Mystery
New member
Only in our minds.
10 things I'm right about, whether you agree or not.
- Thread starter Mystery
- Start date
Ecumenicist
New member
Nope, didn't say any of those things.
But, there are plenty of schizophrenic patients out there who cannot work,
cannot function without meds. And there are thousands who choose to be
homeless rather than take the meds they need in order to function.
For many people, surrendering to Jesus means finding the strength
and the humility to admit they have a problem and get the help they need.
Mystery
New member
There is no such thing as schizophrenia Dave. Even the APA is battling over this issue, and many want it removed from the DSM because no one can define what it is.
Freedom from fear comes from a renewed mind and knowing the love of God. That is what God says, and I'm going to believe God over boneheads like you any day.
Hebrews 6:4-6, if it is saying what you claim, also says that once someone loses salvation, they cannot return to it. Do you believe people can lose their salvation, and never become saved again?
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
-Ephesians 4:30
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
-Romans 8:38-39
Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, [Jesus] “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”[/Jesus]
-Hebrews 13:5
Minerva
New member
I thought they had linked schizophrenia to a problem with the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes (which is part of the limbic system..which controls emotions and behavior) Thses areas appear to be shrunken in patients with schizophrenia and contribute to the damage of nerve cells that impair many of the things that appear as the symptoms of this condition. That would be a problem with the brain itself and not the mind, right?
I know they have not pinpointed the exact cause of schizophrenia, while they do have many interesting theories, such as the one above. Just because they have not figured it out doesn't mean it isn't plausible.
(but I haven't checked out those books you recommended yet, there could be just as convincing of an arguement in them as well)
zoo22
Well-known member
Just because a cause is unknown or because a definition is not agreed upon does not mean that something does not exist.
Mystery
New member
Of course, but that is not what is going on here.
Schizophrenia is a metaphorical illness. It’s not a literal illness. That’s why
schizophrenia, depression, personality disorders and addiction are not listed in
standard textbooks of diseases, because they don’t meet what are called the
nosological [the systematic classification or knowledge of disease] for disease
classification. Simply put, a disease is something that a person has and is some
form of cellular irregularity or abnormality. Schizophrenia is a label applied to
certain socially unacceptable behaviors. Behaviors are not, and can never be,
diseases. Behaviors are something that people do. Diseases are something that
people have.
We have to differentiate between the mind and the
brain. Of course, the brain can be diseased. There are many brain diseases.
For example, Parkinson’s disease is a brain disease. Dementia of the
Alzheimer’s Type is a real disease. Dementia from AIDS—these are all real diseases, and strokes…Schizophrenia has no physiological, cellular irregularity.
It is only hypothesized.
You cannot see schizophrenia in a PET scan or an MRI or an X-ray.
Another way to look at this is as follows: If there really was a bad brain that
produced bad behavior we should be able to tell who is schizophrenic and who
is not simply by looking at PET scans of their brains, at CAT scans of their
brains and we should be able to say, “This brain belongs to that person we call
schizophrenic and this brain belongs to a person we call normal.” Now the fact
of the matter is we cannot tell whose brain belongs to whom by looking at
pictures. That’s a fact—that is not an opinion. So being able to predict who is
schizophrenic and who is not simply by looking at pictures of the brain is not
possible.
Question: Do you believe there are crazy people in our society?
I think there are plenty of crazy people in the sense that they exercise
behaviors that don’t make sense to me and I would certainly include many
politicians in that group, but does that mean that they have a mental illness? Of
course not. There’s crazy behavior. We call behavior crazy because it doesn’t
make sense to us. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for that behavior. .
. . You see, if we say that bad behavior, what’s called mental illness, comes from
a bad brain then logically we must say that good behavior comes from a good
brain. In other words, it can’t be selective. Brains can’t just produce bad
behavior, they have to produce good behavior too. Now let’s think for a moment
about what the implications of that philosophy are. If bad brains produce bad
behavior and good brains produce good behavior, what is left of what we call a
person? Nothing. And in this sense, in the name of being humanistic, I think
that psychiatrists and their cohorts are basically achieving some of the most
dehumanizing acts that we’ve seen in centuries, because basically what they’re
doing is calling people who are mentally ill “three-fifths of a person.” They are
not full persons. Just as when the first Constitution was written, Negroes were
termed “three-fifths persons.” There were certain political reasons for why that
was done. For example, if would not allow for more representation in Congress
for southern states. Calling Negroes “three-fifths persons” helped to maintain
the institution of slavery. Similarly, people we call mentally ill persons are not
considered full persons. It’s as if they’re three-fifths of a person. It’s as if the
Bill of Rights had at the end a postscript that said, “P.S. For mentally healthy
persons only.” And of course that’s not the case. A person can’t be part of a
person. A person is either a person or a thing.
