Side Effects May Include - What's Wrong With Modern Psychiatry?
Christopher Lane is not a psychiatrist; he’s an English professor specializing in Victorian literature and intellectual history. But he knows as much as many psychiatric professionals do about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM — often described as “psychiatry’s bible.” Lane has researched the manual and the process by which new disorders are added to it. What he’s discovered has made him a critic of much of modern psychiatric theory and practice.
Six years ago Lane began to hear from his students at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, that many of them were on psychiatric drugs. They would come to his office to ask for extensions on their assignments, explaining that they were suffering from anxiety or depression but were on medication for it. He had just published Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England, for which he had studied the transition from Victorian psychiatry, out of which psychoanalysis was born, to contemporary psychiatry, with its intense focus on biomedicine and pharmacology. He was already skeptical about the emergence in 1980 of dozens of new mental disorders in the DSM-III, the third edition of the manual. Among these new ailments were the curious-sounding “social phobia” and “avoidant personality disorder.” Lane wanted to know how and why those new disorders had been approved for inclusion and whether they were really bona fide illnesses.
He flew to San Francisco to speak with Mitchell Wilson, who’d written about the creation of the DSM-III years earlier, and Wilson turned over to Lane a cache of documents, including unpublished memos from the archives of the American Psychiatric Association [apa]. Obtaining the papers was itself something of a coup, as researchers had tried unsuccessfully for years to learn how the DSM was updated and transformed. Lane was dogged in seeking answers, and the apa eventually relented and gave him access to its archives.
Lane was troubled by what he found: evidence of drug-company influence, especially in the promotion of “panic disorder” by Pharmacia & Upjohn, maker of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. He also uncovered extensive evidence of questionable research (sometimes involving just one patient), sloppy thinking, dismissal of nonmedical approaches to psychiatric problems, and a degree of inventiveness with terms and symptoms that struck him as playing fast and loose with the facts.
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/435/side_effects_may_include
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