http://www.impactlab.net/2006/02/15/remote-control-heart-attack-weapons/
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
in: Science & Technology News
The brain is on the verge of becoming the next battlefield with weaponscurrently being designed to hack directly into your nervous system.
"Controlled Personnel Effects"(see image, right) is one of the Air Force’s ambitious long-termchallenges. It starts with better and more accurate bombs, but moves onto discuss devices that "make selected adversaries think or actaccording to our needs… By studying and modeling the human brain andnervous system, the ability to mentally influence or confuse personnelis also possible."
Thefirst stage is technology to “remotely create physical sensations.”They give the example of the Active Denial System "people zapper" whichuses a high-frequency radiation similar to microwaves as a non-lethalmeans of crowd control.
Other weapons can affect the nervous system directly. The Pulsed Energy Projectilefires a short intense pulse of laser energy. This vaporizes the outerlayer of the target, creating a rapidly-expanding expanding ball ofplasma. At different power levels, those expanding plasmas coulddeliver a harmless warning, stun the target, or disable them – all withpinpoint laser precision from a mile away.
Early reports on the effects of PEPsmentioned temporary paralysis, then thought to be related to ultrasonicshockwaves. It later became apparent that the electromagnetic pulsecaused by the expanding plasma was triggering nerve cells.
Details of this emerged in a heavily-censored document released to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Projectunder the Freedom if Information Act. Called “Sensory consequence ofelectromagnetic pulsed emitted by laser induced plasmas,” it describedresearch on activating the nerve cells responsible for sensingunpleasant stimuli: heat, damage, pressure, cold. By selectivelystimulating a particular nociceptor, a finely tuned PEP mightsensations of say, being burned, frozen or dipped in acid — allwithout doing the slightest actual harm.
Friday, August 6, 2010
School district spied on students at home as they slept: lawsuit
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0416/school-spied-students-slept/
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
Lawsuit: School administrator 'may be a voyeur' who spied on kids for personal gratification
A Philadelphia-area school district secretly took "thousands" of webcam photos of students in their homes and tracked their Web site visits and parts of online chats through spy software installed on the students' school-issued laptops, a Pennsylvania court heard yesterday.
In February, the family of Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High School in Rosemont, sued the Lower Merion School District after the district admitted to them it had been spying on students via a remote-activated feature on the laptops it issued to all its 2,300 high school pupils.
In a motion filed in court on Thursday, Robbins' lawyers asserted that the school district had taken at least 400 snapshots of 15-year-old Robbins, including some of him sleeping. The motion also stated that "thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
And in a strange twist to the story, the lawyers also suggested that Carol Cafiero, one of two school administrators with access to the spying technology, "may be a voyeur" who spied on students for her personal gratification, as some of the images taken by the laptops may have ended up on her personal computer.
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
Lawsuit: School administrator 'may be a voyeur' who spied on kids for personal gratification
A Philadelphia-area school district secretly took "thousands" of webcam photos of students in their homes and tracked their Web site visits and parts of online chats through spy software installed on the students' school-issued laptops, a Pennsylvania court heard yesterday.
In February, the family of Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High School in Rosemont, sued the Lower Merion School District after the district admitted to them it had been spying on students via a remote-activated feature on the laptops it issued to all its 2,300 high school pupils.
In a motion filed in court on Thursday, Robbins' lawyers asserted that the school district had taken at least 400 snapshots of 15-year-old Robbins, including some of him sleeping. The motion also stated that "thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
And in a strange twist to the story, the lawyers also suggested that Carol Cafiero, one of two school administrators with access to the spying technology, "may be a voyeur" who spied on students for her personal gratification, as some of the images taken by the laptops may have ended up on her personal computer.