Dr. Jeffrey Schaler, professor in the
department of justice, law and society at American University School of Public
Affairs in Washington, DC
************Wrong. Biochemical abnormalities have been found and PET data do show differences in bipolar disorder, ADHD, and other so-called "psychiatric" illnesses.
Katherine
And, BTW, Mystery, you can't see migraines on an MRI or a blood test or a CT scan either. Basically, you're saying that no disorder that is diagnosed clinically can be "real" which is plain and simple BS.
Katherine
Katherine
Yet more proof that this "psychiatric illnesses aren't brain problems" is a heap of hooey:
"A disturbance in the frontal-striatal-thalamic circuitry has been proposed for schizophrenia, but this concept has been based primarily on indirect evidence from psychopharmacology and analogies with animal research. Diffusion tensor imaging, a new MRI technique that permits direct assessment of the large axon masses stretching from the prefrontal cortex to the striatum, was used to study white matter axon bundles. Diffusion tensor images, high-resolution structural MRI and positron emission tomography scans with 18-fluorodexoyglucose were obtained on five patients with schizophrenia and six age- and sex-matched normal controls. Significantly lower diffusion anisotropy in the white matter of the prefrontal cortex in schizophrenic patients than in normal controls was observed in statistical probability maps. Co-registered PET scans revealed significantly lower correlation coefficients between metabolic rates in the prefrontal cortex and striatum in patients than in controls. These twin findings provide convergent evidence for diminished fronto-striatal connectivity in schizophrenia."
Source: Buschbaum et al, MRI white matter diffusion anisotropy and PET metabolic rate in schizophrenia, Neuroreport. 9(3):425-430, February 16, 1998.
"Conclusions: Serotonin-1A receptor BP is abnormally decreased in the depressed phase of familial mood disorders in multiple brain regions. Of the regions tested, the magnitude of this reduction was most prominent in the midbrain raphe. Converging evidence from postmortem studies of mood disorders suggests these reductions of 5HT1A receptor BP may be associated with histopathological changes involving the raphe."
Source: Drevets et al, PET imaging of serotonin 1A receptor binding in depression,
Biological Psychiatry, Volume 46, Issue 10, 15 November 1999, Pages 1375-1387
Katherine
"A disturbance in the frontal-striatal-thalamic circuitry has been proposed for schizophrenia, but this concept has been based primarily on indirect evidence from psychopharmacology and analogies with animal research. Diffusion tensor imaging, a new MRI technique that permits direct assessment of the large axon masses stretching from the prefrontal cortex to the striatum, was used to study white matter axon bundles. Diffusion tensor images, high-resolution structural MRI and positron emission tomography scans with 18-fluorodexoyglucose were obtained on five patients with schizophrenia and six age- and sex-matched normal controls. Significantly lower diffusion anisotropy in the white matter of the prefrontal cortex in schizophrenic patients than in normal controls was observed in statistical probability maps. Co-registered PET scans revealed significantly lower correlation coefficients between metabolic rates in the prefrontal cortex and striatum in patients than in controls. These twin findings provide convergent evidence for diminished fronto-striatal connectivity in schizophrenia."
Source: Buschbaum et al, MRI white matter diffusion anisotropy and PET metabolic rate in schizophrenia, Neuroreport. 9(3):425-430, February 16, 1998.
"Conclusions: Serotonin-1A receptor BP is abnormally decreased in the depressed phase of familial mood disorders in multiple brain regions. Of the regions tested, the magnitude of this reduction was most prominent in the midbrain raphe. Converging evidence from postmortem studies of mood disorders suggests these reductions of 5HT1A receptor BP may be associated with histopathological changes involving the raphe."
Source: Drevets et al, PET imaging of serotonin 1A receptor binding in depression,
Biological Psychiatry, Volume 46, Issue 10, 15 November 1999, Pages 1375-1387
Katherine
Minerva
New member
These things that happen in the brain can be related to other issues as well, obviously, or else they would say "hey, here is concrete proof".
Just like the shrinkage of the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes, they say this is attributed to shizophrenia, however, it is also related to fibromyalgia and ageing.
Mystery
New member
WRONG!! That is a bunch of psychobable crap that you have been chewing on from the junior college that fed it to you.
