Psychiatry is ruining more lives than ever before. The New York Times
recently showcased psychiatric “prevalence inflation” – a vast increase
in reported mental illness among teenagers who are encouraged to view
normal feelings as grave maladies requiring intervention.
Oxford University psychologist Lucy Foulkes
observed that school programs are “creating this message that teenagers
are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to
outsource them to a professional.” In an academic analysis published
last year, Foulkes explained that “awareness efforts” spur young people
“to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health
problems.” Filing such complaints “leads some individuals to experience a
genuine increase in symptoms, because labeling distress as a mental
health problem can affect an individual’s self-concept and behavior in a
way that is ultimately self-fulfilling.”
Like a New Yorker cartoon from the 1950s,
psychiatric diagnoses have become status symbols, propelled by snake oil
“social emotional learning” programs. University of Southern
California clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe warns that mental illness
labels have “become an identity marker that makes people feel special
and unique. That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety
is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who
they are and will be in the future.” Psychiatric labels can become a
ball-and-chain that people drag behind them. The New York Times found
that many young people were left worse off thanks to “mental health
interventions.” Endless classroom presentations on mental health spur
“co-rumination” – excessively talking about one’s problems – which
evokes memories of first dates from hell.
Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas
Szasz warned in the last century, “Psychiatrists manufacture mental
diagnoses the way the Vatican manufactures saints.” But protests by
Szasz and other dissident shrinks did nothing to prevent a sham
stampede.
The American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) now lists
more than 300 mental illnesses, five times as many as it specified in
the 1960s. Dr. Allen Frances, writing in Psychology Today,
warned that the latest DSM contained “many changes that seem clearly
unsafe and scientifically unsound” and is “likely to lead to massive
over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication.” After the DSM redefined
autism in the 1990s, the autism rate “quickly multiplied almost 100
fold.” Thanks to another DSM redefinition, the “number of American
children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold”
between 1993 and 2004, the New York Times reported.
Psychiatrist Laurent Mottron complained in 2023 that the latest version
of the DSM “is full of vague and trivial definitions and ambiguous
language that ensures more people fall into various, abnormal
categories.”
The DSM provides a road map for federal
law. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compels schools and
universities to provide “reasonable accommodation” to students who claim
to have a disability, physical or mental. Even before the pandemic, up
to 25% of students at top colleges were “classified as disabled, largely
because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety,
entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer
time to take exams,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018. Similar
string-pulling occurs for the rigorous entrance exams for New York
City’s elite high schools, where “white students… are 10 times as likely
as Asian students to have a [disability] designation that allows extra
time,” the New York Times reported.
Between 2008 and 2019, the number of
undergraduate students diagnosed with anxiety increased by 134%, 106%
for depression, 57% for bipolar disorder, 72% for ADHD, 67% for
schizophrenia, and 100% for anorexia, according to the National College
Health Assessment. Students’ struggles skyrocketed after COVID
shutdowns. A Boston University analysis of students on almost 400
campuses in 2022 found that “60% of the respondents met the qualifying
criteria for ‘one or more mental health problems, a nearly 50% increase
from 2013.’” But awarding endless psychiatric Purple Hearts will do
nothing to help college graduates adjust to the challenges of life
beyond the classroom.
I recognized that the DSM was becoming
unhinged after attending the 1986 annual meeting of the American
Psychiatric Association in Washington. Here are some riffs from a
Detroit News piece I wrote at that time:
The APA served attendees a batch of freshly-ordained mental
illnesses, including “premenstrual dysphoric disorder.” The APA says
symptoms of this “mental illness” include “irritability,” “marked
fatigue,” and “negative evaluation of self.” According to the APA’s
definition, a third of all women go crazy once a month.
The second newly ordained mental illness is
“self-defeating personality type,” previously known as common or
garden-variety masochism. The symptoms for this grade disorder include,
“complaints, directly or indirectly, about being unappreciated,”
“repeatedly turns down opportunities for pleasure,” and “remains in
relationships in which others… take advantage of him or her.” Bring on
the Valium!
