Posts Tagged ‘DSM’

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What Is Your Emotional Intelligence?

Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

We notice continuing discussions in social media about “emotional intelligence”, although with few successful attempts to actually nail it down.

It used to simply be called “maturity.” Attempts by psychiatry and psychology to dissect it make it more complicated and subject to argument about what it really is. We thought we’d like to weigh in on the discussion, and relate it to psychiatric fraud and abuse.

Some definitions:
[These are not all the possible definitions, but are useful ones.]

Emotional: Relating to a state of feelings or sensations created or experienced by an individual or a body; the physical, mental and spiritual state of an individual manifested as a gradient scale of an individual’s state of being.
[From Latin emov?re to remove, displace, from e– + mov?re to move.]

Intelligence: The ability to perceive, pose and resolve problems; the ability to recognize differences, similarities and identities, and evaluate relative importances.
[From Latin intellegere, to understand.]

Maturity: Relating to a condition of full growth or development; behaving in a sensible way; well-balanced in personality and emotional behavior.
[From Latin maturus, ripe.]

We take the term “Emotional Intelligence” to mean the ability to use one’s emotions intelligently and appropriately in different situations.

Some psychiatrists and psychologists relate emotional intelligence to mental health disorders. Witness the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which describes numerous fraudulent diagnoses for which they can prescribe any number of harmful, mind-altering psychiatric drugs. [The purpose of which is to be able to bill insurance for counseling or drugs for any of these diagnoses.] Here are some of those absurd DSM diagnoses:

— Adjustment disorder, With mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct
— High expressed emotion level within family
— Borderline intellectual functioning
— Intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder)
— Disinhibited social engagement disorder

This over-complication of an essentially simple concept leads to endless speculation, the wasted funds for hundreds of research papers, and no end of descriptions about its components and what to do about it.

There is one very simple way to learn to be more emotionally intelligent — by learning to identify the emotions one is feeling as well as understanding them. You won’t learn this, however, from a psychiatrist.

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Treatment Resistant Depression is Apparently a Thing

Monday, February 6th, 2023

Psychiatrists like to fund research studies for so-called “Treatment Resistant Depression” (TRD). They say that if someone has been given antidepressant drugs but their symptoms haven’t improved, they may have treatment-resistant depression.

Of course, the treatments of choice for TRD are more psychiatric drugs, such as ketamine and esketamine (dissociative anesthetics), olanzapine (an atypical anti-psychotic drug) and fluoxetine (Prozac). Some claim that Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT or shock treatment) “work” for this. Of course, all these “treatments” just knock your brain for a loop, so you don’t feel depressed, or much of anything anymore. None of these actually address the root causes for these symptoms, which psychiatrists conveniently forget to tell you.

One study suggests that between 29% and 46% of patients are still depressed after taking antidepressant drugs. Another study claims 20%-60% do not respond to psychiatric drugs. Well, we’ve known for years that not only is there no such “mental illness” as depression, but also that these mind-altering drugs don’t help.

People can, of course, experience symptoms commonly labeled as depression. In fact, there are hundreds of genuine medical conditions which can produce such mental symptoms — each of which has clinical tests and recognized medical treatments which do not involve psychiatric drugs.

While the fraudulent psychiatric “brain chemical imbalance” theory has been debunked for many years, it has been held firmly in place by the psycho-pharma public relations machine in order to sell more harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs. These drugs make patients for life since the drugs do not cure anything and have devastating side effects.

Psychiatrists have known since the beginning of psychopharmacology that their drugs do not cure any disease, and that antidepressants do not have any legitimate medical value. These are just public relations theories to support the marketing and sale of drugs. This is why the words “depressed” or “depressive” occur 77 times in various fraudulent diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in a vain attempt to legitimize this so-called “disease.”

Troubled patients being misled about what causes their problems and being told that they need to take a psychotropic drug to “correct” this is a form of coercion. Giving patients such misinformation prevents their making an informed decision and has already resulted in many millions of people taking antidepressants or other psychotropic drugs with harmful side effects, erroneously believing these would “correct” something that simply never existed.