*********These changes CAN be taken as evidence that fibromyalgia and some aspects of aging have neurological bases. Mystery was claiming that schizophrenia does not have such a basis, and I don't agree, and there is tons of evidence in the literature that I am correct (while the few fibromyalgia studies I was able to pull up were small and only preliminary).
Katherine
**********LMAO...did you look at the studies I posted? I can post more.
Pull me up a few studies that show that schizophrenia isn't a "real" brain illness and it can be cured with adherence to religion and then we'll talk. Till then, keep your insults to yourself.
Katherine
Mystery
New member
I have already posted several. Look 'em up.
The only reference I could find was a quote from Szasz, which is an opinion, not a study. I admittedly didn't read the religious links because IMO this is not an issue for religion to address except in a supportive role.
OTOH,
"Using this paradigm (go/nogo paradigm) in combination with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show that children without ADHD have increased susceptibility to interference with increasing numbers of go trials preceding a nogo trial, but children with ADHD have difficulty even with a single go trial preceding a nogo trial. In addition, children with ADHD do not activate frontostriatal regions in the same manner as normally developing children, but rather rely on a more diffuse network of regions, including more posterior and dorsolateral prefrontal regions."
Source: Durston et al, Differential patterns of striatal activation in young children with and without ADHD Biological Psychiatry Volume 53, Issue 10, 15 May 2003, Pages 871-878 .
"RESULTS: The hyperactive adolescents showed lower power of response in the right mesial prefrontal cortex during both tasks and in the right inferior prefrontal cortex and left caudate during the stop task. CONCLUSIONS: ADHD is associated with subnormal activation of the prefrontal systems responsible for higher-order motor control. Functional MRI is a feasible technique for investigation of neural correlates of ADHD. "
Rubia et al, Hypofrontality in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder During Higher-Order Motor Control: A Study With Functional MRI, Am J Psychiatry 156:891-896, June 1999
It's fine and dandy to make proclamations that psychiatrists are 'inventing' disorders with clinical criteria but another thing yet to refute these studies. I am not interested in the OPINIONS of Szasz or anyone else. Just the facts, sir.
Katherine
Mystery
New member
Psychiatrists Cannot Define ‘Mental Disorder’
Imagine a medical doctor treating high blood pressure or diabetes, who cannot even define what it is. Now consider that not one psychiatrist can define what he is supposedly “treating.”
On schizophrenia, the DSM-II admitted, “Even if it had tried, the Committee could not establish agreement about what this disorder is; it could only agree on what to call it.”
In DSM-III psychiatrists said there is no satisfactory definition that specifies precise boundaries for the “concept ‘mental disorder.’… For most of the DSM-III disorders … the etiology [cause] is unknown. A variety of theories have been advanced … not always convincing— to explain how these disorders come about.”
DSM-IV claimed the term “mental disorder” continues to appear in the volume “because we have not found an appropriate substitute.”
According to Allen J. Frances, professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, “There could arguably not be a worse term than mental disorder to describe the conditions classified in DSM-IV.”
Psychiatric diagnoses are a combination of social engineering and “what’s good for business,” never medicine. In 1973, APA committee members voted—5,584 to 3,810—to cease calling homosexuality a mental disorder after gay activists picketed the APA conferences.
Lawrence Stevens, a former Assistant District Attorney in California, commented: “If mental illness were really an illness in the same sense that physical illnesses are illnesses, the idea of deleting homosexuality or anything else from the categories of illness by having a vote would be as absurd as a group of physicians voting to delete cancer or measles from the concept of disease.”
Imagine a medical doctor treating high blood pressure or diabetes, who cannot even define what it is. Now consider that not one psychiatrist can define what he is supposedly “treating.”
On schizophrenia, the DSM-II admitted, “Even if it had tried, the Committee could not establish agreement about what this disorder is; it could only agree on what to call it.”
In DSM-III psychiatrists said there is no satisfactory definition that specifies precise boundaries for the “concept ‘mental disorder.’… For most of the DSM-III disorders … the etiology [cause] is unknown. A variety of theories have been advanced … not always convincing— to explain how these disorders come about.”
DSM-IV claimed the term “mental disorder” continues to appear in the volume “because we have not found an appropriate substitute.”
According to Allen J. Frances, professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, “There could arguably not be a worse term than mental disorder to describe the conditions classified in DSM-IV.”
Psychiatric diagnoses are a combination of social engineering and “what’s good for business,” never medicine. In 1973, APA committee members voted—5,584 to 3,810—to cease calling homosexuality a mental disorder after gay activists picketed the APA conferences.
