Free Republic

[Full title: "Psychiatry goes insane: Every human emotion now classified as a mental disorder in new psychiatric manual DSM-5 "] (NaturalNews) The industry of modern psychiatry has officially gone insane. Virtually every emotion experienced by a human being -- sadness, grief, anxiety, frustration, impatience, excitement -- is now being classified as a "mental disorder" demanding chemical treatment (with prescription medications, of course). The new, upcoming DSM-5 "psychiatry bible," expected to be released in a few months, has transformed itself from a medical reference manual to a testament to the insanity of the industry itself. "Mental disorders" named in the DSM-5...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A south Charlotte psychiatric facility for teens is closing its doors in early February, leaving dozens of teens looking for new homes and 122 employees looking for new jobs. The Keys of Carolina officially notified the state this week that it was closing but has not said why. Eyewitness News uncovered it was facing a list of violations from the North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services and a $6,000 administrative fine, according to state officials, for violations of laws regarding the "protection from harm, abuse, neglect or exploitation" of patients. State officials said conditions in...

Enlarge Image On Saturday, the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted to approve the final text of the DSM-5, the next revision to the leading manual for diagnosing mental illness. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which originated in 1952, will be released next May at the APA's annual meeting in San Francisco. The revision process leading to DSM-5 began in 1999, and APA says it consulted more than 1500 experts in 39 countries in updating the criteria for diagnosing hundreds of psychiatric conditions. It has been a bumpy...

Dear Patient, Going into the coming year, I have made a difficult but necessary determination that I will no longer be a Medicare provider. This will go into effect as of January 1, 2013. My decision is directly related to the continuing Medicare cuts and cumbersome requirements that Medicare has put into place. Regretfully, it is no longer feasible for us to participate with Medicare.

The possibility that autism is linked to traffic pollution has been raised by researchers in California. Their study of more than 500 children said those exposed to high levels of pollution were three times more likely to have autism than children who grew up with cleaner air. However, other researchers said traffic was a "very unlikely" and unconvincing explanation for autism. The findings were presented in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal. Data from the US Environmental Protection Agency were used to work out levels of pollution for addresses in California. This was used to compare exposure to pollution, in...

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...

Do you bite your nails? For 30 years, I did. We nail biters can be "pathological groomers" — people for whom normal grooming behaviors, like skin picking or hair pulling, have become virtually uncontrollable. But psychiatry is changing the way it thinks about pathological grooming, and these changes will be reflected in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, short for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A new version is coming out early next year, and it puts pathological grooming in the same category as another disorder you've probably heard of: obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. This rethinking gives pathological...

It would be laughable if it weren't tragic. This week Surgeon General Regina Benjamin introduced a plan to stem the nation's growing suicide rate without addressing the nation's growing use of suicide-linked drugs. Antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, antipsychotics like Seroquel and Zyprexa and anti-seizure drugs like Lyrica and Neurontin are all linked to suicide in published reports and in FDA warnings. (Almost 5,000 newspaper reports link antidepressants to suicide, homicide and bizarre behavior.) Asthma drugs like Singulair, antismoking drugs like Chantix, acne drugs like Accutane and the still-in-use malaria drug Lariam, are also linked to suicide. The US's suicide...

I am sorry to report that Thomas Szasz, the great libertarian critic of coercive psychiatry, the "therapeutic state," and the war on drugs, died over the weekend at his home in Manlius, New York. He was 92.

The former Marine who was detained by the federal government over Facebook posts critical of the government is being held in a psychiatric ward, Peter Bacqué of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.

CHICAGO — U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a Chicago Democrat who took a hushed medical leave two months ago, is being treated for bipolar disorder, the Mayo Clinic announced Monday. The Rochester, Minn.-based clinic specified his condition as Bipolar II, which is defined as periodic episodes of depression and hypomania. Hypomania is a less serious form of mania. "Congressman Jackson is responding well to the treatment and regaining his strength," the clinic said in a statement...

