THE QUACKERY OF LABELS:

Mandated Mental Health Parity;
Coverage from Peanut Butter Phobia to Nose-Picking

LOS ANGELES, June 18th /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following is commentary by Jan Eastgate, president, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International:

Today, mankind is at a watershed of scientific endeavour. Geneticists unlock the human genome. Astronomers map planets in distant solar systems. The Internet brings the world instantly to everyone's doorstep. And what have psychiatry and psychology brought us?

Psychologists say they can now diagnose your mental state by... the colour of your car: "Owners of pastel coloured cars such as lilac, lime and beige are eight times more likely to have suffered depression than people driving blue or silver ones."

Psychiatrists have labelled everything as a mental illness from nose picking (Rhinotillexomania) to altruism, lottery and playing with "action dolls." Happy people are certifiably insane. Psychiatrist Robert Foster, says, "Happy people are out of tune with reality - they simply do not see the ugliness of the world around them or they wouldn't go through life with such a naively cheery attitude."

While mental difficulties do exist, psychiatrists would have you believe that insurance should be mandated to cover treatment of all 374 mental disorders in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) at a cost of more than $23 billion to taxpayers over the next 10 years. With DSM-V and mandated mental health parity both on the horizon, those costs will skyrocket out of control.

Psychiatrists market the spurious idea that DSM disorders such as spelling, written expression and mathematics disorders, caffeine withdrawal, and "Phase of Life Problem" are as legitimate as cancer and diabetes. By lobbying heavily for the political enforcement of these diagnoses through mandated mental health parity, psychiatry ensures that millions of lives conform to its yardstick for 'treatment.'

Although these "disorders" could be considered laughable, if mandated mental health parity passes, it's psychiatry which will be laughing - all the way to the bank. None of the disorders can be medically proven. According to the Washington Times' Insight Magazine, "If there is no way to prove that a single psychiatric mental illness exists in life or death, how does one diagnose something that doesn't exist and then require insurance companies to pay for it?"

This is diagnostic fraud. And like virtually all fraud, money is involved. Big money. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) publishes the DSM. In 1993, sales of DSM grossed the APA more than $22 million. DSM-IV sales were estimated at $40 million, while DSM-V is predicted to reap $80 million. Add "parity" to the mix and the profits will be even higher as more and more practitioners grab for this billing bible to make a buck.

Consider these "disorders" that could make it into DSM-V: One in eight people apparently despair at choosing a dinner menu and suffer "Kitchen Performance Anxiety." Eat peanut butter and you may experience Arichibutryophobia -- the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

This comes at a time when DSM is under increasing attack for its lack of scientific veracity. Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, authors of Making Us Crazy, found that DSM as a clinical tool is "unreliable and therefore of questionable validity as a classification system."

Dr. Thomas Dorman, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, says, "In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of 'disease,' formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough."

Enormous pressure is being brought to bear on politicians by psychiatry's alarmist statements and statistics about the state of mental health in our nation. However, parity is not a problem of battling stigma against or providing desperately needed services for the mentally ill, or even of disparity between physical and mental medicine. Parity is simply an initiative by psychiatrists to achieve enhanced prestige, power, diagnostic influence and ultimately monetary reward for psychiatrists.

This underlying agenda and immense costs of this initiative are being buried in rhetoric that is artfully designed to play on the sympathies of concerned politicians.
U.S. Newswire 18th June 2002

PHILLIP DAY COMMENT: Although nothing should surprise us any more, eyebrows are certainly starting to twitch at psychiatry's latest cash cow, in the form of the coming DSM V, the industry's newly updated diagnostic manual. But then, it's business as usual with psychiatry, this fraudulent science that seeks to pathologise every quirk of human behaviour into a mental disorder, each coming naturally with the obligatory insurance billing code.

For a frank and eye-opening account of psychiatry's past and present human rights abuses, please obtain a copy of my new book The Mind Game. If any member of your family or anyone you know suffers from a 'mental disorder', please reach for the good news contained in my new release. Don't be taken in by pseudo-science and impressive sounding diagnoses. Maybe it's all just Fictitious Disorder Syndrome.