Lawrence Stevens, a former Assistant District Attorney in California, commented: “If mental illness were really an illness in the same sense that physical illnesses are illnesses, the idea of deleting homosexuality or anything else from the categories of illness by having a vote would be as absurd as a group of physicians voting to delete cancer or measles from the concept of disease.”
Mystery
New member
Even the idiot medical "professionals" can't define it...
:chuckle:
LONDON - Mental health experts called on Monday for the term schizophrenia to be dropped, saying it has no scientific validity, is imprecise and stigmatizing.
“It is a harmful concept,” said Marius Romme, a visiting professor of social psychiatry at the University of Central England in Birmingham.
He added that symptoms such as delusions, hearing voices and hallucinations are not the results of the illness but may be reactions to traumatic and troubling events in life.
Speaking at a news conference, Richard Bentall, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Manchester, said the concept of schizophrenia is scientifically meaningless.
“It groups together a whole range of different problems under one label — the assumption is that all of these people with all of these different problems have the same brain disease,” he added.
Schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of people in the United States and Britain. Treatments such as atypical antipsychotic drugs focus on eliminating the symptoms. But the drugs can cause side effects such as weight gain, an increased risk of diabetes and sexual dysfunction.
Paul Hammersley of the University of Manchester who recently helped launch The Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label (CASL), said there is no agreement on the cause of the illness or its treatment.
CASL argues that the term schizophrenia is extremely damaging to those to whom it is applied and implies unpredictability, being dangerous, unable to cope and someone in need of life-long treatment.
“It is like canceling someone’s life,” said Hammersley. “We generally believe this word has to go.”
:chuckle:
LONDON - Mental health experts called on Monday for the term schizophrenia to be dropped, saying it has no scientific validity, is imprecise and stigmatizing.
“It is a harmful concept,” said Marius Romme, a visiting professor of social psychiatry at the University of Central England in Birmingham.
He added that symptoms such as delusions, hearing voices and hallucinations are not the results of the illness but may be reactions to traumatic and troubling events in life.
Speaking at a news conference, Richard Bentall, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Manchester, said the concept of schizophrenia is scientifically meaningless.
“It groups together a whole range of different problems under one label — the assumption is that all of these people with all of these different problems have the same brain disease,” he added.
Schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of people in the United States and Britain. Treatments such as atypical antipsychotic drugs focus on eliminating the symptoms. But the drugs can cause side effects such as weight gain, an increased risk of diabetes and sexual dysfunction.
Paul Hammersley of the University of Manchester who recently helped launch The Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label (CASL), said there is no agreement on the cause of the illness or its treatment.
CASL argues that the term schizophrenia is extremely damaging to those to whom it is applied and implies unpredictability, being dangerous, unable to cope and someone in need of life-long treatment.
“It is like canceling someone’s life,” said Hammersley. “We generally believe this word has to go.”
Mystery
New member
The "Chemical Imbalance"...just an unproven theory...
Are "chemical imbalances" real ? Psychiatrist David Kaiser commented on psychiatry’s promotion of such imbalances to the public in the December, 1996 Psychiatric Times. "Unfortunately what I also see these days are the casualties of this new biologic psychiatry, as patients often come to me with many years of past treatment. Patients having been diagnosed with "chemical imbalances" despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and that there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like." Additionally, Kaiser points out that "modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. This does not stop psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin, and that it is only a matter of time until all this is proven". Kaiser is not alone in his opinion. Psychiatrist Loren Mosher resigned from the APA after 35 years of membership stating that "what we are dealing with here is fashion, politics, and money. This level of intellectual/scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support by my membership". [David Kaiser, Against Biologic Psychiatry, in Psychiatric Times, Vol. 13, Issue 12, 1996, internet article text does not include page numbers]
The "Chemical Imbalance" is Born
In 1963, a time in U.S. psychopharmacological infancy, LIFE magazine introduced the broad public to the concept of brain chemical imbalances. Psychiatrists had been experimenting with drugs, particularly LSD, and astounding themselves at the wide variety of behaviors, emotions, and personality changes they could induce in someone with only a tiny spec of the drug. A hypothesis was born out this. If such wide variations in behavior could be made with such a small amount of a drug, which no doubt affected the brain, then any variations from "normal" behavior must be due to extremely fine changes in brain chemistry. The idea that some other external cause of behavioral disturbance could exist seemed to be discarded. Brain chemistry simply needed to be "balanced". Psychologists such as B.F. Skinner said that scientists could and should control human behavior and predicted that in the future an individuals mood, emotions, and motivation would be maintained at any desired level through the use of drugs.
