The following was printed in the July 2013 issue of The Berean Call. The link to the original article is at the bottom, and that article has a wealth of information about the fraudulent nature of psychiatry.
Evolution News and Views, 5/8/13, "How a Scientific Field Can Collapse: The Case of Psychiatry" [Excerpts]:
Psychology has long struggled to be considered scientific, given the checkered history of its eccentric pioneers, like Freud and Jung. Each of the contradictory theories emerging from psychology has struggled to do better at prediction or explanation than the "folk psychology" ordinary people use to gauge the motivations and behaviors of their fellow human beings. And the recent cases of outright fraud among some of social psychology's leading lights (examples in the New York Times and Nature) have made the field suspect, some would say a laughingstock as science.
Psychiatry, though, was supposed to be better. Its practitioners had to earn an MD. It had a widely accepted, peer-reviewed guidebook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by its professional society, the American Psychiatric Association. With its focus on observable symptoms, presumably rooted in biology, it had all the trappings of science. The things being said about psychiatry now, though, on the eve of publication of its latest upgrade, the DSM-5, are revealing it to be a science in crisis-if it ever was a science at all.
DSM-5, [which came] out on May 22, is the latest edition of the official diagnostic "bible" for psychiatrists that had its genesis in 1952. DSM-5 removes some diagnoses, like Asperger's syndrome, reclassifies others, and adds a number of new conditions that are, to most of us, just weird: like "Skin Picking Disorder," "Sluggish Cognitive Tempo," and "Compulsive Hoarding." What about the new "Hypersexual Disorder"? Are psychiatrists just giving excuses for irresponsible behavior? Is psychiatry "cutting nature at its joints" or just manufacturing artificial pigeonholes?
According to Nick Craddock, professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University, also writing for New Scientist [says], "Not since Freud's pseudoscientific theories early last century has psychiatry claimed any broad theoretical basis for making sense of our normal and abnormal feelings, thinking and social behaviours--the complexities at the heart of being human." In other words, psychiatry never made it to scientific status in the first place. Its claims remain "atheoretical," he believes, even though he is optimistic its day will come.
David Dobbs's review in Nature of Gary Greenberg's new book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, is the most devastating critique of psychiatry as a science. Dobbs writes under the headline: "Psychiatry: a very sad story." He notes that a century ago, psychiatrists considered "masturbatory insanity" and "wedding night psychosis" as mental illnesses. That those categories were dropped and new ones added in the interim suggests psychiatry lacks scientific footing, and instead evolves according to cultural norms. Yet the APA vigorously defends DSM-5, partly because it relies on sales for revenue. Greenberg is not just an outsider. He participated in a clinical trial. "The process proved so convoluted that he wanted to apologize to one patient for the 'inadequacy, the pointlessness, the sheer idiocy of the exercise,'" Dobbs writes.