These drugs mask the real cause of problems in life and debilitate the individual, so denying him or her the opportunity for real recovery and hope for the future. This is the real reason why psychiatry is a violation of human rights. Psychiatric treatment is not just a failure — it is routinely destructive to the individual and one’s mental health.

If you know someone who has bought into these lies, suggest they investigate non-psychiatric, non-drug alternatives. Contact your local, state and federal representatives and demand that they stop government funding of these drugs.

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What Is “Normal Behavior?”

Monday, December 5th, 2022

Psychiatry’s billing bible DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, revision 5) released in May, 2013, and its current update DSM-5-TR (Text Revision of 2022) are the latest versions of the standard handbook of “mental illnesses” as determined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

The DSM purports to diagnose abnormal human behavior, although failing to define what is normal. In fact, it is not possible to define normal human behavior by using the DSM, since there are no clinical tests for these conditions for which a range of results could be specified as either normal or abnormal in the general population of society. Diagnosis with the DSM is purely an opinion, usually a psychiatrist’s opinion of something they do not like. This led the late Dr. Thomas Szasz (co-founder of CCHR) to say, “If we recognize that ‘mental illness’ is a metaphor for disapproved thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we are compelled to recognize as well that the primary function of Psychiatry is to control thought, mood, and behavior.”

Normal: Generally free from impairment; Within a range considered safe, healthy, or optimal; Routine; A standard, model or pattern regarded as typical for a specific group or situation.
[From Latin norm?lis “forming a right angle;” from norma “carpenter’s square” + -?lis “related to”.]

No psychiatrist has succeeded in defining abnormal or normal behavior in a precise and workable way. This is one reason we say that psychiatry is not workable. In addition, any form of etiology (the cause or origin of disease) is missing from the DSM.

How then can we get to a definition of normal human behavior? This is not a simple assignment. But we can approach it in a different way. We can ask, “What is the Ideal of Human Behavior?”

An Ideal might be described this way: The absence of unwanted mental, physical and spiritual conditions; Sane, ethical and responsible behavior as a well-adjusted, functioning and productive contributor to society. OK, we get that this is also difficult to enumerate.

Perhaps we should examine another factor that leads to fraudulent DSM diagnoses. The proliferation of psychiatric diagnoses is exceedingly profitable for the vested interests of the psychiatric industry.

What is a “vested interest?”

Here are some definitions of a vested interest:
— enjoying benefits from an existing economic or political privilege
— a special concern or stake in maintaining or influencing an arrangement especially for selfish ends or to protect one’s money, power, or reputation
— cooperating or competing in pursuing selfish goals for personal gain and exerting a controlling influence to maintain such.

Could it be that psychiatric vested interests are engaged in such activities because of an abiding fear of losing their livelihood should there appear to be more normal people than abnormal?

Baldly, the psychiatric profession has a profit interest in ensuring that society is focused on the abnormal rather than the normal, and in ensuring that psychiatric “treatments” worsen these conditions in order to preserve and expand the patient base.

Coming up with new lists of behaviors and new “disorders” is the bedrock of the multi-billion dollar psychiatric industry. It’s how they get paid. Remember, no psychiatric label, no billing insurance. No psychiatric label, no drug prescribed. The psychiatric labels are backed by corporate interests, not medicine, and not science.

The psychiatric industry must be deprived of their unearned billions and the world made safe for both the normal and the abnormal (whoever and whatever they are) to pursue an effective route to an Ideal of Human Behavior.

Reference
The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry by C.F. van der Horst (Per Veritatem Vis Foundation, 2022)

CCHR

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Local psychiatrist known for giving medical marijuana cards could lose her license

Monday, October 17th, 2022

Dr. Zinia Thomas, a psychiatrist in St. Louis, Missouri, was arrested September 1, 2022 on felony drug charges for illegally possessing marijuana, which she had allegedly attempted to sell.

Apparently she had also been previously investigated for improperly issuing Missouri medical marijuana cards.

In addition to marijuana, Dr. Thomas also promotes the use of ketamine, a psychedelic anesthetic also called a “date-rape” drug. Basically it knocks you out so you don’t feel so depressed anymore. You don’t feel much of anything, actually, since you’ve just shot up an anesthetic. Psychiatrists pushing ketamine are shameful drug pushers who are making a buck off people’s misfortune.

