Nosology
While not directly related to Schnozology, Nosology is still an interesting term.
- Nosology: The branch of medicine concerned with the classification of diseases. [from Greek nosos disease + Greek logos word]
We caught the term being used in the July 2013 issue of Reason magazine, in an article by Gary Greenberg, a practicing psychotherapist, titled “Overselling Psychiatry;” here is the quote: “Doubts like Frances’, on the part of both respected professionals and confused laypersons, are inevitable given the way the APA conducts nosology, the science of disease classification.”
Here are some additional quotes from this article to give the context:
“Allen Frances, former head of the Duke University School of Medicine’s psychiatry department … was chair of the APA task force for DSM-IV … [and] has been warning everyone who will listen that the newest DSM revision [DSM-5] will turn even more of human suffering into mental illness and thus into grist for the pharmaceutical mill.”
The DSM, of course, is the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the fifth edition (DSM-5) having been released this past May. Despite a growing consensus of people who see the DSM for what it is — a purely subjective work of no scientific substance or authority — it is still accepted in the legal system as being a scientific work that catalogs descriptions of mental symptoms as if they were real medical diseases.
“…many critics have pointed out that these disease categories do not exist in nature…”
In 1984 the results of a survey of 20,000 Americans indicated that, “In any given year, more than 20 percent of Americans qualified for a DSM-III diagnosis.”
Extrapolating this result to say that 20 percent of the population is mentally ill, as is the current marketing cry of the mental health industry, is the height of fraudulent statistical hubris, as the DSM itself has no basis in fact.
“… doctors using DSM checklists were all too likely to find disease everywhere they looked. There was no governor in the mechanism, no way to say this person was sick and that one was simply unhappy…”
“‘The tendency [is] always strong,’ John Stuart Mill wrote in 1869, ‘to believe that whatever receives a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own.’ … this tendency had led all the stakeholders in nosology — scientists, regulators, editors, doctors, drug companies, and, of course, patients — to take the labels not as arbitrary descriptions but as the names of actual diseases.”
The moral of this tale, to spell it out, is that psychiatric labels are junk science; psychiatry is junk science; psycho-pharmaceuticals are junk science.
See a competent, non-psychiatric health professional for your troubles. Insist on full disclosure of lab tests, diagnoses, drug actions and drug side effects, and exercise your fully informed consent before accepting treatment.
While we do not provide medical advice, we do provide educational materials so that you can Find Out yourself about these things. Select a downloadable booklet from www.CCHRSTL.org that catches your interest and let us know what you think about it. Forward this newsletter to everyone you know and recommend they subscribe.