FORCED DRUGGING OF AMERICAN CHILDREN - CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/drugging_children.htm
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
The Psycho State: by Rep. Ron Paul, MD
http://www.house.gov/paul/mail/welcome.htm
A presidential initiative called The “New Freedom Commission on Mental Health” has issued a report recommending forced mental health screening for every child in America, including preschool children. The goal is to promote the patently false idea that we have a nation of children with undiagnosed mental disorders crying out for treatment.One obvious beneficiary of the proposal is the pharmaceutical industry, which is eager to sell the psychotropic drugs that undoubtedly will be prescribed to millions of American schoolchildren under the new screening program. Of course a tiny minority of children suffer from legitimate mental illnesses, but the widespread use of Ritalin and other drugs on youngsters who simply exhibit typical rambunctious, fidgety, and impatient behavior is nothing short of criminal. It may be easier to teach and parent drugged kids, but convenience is no justification for endangering them. Children’s brains are still developing, and the truth is we have no idea what the long-term side effects of psychiatric drugs may be. Medical science has not even exhaustively identified every possible brain chemical, even as we alter those chemicals with drugs.Dr. Karen Effrem, a physician who strongly opposes mandatory mental health screening, warns us that “America’s children should not be medicated by expensive, ineffective, and dangerous medications based on vague and dubious diagnoses.” She points out that psychiatric diagnoses are inherently subjective, as authors of the diagnostic manuals admit. She also is concerned that mental health screening could be used to label children whose attitudes, religious beliefs, and political views conflict with the secular orthodoxy that dominates our schools.The greater issue, however, is not whether youth mental health screening is appropriate. The real issue is whether the state owns your kids. When the government orders “universal” mental health screening in schools, it really means “mandatory.” Parents, children, and their private doctors should decide whether a child has mental health problems, not government bureaucrats. That this even needs to be stated is a sign of just how obedient our society has become toward government. What kind of free people would turn their children’s most intimate health matters over to government strangers? How in the world have we allowed government to become so powerful and arrogant that it assumes it can force children to accept psychiatric treatment whether parents object or not?Parents must do everything possible to retain responsibility and control over their children’s well-being. There is no end to the bureaucratic appetite to rule every aspect of our lives, including how we raise our children. Forced mental health screening is just the latest of many state usurpations of parental authority: compulsory education laws, politically-correct school curricula, mandatory vaccines, and interference with discipline through phony “social services” agencies all represent assaults on families. The political right has now joined the political left in seeking the de facto nationalization of children, and only informed resistance by parents can stop it. The federal government is slowly but surely destroying real families, but it is hardly a benevolent surrogate parent.
September 14, 2004
Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.Ron Paul Archives
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul-arch.html
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
The Psycho State: by Rep. Ron Paul, MD
http://www.house.gov/paul/mail/welcome.htm
A presidential initiative called The “New Freedom Commission on Mental Health” has issued a report recommending forced mental health screening for every child in America, including preschool children. The goal is to promote the patently false idea that we have a nation of children with undiagnosed mental disorders crying out for treatment.One obvious beneficiary of the proposal is the pharmaceutical industry, which is eager to sell the psychotropic drugs that undoubtedly will be prescribed to millions of American schoolchildren under the new screening program. Of course a tiny minority of children suffer from legitimate mental illnesses, but the widespread use of Ritalin and other drugs on youngsters who simply exhibit typical rambunctious, fidgety, and impatient behavior is nothing short of criminal. It may be easier to teach and parent drugged kids, but convenience is no justification for endangering them. Children’s brains are still developing, and the truth is we have no idea what the long-term side effects of psychiatric drugs may be. Medical science has not even exhaustively identified every possible brain chemical, even as we alter those chemicals with drugs.Dr. Karen Effrem, a physician who strongly opposes mandatory mental health screening, warns us that “America’s children should not be medicated by expensive, ineffective, and dangerous medications based on vague and dubious diagnoses.” She points out that psychiatric diagnoses are inherently subjective, as authors of the diagnostic manuals admit. She also is concerned that mental health screening could be used to label children whose attitudes, religious beliefs, and political views conflict with the secular orthodoxy that dominates our schools.The greater issue, however, is not whether youth mental health screening is appropriate. The real issue is whether the state owns your kids. When the government orders “universal” mental health screening in schools, it really means “mandatory.” Parents, children, and their private doctors should decide whether a child has mental health problems, not government bureaucrats. That this even needs to be stated is a sign of just how obedient our society has become toward government. What kind of free people would turn their children’s most intimate health matters over to government strangers? How in the world have we allowed government to become so powerful and arrogant that it assumes it can force children to accept psychiatric treatment whether parents object or not?Parents must do everything possible to retain responsibility and control over their children’s well-being. There is no end to the bureaucratic appetite to rule every aspect of our lives, including how we raise our children. Forced mental health screening is just the latest of many state usurpations of parental authority: compulsory education laws, politically-correct school curricula, mandatory vaccines, and interference with discipline through phony “social services” agencies all represent assaults on families. The political right has now joined the political left in seeking the de facto nationalization of children, and only informed resistance by parents can stop it. The federal government is slowly but surely destroying real families, but it is hardly a benevolent surrogate parent.
September 14, 2004
Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.Ron Paul Archives
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul-arch.html
WE ARE ALL MENTALLY ILL - JUST ASK THE NEW PSYCHIATRIC MANUAL FOR DIAGNOSING NEW MENTAL ILLNESSES
http://www.cchrint.org/2010/07/28/the-bbc%e2%80%94new-report-challenges-psychiatrys-billing-bible-the-dsm%e2%80%94mental-health-are-we-all-sick-now/
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
Mental health: are we all sick now?
BBC NewsBy Philippa RoxbyJuly 28, 2010
Diagnosing psychiatric illness has always been controversial, mental health experts say. Now some are worried that a new draft of the diagnostic ‘bible’ for mental health medicine could result in almost everyone being diagnosed with a mental condition.
The diagnostic ‘bible’ in question is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.
The US manual is used worldwide as a basis for diagnosis, research and medical education.
Its forthcoming fifth edition – known in the profession as as DSM-5 – is set to contain a range of new diagnoses, including conditions such as “mixed anxiety depression, psychosis risk syndrome and temper dysregulation disorder”, as well as the more mundane binge eating.
The danger, say experts writing in a special issue of the Journal of Mental Health, is that there has not been enough research to back up these changes.
Even the smallest shift in how to define something like depression could have huge implications.
Self-fulfilling
Dr Felicity Callard, senior research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, says it is crucial to understand what happens when people are over-diagnosed.
“There are very big potential implications on how people, particularly adolescents, respond to being told they have a mental illness. It’s likely there will be harmful consequences,” she said.
She cites the “at risk psychosis syndrome” diagnosis as an example of a label which is given to young people who ‘might’ have psychosis – characterised by abrupt changes in personality. It is a diagnosis of something which could result in a disorder, but only potentially. That can have complicated effects, she says.
“Imagine a young person being told that they are “at risk” of developing a mental illness. How would that affect that individual’s behaviour? Could it lead to increased stigma or even discrimination? And how might it affect the parents and family of that person too?”
Jerome Wakefield of New York University’s Department of Psychiatry writes: “One of the most frightening scenarios is the potential for medicating people – particularly children – who haven’t yet shown any signs of illness in a bid to ‘treat’ them.”
These concerns are shared by a number of clinical experts in the Journal of Mental Health.
Read entire article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10787342
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
Mental health: are we all sick now?
BBC NewsBy Philippa RoxbyJuly 28, 2010
Diagnosing psychiatric illness has always been controversial, mental health experts say. Now some are worried that a new draft of the diagnostic ‘bible’ for mental health medicine could result in almost everyone being diagnosed with a mental condition.
The diagnostic ‘bible’ in question is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.
The US manual is used worldwide as a basis for diagnosis, research and medical education.