Psychiatry, in spite of diagnosing cannabis use as a mental disorder, also pushes cannabis as a treatment for mental trauma. In Missouri, “psychiatric disorders” are a top reason that patients are approved for a medical marijuana license.

Medical marijuana sales in Missouri are above $200 million since it went on sale in October 2020. Roughly 17% of approximately 200,000 medical marijuana cards issued in Missouri are for so-called psychiatric disorders, which must be diagnosed by a state-licensed psychiatrist. One popular diagnostic code from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is “Unspecified mental disorder”. Note also that there are 32 diagnostic codes for various mental problems with marijuana use and abuse, including the ever popular “Unspecified cannabis-related disorder”. Notice that a psychiatrist can recommend the issuance of a Missouri medical marijuana card to someone to treat their problems from using marijuana. How convenient is that?

False information published by the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration claimed that “19.9 percent of American adults in the United States (45.1 million) have experienced mental illness over the past year.”

This popular statistic, pushed by the psychiatric industry to justify their existence, is completely false or, at best, highly questionable. The apparent epidemic of “mental illness” is because the psychiatric industry, working with the pharmaceutical industry and the Food and Drug Administration, invents new fraudulent disorders for which more drugs can be prescribed; all-encompassing disorders such as the one noted above, “Unspecified mental disorder.” People can have serious problems in life; these are not, however, some unspecified mental illness caused by a deficiency of marijuana.

The psychiatric industry today has jumped on the cannabis bandwagon for several reasons. Psychiatrists are embracing all things marijuana because they are getting so many patients with marijuana-related problems such as addiction and psychosis.

When psychiatric treatments fail and psychotropic drug patents run out, there are usually efforts to resurrect old treatments as “new miracles,” such as psychedelics. There is a hefty body of evidence showing the lack of science behind psychiatry’s diagnostic system that leads to unworkable and potentially damaging treatments including psychedelics. The psychedelic “therapy” industry is predicted to reach $7 billion by 2027, a powerful draw for a therapist without scruples.

Governments keep investing billions of dollars into psychiatry to improve conditions that psychiatrists admit they cannot cure. Promises are repeatedly made to improve the mental health of the country but the opposite has occurred. The rate of mental trauma keeps soaring, and with it, demands for a blank check for more funding. Contact your local, state and federal officials and demand that they stop funding harmful psychiatric “treatments,” and that psychiatry is held accountable for their harm.

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More About the ADHD Hoax

Monday, October 10th, 2022

In 1987, “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD) was literally voted into existence by a show of hands of American Psychiatric Association members and included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Within a year, 500,000 children in America alone were diagnosed with this fraudulent “disease”.

Sarah Durston, Professor of Developmental Disorders of the Brain at the University Medical Center Utrecht in Utrecht, Netherlands, spent 13 years (between 2003-2018) and over 2.5 million euros searching for the source of ADHD in the brain, and did not find it.

She concluded in a 2021 article about ADHD in Scientific American that, “Calling the condition a disorder falsely implies we know of a cause located in the brains of people diagnosed with it—and we don’t.” She says, “The most common psychiatric handbooks (DSM-5 and ICD-11) are clear on the status of their classifications: they are purely descriptive and are not based on underlying causes” and that “ADHD does not cause attention problems any more than low socioeconomic status causes poverty.”

Trying in vain to find a biological cause is not unique to ADHD; this deficiency exists for virtually all 541 disorders in DSM-5. The DSM says, “in the absence of clear biological markers or clinically useful measurements of severity for many mental disorders it has not been possible to completely separate normal and pathological.”

Moreover, the symptoms used to “diagnose” ADHD are typical of the side effects of central nervous system stimulants (such as methylphenidate [e.g. Ritalin, Concerta]) used to “treat” ADHD. This confusion is not so surprising because much ADHD research is done on children who are already taking stimulants.

All stimulants work by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. The body must strictly regulate dopamine levels since both an excess and a deficiency can be very problematic. Thus drugs which mess with dopamine play Russian Roulette with your brain.

