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Mercnbeth -> It's NOT your fault. (1/1/2006 5:10:35 PM)
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Psychiatry is becoming a growth industry. The APS (American Psychiatric Association) is doing their best to make sure that anything you do - isn't your fault. Successful, the ultimate result of their efforts may be the elimination of prisons and long stay psychiatric hospitals. With any time spent watching TV, you will surly encounter the "disease du jour", being "sold" with the appropriate pill cure. It's even easier to market the concept when you create the disease and base it upon common human experience.
quote:
Psychiatry's sick compulsion: turning weaknesses into diseases
By Irwin Savodnik, Irwin Savodnik is a psychiatrist and philosopher who teaches at UCLA.
The association specializes in turning ordinary human frailty into disease. In the last year, ads have been appearing in psychiatric journals about possible treatments for shyness, a "syndrome" not yet officially recognized as a disease. You can bet it will be in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV, published by the association. As it turns out, the association has been inventing mental illnesses for the last 50 years or so. The original diagnostic manual appeared in 1952 and contained 107 diagnoses and 132 pages, by my count. The second edition burst forth in 1968 with 180 diagnoses and 119 pages. In 1980, the association produced a 494-page tome with 226 conditions. Then, in 1994, the manual exploded to 886 pages and 365 conditions, representing a 340% increase in the number of diseases over 42 years.
In an attempt to excuse behavior, psychiatry has the potential of becoming the next religion. Socially unacceptable behavior is the result of a disease. It would be immoral to prosecute (persecute?) a "sick person. It's stated in the article...
quote:
It's a natural step from using social and political standards to create a psychiatric diagnosis to using them to influence public policy. Historically, that influence has appeared most dramatically in the insanity defense. Remember Dan White, the man who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978? Or John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan in 1981? Or Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon? White, whose psychiatrist came up with the "Twinkie defense" — the high sugar content of White's favorite junk food may have fueled his murderous impulses — was convicted and paroled after serving five years, only to commit suicide a year later.
The erosion of personal responsibility is, arguably, the most pernicious effect of the expansive role psychiatry has come to play in American life. It has successfully replaced huge chunks of individual accountability with diagnoses, clinical histories and what turn out to be pseudoscientific explanations for deviant behavior.
Entire Article: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/editorials/la-op-psych1jan01,1,436152.story?track=mostemailedlink&coll=la-newsaol-headlines&ctrack=1&cset=true
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