The Selling of Psychiatric Illness

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http://www.cchr.org/doctors/eng/page11.htm

 

Mental Disorders and Treatments

 

The Selling of Psychiatric Illness

 

Through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

(DSM-IV) and the mental disorders section of the International

Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), psychiatrists have sought more

alignment with medicine, believing that discrete and identifiable

mental diseases exist, when no objective abnormality can be found in

any psychiatric disorder. A favored strategy of theirs is to co-mingle

psychiatric terms with neurological—such as Alzheimer's disease and

Dementia—hoping the reader will think that they are psychiatric. While

in medicine, medical drugs are developed for existing illnesses, in

psychiatry, new illnesses may be invented for existing psychiatric

drugs or ones soon to be approved by drug agencies.

 

" The way to sell drugs is to sell psychiatric illness. "

— Carl Elliot, Bioethicist, University of Minnesota, 2001