Methylphenidate is often referred to as “amphetamine-like” or “cocaine-like.” It has hallucinogenic properties as well as being a stimulant. It binds to the same sites in the brain as cocaine, thus producing effects that are indistinguishable from cocaine; in fact, it is more potent than cocaine. For this reason it is also called “kiddie cocaine.”

Why do people who take amphetamine-like drugs such as methylphenidate say that their attention and concentration improves? One explanation is that this drug can cause psychosis, and compulsive-psychotic behavior may make the person less likely to be distracted by external stimuli. This is called “tunnel-focus”, and prompts the additional moniker of “chemical straightjacket.” Long-term use increases the likelihood of addiction and psychosis.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has this to say about methylphenidate: “There is neither specific evidence which clearly establishes the mechanism whereby Ritalin produces its mental and behavioral effects in children, nor conclusive evidence regarding how these effects relate to the condition of the central nervous system;” and “Treatment emergent psychotic or manic symptoms, e. g., hallucinations, delusional thinking, or mania in children and adolescents without a prior history of psychotic illness or mania can be caused by stimulants at usual doses.”

Furthermore, there is no evidence that stimulants result in any long-term improvement in either behavior or academic achievement.

The ADHD diagnosis does not identify a genuine biological or psychological disorder. The diagnosis is simply a list of behaviors that may appear unwanted, disruptive or inappropriate.

Meanwhile, a former nurse practitioner who ran psychiatric clinics in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, admitted October 4, 2022 to writing illegal Adderall prescriptions while suspended for other drug charges. He continued to prescribe Adderall despite his suspension and submitted claims to Medicare for office visits under a co-worker’s license. Adderall is another habit-forming stimulant amphetamine drug prescribed for ADHD.

Any medical doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a child or adult exhibiting signs of what a psychiatrist calls ADHD can find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. Any person labeled with so-called ADHD needs to receive a thorough physical examination by a competent medical—not psychiatric—doctor to first determine what underlying physical condition is causing the manifestation.

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable, subject to unreasonable depression, inattention, anxiety or panic. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being. Psychiatric diagnosis, drugs and other psychiatric treatments are not workable.

Reference
The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry by C.F. van der Horst (Per Veritatem Vis Foundation, 2022)

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Intuition – Your Friend or Foe?

Monday, October 3rd, 2022

Lately there has been an abundance of social media postings about intuition or gut feelings. We were curious about this, as many people seem to be promoting the use of intuition to reach critical Life decisions rather than direct observation and rational thought. We suspect this might be related to a misunderstanding, mistrust, or confusion between rational and emotional reactions to Life situations.

There are many ways to describe and define the word “intuition”:
– insight, a snap judgment
– instinctive knowingness, spiritual perception
– perceive directly without reasoning
– an impression that something might be the case
– knowledge gained without evident rational thought or facts
– knowledge gained by feelings rather than thought
– knowing or understanding something without reasoning or evidence
– knowledge dependent more upon past experience than present perception

[from Late Latin intuitio “act of contemplating”, from Latin intu?ri “to look at, contemplate”]

The idiom “gut feeling” speaks to the visceral sensation or emotional reaction one is said to experience. The idea that emotions are experienced in the gut has a long historical legacy, and many nineteenth-century doctors considered the origins of mental illness to derive from the intestines.

In truth, pure knowingness, not influenced by space or energy, is a property of a spiritual being; it is not dependent upon observation. Below this state there is knowing about, which is the province of data, or speculations or conclusions or methods about data. True knowledge is certainty, not data.

In order to play any game (such as The Game Of Life) one has to reduce one’s knowingness by assuming one cannot know or knows wrongly, since if one fully knew everything about the game (e.g. knowing all the moves of both sides in a card game), it would no longer be a game.

One convenient way many humans accomplish this is to substitute for rational observation in present time with irrational recall of past events. This gives rise to the type of intuition we know as a gut feeling, where unconscious recalls impinge upon the body and mind to produce feelings that may or may not apply to present circumstances.

This type of intuition has a formal definition in psychiatry and psychology: a faculty in which hunches are generated by the unconscious mind rapidly sifting through past experience. Psychology and psychiatry provide guesses about how this is supposed to work, with many wasted efforts attempting to justify the substitution of intuition for rational observation and thought.

