Group Calls Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a Scam

VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA, February 24, 2013 (Press-News.org) The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has called psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders into question saying it is a fraud perpetrated on society for the sole purpose of enormously increasing their income base by labeling and drugging individuals, particularly helpless little children, for profit. Furthermore, they are calling this fraudulent labeling and drugging of little children a gross violation of human rights and child abuse.

The psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year in order to convince the public, legislators and the press that psychiatric disorders such as Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, etc., are medical diseases on par with verifiable medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. This is simply a way to maintain their hold on a $84 billion dollar-a-year psychiatric drug industry that is based on marketing and not science.

The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the book that contains names and descriptions of 374 so-called mental disorders (including everything from depression to "caffeine withdrawal disorder"). Doctors, psychiatrists and other medical and mental health practitioners use the DSM to diagnose patients. Each DSM mental disorder description carries a code that clinicians can use to substantiate claims for health insurance reimbursement.

Every psychiatric "expert" involved in writing the DSM standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses.

The fifth edition of DSM is planned for release in 2013. Since the announcement in 2007, it has been garnering continuous criticism for the widening inclusion of a new series of so-called behavioral addictions to shopping, sex, food, videogames, the Internet, eating at night and so on.

Brian Beaumont, President of the British Columbia chapter of CCHR said "The 'disorders' in the diagnostic manual are invented by psychiatrists and placed in the DSM for the sole purpose of increasing the numbers of diagnosis that can be made, thereby enormously increasing their income base (unearned cash) and the income of their natural allies, the drug companies. The whole process is done intentionally for the pure and simple purpose of labeling and drugging more and more adults and children for more and more profit. No other reason. The ADHD 'diagnosis' (label) has been one of the biggest money makers in psychiatry's whole history of invented disorders and is a 100 percent fraud".

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.

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