Is practicing psychiatry a disorder in need of treatment?

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http://www.troymedia.com/?p=8409

Is practicing psychiatry a disorder in need

of treatment?

February 21, 2010 Murgatroyd

By Dr.

Columnist

Troy Media

Dr. Murgatroyd

HALIFAX, NS, Feb. 21, 2010/ Troy Media/ — Who knew?

Psychiatrists are currently debating whether “sex addiction” should

be added to the catalogue of psychological disorders that can be

reliably diagnosed and treated.

On the one hand, some are saying that sexual addiction, in the true

sense of a diagnosis, is a real disorder and anyone who works with sex

addicts know that they have a long array of behaviours. Others,

however, believe the term is simply used to excuse bad behaviour.

Next in line will be the Tiger Woods syndrome, along with

catastrophic views on the environment, an addiction to Starbucks,

liking Barry Manilow and singing the praises of Rush Limbaugh. Soon all

of our lives will be illness states, with some of us coping better than

others in managing our daily diagnostics and treating ourselves through

counselling, psychiatry and self-medication.

Everything is problematic

The quest to add sex addiction to the catalogue of recognized

illness states is just a part of the desire of psychiatrists to

identify everything as problematic. The handbook for diagnosis, known

as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), now

in its 4th edition, is the bible of mental illness. If you want to call

in sick, go to the library and find a copy – it’s a treasure trove of

sick-day opportunities. A new edition, the fifth, is due in 2013.

The DSM itself is problematic. Diagnoses like “homosexuality”, once

classified as an illness, come and go depending on societal pressures.

By no stretch of the imagination is it a scientific, evidence-based

document. This is not surprising. Freud was not a scientist who used

evidence and data for his treatment. Now Freud’s ideas have been

largely discounted and his diagnostic category of “neurosis” is no

longer used. Indeed, several forms of therapy once popular have, on the

basis of evidence, been sidelined. What hasn’t been revised is the

approach to the definition of mental illness.

There has also been a lot of psychiatric nonsense and billable

rubbish, including the recovered memory craze, Satanic abuse

confabulations, facilitated communication, multiple personality

disorder with up to a hundred or more alternative personalities,

including animals. Then there was Harvard psychiatrist Mack’s

gullible speculations about alien abductions – a suitable case for

treatment in itself. Some psychiatrists are addicted to revenue and new

illness categories “capture” more customers.

Szasz argued that there was no such thing as mental illness

and that psychiatry is largely a fraud. He had many followers. Indeed,

fraud and psychiatry sometimes go together. In the 1990’s the medical

insurers in the US took Szasz’s claims seriously and started to

investigate psychiatric fraud. They looked at 50,000 cases handled by

the National Medical Enterprises Corporation’s psychiatric hospitals.

What they found was startling: 32.6 per cent contained a fraudulent

diagnosis to match insurance coverage, while 43.4 per cent of the cases

were billed for services not actually rendered. Is systematic deception

to be a new addiction and a new DSM category?

Millions of students are now sent to special education classes or

given prescriptions for Ritalin and other powerful, addictive

medications for conditions termed “learning disabilities”, dyslexia,

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and attention deficit

disorder (ADD). Fred Bauman, M.D., a specialist in child neurology for

35 years, contends that these children are said to have conditions that

do not really exist: “I diagnose these children the same way that I

diagnose real diseases, such as epilepsy, brain tumours, and so on, and

I find that they are normal. I do not find that I can validate the

presence of any disease in this population of children,” he said. Some

of us went to school before Ritalin was available – when we found

ourselves with ADHD we were reassigned to activities which demanded our

attention. Now we administer drugs.

Everything is not a form of illness

It’s time to rethink mental illness and to challenge the assumption

that everything we do is a form of illness – from eating well (dietary

disorder), drinking good wine (alcoholism), needing three cups of

coffee to kick start the morning (Starbucks addiction), sex two times a

day (sex addiction), telling funny stories (humour addiction), not

paying attention when the news is on (attention deficit disorder),

having sex while the news is on and drinking wine at the same time

(deviancy) and so on. While there are real mental illnesses –

depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disease – not everything we do is

“on the edge” of madness.

It may actually be the case that psychiatry itself is the new

disorder in need of treatment.