Of course, consulting one’s past experiences is certainly a valid use of experience in evaluating present time situations. The problem with gut feelings is that this process is unconscious and liable to pull up irrational responses rather than rational ones.

Attempts by psychology and psychiatry to teach people how to use their intuition is, to be blunt, fraudulent; since their concept of intuition is by definition an unconscious process based solely on the past, and as likely to be irrational as it is to appear rational. They may promote meditation as a path to using intuition, and we have written previously about the psychiatric corruption of meditation.

On the other hand, true intuition which is a spiritual knowingness and awareness can be rehabilitated by boosting one’s awareness, and improving one’s ability to consciously observe and consider things in present time, as well as considering consequences in future time. Learning more about how to make good judgments is also a positive approach.

The real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness” and stigmatize unwanted behavior as “diseases,” using the psychiatric billing bible the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as their justification. The bottom line is that all psychiatric “treatments” are harmful, including attempts to focus on intuition where it unconsciously restimulates past events.

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The High Number Of Suicides After Electroshock

Monday, September 26th, 2022

A recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry [1] showed an astounding rate of suicide death for those who received electroconvulsive (shock) therapy (ECT), contrary to the claims of its proponents.

Here is the study’s conclusion: “The risk of suicide mortality 30 days and 1 year following treatment was similar in patients treated with an index course ECT and in a matched group. There was no evidence that an ECT course decreased the risk of death by suicide.”

The electroshock study utilized electronic medical record data from the Department of Veterans Affairs health system between 2000 and 2017 to include 5,157 index courses of ECT therapy, along with 10,097 matched controls who did not receive ECT. Index ECT usually refers to the initial phase of treatment in hospital to induce maximum response. The typical number of treatments is 6–12.

The study found the risk of suicide death was similar in patients treated with an index course ECT and in a matched group who were not given ECT. In the cohort, suicide deaths were: 138.65 per 10,000 in 30 days and 564.52 per 10,000 in 1 year. “ECT does not appear to have a greater effect on decreasing the risk for suicide than other types of mental health treatment provided to patients with similar risk,” the authors wrote.

Assertions by psychiatric organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association that ECT is a life-saving treatment is so misleading that it could constitute consumer fraud.

Between Tricare [DoD health insurance] and Veteran Affairs, the Department of Defense (DoD) spent more than $70 million dollars on electroshock treatment between 2010 and 2019. During this same period, there was a 46% increase in the number of veterans that were given ECT. [2]

The tragic expectation is that more patients will commit suicide after receiving electroshock. Psychiatrists and the FDA will blame this on their “illness” rather than failed treatment. [3]

Electroshock carries the risk of driving people to commit suicide. Patients sold on the fraudulent idea that the treatments correct a “chemical imbalance” or faulty chemical messengers in the brain become hopeless when those treatments fail them and go on to make fatal decisions about their lives.

There needs to be accountability for false claims made in defense of these treatments—better still, take them off the market when their risks are so high. Consumer fraud litigation should ensue in addition to any personal injury claims.

Vulnerable patients seeking mental health care deserve much, much better. Non-harmful practices should be made available to them.

Why Use Shock Treatment At All?

The barbaric and shameful use of shock treatment unfortunately has a lengthy history. ECT had its beginnings in early Roman times when people would place an electrical torpedo fish against their heads to rid themselves of headaches.

The purpose of ECT shock treatment is to cause convulsions and create brain damage in order to reduce one’s awareness of their troubles. Make no mistake, shock treatment is painful. Stick your finger in an electrical outlet if you doubt this. Shock treatment uses an anesthetic to numb the pain and render the patient unconscious. A muscle relaxant is administered, causing a virtual shutdown of muscular activity to reduce damage from the convulsions.

Notice that someone with troubles is already at a lower level of awareness. Pain is then what they are most aware and certain of. The psychiatrist is there to deliver more pain in the mistaken idea that this will cause the insane to be less insane. However, the certainty and awareness of pain which is delivered by such an impact is a non-self-determined certainty. Certainty delivered by force, pain, blows and shock eventually brings about only unconsciousness and the certainty of unawareness.

