The Board of Trustees of the former National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems (NAPHS) announced the association has changed its name to the National Association for Behavioral Healthcare (NABH), effective Monday, March 19, 2018.
NABH advocates for behavioral healthcare and represents behavior healthcare provider organizations such as psychiatric hospitals.
The reason they gave for the name change is to reflect the association’s mission to advocate for behavioral healthcare, because these healthcare needs are too complex to represent solely by reference to psychiatry.
We conjecture in addition that by removing the word “psychiatric” they are acknowledging that this word is gaining negative connotations in society.
In their anxiety to keep their failures explained, psychiatry continually redefines key words; in this case, replacing “psychiatric” with “behavioral health”. The emphasis is on describing ever more complicated conditions instead of curing them. The continual cry for more government funding buys no cures, but only how incurable it all is.
In fact, healthcare needs are relatively simple, and the effort to represent it as very complex is an obfuscation that facilitates asking for more funds to support more and more harmful and ineffective treatments.
Research has shown that proper medical screening by non-psychiatric diagnostic specialists could eliminate more than 40% of psychiatric admissions. Medical studies have shown time and again that for many patients, what appear to be mental problems are actually caused by an undiagnosed and untreated physical illness or condition.
While life is full of problems, and sometimes those problems can be overwhelming, it is important to know that psychiatry, its diagnoses and its drugs, are the wrong direction to go. The drugs can only chemically mask problems and symptoms; they cannot and never will be able to solve problems.
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