In 1967, psychiatrist Nathan Klien, an MK-Ultra participant, made a chilling prediction which showed just how much psychiatry wanted to use drugs for behavior control, not for "treating mental illness". Klien had been studying the effects of psychiatric drugs on "normal humans" and reported that "...the present breadth of drug use may be almost trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man’s life by the year 2000...if we accept the position that human mood, motivation, and emotion are reflections of a neurochemical state of the brain, then drugs can provide a simple, rapid, expedient means to produce any desired neurochemical state we wish. The sooner that we cease to confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use, the sooner we can consider the types of neurochemical states that we wish to provide for people". [EIR, British Psychiatry: From Eugenics to Assassination, Anton Chaitkin, October 7, 1994, p.39]
Psychiatrists had decided they would provide the public with the types of chemical personality they saw fit. What would follow in the years to come would be the medicalization of any behavior psychiatry deemed "inappropriate".
As David Kaiser had noted, psychiatrists cannot measure levels of neurotransmitters in the brain in the way doctors can measure sugar levels in a diabetic patient. The question must be asked then, how can you balance or adjust something which cannot be measured? More importantly, does an actual chemical imbalance exist? Parents are told routinely that children given an ADD diagnosis have a chemical imbalance and that amphetaminelike drugs will balance the child's brain chemistry.
Thomas J. Moore, Senior Fellow in Health Policy at George Washington University Medical Center writes that while some "claim hyperactivity in children is a ‘biochemical imbalance’ ...researchers cannot identify which chemicals...or find abnormal levels" in children. "The chemical imbalance theory has not been established by scientific evidence." [Thomas J. Moore, Prescription for Disaster, 1998, p.22]
It has been pointed out by psychiatrists themselves that the downfall of psychiatric diagnosis is that psychiatrists never look beyond symptoms. If a child is "hyperactive" - a symptom - the psychiatrists say, "He has hyperactivity!" Psychiatrist Sidney Walker says this is like telling your doctor you have a bad cough - a symptom - and getting a "diagnosis" of "coughing disorder", without finding out if the cough is caused from a cold, lung cancer, or tuberculosis. [Sidney Walker, The Hyperactivity Hoax, 1998 p. 6]
Psychiatrists never look beyond "symptoms", they merely classify symptoms as the "disease." Dr. Mary Ann Block says she hates to see children given labels of "hyperactivity" or "attention deficit disorder". In fact, she refuses to use such labels. She says, "How sad it is to see children drugged while their underlying health problems go untreated". [Mary Ann Block, No More Ritalin, Treating ADHD Without Drugs, 1996 p.49]
"Theory Begging"
In psychology and psychiatry there is a phenomenon called ‘theory begging’ which can explain the notion of ‘chemical imbalances.’ Theory begging is the reporting of a scientific theory as ‘fact’ so often that it becomes accepted as fact within the profession despite having never been proven. For example, it is taken for granted by psychiatry that patients said to have ‘mental illness’ have a ‘chemical imbalance’ in their brain. The ‘chemical imbalance’ is taken for granted, not actually found and verified by medical test. As Nathan Klien had said, psychiatry had "accepted the position" of chemical imbalances, a position that has yet to be verified.
While the rest of medicine has made great advances in diagnostic techniques, psychiatry has lagged behind. In 1994 psychiatrists Richard Keefe and Philip Harvey explained the current process of psychiatric diagnosis:
"The process of diagnosis is very different in psychiatry. Since there are no clear indications of a specific biological abnormality that causes any of the psychiatric disorders, no laboratory tests have been developed to confirm or refute any psychiatric diagnosis". [Richark Keefe and Philip Harvey, Understanding Schizophrenia, 1994 p.19]
In fact, they state that psychiatrists must rely only on what they observe and what they are told from friends or relatives to make a psychiatric diagnosis. Could a cardiologist accurately and safely treat patients using this type of diagnostic protocol ?
Psychiatrist Mark Gold says that "up to 40% of all diagnoses of depression are misdiagnoses of common and uncommon physical illness...There are as least 75 diseases that first appear with emotional symptoms. People with these diseases often get locked up in psychiatric hospitals". [Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression, 1986, p.XV]
Gold admits that psychiatrists do not rule out other medical problems, rather, they rule in their diagnosis, failing to diagnose the nearly one hundred medical illnesses which contain ‘depression’ as a symptom of that disease process.