Today, psychiatry is not particularly interested in increasing awareness; they would rather blunt someone’s awareness in a misguided attempt to make a person less aware of their troubles.

Thus we see that ECT does not and never can cause an improvement in mental health, since it produces only the reduction of awareness.

Psychiatry’s brutal ECT can now be seen for what it really is: an attempt to overwhelm an individual, eventually rendering them unaware of their mental traumas and compromising any efforts to actually get better.

The real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness” and stigmatize unwanted behavior as “diseases,” using the psychiatric billing bible the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as their justification. The bottom line is that all psychiatric “treatments” are harmful.

Contact your local, state and federal representatives and urge them to ban ECT.

References:

[1] Bradley V. Watts, MD, MPH, Talya Peltzman, MPH, and Brian Shiner, MD, MPH, “Electroconvulsive Therapy and Death by Suicide,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Apr. 2022, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35421285/

[2] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/05/25/cchr-supports-veterans-against-electroshock-dod-spends-70m-on-shocking-minds/

[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2022/08/05/new-study-shows-high-number-of-suicides-after-electroshock/

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Are You Woke?

Monday, August 8th, 2022

“In an effort to raise awareness of social injustices, the woke Left has gotten Scrabble to ban 400 ‘offensive’ terms that refer to racial slurs, sexuality, and gender identity.”

[Washington Examiner, July 12, 2022]

Woke has evolving meanings due to rapidly changing social conditions and the speed of social media. It can also be used in a positive or negative sense.

[Past tense & past participle of wake, akin to Latin vegere to enliven.]

Examples:
A play on the word “awake”.
Spiritual and intellectual enlightenment; a higher sense of awareness.
A sudden understanding of what’s really going on.
A politically correct narrative.
Acutely aware of issues of social justice or injustice.
A state of intense self-realization induced by psychedelic drugs.
(Positive) Expressing admiration for someone who is au courant and in-the-know.
(Negative) Branding someone as pompous or stupid for being trendy, or for pretending to be of greater intelligence or awareness than they actually are.

Of course the psychiatric industry has its own take on the woke phenomenon. Those in the know call wokeism “Critical Social Justice Theory”, such as the woke doctrine of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and the scramble to find racism everywhere while insinuating that one’s mental health is at risk.

Interestingly enough, “woke mental health” has likely led to the Drug Enforcement Administration loosening its restrictions on prescriptions for Schedule II controlled drugs via telehealth appointments during a public health emergency. Such drugs previously required in-person physical evaluations. Nothing like a pandemic to increase the patient pool for psychiatric mental health care.

We call it “care” loosely. It isn’t really care; it’s coercive social control.

According to psychiatric thinking, the solution for everything from the most minor to the most severe personal problem is strictly limited to diagnosis with the fraudulent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), assigning a mental illness label, and prescribing a restrictive, generally coercive and costly range of harmful treatments, none of which have been shown to cure anything.

Ultimately, psychiatry must be eliminated from all social institutions and their coercive and unworkable methods should never be funded by the government. Contact your local, state and federal officials and let them know what you think about this.

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Scientists are testing a psychiatric treatment for broken heart syndrome

Monday, July 18th, 2022

I thought it was a joke, but these “scientists” are serious!

Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy — or broken heart syndrome — is the latest medical condition being coopted by the psychiatric industry, which would like to diagnose you and prescribe a course of psychiatric treatments for those conditions.

Now takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a real physical illness, a heart disease characterized by transient dysfunction and ballooning of the left ventricle of the heart. It has been observed mostly affecting elderly women and is often triggered by severe physical or emotional stress, such as a sudden illness, the loss of a loved one, a serious accident, or a natural disaster — hence the “broken heart” moniker.

But they now have research funding to try treating it with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is a form of psychotherapy that attempts to modify dysfunctional emotions, behaviors, and thoughts — by evaluating for the person, challenging the person’s behaviors, and getting the person to change those behaviors, often in combination with psychiatric drugs.

