Eve left note of an important article in the New York Review of Books today, in my comment section. It’s written by Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and so carries particular weight among those who generally find all of us who question the veracity in all these claims of corruption full of crap. This woman is from inside the ranks. We need more people like her coming out and speaking in this manner. Many of the psychiatrists who speak out like this get marginalized and ostracized from their comrades.
I will leave you with Eve’s quote picks from the piece as they are good focusing in particular on the DSM and diagnosis. The whole article and the books it’s highlighting are worth reading. I’m familiar with them all but have not read them yet. I hear Alison Bass’s book reads like a novel.
This article starts by going into the recent history of Senator Grassley busting particularly corrupt psychiatrists who take pharma money and is a good synopsis on all that if you’ve not been keeping up to date with the news. It continues and encompasses many issues regarding psychiatry, drugs, pharma and the DSM.
Eve’s picks regarding the DSM and the general fallacy of psychiatric diagnosis at all:
Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often uncertain, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones….
…Given its importance, you might think that the DSM represents the authoritative distillation of a large body of scientific evidence. But Lane, using unpublished records from the archives of the American Psychiatric Association and interviews with the princi-pals, shows that it is instead the product of a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. What the DSM lacks is evidence. (rest of article here–it’s quite packed with all sort of facts—good reading, I’m just too tired to do a really good breakdown of it)
Markps2: The banks and auto industry were making money too. They collapsed because of poor business practices.
What will happen as more kids get diabetes because of anti-psychotics? What will happen when the newer drugs start making various organs fail en masse?
The wheel of karma is not some judgmental being sitting up there saying this is good or this is bad. It is the energy, stuff, acitons, etc. we put out that come right back around. You put out as much negativity as the pharma have and it comes back.
We just need change and it will happen. It IS the way of life. Things come and go. Eventually this toxic junk will not be the first choice.
We’ve been drugged into submission. It might take years, but perhaps us radicals will get our say when the world realizes that there is no one “normal” left and everyone is taking a drug for something and everything comes crashing down on itself.
We need a revolution. Someone in power to just finally take a stand.
It makes me so angry to think about all the drugging that goes on. I was one of those people who so blindly believed in taking a drug for every “symptom” of my personality. And all it did was make me more miserable and more reliant on the system. Until I said “F” it.
A year off meds and I’ve never been happier!
Who will change it and why? As a wise man once said, “be the change you wish to see in the world.”
“The system needs an overhaul.”
The system is making money and serving its customers. The drug companies lose the court case here and there for millions but still Net a profit.
People demand a magic pill and they will get it as long as they are asking.
I don’t see the system changing anytime soon, who will it change for and why?
I get furious every time I think of this. Good article. You know I have been pondering shooting off an email to Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN, to see if he has the balls to raise these kinds of questions within the medical field. I’d love to see what he has to say about. I encourage anyone who reads this to do just that. “Paging Dr. Gupta… Dr. Sanjay Gupta”.
I really believe that the way the pharma pimps have done business will come back to bite them in the butt.
It is beyond scary how bad the corruption is. It is not worth the cost. The system needs an overhaul.