Is your child sucking his thumb to fall asleep or throwing tantrums over nothing? Do you bite your nails or sleepwalk? Do you scratch yourself a little too often? Does your boss think you are inefficient? Are you a collector and compulsively accumulate useless things?
Attention, le trouble psychiatrique vous guette !
A few years ago, what could possibly pass for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), is now becoming afull-blown psychiatric disorder.
In fact, at the present time and regardless of your symptoms, the DSM allows the psychiatrist to classify you in one of the categories of mental disorders that are referenced there. You will be able to benefit from prescriptions of psychotropic drugs reimbursed by the social security! What could be better?
The DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It serves as a real reference for psychiatrists in order to make a diagnosis. And it is clear that since its conception, the content of this true "bible" of psychiatry has evolved in a disturbing way.
The DSM-I, the first edition of this manual, was published in 1958. He then counts 60 mental disorders. The DSM-II published in 1968 lists 145 of them. In the 1970s in the United States, psychiatry was frowned upon by the medical profession; yet the dream of every psychiatrist was to be considered a "doctor" and to be able to practice real medicine. For this reason, in 1980, in the DSM-III, the APA decided to carefully define "medical conditions" that would make it possible to determine mental disorders with precision in order to assimilate them to real diseases. Diseases with prescriptions. In a revised version in 1987, the DSM-III-R, many criteria and syndromes were further refined and the number of disorders rose to 259. This last manual is more empirical and detached from any psychoanalytical theory. The APA decided that psychiatric diagnoses would now be purely biological and based on the theory of chemical imbalance. Invented in 1965, this theory attempts to explain that depression could result from a chemical imbalance in the brain with a lack or excess of certain neurotransmitters.
According to Dr. Schildkraut: "If psychotropic drugs change the level of certain chemicals, then mental illness must be caused by too high or too low levels of these chemicals. We can see that this is a totally reversed reasoning, but it is enough to give the DSM-III an "air" of science... It thus marks a real break with the previous editions. We are moving towards the progressive medicalization of psychiatry.
Since then, psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry have continued to promote this theory of chemical imbalances to the medical world and the general public.
However, on closer inspection, no so-called "scientific" study has really proven the existence of these chemical imbalances. Even more importantly, there are dozens of studies that prove that these imbalances do not exist. In any case, they are not measurable!
The DSM-IV published in 1994 recognizes 410 psychiatric disorders. The second most recent version used is the DSM-IV-TR, a minor revision of DSM-IV released in 2000. This edition extends and deepens the work begun with the DSM-III.
The DSM-V published in May 2013 in the United States contains 297 official mental disorders. Some disorders have been removed, but to the delight of the pharmaceutical industry, many other diagnoses have been expanded. The report was to be translated into French within months of its publication.
Allen Frances, former professor of psychiatry at Duke University, oversaw the DSM-IV writing team. For several years, he has railed against the drift of the latest version of the DSM-V. Grief is transformed into a major depressive disorder if it lasts too long (more than 2 months); however, we know that the length of time it takes to accept grief can vary from one person to another. Tantrums become "explosive mood dysregulation disorder", memory loss in the elderly becomes a mild neurocognitive disorder, illness anxiety becomes a somatic symptom disorder, gluttony is called binge eating, etc.
So, are we all sick?
Another option: would the slightest daily emotion be medicalized in order to increase the field of prescription of antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs?
There is really something to wonder about when you consider that the DSM itself states, "Although this manual provides a classification of mental disorders, it must be acknowledged that there is no definition that delineates the concept of mental disorder with precision.
Where are we going if psychiatrists themselves are unable to define what a mental disorder is?
While physicians rely on specific criteria and symptoms to diagnose an illness, this is not at all the case in psychiatry. Indeed, even today, there is no precise model or criterion for diagnosing a mental illness with certainty. If doctors and psychiatrists are honest, they must recognize that no test can truly measure the chemical state of a living person's brain and no physiological cause supports a psychiatric diagnosis.
Yet prescriptions for psychotropic drugs are only increasing. Antidepressants and anxiolytics have never been prescribed as much, regardless of age, since even very young children are drugged with methylphenidate hydrochloride (Concerta - Quasym - Ritalin or Rilatine). It is a molecule of the amphetamine class, which are psychostimulant substances similar to cocaine and used in raves ("ecstasy").
Nothing stops prescribers. However, the alarming side effects of these chemical substances are excessively numerous: violent outbursts (many serial killers are on psychotropic drugs), suicide, persistent depression, etc. Not to mention the addiction that these drugs create.
Even some eminent psychiatrists and other physicians agree that these abuses are taking place.
All of this is to say that the terms "psychiatric disorder" or "mental disorder" are very poorly defined and that the boundary between normality and abnormality is excessively blurred. Moreover, these boundaries can widen or narrow at the whim of certain associations and pharmaceutical interests. Totally unclear and obscure. The diagnosis of mental illness thus results from the mere "judgment" of a psychiatrist,a judgment based solely on purely subjective criteria. In short, a simple psychiatrist's opinion can result in a person being committed to a psychiatric facility or interfere in many areas of private life, such as regulating parental custody, civil rights, or affecting job searches.