L K's List: Mental Health

• • Relate to ODD
• The most common explanations for the mental illness epidemic include recent over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, diagnoses expansionism, and psychiatry’s pathologizing normal behavior.
• oppositional defiant disorder (ODD)
• “69% of the DSM-5 task force members report having ties to the pharmaceutical industry.”
• DSM-5 was published in May, 2013.
• The journal PLOS Medicine
• However, DSM-5 has been criticized even by some mainstream psychiatrists such as Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce, for creating more mental patients by making it easier to qualify for a mental illness, especially for depression. (See Frances’ “ Last Plea To DSM-5: Save Grief From the Drug Companies.”) In the last two decades, there have been a slew of books written by journalists and mental health professionals about the lack of science behind the DSM, the over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, and the pathologizing of normal behaviors. Even more remarkable than Allen Frances jumping on the DSM-trashing bandwagon has been the  harsh critique of DSM-5 by Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Insel recently announced that the DSM’s diagnostic categories lack validity, and that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”
• Whitaker argues that the adverse affects of psychiatric medications are the primary cause of the epidemic. He reports that these drugs, for many patients, cause episodic and moderate emotional and behavioral problems to become severe, chronic, and disabling ones.
• With respect to the dramatic increase of pediatric bipolar disorder, Whitaker points out that, “Once psychiatrists started putting ‘hyperactive’ children on Ritalin, they started to see prepubertal children with manic symptoms. Same thing happened when psychiatrists started prescribing antidepressants to children and teenagers. A significant percentage had manic or hypomanic reactions to the antidepressants.” These children and teenagers are then put on heavier-duty drugs, including drug cocktails, often do not respond favorably to treatment, and deteriorate. That, for Whitaker, is a major reason for the 35-fold increase between 1987 and 2007 of children classified as being disabled by mental disorders.

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