APA's Latest DSM-5 Basically Defines Everyone as Mentally ill (Say Goodbye to Your Guns)

(Be The Media) – The soon-to-be-released DSM-5’s latest guidelines for professionals in the filed of psychiatry is now in its final stages and is due for publication on May 22nd, 2013. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is the planned 5th edition of American Psychiatric Association (APA). To make a long story short, basic every human emotion and medical condition is now being classified as a “mental disorder” of some sort.

Dr. Allen Frances, M.D., former chair of the DSM-IV Task Force and current professor emeritus at Duke, says this is the saddest moment in his 45-year career of studying, practicing and teaching psychiatry. Frances describes the DSM-5 as “deeply flawed containing many changes that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound.”

“My best advice to clinicians, to the press, and to the general public – be skeptical and don’t follow DSM 5 blindly down a road likely to lead to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication,” says Frances.

Fear, anxiety, grief, frustration, excitement are now deemed to be “mental disorders”, which are obviously treated with prescription drugs brought to you by big pharma. Here are some examples of what’s to come:

1)    Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder: DSM-5 will turn temper tantrums into a mental disorder — a puzzling decision based on the work of only one research group.

2)    Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder, thus medicalizing and trivializing our expectable and necessary emotional reactions to the loss of a loved one and substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion, and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.

3)    The everyday forgetting characteristic of old age will now be misdiagnosed as Minor Neurocognitive Disorder, creating a huge false positive population of people who are not at special risk for dementia.

4)    First time substance abusers will be lumped in definitionally in with hard-core addicts despite their very different treatment needs and prognosis and the stigma this will cause.

5)    DSM-5 has created a slippery slope by introducing the concept of Behavioral Addictions that eventually can spread to make a mental disorder of everything we like to do a lot. Watch out for careless over diagnosis of Internet and sex addiction and the development of lucrative treatment programs to exploit these new markets.

6) The changes in the DSM 5 definition of Autism will result in lowered rates- 10% according to estimates by the DSM 5 work group, perhaps 50% according to outside research groups. The problem is the misleading promises that it will have no impact on rates of disorder or of service delivery. School services should be tied more to educational need, less to a controversial psychiatric diagnosis created for clinical (not educational) purposes and whose rate is so sensitive to small changes in definition and assessment.

7) First time substance abusers will be lumped in definitionally in with hard core addicts despite their very different treatment needs and prognosis and the stigma this will cause.

8) DSM 5 has created a slippery slope by introducing the concept of Behavioral Addictions that eventually can spread to make a mental disorder of everything we like to do a lot. Watch out for careless overdiagnosis of internet and sex addiction and the development of lucrative treatment programs to exploit these new markets.

9) DSM 5 obscures the already fuzzy boundary been Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the worries of everyday life. Small changes in definition can create millions of anxious new ‘patients’ and expand the already widespread practice of inappropriately prescribing addicting anti-anxiety medications. 

10) DSM 5 has opened the gate even further to the already existing problem of misdiagnosis of PTSD in forensic settings.

The insanity of this psychiatric hokum, however, is that now even medical conditions are seen as mental disorders. These proposals will now grant the application of a mental health diagnosis for all illnesses, even “established general medical conditions or disorders” like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and, get this, even Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Basically, if you’re thinking too much about the fact that you can’t poo, you’re demented and need to pop some meds.You can’t make this stuff up. 

All it takes is that a clinician believes the patient is devoting too much time to their symptoms and that their life has become “subsumed” by health concerns and preocupations, or that their response to distressing somatic symptoms is “excessive” or “disproportionate”, or their coping strategies “maladaptive.”

Dr. Frances is a staunch supporter of gun control, however. He, along with everyone else on the left, has wasted no time to ask for more guntrol, while those on the right wasted no time to introduce the mental health red herring. Psychiatry will, thus, be used to deprive people from their Second Amendment rights, as anyone can be labelled mentally ill.

“We must go much further. No civilian—mentally ill or not—ever needs or deserves access to a military-style assault weapon that is capable of killing dozens of people in a few short minutes. The pleasure that some gun enthusiasts seem to take in owning and firing these weapons is not an inalienable constitutional right deserving second amendment protection,” says Frances.

As a result of all this insanity, millions of people with normal grief, gluttony, distractibility, worries, reactions to stress, the temper tantrums of childhood, the forgetting of old age, and ‘behavioral addictions’ will soon be mislabeled as psychiatrically sick and given inappropriate treatment. DSM 5 will also give drug companies running room to continue their disease mongering and the government an excuse to take away people’s right to own guns

Source:

http://dxrevisionwatch.com/2012/05/26/somatic-symptom-disorder-could-capture-millions-more-under-mental-health-diagnosis/

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201212/dsm-5-is-guide-not-bible-ignore-its-ten-worst-changes

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