Its forthcoming fifth edition – known in the profession as as DSM-5 – is set to contain a range of new diagnoses, including conditions such as “mixed anxiety depression, psychosis risk syndrome and temper dysregulation disorder”, as well as the more mundane binge eating.
The danger, say experts writing in a special issue of the Journal of Mental Health, is that there has not been enough research to back up these changes.
Even the smallest shift in how to define something like depression could have huge implications.
Self-fulfilling
Dr Felicity Callard, senior research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, says it is crucial to understand what happens when people are over-diagnosed.
“There are very big potential implications on how people, particularly adolescents, respond to being told they have a mental illness. It’s likely there will be harmful consequences,” she said.
She cites the “at risk psychosis syndrome” diagnosis as an example of a label which is given to young people who ‘might’ have psychosis – characterised by abrupt changes in personality. It is a diagnosis of something which could result in a disorder, but only potentially. That can have complicated effects, she says.
“Imagine a young person being told that they are “at risk” of developing a mental illness. How would that affect that individual’s behaviour? Could it lead to increased stigma or even discrimination? And how might it affect the parents and family of that person too?”
Jerome Wakefield of New York University’s Department of Psychiatry writes: “One of the most frightening scenarios is the potential for medicating people – particularly children – who haven’t yet shown any signs of illness in a bid to ‘treat’ them.”
These concerns are shared by a number of clinical experts in the Journal of Mental Health.
Read entire article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10787342
Psychiatry’s Billing Bible: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
http://www.cchrint.org/cchr-issues/dsm-billing-bible/
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
..The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatry’s billing bible of so-called mental disorders. With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a mental illness simply by adding the term disorder onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific/medical validity to the disorders, the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more.
The DSM is driven not by science, but instead caters to the pharmaceutical industry. With its expanding list of “mental disorders”—voted into existence, not discovered as in real medicine—for each of these a psychiatric drug can be prescribed and insurance companies billed. That big formula spells big profits for psychiatrists and drug companies. And this has been exposed more recently with a U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation into the APA itself and the fact that about 56% of its $12 million-a-year income derives from drug makers (more below).
“The way to sell drugs is to sell psychiatric illness,” says Carl Elliot, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota.[1]
Kelly Patricia O’Meara, an award winning journalist and former Congressional staff points out, “Drug companies pull a mental disorder out of the DSM hat and get FDA approval to use an already existing drug to treat it. Well-known psychiatrists are enlisted to publicly affirm the disorder as a social problem…Voila! Confirmed psychiatric ill and magic pill.”[2]
Even within its own ranks there is disagreement about the drug company influence on the diagnostic process. An international poll of mental health experts conducted in 2001, voted DSM-IV one of the 10 worst psychiatric papers of the millennium.
Dr. Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, says: “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Studies Expose Conflicts of Interest
That became evident in the landmark study published in the journal of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in 2006 that found that for more than half of the panel members that reviewed which disorders would be included in the fourth edition revision of DSM (1994), more than half had undisclosed financial links to Big Pharma. For the so-called mood disorders (“depression” and “bipolar”) and “schizophrenia/psychotic disorder,” 100% of the panel members had financial involvements with drug companies. Sales of the drugs prescribed for these (by virtue of their inclusion in the DSM) reach more than $80 billion worldwide.
Apparently the APA psychiatrists did not want to give up this cashcow. For the DSM-V revision, another study found that 18 of the 20 members overseeing the revision of clinical guidelines for treating just three “mental disorders” had financial ties to drug companies, with drug treatment for these disorders generate some $25 billion a year in pharmaceutical sales (U.S. alone).
Under such public criticism and a year after it had been under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee for its conflicts of interest in drug companies, in March 2009, the APA announced that it would phase out pharmaceutical funding of continuing medical education seminars and meals at its conventions. However, within two months, the APA accepted more than $1.7 million in pharmaceutical company funds for its annual conference, held in San Francisco.
