Posted on 11/15/2012 11:59:32 AM PST by Academiadotorg
There may actually be some good news coming out of academia. “This really is a profession that has run amok,” Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic said of psychiatrists in a recent interview with Celeste McGovern which appeared in Citizen magazine. “People are beginning to question its legitimacy and they are beginning to mistrust its values, its diagnoses and its treatments.”
McGovern writes that, “Even medical students are avoiding it, he adds, as the average age of psychiatrists is now 57.” Citizen is published by Focus on the Family. McGovern is based in the United Kingdom.
“Every day in the United States, 850 adults and 250 children are added to the federal government’s disability benefit rolls because of mental illness,” McGovern reports. “That means about 400,000 people are incapacitated each year, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands more diagnosed with less-crippling psychiatric illnesses.”
“The alarming growth rate of this phenomenon is reflected in American spending on psychiatric drugs: Between 1985 and 2007, spending on antidepressants and anti-psychotics alone multiplied nearly 50 times, from $503 million to more than $24 billion annually.”
Part of this trend is catalogued in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental illness 5, compiled by the American Psychiatric Association. “Its current version, the DSM-IV, last updated in 1994, defines 297 disorders based on diagnostic checklists of symptoms,” McGovern relates. “A diagnosis of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for example, is given if clinicians can tick off six of a list of symptoms, including ‘not listening,’ ‘fidgeting’ and ‘losing things.’”
“Today, at least 3 million American children are taking amphetamine drugs like Ritalin as a result of ADHD diagnoses.”
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
1. We now have a large number of people who have been using recreational drugs for decades, so that could account for an increased number of people who need anti-psychotics to deal with the long term effects of such usage.
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If you are counting alcoholics among this number ...I agree. I bet psych hospitals are seeing at least 20% eval for drug/alcohol induced dementia.
Some in that field are very good.
I went to a psychiatrist once. It was a few decades ago, the year I had graduated from college. I had run out of money, moved back home with my parents, was very depressed, and doing terribly in job interviews. The psychiatrist basically told me the following:
1. “With your qualifications, you should have a professional job right now. You’re just not trying hard enough.”
2. “Stop blaming your parents for your problems. Be thankful they were willing to let you move back home and are providing for you.”
3. “You say you’re sending out resumes, but you’re not. By our next session, I want you to have applied for one job. I will be asking.” (I said “I could apply for 20 jobs in a week” but the psychiatrist just wanted me to apply for one job. He knew I would say 20 and do none, and it was better to say one and do one. The next session, he said “apply for two jobs by the next session” and soon, I was off and running on my own.)
Within two months, I had a professional job, moved out of my parent’s home, and never went back. No drugs—just honest assessment and direction.
Some in that field are very good.
I went to a psychiatrist once. It was a few decades ago, the year I had graduated from college. I had run out of money, moved back home with my parents, was very depressed, and doing terribly in job interviews. The psychiatrist basically told me the following:
1. “With your qualifications, you should have a professional job right now. You’re just not trying hard enough.”
2. “Stop blaming your parents for your problems. Be thankful they were willing to let you move back home and are providing for you.”
3. “You say you’re sending out resumes, but you’re not. By our next session, I want you to have applied for one job. I will be asking.” (I said “I could apply for 20 jobs in a week” but the psychiatrist just wanted me to apply for one job. He knew I would say 20 and do none, and it was better to say one and do one. The next session, he said “apply for two jobs by the next session” and soon, I was off and running on my own.)
Within two months, I had a professional job, moved out of my parent’s home, and never went back. No drugs—just honest assessment and direction.
Or we have 400,000 people gaming the system because mental illness disabilities are the hardest to objectively disprove. If someone claims a disability because he's missing a leg and you can count both of his legs still attached you can catch him for fraud. How do you disprove "voices in the head"?
Until the mid-1950's there were no effective psychiatric drugs.
What passed for meds back then was mostly barbiturates, for anxiety and behavior agitation, and amphetamines for depression and lethargy.
Half of all hospital beds in the United States in the mid-fifties were occupied by mental patients, most of them going nowhere fast, receiving no treatment to speak of, and living in custodial institutions in rural areas, away from the sensitive eyes of the public, and which came to be known as "funny farms."
Discharged and left to their own devices, they died.
Compare that to today, when many hospitals have only a few, if any, psych beds at all, and lengths of stay are measured usually in days, not years.
Meds used today generally are not addictive and destructive like the barbiturates and amphetamines were. Some have side effects, to be sure--any effective medicine of any sort will have side effects in some percentage of the population.
But for most people, the price is a small one to pay for being able to function reasonably well in the community.
End of message from Reality-- we now return to the previously scheduled rantings and ravings of the juvenile ignorati.
Western philosphy and culture produced certain results among professionals and the public in the West.
Liberalism’s humanist philosphy and it’s amoral and corrupt culture - produces the results we see today in all professions and at all levels of society.
Sounds more like a priest than a shrink.
Indeed. In reality, psychiatry/psychology is the new religion of secular humanism. But you won't hear any leftist screaming about the "separation" of THIS "church" and state.
Chronic Lyme disease is strongly associated with depression, so I think there are still cures to come, but not from the shrinks.
You stil repeat yourself though. Might need a refresher!
In the 10+ years I’ve been looking at the stats, my local school district has had 20.0% of kids diagnosed “special needs”.
What an astoundingly round number.
What a vile and debased system.
They call it self-diagnosis.
Whatever works!
It’s also a big political business.
More and more countries will classify you as deranged/delusional if you don’t have the correct leftist outlook.
Freud was an evil devil
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