In a Florida study, 100 consecutively admitted patients to a psychiatric hospital who had been given a psychiatric diagnosis were given a complete medical examination. Doctors concluded that nearly half of the patients’ psychiatric problems were secondary manifestations of an undiagnosed medical problem. According to Gold, nearly all of these patients would have ended up warehoused in state run mental health facilities, which costs the patients their health with tax dollars paying for the negligence. Some patients die confined in mental hospitals as there real illness, cancer for example, goes untreated.
In the Florida study, psychiatrists missed diagnosing physical illness in 80% of the cases. Gold said he was "embarrassed" at how bad psychiatrists were at "doctoring" and that one third of psychiatrists admit feeling incompetent to give a patient a complete physical examination. [Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression, 1986, p.22-24]
Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist, psychiatrist and author of A Dose of Sanity, says that psychiatric labels have "led to the unnecessary drugging of millions of Americans who could be diagnosed, treated, and cured without the use of toxic and potentially lethal medications".
Charles B. Inlander, president of The People’s Medical Society, and his colleagues write in Medicine on Trial, "People with real or alleged psychiatric or behavioral disorders are being misdiagnosed - and harmed - to an astonishing degree...Many of them do not have psychiatric problems but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a limbo from which they may never return...." [CCHR publication, Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p.14]
Dr. Walker refers to a case from Frederick Goggan’s book, Medical Mimics of Psychiatric Disorders, in which a 27-year-old executive was hospitalized after attempting to kill herself by overdosing on the antidepressants prescribed by her psychiatrist. The attempted suicide followed a year of psychotherapy that had failed to relieve her fatigue, cognitive problems, and despondency. This time, however, doctors did a thorough physical exam and found what the psychiatrist didn’t even look for. She had hypothyroidism which can manifest with "listlessness, sadness, and hopelessness" She was given thyroid supplements and has since been free of all "psychiatric symptoms" and has "thrived both personally and professionally".
In another case reported by Dr. Walker, John, a happy and successful family man, began suffering from inexplicable sadness and exhaustion. Unable to concentrate at work, he cut down his overtime, slept in late on weekends, and lost control of his emotions, inexplicably subjected to fits of uncontrollable weeping. He saw three doctors, two of them psychiatrists, who saddled him with a variety of DSM labels and treated him with 26 different drugs. A fourth doctor conducted a thorough medical diagnostic and physical evaluation and found that John was suffering from a slow-growing tumor of the brain lining. John’s tumor was removed, and his sadness and fatigue rapidly cleared. [CCHR publication, Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p.15]
Are "chemical imbalances" real ? Psychiatrist David Kaiser commented on psychiatry’s promotion of such imbalances to the public in the December, 1996 Psychiatric Times. "Unfortunately what I also see these days are the casualties of this new biologic psychiatry, as patients often come to me with many years of past treatment. Patients having been diagnosed with "chemical imbalances" despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and that there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like." Additionally, Kaiser points out that "modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. This does not stop psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin, and that it is only a matter of time until all this is proven". Kaiser is not alone in his opinion. Psychiatrist Loren Mosher resigned from the APA after 35 years of membership stating that "what we are dealing with here is fashion, politics, and money. This level of intellectual/scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support by my membership". [David Kaiser, Against Biologic Psychiatry, in Psychiatric Times, Vol. 13, Issue 12, 1996, internet article text does not include page numbers]
The "Chemical Imbalance" is Born
In 1963, a time in U.S. psychopharmacological infancy, LIFE magazine introduced the broad public to the concept of brain chemical imbalances. Psychiatrists had been experimenting with drugs, particularly LSD, and astounding themselves at the wide variety of behaviors, emotions, and personality changes they could induce in someone with only a tiny spec of the drug. A hypothesis was born out this. If such wide variations in behavior could be made with such a small amount of a drug, which no doubt affected the brain, then any variations from "normal" behavior must be due to extremely fine changes in brain chemistry. The idea that some other external cause of behavioral disturbance could exist seemed to be discarded. Brain chemistry simply needed to be "balanced". Psychologists such as B.F. Skinner said that scientists could and should control human behavior and predicted that in the future an individuals mood, emotions, and motivation would be maintained at any desired level through the use of drugs.
