The future of mental health: radical changes ahead.

• Author: Baughman, Fred A., Jr.

Over the past 30 years, psychiatry has denigrated and jettisoned the human willpower-coping model and psychotherapy. It claims instead that all character flaws and emotional pains are "diseases," the result of biochemical imbalances of the brain, to be "balanced" with drugs. Were organized psychiatry not "one" with the pharmaceutical industry, with drugs to sell, the espousal of "biopsychiatry" and of one-dimensional drugging for illusory diseases might be difficult to understand.

In an editorial, "In Bed Together at the Market--Psychiatry and the Pharmaceutical Industry," psychiatrist Matthew Dumont urged that psychiatry declare itself an arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Typical of efforts to biologize and pathologize human emotions, the Yale University Anxiety Clinic announced active research programs in the "clinical neurobiology, psychopharmacology, etiology, genetics, and neuroen-docrinology" of anxiety.

In a quid pro quo relationship with American public schools, child psychiatry has made "learning disabilities," "brain diseases," and "special education" out of the illiteracy, alienation; and discomfiture that are the result of massive educational malfeasance. On the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 25% of fourth graders, 28% of eighth-graders, and 37% of 12th-graders were "proficient" readers. Child psychiatry urges its members to establish service contracts with schools. For-profit psychiatric hospitals place personnel in schools, targeting children by providing free assessments--a sham and prelude to drugging and hospitalization. Not only do they invent diseases, they invent entire epidemics.

Attention-deficit disorder (ADD)-invented, in-committee, at the American Psychiatric Association, but never proven to be a disease--has burgeoned, from 500,000 diagnoses in 1988 to 4,400,000 today. In drug company-sponsored physicians' seminars and parent-teacher presentations, ADD is portrayed as an actual disease, "like diabetes or cancer," and the drug Ritalin as "safe and non-addictive." These assertions are untrue and fraudulent.

Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration have acknowledged that ADD is not a disease or anything organic or biologic. The United Nations' International Narcotics Control Board has expressed concern to U.S. officials over the level of Ritalin consumption in America--90% of the world supply, up sixfold from 1990 through 1995.

Lewis Judd, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, urged inclusion in the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of a new "disease"-sub-syndromal symptomatic depression (SSD). He claimed that SSD affects 24,000,000 Americans and that it responds to Prozac. With no proof whatsoever that SSD is a disease, real and biological, it wasn't included--this time. No matter, child psychiatrists have found a new market for Prozac and for all psycho pharmaceuticals infants and toddlers.

Paula Caplan, author of They Say You're Crazy, observes that "rocketing costs result from ballooning definitions of mental disorders and by implication, necessary treatments." From 1987 to 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual...