Psychiatric Manual Diagnosis To Justify Drugging Small Children

by Heidi Stevenson

21 March 2010

The day is rapidly approaching when your child could be diagnosed with a mental illness for having an active imagination or bugging someone else enough to complain. The proposed Disgnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) includes the new diagnosis of Psychosis Risk Syndrome⁽¹⁾. If your child should ever have an attenuated (mild) delusion, hallucination, or disorganized speech, you might start being pressured to give your child a heavy-duty mind-destroying drug.

Isn't part of being a child imagining things? Like imaginary friends or being a hero or a cowboy or able to fly? Those things qualify as delusions. What exactly is "disorganized speech"? What's a hallucination—an imaginary friend? What's a delusion—thinking you might grow up to be president? Who gets to decide?

Think this is extreme, that no one would actually do such a thing? It's in the works right now. Diagnosis could be made if a child's behavior cannot be described by another diagnosis. The words used by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) are:

Characteristic attenuated psychotic symptoms are not better explained by another DSM-V diagnosis. --OR-- Clinical criteria for any DSM-V psychotic disorder have never been met.

So, if your child acts differently from some arbitrary standard and no other diagnosis fits, then your child must have Psychosis Risk Syndrome—and, of course, needs to be drugged.

Notice the word "attenuated" in describing these symptoms. Attenuated means diluted. In this context, it implies that these guys are trying to make any behavior a diagnosable disorder. What if your child suddenly decides that it's fun to jump off the porch and say, "Whee! I'm flying!" Hmmm...looks like an attenuated delusion. Better drug him.

In Psychology Today, Dr. Allen Frances has spoken out against the proposed diagnosis in the upcoming DSM-5⁽²⁾. He wrote:

"Psychosis Risk Syndrome" fails badly on all three counts: 1) it would misidentify many teenagers who are not really at risk for psychosis; 2) the treatment they would most often receive (atypical antipsychotic medication) has no proven efficacy; but, 3) it does have definite dangerous complications

The diagnosis is actually in use already. As Dr. Frances points out,

Even in the most expert of hands (ie in very highly selected research clinics), at least two of three people who get the diagnosis do not go on to become psychotic.

If it seems unlikely that Psychosis Risk Syndrome will actually make it to DSM-5, consider reading the justification given on the APA's website⁽¹⁾. Under the tab, "Rationale", it says:

Young people at risk for later manifestation of a psychotic disorder can be identified. It has been established in follow-back studies that early signs and symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, are present years before diagnosis is established [e.g., Haffner's longitudinal study] and can be predicted even in infants [Walker's home movies study]. However, it is the work of multiple groups of investigators in several countries over the past 15 years that has produced evidence for the effectiveness of detecting at risk individuals.

It goes on in the same tone, making claims that, as Dr. Frances makes clear, are simply untrue. Young people at risk cannot be readily identified. So why is the APA so determined to add this spurious diagnosis?

The bottom line is that the creation of Psychosis Risk Syndrome serves one purpose alone. It brings more people into the Big Pharma drugs program. By creating a new diagnosis for a nonexistent condition, thousands and millions of young people can be brought into the medical system and become utterly reliant on it. Once given antipsychotic drugs, the human being who has been transformed into a patient can expect to develop disabling, humiliating, and often excruciatingly painful tics and abnormal movements. The likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome is enormous, as a huge percentage of patients gain weight at an astounding rate. These drugs function by, as Dr. Peter Breggin has written, doing chemical lobotomies—literally destroying brain tissue.

Beware doctors bearing diagnoses of mental disorders. There is only one mainstream way of treating them: drugs. When they have bad effects, then the treatment of choice is...more drugs.

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