"The number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness skyrocketing from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today is an iatrogenic, physician induced epidemic that will only mount in the future," Dr Baughman says. "The utter, complete fraud based on the fiction of psychiatric diseases has got to stop."
Invented Diseases
Unlike a medical diagnose that indicates a probable cause, treatment and prognosis, mental disorders are voted into existence by committees representing the American Psychiatric Association, a roughly 38,000 member professional group, that gets to decide what is normal, and what is not, for the more than 300 million other people in the US.
The APA's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders IV (DSM IV)," contains all the billable mental disorders and amounts to nothing much more than a bunch of checklists of symptoms. The original 1952 version contained just over 100 disorders. By the fourth edition the number had more than tripled to over 350. The DSM5 is due for publication in May 2013.
The DSM is immensely important to drug makers because the FDA will not approve a medication to treat a disorder unless the condition is listed in the manual. For the DSM IV, fifty-six percent of of the 170 panel members, and one-hundred percent of the experts involved in writing diagnostic criteria for "mood disorders" and "schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders," for which medication is standard treatment, had financial ties to the drug companies, according to a 2006 study titled, "Financial Ties Between DSM-IV Panel Members and Pharmaceutical Industry," in the "Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics" journal.
The leading categories of financial interest for panel members were research funding (42%), consultancies (22%) and speakers bureau (16%).
The authors of the DSM 5 have agreed to limit their industry income to $10,000 or less per year until the completion of their work. But as Dr J Wesley Boyd, an academic psyhiatrist, pointed out in an April 11, 2009 editorial in the Boston Globe:
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