Do pharmaceutical companies control the social definition of normal? Can advertising and public relations campaigns turn acceptable personality differences into unacceptable disorders? British-American literary critic and historian Christopher Lane discusses his book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, including the way politics and profits drive the bible of mental health treatment, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
You can listen here:
Lately Christopher has been shaking the Psychology Today blogging world with pieces that make his colleagues at Psychology Today quake in their boots. I left a comment for this guy supporting Christopher Lane.
The bipolar child is a purely American phenomenon”: An interview with Philip Dawdy
and
Bipolar disorder and its biomythology: An interview with David Healy
Update and note: As Mama Dharma points out I fail to mention that David Healy supports ECT. I’ve known this for a long time and should have mentioned it. I did confront him in the comment section of Christopher Lane’s blog where David himself proudly admits to supporting this barbaric practice. I retort with this:
David, as much as I like what you have to say about the mythology around mental illness and the fallacy of drugs…
I’m sorely disappointed and can’t even begin to fathom how in the heck you can support ECT when there is so much documentation on how brain damaging it is.
It’s severely impaired a number of people I know personally and when I worked as a social worker I was exposed to hundreds of people who took both drugs and used ECT…I see no difference in the degree of inhumanity involved.
it’s all about damaging the brain.
Anyway, us human critters often defy making any sense at all and certainly Healy’s inability to see the inhumanity of ECT is a horrible, horrible, inexusable flaw.
Do you know if he actually practices shock? I’m not sure that he does. He is certainly and apologist for it though, that being a generous statement.
He wouldn’t be out of business if he was opposed to shock…he has done some of the very little research on withdrawal from antidepressants and could do a lot of good helping people withdraw safely from them.
we need doctors who know how to responsibly withdraw from meds and they are very very few. In fact I’ve not met one who really knows what they are doing online or off…with the exception of Peter Breggin who has helped me tremendously with his book, BUT he really doesn’t know how to help people with diet and nutrition and it can help ease the process immensely!!
He at least gets how dangerous it is and how insanely slowly one must go sometimes…most doctors simply can’t conceive of that and that is where problems crop up.
Healy gets that too…but as far as most of his experience is with ADs.
I imagine there are a few others out there.
Thanks for the addendum. I couldn’t imagine that you were not aware. Now that I know I’ll always make sure to out him as a shock doc at every opportunity. There are lots of other people who have good crititiques of the drugs that also support us on shock.
Linda put it well: psychiatry is largely composed of drugs and shock. He opposes drugs, so if he opposed shock, he’d be out of business.
Is that too cynical? When it comes to psychiatry, I’m not sure that’s possible?
here…this is what I said to him…I’ve actually known for a long time about this bizarre double standard he has:
David, as much as I like what you have to say about the mythology around mental illness and the fallacy of drugs…
I’m sorely disappointed and can’t even begin to fathom how in the heck you can support ECT when there is so much documentation on how brain damaging it is.
It’s severely impaired a number of people I know personally and when I worked as a social worker I was exposed to hundreds of people who took both drugs and used ECT…I see no difference in the degree of inhumanity involved.
it’s all about damaging the brain.
I know he’s a shock doc…I confront him on Chris Lane’s interview where he proudly admits it in comments….go take a look!!
I support all this great work – defy the Lie.
Just wanted to let your readers know that David Healy is a shock doc. I’m not kidding. He says great things about psych drugs but totally supports shock.
I feel that people need to be aware of this.
I myself was not until I attended Linda Andre’s book signing of “Doctors of Deception.”
He’s not an ally.
Posted in a spirit of love and solidarity, not as a criticism – keep putting out the great stuff you do, Gianna 🙂
Yep, Lane is a hero.
Yep, I have a masters in counseling and thought the dsm was a joke, until, well what has happened in mental health in the last 20 years is unconscionable.
Hi,
I have a graduate degree in the mental health field. I remember being totally amazed at the DSM III and thinking it was mostly bogus…and just a guideline. I knew it wasn’t scientific. I remember one of my part-time employers becoming perturbed with me for not purchasing my own copy.
What is wrong with people.
Later on, I worked at a facility where we used it as suggestions to the psychiatrist when we referred a patient to him/her.
In ways, I would like to get back into the mental health field. But I think all these bogus diagnosis and drug pushing would drive me nuts.