Never mentioned is the idea that people who are diagnosed with mental illness have statutory and Constitutional Rights as a person with a disability. Psychiatrists seem to think they are above the laws of man. One psychiatrist told me "I don't have time to read the Constitution."
This essay treats irrational arguments equally to rational arguments. Logic does not enter into the discussion.
[From the article]
Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world. [. . .]
it’s not even that drug companies and the psychiatric establishment have some kind of moral or political stake in these arrangements—that they’re in the game in order to protect the status quo. They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money. They invented a disease so that they could sell the cure.[. . .]
the increase in the number of people who are given a diagnosis of depression suggests that what has changed is not the number of people who are clinically depressed but the definition of depression, which has been defined in a way that includes normal sadness.[. . .]
The discovery of the remedy creates the disease. [. . .]
Donald Klein, of Columbia University, who was one of the key figures in the transformation of psychiatry to a biologically based practice.[. . .]
Kirsch concludes that since antidepressants have no more effectiveness than sugar pills, the brain-chemistry theory of depression is “a myth.”[. . .]
Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless?[. . .]
critics who, like Greenberg, accuse it of turning deviance into a disorder, and of confusing health with conformity. [. . .]
Homosexuality, originally labelled a sociopathic personality disorder, was eliminated from the D.S.M. in 1973, partly in response to lobbying by gay-rights groups.[. . .]
Between 1968 and 1981, Valium was the most frequently prescribed medication in the Western world. In 1972, stock in its manufacturer, Hoffmann-La Roche, traded at seventy-three thousand dollars a share.[. . .]
thalidomide, which was prescribed as a sedative, caused birth defects.[. . .]
D.S.M.-II listed a hundred and eighty-two diagnoses; the current edition, D.S.M.-IV-T.R., lists three hundred and sixty-five.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/01/100301crat_atlarge_menand
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