Psychiatrists Becoming Doctor Joke

Accuracy in Academia ^ | November 14, 2012 | Malcolm A. Kline

[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.”

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

People use to self-medicate. Opium and alcohol were the most popular ways to make your problems go away. And since beer was considered a perfectly respectable drink from morning to night it was possible to be at least mildly potted most of your waking life.

Back then you were not depressed, you were melancholy. You were not expected to get better and no one was surprised when you died in a strange accident involving a rope and chair or cleaning your gun or possibly ate something that disagreed with you.

Later on they reached for "mother's little helper".

Now people are expected to be sober and functional most of the time.

Sometimes the pills help. Sometimes other things help. But the odd idea that depression and other mental conditions is somehow something that has just appeared is to ignore history.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Psychology is worse. It's almost entirely a pseudo-science. Unfortunately, all teacher colleges are steeped in it.

[1010RD]

The Communists love psychiatry.