stradi

You are suggesting psychiatrists perform the full physical medical examination that would necessarily perform the basis of a deductive differential diagnosis? And if not, how can they have a sound basis from which to deduce? You know too, that sham pseudoscientific labels such as "disorder of the written expression" and "narcissistic personality disorder" are sham pseudo-scientific labels that have no basis in medical science? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged S/he's right.... there's no science in the DSM. Psychiatry used to have an admirably strong scientific basis until the advent of the DSM, when the profession was hijacked by Freudian psychoanalytical psychiatrists and effectively removed from the field of medicine.

Could you name some classifications you find 'useful'? But maybe the norm itself is harmful? In certain regimes the murder of rape victims for adultery is "normal". At one point a woman who had sex with lots of partners would have been deemed "pathological". Now a woman who is celibate may be labelled as sexually dysphoric. At one point gay people were labelled sociopaths in the DSM. Now homosexuality is considered normal in psychiatric circles. These classifications are trivial. They reflect the social philosophies of the day. They have nothing to do with real medicine. Unless they perform a proper deductive differential diagnosis, they are in no position to know what the basis of their patient's problem really is. How exactly can a psychiatrist treat medical problems a patient "may" have unless s/he performs a deductive differential diagnosis to determine whether the patient's mental distress is caused by such medical problems or not? Factitious Disorder. Disorder of the Written Expression. Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Nightmare Disorder. Primary Hypersomnia. Conversion Disorder. There's no science in any of these terms. They are pseudo-scientific labels thought up in a boardroom. None of them are likely to help the patients who get labelled with them, but they will be very help for pharmaceutical companies looking to expand their markets when their drugs are prescribed to people will psychiatric "illnesses" that don't exist. Meanwhile, any medical causes of a disordered written expression/narcissism/nightmares will go ignored and neglected, because no deductive differential diagnosis has been conducted.

Sounds like John Money is full of BS. Lewis Carroll hated children. How Money proposes raping anyone is compatible with loving them, much less a child, is beyond me. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I think his development was arrested certainly. He seemed asexual to me. I hope he wasn't... that horrible word beginning with 'p'. Did you hear his final song? He was going publicly up against the US government.

Completely agree: Freud was indeed a cocaine addicted misogynist. More seriously yet, he was a professional fraudster who falsified each of his famous cases in order to make it a) fit with his far-fetched and grotesque theories and b) make it look like he had cured them. Egs., little Hans was pretty sure his horse-phobia was the result of seeing a horse fall down in a street. But his psychoanalyst father, under Freud's direction, browbeat the poor 5 yr old until he "admitted" that it really meant he wanted to sleeop with his own mother. An Austrian reporter tracked "Wolfman" down decades after Freud had pronounced him psychoanalysis' greatest success. "Wolfman" told the reporter he found Freud's treatments "terribly far-fetched" (Freud insisted that a dream the man had had about wolves meant he's watched his own parents having anal sex when he was 18 months old and got jealous of them, even though poor wolfman had no such recollection). Wolfman told the reporter the universal belief he had been cured was "false". I remember Freud once saying his own father was a "pervert" who had "terrorised" his brother and sister. It sounds like the creepy oedipus theory may have been true of Freud himself; his insistence that it's true for people generally is, as wolfman would have said "terribly far-fetched". Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged *Really*? Eysenck performed a famous study in the fifties, with the proper controls psychology studies had formerly tended to lack. He found 2/3 of people were "cured" by psychotherapy, but the same number tended to get better as they were on the waiting list for therapy. The therapy was maybe helpful in speeding up the process for those who would have got better in any case. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Isn't Janov the guy who told people they would get better by lying spread-eagled on the floor and talking about how bad their lives have been for hours until they progress to screaming out something like "mommy I hate you!"? After about a year they are deemed well enough to scream by themselves at home. It's sad that some therapists are prepared to explot vulnerable people by charging top dollar for this nonsense.

How do you reach this conclusion, MM6? The DSM has led to - people losing their jobs after being witchhunted on the basis they had non- existent disorders (an NIMH employeee was sacked after she correctly reported she had been sexually harassed, on the basis she had "self-defeating personality disorder"). The label was in the DSM 3 but removed from the DSM 4. So she was sacked for a quack label which psychiatrists later admitted had no basis. -psychiatry has had a disastrous effect on the legal world. IN 1983 the supreme court acknowledged psychiatrists' predictions of future violent behaviour were wrong twice as often as they were write (in other words, thier expert witness did not really meet the criteria for courtroom witness). One five year study of defendants found not guilt by reason of insanity and then released when psychs deemed them "no longer a danger to society" found that 1/3 were re-arrested again, usually for violent offenses. - Ironically, Because psychiatry ignores the link between the physical and mental disorders (except to prescribe powerful mind-altering drugs) they don't do the detective work on criminals that may *well* lead to a decrease in recidivism. Egs. Alan Rosenbaum has found strong evidence to suggest a link between head injury and violence in men. But this is ignored in favor of a DSm label and non-treatment by the profession. - What exactly do you mean by the "norm"? Why should a depressed or anxious person be deemed to have deviated from the "norm"? Given that virtually everyone could qualify for a DSM label, (Maybe you have PMS? That's "late luteal dysphoric disorder". Maybe you are a sloppy writer? You have "disorder of the written expression)". The role that psychiatrists are typically performing now is acting as agents for pharmaceutical drug companies. A 2 trillion dollar industry (annually) which never *attempts) to cure its patients. Can you see what's wrong with this picture? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged False dichotomy IMHO. I blame Freud, the quack who browbeat and harmed his patients instead of listening to them. How many psychology students are taught the truth - that he failed to cure a single one of them? His effect on psychiatry has been disastrous too. It used to be a biologically oriented field, until it was hijacked by freudian psychoanalysts like anna freud, who insisted that symptoms were caused by "childhood trauma".

I agree, Arjan. E. Fuller Torey was the first major psychiatrist to question the labelling and drugging of his psychiatric patients, and he was shunned from the profession as a result. At one point some members of the APA *did* question the pervasive influence of drug money on the profession. THe APA responded by forming a task force to study of the potential impact the loss of drug support, and concluded it couldn't functon without drug money. So the drug industry effectively has psychiatrists under its thumb. Consequentlymainstream psychiatrists now typically have zero knowledge about the medical causes of depression. Apparently they used to. The profession has gone backwards.

Greetings all I am a newb... Have you read the work of Sydney Walker? He points out that things like mental confusion and distress are serious symptoms that need to be treated and, where possible, cured, but that psychiatrists (mainstream) are currently foregoing this role, because they treat subjective, unscientific DSM labels as disorders in themselves, rather than finding the root physical causes of brain dysfunction. Egs., so-called ADHD may actually be the result of lead poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, pinworms, blocked colons, and dozens of other genetic, / environmental causes. But by assigning patients a meaningless label and then drugging them, psychs ensure that any root physical cause as may exist goes neglected and untreated.