The third “discovery” was guaranteed to
raise the APA’s popularity with trial lawyers. The APA tentatively
decided that anyone who persistently fantasizes about or actively forces
a non-consenting person to have sex suffers from “paraphilic rapism.”
In other words, a person would have to be nuts to rape somebody. As one
protester at the APA’s meeting declared, “Sexual assault is a crime –
not a mental disorder.” The Committee of Women of the APA said the new
category would “provide an instant insanity plea for anyone charged with
rape.”
The redefinition of rape epitomizes
psychiatry’s view of crime: no one is responsible for anything and
psychiatrists should have supervision over everything. The big hero at
the APA’s convention was Jack Hinckley, father of John Hinckley, who
announced he was launching a campaign to increase public support for
psychiatry. (His son was seeing a psychiatrist before he shot President
Reagan, but APA members would rather not talk about that.) The
psychiatrist introducing Hinckley, Sr., spoke movingly about the
“tragedy that struck the Hinckley family” – with no thought of a nation
that was almost robbed of its elected leader.
The APA’s new mental illnesses will provide
shrinks with lucrative new court “expert witness” opportunities. One
woman already successfully used premenstrual syndrome as an “insanity”
defense for murdering her husband, and PMS is now being used as a
defense in child abuse cases. This is progress?
If shrinks only cleaned out people’s
wallets, then they would be no more harmful than your average
politician. But psychiatrists nowadays routinely rely on mind-numbering
drugs and mind-shattering electric shock treatments. Some mental
patients are developing Parkinson’s disease symptoms as a result of
years of heavy medication. Electric shock “therapy” – aside from being a
terrifying experience – sometimes causes permanent memory loss, thus
making it harder for a patient to handle reality.
We have new mental illnesses not because of
new breakthroughs in understanding the mind, but because psychiatrists
want more money and more power over the rest of us. Shrinks generally
have a poor batting average for curing known mental problems – but that
has not stopped them from creating new “illnesses” that supposedly they
alone can treat. But a con artist with an M.D. is still a con artist.
***
My carping did nothing to slow the
hucksters. In 2019, the American Psychological Association officially
designated traditional masculinity as a de facto mental illness. Their
new guidelines specifically state that “stoicism” and other traits are
“on the whole, harmful.” Did that make Marcus Aurelius spin in his
grave? Apparently, instead of toughing out challenges, people are
supposed to spend their lives whimpering to shrinks and getting
appropriately drugged. But the Food and Drug Administration is a shill
for Big Pharma and is unlikely to expose or admit the long-term harm
from drugs that can partially numb minds.
Psychiatrists have helped some individuals
better understand themselves and deal more deftly with everyday
reality. But bogus mental illnesses have turned millions of healthy
Americans into “mental patients,” according to Dr. Allen Frances. That
debacle explains why Thomas Szasz crusaded against the “therapeutic
state” and the “medicalization of everyday life.”
But this peril also profoundly endangers
freedom. The profusion of new diagnostic labels encourages people to
view themselves as psychologically fragile. Actually, the Americans with
Disabilities Act tacitly rewards people who demand “reasonable
accommodations” because they are depressed or anxious. Those incentives
create a downward politico-psychological spiral. Besides, if you’re
reading this website, you’re at risk of being designated – i.e., found
guilty – of DSM category 313.81, Oppositional Defiant Disorder. One
tell-tale trait of that mental illness: “Often argues with authority
figures.” Would my sarcastic tweets suffice to convict me on that
charge?
Therapists are hollowing out the American
character, generation by generation. What do they offer in lieu of the
stoicism they deride? Unfortunately, there is no DSM category for people
suffering from a “Missing Bullshit Alarm.” Maximizing the number of
people labeled as psychologically fragile or damaged becomes an
entitlement program for demagogues riding to the rescue. A century ago,
H.L. Mencken observed, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety—by
menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.” And the more panicky people become, the more gullible they
will be.