Not surprising. In 2002, the APA’s Anand Pandya said that without pharmaceutical industry funds, membership dues could escalate 455% from $540 a year to $3,000. Pandya is president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which in 2009 as also asked to provide records of its pharmaceutical company funding to federal investigators.
Psychiatry’s 300% increase of mental disorders in the DSM over five decades has already generated billions of dollars in government funding. Since DSM-IV, there has been also been a 256% increase in psychiatric (antipsychotics and antidepressants) drug sales.
Just how far psychiatrists will go using the DSM to label people “disordered” is reflected in a recent survey conducted by Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. He relied upon the DSM to survey Americans and concluded that nearly every second one (48%) suffers from at least one mental illness during their lifetime.[3] A “DSM–IV personality disorders” survey that he conducted for the World Health Organization, the results of which were published in 2009, was heavily funded by Eli Lilly Foundation, Ortho-McNeil, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. Kessler himself is a consultant for at least seven drug companies.
More to the point, as the late Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist and psychiatrist, wrote: “Drug company money influences every aspect of modern-day psychiatry. The American Psychiatric Association is literally built on a foundation of drug money…In return, the APA bends over backward to help drug companies promote their products.”[4] “That influence,” he said, “has focused on expanding the number of ‘psychiatric disorders’ recognized by the APA, and the number of drug treatments recommended for these disorders. After all, every DSM ‘diagnosis,’ is a potential gold mine for pharmaceutical firms.”[5]
No Scientific Validity
As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life-threatening treatments based solely on opinion. The scientific validity of the DSM has come under increasing attack from medical professionals and scientific experts such as Herb Kutchins of California State University and Stuart A. Kirk of UCLA, and authors of Making Us Crazy: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders, determined that “…there is ample reason to conclude that the latest versions of DSM as a clinical tool are unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system.”
The late Loren Mosher, M.D., a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry who resigned from the APA because of its drug company influence, wrote: “DSM-IV has become a bible and a money making bestseller—its major failings notwithstanding. It confines and defines practice, some take it seriously, others more realistically.”
Further, “The issue is what do the categories [in DSM] tell us? Do they in fact accurately represent the person with a problem? They don’t, and can’t, because there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder.”
The internationally renowned professor of psychiatry emeritus Thomas Szasz, supports this point, writing: “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.” So classified, it would make psychiatry redundant, and general physicians would replace it.
Therein lies the underlying problem of DSM—it isn’t a medical diagnostic system. Its all based on opinion—and faulty at best. Psychiatry lacked a system equivalent to that in medicine, and this contributed greatly to its poor reputation, both among medical professionals and the population as a whole. Thus it invented DSM to both convince real medicine of psychiatry’s legitimacy and to capture a slice of the insurance market. As Kutchins and Kirk point out, the evolution of the DSM is a “story of the struggles of the American Psychiatric Association to gain respectability within medicine and maintain dominance among the many mental health professionals.”[6]
Further, they assumed that if “a group of psychiatrists agree on a list of atypical [new] behaviors, the behaviors constitute a valid mental disorder. Using this approach, creating mental disorders can become a parlor game in which clusters of all kinds of behaviors (i.e. syndromes) can be added to the manual.” In fact, all DSM succeeds in doing is “to medicalize too many human troubles.”
Even psychiatrist Al Parides observes: “what they have done is medicalize many problems that don’t have demonstrable, biological causes.
Other Expert Quotes Show No Science to DSM
Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D.: says its tantamount to fraud. “The notion of scientific validity…is related to fraud. Validity refers to the extent to which something represents or measures what it purports to represent or measure. When diagnostic measures do not represent what they purport to represent, we say that the measures lack validity. If a business transaction or trade rested on such a lack of validity, we might say that the lack of validity was instrumental in a commitment of fraud.”
Psychiatry has been unable to determine a single cause for a single mental disorder.
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).”
Psychologist Renee Garfinkel, a staff member of the American Psychological Association, said of the DSM-III-R review committee: “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.”
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.”
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.”