Granted, treating the emotional component of a physical illness is certainly a good move; the only problem is it’s a psychiatric move, which as we’ve said many times is open to distrust, especially if it leads to harmful and addictive mind-altering psychotropic drugs.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has criteria for labeling normal emotional disturbances as “mental illness.” For example, these are a few diagnoses which could be applied to someone experiencing anxiety as a result of cardiac disease:

* Adjustment disorder, With mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct
* High expressed emotion level within family
* Histrionic personality disorder
* Illness anxiety disorder

However, while medicine has advanced on a scientific path to major discoveries and cures, psychiatry has never evolved scientifically and is no closer to understanding or curing mental problems.

The DSM’s original purpose was aimed at rectifying psychiatry’s poor reputation among medical professionals by applying a veneer of medical terminology to mental and emotional symptoms in spite of the fact that none of the diagnoses are supported by objective clinical evidence of mental illness. This is why we distrust any so-called “psychiatric treatment” of an obvious physical disease, without first medically treating that physical disease.

Recommendations

Install in all psychiatric facilities a full complement of diagnostic equipment with which non-psychiatric medical doctors can use to locate underlying undiagnosed and untreated physical conditions.

None of the DSM mental disorders should be eligible for insurance coverage because they have no scientific, physical validation.

Contact your local, state and federal officials to express your viewpoints in this matter.

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Psychiatric Labels Are The Stigma

Monday, July 11th, 2022

In this Universe, all people run on the same common denominators (matter, energy, space, time, thoughts, location, form), but the interrelationships of these things and one’s personal experiences create unlimited combinations.

Never forget that a label is a convenience for communication, it isn’t the thing itself. Labels are a necessary thing in the field of communication. They are a symbol used to represent some real thing, such as one or more of these common denominators.

Labels only really become an issue when one confuses the real thing with the label and thinks they are the same.

Labels are also an obligatory element of psychiatric diagnoses. The psychiatric billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), is the standard handbook of “mental illnesses” as determined by a show of hands at the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

Through psychiatrists’ false diagnoses, stigmatizing labels, easy-seizure commitment laws, brutal, depersonalizing “treatments,” thousands of individuals are harmed and denied their inherent human rights.

Using the DSM, a psychiatrist need only label the patient with a “mental disorder”, prescribe a drug and bill the patient’s insurance or Medicaid. The psychiatrist with the DSM in hand can try various labels on the patient as if they were different sizes of apparel until he finds one that either fits the patient’s symptoms or comes close enough to allow him to bill the patient’s insurance.

With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and labeled them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. Even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific or medical validity to these “disorders.”

Why do we say psychiatric labels are stigmatizing?

Well, what is a stigma? A common definition is a mark or characteristic indicative of a history of a disease or abnormality. Is there a stigma associated with mental distress? First of all, the psychiatric manifestation known as “mental illness” is not a disease, it’s a symptom. And let’s face it, what a psychiatrist calls “abnormal” is just a label for something they don’t like.

The questions to ask are: Do any of these “disorders” or “mental illnesses” actually exist? Does the DSM have any relationship to a patient’s actual condition, or is it just a convenient and simplistic method of compartmentalizing symptoms without actually working to isolate the true cause of the patient’s real problems?

Since there are no clinical laboratory tests for these “diseases,” making lists of behaviors, applying medical-sounding labels to people who engage in them, then using the presence of those behaviors to prove they have the illness in question is scientifically meaningless.

Thus we call the DSM a fraudulent mechanism for falsely diagnosing symptoms as diseases so that a drug to suppress those symptoms, rather than cure them, can be prescribed and billed — making a patient for life, as the root cause has not been found and treated.

The real stigmatization is coming from those that benefit from labeling behaviors as diseases to be “treated” despite the complete lack of medical or biological evidence to support them.

Psychiatric labels themselves are the stigma.

Moreover, the campaign to “stop the stigma” of mental illness is a pharmaceutical marketing campaign.

Fraudulent diagnoses perpetrated by the DSM obscure the role of family, drug abuse, undiagnosed and untreated medical conditions, nutritional deficiencies, stress, illiteracy, and other factors contributing to mental distress. The result is often further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion.

Recommendation

Government, criminal, educational, judicial and other social agencies should not rely on the DSM and no legislation should use this as a basis for determining the mental state, competency, educational standard or rights of any individual. Contact your local, state and federal officials to express your viewpoint about this.

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