THE TRUTH ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS OOZES OUT

[Guest guest]

http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=2862

 

 

 

THE TRUTH ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS OOZES OUT

2005-10-19

 

 

OCTOBER 19, 2005. For years, I have been reporting that no so-called

mental illness can be defined by a concrete physical test.

 

You can't take blood from a patient or scan his brain and say, " He has

so-and-so mental disorder. "

 

The implications of this fact are staggering, because you are then

left with hundreds of purported mental disorders---all of which have

official names---but no possible diagnosis based on science.

 

Instead, you have committees of self-serving psychiatrists who

assemble lists of behaviors and derive disease names. These labels and

the lists of " symptoms " are published in the official bible of the

psychiatric profession---and of course patients are given highly toxic

drugs to treat these phantom disorders.

 

Talk about scandals.

 

Note well that it's a far different thing to say a person is sad or

fearful or anxious than it is to say the person HAS A MENTAL DISORDER.

In science, you are supposed to offer convincing evidence before you

announce you have found a physically based condition.

 

Well, now we have an article in The NY Times which finally confesses

to the truth.

 

No doubt the Times finding will sink like a stone. The TV ads about

depression et al will continue to flourish. People will blithely

assume that the shrinks know what they're doing. Psychiatric drugs

will still be dispensed like hotcakes. Bush's proposal to screen every

child in America for mental illnesses will be taken

seriously---instead of being debunked for the sordid politically

motivated action that it is.

 

Consider this. What do you call a regimen in which a person is

diagnosed by an MD with a non-existent mental disorder and then given

highly toxic drugs? Answer: a felony.

 

Here is an excerpt from the Times piece:

 

Can Brain Scans See Depression?

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: October 18, 2005

 

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

 

Not long ago, scientists predicted that these images, produced by

sophisticated brain-scanning techniques, would help cut through the

mystery of mental illness, revealing clear brain abnormalities and

allowing doctors to better diagnose and treat a wide variety of

disorders. And nearly every week, it seems, imaging researchers

announce another finding, a potential key to understanding depression,

attention deficit disorder, anxiety.

 

Yet for a variety of reasons, the hopes and claims for brain imaging

in psychiatry have far outpaced the science, experts say.

 

PROMISING, NOT YET PRACTICAL

Researchers have scanned the brains of patients with illnesses

including depression, schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder,

hoping to find patterns. But so far, scanning has not yielded reliable

ways to diagnose or treat disorders.

 

After almost 30 years, researchers have not developed any standardized

tool for diagnosing or treating psychiatric disorders based on imaging

studies.

 

Several promising lines of research are under way. But imaging

technology has not lived up to the hopes invested in it in the 1990's

- labeled the " Decade of the Brain " by the American Psychiatric

Association - when many scientists believed that brain scans would

turn on the lights in what had been a locked black box.

 

Now, with imaging studies being published at a rate of more than 500 a

year, and commercial imaging clinics opening in some parts of the

country, some experts say that the technology has been oversold as a

psychiatric tool. Other researchers remain optimistic, but they wonder

what the data add up to, and whether it is time for the field to

rethink its approach and its expectations.

 

" I have been waiting for my work in the lab to affect my job on the

weekend, when I practice as a child psychiatrist, " said Dr. Jay Giedd,

chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National

Institute of Mental Health, who has done M.R.I. scans in children

Monday through Friday for 14 years. " It hasn't happened. In this

field, every year you hear, 'Oh, it's more complicated than we

thought.' Well, you hear that for 10 years, and you start to see a

pattern. "

 

Psychiatrists still consider imaging technologies like M.R.I., for

magnetic resonance imaging, and PET, for positron emission topography,

to be crucial research tools. And the scanning technologies are

invaluable as a way to detect physical problems like head trauma,

seizure activity or tumors. Moreover, the experts point out, progress

in psychiatry is by its nature painstakingly slow, and decades of

groundwork typically precede any real advances.

 

But there is a growing sense that brain scan research is still years

away from providing psychiatry with anything like the kind of clear

tests for mental illness that were hoped for.

 

" I think that, with some notable exceptions, the community of

scientists was excessively optimistic about how quickly imaging would

have an impact on psychiatry, " said Dr. Steven Hyman, a professor of

neurobiology at Harvard and the former director of the National

Institute of Mental Health. " In their enthusiasm, people forgot that

the human brain is the most complex object in the history of human

inquiry, 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 right

track. They just need more time and better techniques. "

 

Regardless, you don't publish official mental-disease names and

treatment options when you have no evidence pointing to specific brain

disorders.

 

Believing these disorders exist is one thing. But would you act on

such a belief, to the extent of giving millions of people dangerous

and harmful drugs? Would you?

 

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com