The DSM-V review psychiatrists should take heed of Paul Genova, M.D., writing in Psychiatric Times, who said, the “DSM diagnostic system has outlived its usefulness by about two decades. It should be abandoned, not revised.”
[1] Shankar Vedantam, “Drug Ads Hyping Anxiety Make Some Uneasy,” The Washington Post, 16 July 2001.
[2] Kelly O’Meara, addressing CCHR 34th Anniversary and Human Rights Awards, Los Angeles, 2002.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Comorbidity_Survey; http://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/ncs/; http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/41/9/22.full?maxtoshow=&HITS=&hits=&RESULTFORMAT=1&andorexacttitle=and&titleabstract=ADHD+%2522social+status%2522+reward+dopamine&andorexacttitleabs=or&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=120&sortspec=relevan.
[4] Sydney Walker, III, M.D., A Dose of Sanity, ( John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, 1996), p. 229.
[5] Sydney Walker, III, M.D., A Dose of Sanity, ( John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, 1996), p. 230.
[6] Op. cit., Herb Kutchins, Stuart A. Kirk, Making Us Crazy, p. 22.
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:
..The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatry’s billing bible of so-called mental disorders. With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a mental illness simply by adding the term disorder onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific/medical validity to the disorders, the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more.
The DSM is driven not by science, but instead caters to the pharmaceutical industry. With its expanding list of “mental disorders”—voted into existence, not discovered as in real medicine—for each of these a psychiatric drug can be prescribed and insurance companies billed. That big formula spells big profits for psychiatrists and drug companies. And this has been exposed more recently with a U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation into the APA itself and the fact that about 56% of its $12 million-a-year income derives from drug makers (more below).
“The way to sell drugs is to sell psychiatric illness,” says Carl Elliot, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota.[1]
Kelly Patricia O’Meara, an award winning journalist and former Congressional staff points out, “Drug companies pull a mental disorder out of the DSM hat and get FDA approval to use an already existing drug to treat it. Well-known psychiatrists are enlisted to publicly affirm the disorder as a social problem…Voila! Confirmed psychiatric ill and magic pill.”[2]
Even within its own ranks there is disagreement about the drug company influence on the diagnostic process. An international poll of mental health experts conducted in 2001, voted DSM-IV one of the 10 worst psychiatric papers of the millennium.
Dr. Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, says: “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Studies Expose Conflicts of Interest
That became evident in the landmark study published in the journal of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in 2006 that found that for more than half of the panel members that reviewed which disorders would be included in the fourth edition revision of DSM (1994), more than half had undisclosed financial links to Big Pharma. For the so-called mood disorders (“depression” and “bipolar”) and “schizophrenia/psychotic disorder,” 100% of the panel members had financial involvements with drug companies. Sales of the drugs prescribed for these (by virtue of their inclusion in the DSM) reach more than $80 billion worldwide.
Apparently the APA psychiatrists did not want to give up this cashcow. For the DSM-V revision, another study found that 18 of the 20 members overseeing the revision of clinical guidelines for treating just three “mental disorders” had financial ties to drug companies, with drug treatment for these disorders generate some $25 billion a year in pharmaceutical sales (U.S. alone).
Under such public criticism and a year after it had been under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee for its conflicts of interest in drug companies, in March 2009, the APA announced that it would phase out pharmaceutical funding of continuing medical education seminars and meals at its conventions. However, within two months, the APA accepted more than $1.7 million in pharmaceutical company funds for its annual conference, held in San Francisco.
Not surprising. In 2002, the APA’s Anand Pandya said that without pharmaceutical industry funds, membership dues could escalate 455% from $540 a year to $3,000. Pandya is president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which in 2009 as also asked to provide records of its pharmaceutical company funding to federal investigators.
Psychiatry’s 300% increase of mental disorders in the DSM over five decades has already generated billions of dollars in government funding. Since DSM-IV, there has been also been a 256% increase in psychiatric (antipsychotics and antidepressants) drug sales.