In 1967, psychiatrist Nathan Klien, an MK-Ultra participant, made a chilling prediction which showed just how much psychiatry wanted to use drugs for behavior control, not for "treating mental illness". Klien had been studying the effects of psychiatric drugs on "normal humans" and reported that "...the present breadth of drug use may be almost trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man’s life by the year 2000...if we accept the position that human mood, motivation, and emotion are reflections of a neurochemical state of the brain, then drugs can provide a simple, rapid, expedient means to produce any desired neurochemical state we wish. The sooner that we cease to confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use, the sooner we can consider the types of neurochemical states that we wish to provide for people". [EIR, British Psychiatry: From Eugenics to Assassination, Anton Chaitkin, October 7, 1994, p.39]
Psychiatrists had decided they would provide the public with the types of chemical personality they saw fit. What would follow in the years to come would be the medicalization of any behavior psychiatry deemed "inappropriate".
As David Kaiser had noted, psychiatrists cannot measure levels of neurotransmitters in the brain in the way doctors can measure sugar levels in a diabetic patient. The question must be asked then, how can you balance or adjust something which cannot be measured? More importantly, does an actual chemical imbalance exist? Parents are told routinely that children given an ADD diagnosis have a chemical imbalance and that amphetaminelike drugs will balance the child's brain chemistry.
Thomas J. Moore, Senior Fellow in Health Policy at George Washington University Medical Center writes that while some "claim hyperactivity in children is a ‘biochemical imbalance’ ...researchers cannot identify which chemicals...or find abnormal levels" in children. "The chemical imbalance theory has not been established by scientific evidence." [Thomas J. Moore, Prescription for Disaster, 1998, p.22]
It has been pointed out by psychiatrists themselves that the downfall of psychiatric diagnosis is that psychiatrists never look beyond symptoms. If a child is "hyperactive" - a symptom - the psychiatrists say, "He has hyperactivity!" Psychiatrist Sidney Walker says this is like telling your doctor you have a bad cough - a symptom - and getting a "diagnosis" of "coughing disorder", without finding out if the cough is caused from a cold, lung cancer, or tuberculosis. [Sidney Walker, The Hyperactivity Hoax, 1998 p. 6]
Psychiatrists never look beyond "symptoms", they merely classify symptoms as the "disease." Dr. Mary Ann Block says she hates to see children given labels of "hyperactivity" or "attention deficit disorder". In fact, she refuses to use such labels. She says, "How sad it is to see children drugged while their underlying health problems go untreated". [Mary Ann Block, No More Ritalin, Treating ADHD Without Drugs, 1996 p.49]
"Theory Begging"
In psychology and psychiatry there is a phenomenon called ‘theory begging’ which can explain the notion of ‘chemical imbalances.’ Theory begging is the reporting of a scientific theory as ‘fact’ so often that it becomes accepted as fact within the profession despite having never been proven. For example, it is taken for granted by psychiatry that patients said to have ‘mental illness’ have a ‘chemical imbalance’ in their brain. The ‘chemical imbalance’ is taken for granted, not actually found and verified by medical test. As Nathan Klien had said, psychiatry had "accepted the position" of chemical imbalances, a position that has yet to be verified.
While the rest of medicine has made great advances in diagnostic techniques, psychiatry has lagged behind. In 1994 psychiatrists Richard Keefe and Philip Harvey explained the current process of psychiatric diagnosis:
"The process of diagnosis is very different in psychiatry. Since there are no clear indications of a specific biological abnormality that causes any of the psychiatric disorders, no laboratory tests have been developed to confirm or refute any psychiatric diagnosis". [Richark Keefe and Philip Harvey, Understanding Schizophrenia, 1994 p.19]
In fact, they state that psychiatrists must rely only on what they observe and what they are told from friends or relatives to make a psychiatric diagnosis. Could a cardiologist accurately and safely treat patients using this type of diagnostic protocol ?
Psychiatrist Mark Gold says that "up to 40% of all diagnoses of depression are misdiagnoses of common and uncommon physical illness...There are as least 75 diseases that first appear with emotional symptoms. People with these diseases often get locked up in psychiatric hospitals". [Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression, 1986, p.XV]
Gold admits that psychiatrists do not rule out other medical problems, rather, they rule in their diagnosis, failing to diagnose the nearly one hundred medical illnesses which contain ‘depression’ as a symptom of that disease process.
In a Florida study, 100 consecutively admitted patients to a psychiatric hospital who had been given a psychiatric diagnosis were given a complete medical examination. Doctors concluded that nearly half of the patients’ psychiatric problems were secondary manifestations of an undiagnosed medical problem. According to Gold, nearly all of these patients would have ended up warehoused in state run mental health facilities, which costs the patients their health with tax dollars paying for the negligence. Some patients die confined in mental hospitals as there real illness, cancer for example, goes untreated.
