In just two decades, pointing out the pseudoscience of the DSM has gone from being an “extremist slur of radical anti-psychiatrists” to a mainstream proposition from the former chairs of both the DSM-3 and DSM-4 taskforces and the director of NIMH. In addition to the pathologizing of normal behaviors, another explanation for the epidemic the adverse effects of psychiatric medications is also evolving from radical to mainstream, thanks primarily to the efforts of Robert Whitaker and his book Anatomy of an Epidemic. While diagnostic expansionism and Big Pharma certainly deserve a large share of the blame for this epidemic, there is another reason.
In Memoriam: Paula Joan Caplan
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Paula Caplan, a prolific writer, playwright, and social activist, who for decades was one of the most prominent critics of psychiatry and its diagnoses, died on Wednesday from cancer. She was 74.
In 1996, Paula Caplan published a withering critique of the creation of DSM IV,
They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal. She had been a consultant to the DSM IV task force in the earlier stages of its work, and with this insider’s experience informing the book, she described a process for defining “normalcy” by the American Psychiatric Association that lacked scientific grounding and was, in many ways, an arbitrary drawing of boundary lines between the normal and abnormal. Her book, together with
Psychiatric Industry Aiming to Profit from Racism, Targets African Americans
January 28, 2021
Excerpted from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights Colorado website
WASHINGTON, DC, USA, January 28, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ While many Americans see the recent racial tension in this country as an opportunity to address the issue of racial injustice, the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry sees it as an opportunity to expand their reach – very profitably – into the African American community.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health groups, many funded by pharmaceutical companies, had already been arbitrarily asserting that African Americans are 20% more likely to experience serious mental health problems, and less likely to identify their own mental health problems, than the general population.
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