Just how far psychiatrists will go using the DSM to label people “disordered” is reflected in a recent survey conducted by Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. He relied upon the DSM to survey Americans and concluded that nearly every second one (48%) suffers from at least one mental illness during their lifetime.[3] A “DSM–IV personality disorders” survey that he conducted for the World Health Organization, the results of which were published in 2009, was heavily funded by Eli Lilly Foundation, Ortho-McNeil, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. Kessler himself is a consultant for at least seven drug companies.
More to the point, as the late Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist and psychiatrist, wrote: “Drug company money influences every aspect of modern-day psychiatry. The American Psychiatric Association is literally built on a foundation of drug money…In return, the APA bends over backward to help drug companies promote their products.”[4] “That influence,” he said, “has focused on expanding the number of ‘psychiatric disorders’ recognized by the APA, and the number of drug treatments recommended for these disorders. After all, every DSM ‘diagnosis,’ is a potential gold mine for pharmaceutical firms.”[5]
No Scientific Validity
As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life-threatening treatments based solely on opinion. The scientific validity of the DSM has come under increasing attack from medical professionals and scientific experts such as Herb Kutchins of California State University and Stuart A. Kirk of UCLA, and authors of Making Us Crazy: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders, determined that “…there is ample reason to conclude that the latest versions of DSM as a clinical tool are unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system.”
The late Loren Mosher, M.D., a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry who resigned from the APA because of its drug company influence, wrote: “DSM-IV has become a bible and a money making bestseller—its major failings notwithstanding. It confines and defines practice, some take it seriously, others more realistically.”
Further, “The issue is what do the categories [in DSM] tell us? Do they in fact accurately represent the person with a problem? They don’t, and can’t, because there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder.”
The internationally renowned professor of psychiatry emeritus Thomas Szasz, supports this point, writing: “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.” So classified, it would make psychiatry redundant, and general physicians would replace it.
Therein lies the underlying problem of DSM—it isn’t a medical diagnostic system. Its all based on opinion—and faulty at best. Psychiatry lacked a system equivalent to that in medicine, and this contributed greatly to its poor reputation, both among medical professionals and the population as a whole. Thus it invented DSM to both convince real medicine of psychiatry’s legitimacy and to capture a slice of the insurance market. As Kutchins and Kirk point out, the evolution of the DSM is a “story of the struggles of the American Psychiatric Association to gain respectability within medicine and maintain dominance among the many mental health professionals.”[6]
Further, they assumed that if “a group of psychiatrists agree on a list of atypical [new] behaviors, the behaviors constitute a valid mental disorder. Using this approach, creating mental disorders can become a parlor game in which clusters of all kinds of behaviors (i.e. syndromes) can be added to the manual.” In fact, all DSM succeeds in doing is “to medicalize too many human troubles.”
Even psychiatrist Al Parides observes: “what they have done is medicalize many problems that don’t have demonstrable, biological causes.
Other Expert Quotes Show No Science to DSM
Jeffrey A. Schaler, Ph.D.: says its tantamount to fraud. “The notion of scientific validity…is related to fraud. Validity refers to the extent to which something represents or measures what it purports to represent or measure. When diagnostic measures do not represent what they purport to represent, we say that the measures lack validity. If a business transaction or trade rested on such a lack of validity, we might say that the lack of validity was instrumental in a commitment of fraud.”
Psychiatry has been unable to determine a single cause for a single mental disorder.
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).”
Psychologist Renee Garfinkel, a staff member of the American Psychological Association, said of the DSM-III-R review committee: “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.”
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.”
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.”
The DSM-V review psychiatrists should take heed of Paul Genova, M.D., writing in Psychiatric Times, who said, the “DSM diagnostic system has outlived its usefulness by about two decades. It should be abandoned, not revised.”
[1] Shankar Vedantam, “Drug Ads Hyping Anxiety Make Some Uneasy,” The Washington Post, 16 July 2001.
