can be dangerous and neurotoxic.

Suzanne,

About the subject of that post , had the client committed suicide when severely depressed or being killed in a traffic accident when intoxicated (in a real maniac state people take many risks and make mistakes of every sort you can imagine ) an etiological cure would not have been possible.

A dead person cannot receive a proper treatment – besides the fact that immunosuppressants are not sugar pills…

One of the biggest lies of the fundamentalist antipsychiatrists is that nobody ever can benefit from a psychiatric label or a psychiatrist’s prescription when it can saves lives and also make people live a better life.

Other big lies psychosis, depression and mania are good for your spiritual awaking and makes you a superior human being or that otehr people's behavior are the only responsable for your condition (the trauma theory) with society at large and family having only the right to suffer in silence your most violent or disturbing behaviors.

The reality is that some people would not accept to be deprived of antidepressants and for other people neuroleptics make them able to have a family and a proper job.

It is a fact and I even met a a recovery meeting in London a man who told us that he chose a depot form in order to prevent his youngest children to know about his neuroleptic treatment and risk an accidental ingestion of neuroleptics.

In medicine, psychiatry included, symptomatic treatments can be extraordinarily useful in relieving symptoms- be it drugs or psychological and educational interventions like ABA and other autisms. It is a fact that down syndrome is due to three 21 chromosomes instead of two but caring and education not genetic treatment is the good practice for the time beings.

(Please, Suzanne, read Stanley Holmes above in the discussion.)

Every potent recreational or medical drug, psychological intervention, diet, or surgical procedure has side effects which means that you have to be very careful in taking and prescribing them.

Many people die in rich countries as a result of medical treatments or surgical procedures and it is always a risk/benefit decision to take- or give your child- a potent drug.

For a concrete example, when an orthopedic surgeon cannot fix a brocken bone(s) with a simple cast working “on the open” or even introducing pins through the skin means taking the risks of an anesthesia accident, of a nasty chronic bone infection.

Do we want many people unable to walk properly or use an arm properly when a surgical procedure might have prevent it for a terror of the evil orthopedic surgeons induced by bloggers on a “Brocken bone in America” website ?

We need more science not less of it and some of the big lies of antipsychiatrists are of a fundamentalist obscurantist intrinsic frightening quality with psychiatry becoming the “Big Satan” and Mrs Laura Delano pretending that she received the calling to make earth a better place by suppressing psychiatry as a mean of suppressing mental illnesses…

Idem for labels: some people and families want a label for the benefits it offers.

NB: Mr Robert Whitaker refused to an Asperger's syndrome person activist the right to respond on Mad In America to Mrs Laura Delano post abusing Mrs Liza Long infamous and cruel post ” A challenge to I am Adam Lanza's mother”

PS: I am for peers support and the least possible psychiatric drugs prescription what I am against is fundamentalist antipsychiatrists forbidding anyone to benefit from psychiatric drugs and any single mother dealing with a violent behavior of an adolescent to cry for help.

'The Mind(TM) is a brand name for what's generically called the brain.'

This is a re-run of the dualism /materialism theory of mind debate. Dualists form an orderly cue here behind the psychiatrists while materialists form another orderly cue here behind the neurosurgeons. The question is do Psychiatrists believe that their drugs are ever disease modifying? Or are they simply offering palliative treatments for neurological/ immunological conditions that have yet to be discovered or properly diagnosed?

And with DSM, would this gentleman have the wiggle room to ever be diagnosed accurately?