"Even if these individuals adhere to the stated income limits, how much pharmaceutical funding is being funneled into the authors' respective departments by way of lectureships, endowed chairs, or sponsored research? And if the authors are free to resume their usual heavier ties to industry after 2012, how can the promise of big payouts later not influence their current work?"
In 2003, a group of psychiatric survivors went on a hunger strike in California with the goal of forcing the APA and the National Alliance on Mental Illness to acknowledge that there was no scientific proof for the claim that mental illness was biological in nature. Three weeks into the strike, the APA issued a statement admitting that "brain science has not advanced to the point where scientists or clinicians can point to readily discernible pathologic lesions or genetic abnormalities that in and of themselves serve as reliable or predictive bio-markers of a given mental disorder or mental disorders as a group."
The marketing strategy in psychiatry is to invent diagnoses out of thin air and call them diseases as a means to prescribe drugs, says Dr Baughman.
"They take entirely normal people and create patients by diagnosing them with fictional diseases," Baughman says. "It's a total fraud."
To validate this point, he tells how he helped a father in Canada, whose son had been diagnosed with multiple disorders, write a letter to Health Canada, an agency similar to the FDA, asking for information on ways to validate a diagnosis of mental illness.
In a November 10, 2008 response letter, Health Canada stated: "For mental/psychiatric disorders in general, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and ADHD, there are no confirmatory gross, microscopic or chemical abnormalities that have been validated for objective physical diagnosis. Rather, diagnoses of possible mental conditions are described strictly in terms of patterns of symptoms that tend to cluster together."
Baughman then wrote a similar inquiry to the FDA Commissioner, and forwarded a copy of Health Canada's letter. Donald Dobbs, from the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, consulted with the FDA's new drug review division, and responded to Baughman's inquiry by stating: ""they concurred with the response you enclosed from Health Canada. Psychiatric disorders are diagnosed based on a patient's presentation of symptoms that the larger psychiatric community has come to accept as real and responsive to treatment. We have nothing more to add to Health Canada's response."
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