In the Florida study, psychiatrists missed diagnosing physical illness in 80% of the cases. Gold said he was "embarrassed" at how bad psychiatrists were at "doctoring" and that one third of psychiatrists admit feeling incompetent to give a patient a complete physical examination. [Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression, 1986, p.22-24]
Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist, psychiatrist and author of A Dose of Sanity, says that psychiatric labels have "led to the unnecessary drugging of millions of Americans who could be diagnosed, treated, and cured without the use of toxic and potentially lethal medications".
Charles B. Inlander, president of The People’s Medical Society, and his colleagues write in Medicine on Trial, "People with real or alleged psychiatric or behavioral disorders are being misdiagnosed - and harmed - to an astonishing degree...Many of them do not have psychiatric problems but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a limbo from which they may never return...." [CCHR publication, Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p.14]
Dr. Walker refers to a case from Frederick Goggan’s book, Medical Mimics of Psychiatric Disorders, in which a 27-year-old executive was hospitalized after attempting to kill herself by overdosing on the antidepressants prescribed by her psychiatrist. The attempted suicide followed a year of psychotherapy that had failed to relieve her fatigue, cognitive problems, and despondency. This time, however, doctors did a thorough physical exam and found what the psychiatrist didn’t even look for. She had hypothyroidism which can manifest with "listlessness, sadness, and hopelessness" She was given thyroid supplements and has since been free of all "psychiatric symptoms" and has "thrived both personally and professionally".
In another case reported by Dr. Walker, John, a happy and successful family man, began suffering from inexplicable sadness and exhaustion. Unable to concentrate at work, he cut down his overtime, slept in late on weekends, and lost control of his emotions, inexplicably subjected to fits of uncontrollable weeping. He saw three doctors, two of them psychiatrists, who saddled him with a variety of DSM labels and treated him with 26 different drugs. A fourth doctor conducted a thorough medical diagnostic and physical evaluation and found that John was suffering from a slow-growing tumor of the brain lining. John’s tumor was removed, and his sadness and fatigue rapidly cleared. [CCHR publication, Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p.15]
Mystery
New member
Edward Drummond, M.D., Associate Medical Director at Seacoast Mental Health
Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, informs us: “First, no biological etiology
[cause] has been proven for any psychiatric disorder…in spite of decades of
research.…So don’t accept the myth that we can make an ‘accurate
diagnosis’
Psychologist Bruce Levine, Ph.D., concurs: “Remember that no biochemical,
neurological, or genetic markers have been found for attention deficit disorder,
oppositional defiant disorder, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive
alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling, or any other so‐called mental illness,
disease, or disorder.”
• Charles E. Dean, M.D., says that people are “convinced that the origins of mental
illnesses are to be found in biology, when, despite more than three decades of
research, there still is no proof…The absences of any well‐defined physical causation
is reflected in the absence of any laboratory tests for psychiatric diagnoses—much in
contrast to diabetes and many other physical disorders.
• “There are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s
brain.” – Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D.
• Psychiatrist David Kaiser adds this: “Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical
imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and... there is
no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”
• “Biopsychiatrists have created the myth that psychiatric ‘wonder’ drugs correct
chemical imbalances. Yet there is no basis for this model because no chemical imbalance
has ever been proven to be the basis of a mental illness,” wrote Ty C. Colbert, a clinical
psychologist.
Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, informs us: “First, no biological etiology
[cause] has been proven for any psychiatric disorder…in spite of decades of
research.…So don’t accept the myth that we can make an ‘accurate
diagnosis’
Psychologist Bruce Levine, Ph.D., concurs: “Remember that no biochemical,
neurological, or genetic markers have been found for attention deficit disorder,
oppositional defiant disorder, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive
alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling, or any other so‐called mental illness,
disease, or disorder.”
• Charles E. Dean, M.D., says that people are “convinced that the origins of mental
illnesses are to be found in biology, when, despite more than three decades of
research, there still is no proof…The absences of any well‐defined physical causation
is reflected in the absence of any laboratory tests for psychiatric diagnoses—much in
contrast to diabetes and many other physical disorders.
• “There are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s
brain.” – Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D.
• Psychiatrist David Kaiser adds this: “Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical
imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and... there is
no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”
• “Biopsychiatrists have created the myth that psychiatric ‘wonder’ drugs correct
chemical imbalances. Yet there is no basis for this model because no chemical imbalance
has ever been proven to be the basis of a mental illness,” wrote Ty C. Colbert, a clinical
psychologist.