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease. SNIP The need for a new approach crystallized last Sunday for one of the nation's leading gun violence experts, Dr. Stephen Hargarten. He found himself treating victims of the Sikh temple shootings at the emergency department he heads in Milwaukee. Seven people were killed, including the gunman, and three were seriously injured. It happened two weeks after the shooting that...

Accused Colorado shooter James Holmes, charged with murder over a shooting rampage last month at a movie theater in a Denver suburb, has a "mental illness" and tried to get help before the shooting, his defense attorney said in court on Thursday. Holmes, who is accused of opening fire at a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the suburb of Aurora, was present in a hearing in which a judge weighed a request by 20 media organizations to unseal documents related to his case. During the hearing, Holmes' public defender, Daniel King, repeatedly made references to his client's...

TUESDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Use of powerful antipsychotic medications such as Abilify and Risperdal to control youngsters with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other behavior problems has skyrocketed in recent years, a new study finds. Antipsychotics are approved to treat bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, other serious mental problems and irritability related to autism. But they don't have U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for ADHD or other childhood behavior problems, and their use for this purpose is considered "off label." "Only a small proportion of antipsychotic treatment of children (6 percent) and adolescents (13 percent) is for FDA-approved clinical indications,"...

There is no inherent thing in a person that prevents them from carrying out acts of killing, or mass destruction. The thing that restrains a person is their upbringing. The morality and ethics that they are taught when they are growing up. That fact becomes all the more important when they enter a field of study where they are dealing with the very perception of reality that those morals are based on. There has been a long standing problem in research. That is the tendency for the researcher to go native. A researcher has to study the interaction from an...

DENVER -- The psychiatrist treating accused Aurora theater gunman James Holmes was so concerned about his behavior that she notified other members of the University of Colorado Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment, or BETA, team that he could potentially be a danger to others, sources with knowledge of the investigation told CALL7 Investigators.

James Holmes came to the attention of the threat assessment committee at the University of Colorado but no further action was taken because he left the school more than a month before the attack that killed 12 and injured 58, sources told ABC News. ABC News has learned that Dr. Lynne Fenton, the psychiatrist who was treating Holmes, 24, at the school, was also a key member of the university's threat assessment team. The group of experts were responsible for protecting the school from potentially violent students. KMGH-TV, ABC News' affiliate in Denver, reported exclusively that, according to sources, by...

The suspected Batman massacre gunman was seeing a psychiatrist specialising in schizophrenia before the attack that killed 12 in Colorado, court documents show. The motion named Dr Lynn Fenton as defence lawyers sought to gain access to a package James Holmes had mailed to her prior the July 20 mass shooting, which also wounded 58 people. Reports surfaced on Wednesday that Holmes - who recently dropped out of the University of Colorado - had sent a notebook to a university psychiatrist that included details and drawing of his plans to kill people. There were conflicting reports about whether the package...

Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., whose whereabouts haven't been disclosed since he mysteriously took a medical leave several weeks ago, is being treated for depression at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., according to a statement Friday from the hospital. Jackson is undergoing an extensive inpatient evaluation for depression and for gastrointestinal issues, according to the statement, which also provided the first details about his medical condition. But it provided no details about where the congressman, the son of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, had previously been staying. [Snip] The timing of [Jackson's] leave has raised questions, in part because...

THE Rev. JESSE JACKSON is devastated over the headline-making mystery illness that’s struck his son, U.S. Congressman Jesse Jr. – and The ENQUIRER has learned the shocking cause of the tragedy. “At first we thought he was sim­ply exhausted,” said a source close to the family. “But after five weeks of extensive evaluation, doctors diagnosed Jesse Jr. with bipolar disorder.” The serious mental condition is triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain, which propels sufferers from manic highs to depressive lows. Some insiders point the finger of blame squarely at a gastric bypass operation the 47-year-old poli­tician underwent in 2004...