[2] Kelly O’Meara, addressing CCHR 34th Anniversary and Human Rights Awards, Los Angeles, 2002.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Comorbidity_Survey; http://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/ncs/; http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/41/9/22.full?maxtoshow=&HITS=&hits=&RESULTFORMAT=1&andorexacttitle=and&titleabstract=ADHD+%2522social+status%2522+reward+dopamine&andorexacttitleabs=or&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=120&sortspec=relevan.
[4] Sydney Walker, III, M.D., A Dose of Sanity, ( John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, 1996), p. 229.
[5] Sydney Walker, III, M.D., A Dose of Sanity, ( John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, 1996), p. 230.
[6] Op. cit., Herb Kutchins, Stuart A. Kirk, Making Us Crazy, p. 22.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
POSSIBLE GANG STALKING ACTIVITY IN TORONTO
Sunday (JUNE 4)I went to the park and spent a few hours. As I came back to the parking lot I noticed a car parked next to mine in an all but empty parking lot with no hub caps. (I noticed it because there were no hub caps.) Anyway, as I walked to my car a white middle aged male who was sitting in the drivers seat of a silver four van parked a few lanes away from my car in an isolated spot, just waiting, looked out in my direction. As he did so he got out of a silver van, opened all his doors and started cleaning his windows.
WEIRD I THOUGHT, IT WAS SUCH A HOT AFTERNOON TO BE DOING SO IN A PARKING LOT OF A PUBLIC PARK. I READ THAT THIS IS THE SORT TO THINK COMMMUNITY POLICEMEN DO WHEN KEEPING THE COMMUNITY SAFE. IE COMMUNITY SPIES.
PS AS I TYPING THIS THE TOP OF MY LEFT EYE SUDDENLY STARTS HURTING AS IT FEELS LIKE SOME ENERGY IMPACTED THE AREA. HMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
SEE http://www.gangstalkingworld.com/Structure.html
WEIRD I THOUGHT, IT WAS SUCH A HOT AFTERNOON TO BE DOING SO IN A PARKING LOT OF A PUBLIC PARK. I READ THAT THIS IS THE SORT TO THINK COMMMUNITY POLICEMEN DO WHEN KEEPING THE COMMUNITY SAFE. IE COMMUNITY SPIES.
PS AS I TYPING THIS THE TOP OF MY LEFT EYE SUDDENLY STARTS HURTING AS IT FEELS LIKE SOME ENERGY IMPACTED THE AREA. HMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
SEE http://www.gangstalkingworld.com/Structure.html
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
COVERT MICROWAVE ATTACKS???
http://www.multistalkervictims.org/
http://www.multistalkervictims.org/lawson.htm
I START LISTENING TO A UTUBE CHANNEL AND SUDDENLY MY EAR STARTS HURTING, AND KNEES STARTS BURNING AND PULSING. A SPOT ON THE TOP OF THE LEFT SIDE OF HEAD IS PULSING IN PAIN AND MY CHINESE NEIGHBOUR DIRECTLY ABOVE ME IS MAKING SCRAPING NOISES SUDDENLY.
SEE http://www.freedomfchs.com/auditoryresponsetopulsedrf.pdf
http://www.freedomfchs.com/historyofelectromagneticweapons.pdf
http://www.multistalkervictims.org/lawson.htm
I START LISTENING TO A UTUBE CHANNEL AND SUDDENLY MY EAR STARTS HURTING, AND KNEES STARTS BURNING AND PULSING. A SPOT ON THE TOP OF THE LEFT SIDE OF HEAD IS PULSING IN PAIN AND MY CHINESE NEIGHBOUR DIRECTLY ABOVE ME IS MAKING SCRAPING NOISES SUDDENLY.
SEE http://www.freedomfchs.com/auditoryresponsetopulsedrf.pdf
http://www.freedomfchs.com/historyofelectromagneticweapons.pdf
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