THE TRUTH ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS OOZES OUT

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THE TRUTH ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS OOZES OUT 2005-10-19

 

OCTOBER 19, 2005. For years, I have been reporting that no so-calledmental illness can be defined by a concrete physical test.

 

You can't take blood from a patient or scan his brain and say, "He hasso-and-so mental disorder."

 

The implications of this fact are staggering, because you are thenleft with hundreds of purported mental disorders---all of which haveofficial names---but no possible diagnosis based on science.

 

Instead, you have committees of self-serving psychiatrists whoassemble lists of behaviors and derive disease names. These labels andthe lists of "symptoms" are published in the official bible of thepsychiatric profession---and of course patients are given highly toxicdrugs to treat these phantom disorders.

 

Talk about scandals.

 

Note well that it's a far different thing to say a person is sad orfearful or anxious than it is to say the person HAS A MENTAL DISORDER.In science, you are supposed to offer convincing evidence before youannounce you have found a physically based condition.

 

Well, now we have an article in The NY Times which finally confessesto the truth.

 

No doubt the Times finding will sink like a stone. The TV ads aboutdepression et al will continue to flourish. People will blithelyassume that the shrinks know what they're doing. Psychiatric drugswill still be dispensed like hotcakes. Bush's proposal to screen everychild in America for mental illnesses will be takenseriously---instead of being debunked for the sordid politicallymotivated action that it is.

 

Consider this. What do you call a regimen in which a person isdiagnosed by an MD with a non-existent mental disorder and then givenhighly toxic drugs? Answer: a felony.

 

Here is an excerpt from the Times piece:

 

Can Brain Scans See Depression?By BENEDICT CAREYPublished: October 18, 2005

 

They seem almost alive: snapshots of the living human brain.

 

Not long ago, scientists predicted that these images, produced bysophisticated brain-scanning techniques, would help cut through themystery of mental illness, revealing clear brain abnormalities andallowing doctors to better diagnose and treat a wide variety ofdisorders. And nearly every week, it seems, imaging researchersannounce another finding, a potential key to understanding depression,attention deficit disorder, anxiety.

 

Yet for a variety of reasons, the hopes and claims for brain imagingin psychiatry have far outpaced the science, experts say.

 

PROMISING, NOT YET PRACTICALResearchers have scanned the brains of patients with illnessesincluding depression, schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder,hoping to find patterns. But so far, scanning has not yielded reliableways to diagnose or treat disorders.

 

After almost 30 years, researchers have not developed any standardizedtool for diagnosing or treating psychiatric disorders based on imagingstudies.

 

Several promising lines of research are under way. But imagingtechnology has not lived up to the hopes invested in it in the 1990's- labeled the "Decade of the Brain" by the American PsychiatricAssociation - when many scientists believed that brain scans wouldturn on the lights in what had been a locked black box.

 

Now, with imaging studies being published at a rate of more than 500 ayear, and commercial imaging clinics opening in some parts of thecountry, some experts say that the technology has been oversold as apsychiatric tool. Other researchers remain optimistic, but they wonderwhat the data add up to, and whether it is time for the field torethink its approach and its expectations.

 

"I have been waiting for my work in the lab to affect my job on theweekend, when I practice as a child psychiatrist," said Dr. Jay Giedd,chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the NationalInstitute of Mental Health, who has done M.R.I. scans in childrenMonday through Friday for 14 years. "It hasn't happened. In thisfield, every year you hear, 'Oh, it's more complicated than wethought.' Well, you hear that for 10 years, and you start to see apattern."

 

Psychiatrists still consider imaging technologies like M.R.I., formagnetic resonance imaging, and PET, for positron emission topography,to be crucial research tools. And the scanning technologies areinvaluable as a way to detect physical problems like head trauma,seizure activity or tumors. Moreover, the experts point out, progressin psychiatry is by its nature painstakingly slow, and decades ofgroundwork typically precede any real advances.

 

But there is a growing sense that brain scan research is still yearsaway from providing psychiatry with anything like the kind of cleartests for mental illness that were hoped for.

 

"I think that, with some notable exceptions, the community ofscientists was excessively optimistic about how quickly imaging wouldhave an impact on psychiatry," said Dr. Steven Hyman, a professor ofneurobiology at Harvard and the former director of the NationalInstitute of Mental Health. "In their enthusiasm, people forgot thatthe human brain is the most complex object in the history of humaninquiry, and it's not at all easy to see what's going wrong."

 

For one thing, brains are as variable as personalities...

 

end NY Times excerpt

 

I'm sure some people will say, "Well, you see, they're on the righttrack. They just need more time and better techniques."

 

Regardless, you don't publish official mental-disease names andtreatment options when you have no evidence pointing to specific braindisorders.

 

Believing these disorders exist is one thing. But would you act onsuch a belief, to the extent of giving millions of people dangerousand harmful drugs? Would you?

 

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com