LATEST NEWS: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR SPECIAL ISSUE ON 'ANTI-CAPITALISM AND MENTAL HEALTH'

LATEST ISSUE, SPRING 2012

Latest Edition - Sneak Previews

No More Psychiatric Labels by Sami Timimi

The new Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM5) is soon due to be published. DSM is the modern ‘bible’ for diagnosis in psychiatry. Yet there is little or no evidence to support the idea that the categories used in DSM are either based on sound science or clinically helpful. So I decided earlier this year that it was time to start a campaign. I’ve called it: ‘No More Psychiatric Labels’. My arguments are mainly empirical, based on a review of the evidence. I thought it was important to demonstrate that it is the science that tells us that the system of psychiatric diagnostic is a bad idea. In summary, my review found that:

• Psychiatric diagnoses are neither reliable nor valid.

• Using psychiatric diagnosis does not aid treatment decisions.

• Long-term prognosis for mental health problems has got worse over the years.

• The use of psychiatric diagnosis increases stigma.

• Psychiatric diagnosis imposes Western beliefs about mental distress on other cultures.

• Alternative evidence-based models for organizing effective mental health care are available.

Psychiatric diagnoses are not reliable.

Validity refers to whether a particular diagnosis has a meaningful correspondence with something that exists objectively in the real, ‘natural’ world. For example, that the term ‘depression’ applies to a psychological and/or physiological process that can actually be identified, and that a similar process occurs in people all over the world afflicted with the condition.

The failure of scientific research to reveal any specific biological abnormality to identify a psychiatric diagnosis - or for that matter any physiological or psychological marker - is well recognised. Unlike the rest of medicine, which has developed diagnostic systems based on testable theories about the causes of illness, psychiatric diagnoses have established themselves simply through the voting rights of boards of psychiatrists who decide amongst themselves when a new diagnostic category is to be created.

In psychiatry, diagnoses are descriptions of sets of behaviours that often go together. By itself, a psychiatric diagnosis cannot tell you about the cause, the meaning, or the best treatment.

Challenging Psychiatric Coercion by Bob Sapey

During the 1980s I was an Approved Social Worker, and I cannot quite understand how so much power was invested in me. I now understand how little I knew and how little I needed to know in order to satisfy the authorities that appointed me.

Over the years since I have heard and read several first-hand accounts of the experience of ‘being sectioned’ and these have reinforced my concerns about coercion. But it was listening to Jacqui Dillon and Peter Bullimore a few years ago that convinced me that it was not only wrong to invest the authority to detain in social workers, but that it was also wrong to invest it in psychiatry.

Jacqui’s and Peter’s explanations of their experiences, along with so many stories from others in the Hearing Voices Network, simply made much more sense than the ideas constructed by pharmacological psychiatry. So in this article I want to question the professional legitimacy of social workers being involved in the detention and compulsory treatment of people struggling to recover from trauma.

Trains, Voices, Possible Narcoplexy Onset, I the Not Necessarily Devine, A New Theory Buds? By Matilda Melbert

There we were on a train, my son and I. Second row in, on the left. I was in the window seat. Behind my son, a man. In front of me, a lady in a pink coat, with pink nail varnish, on a pink mobile. Opposite us sat a man by the window. Behind him, on the first row, by the window, another man. I was aware of two ladies further up on our side and one lady further up at the end of the carriage, on the right. Well I do have SAS blood in me, ipso factso! Ridiculous, but a safety habit. Oh Bruce, where is the conveyor belt!

We needed the fifth stop. At the second, my son asked me, “Is this our stop?” I replied, “No.” Then a female voice boomed out in the carriage, “Where are you going to?”

I looked at my son to see if he’d heard it too. But he sat there, motionless, expressionless, staring ahead. I was comfortably devastated as I felt the prickles and sweat of anxiety begin. I thought, “Why now, and how will this pan out?”

http://twitter.com/asylumNW