7.0 What They Say:
“Untreated mental illnesses that grow out of a terrorist
assault can be widespread and devastating. Treated, they are
eminently curable.”
7.1 What They Don’t Say:
There is no scientific evidence proving that any mental
disorder is “eminently curable,” largely because there are
no known causes of it. In 1995, psychiatrist and former director
of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Rex Cowdry,
admitted that as for mental illness, “We do not know the causes.
We don't have methods of ‘curing’ these [mental] illnesses
yet.”46 Indeed, in 1994, psychiatrist
Norman Sartorius, president of the World Psychiatric Association
(1996-1999), declared at a meeting of a congress of the Association
of European Psychiatrists, “The time when psychiatrists considered
that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future
the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.”47
Professor Yvonne McEwan, advisor to the U.S. government
after the Oklahoma City bombing, said the booming profession
[psychology] was at best useless and at worst highly destructive
to victims seeking help: “Professional counseling is largely
a waste of time and does more to boost the ego of the counselor
than to help the victim….” “The rights of the victims are
being sacrificed to keep counselors in jobs.”48
In 1996, a team of psychiatrists at Whitechurch hospital
in Cardiff, Wales, who monitored the recoveries of 110 burn
victims, found, “Victims who are made to talk about the pain
and shock of their accidents are three times more likely to
suffer long-term problems than those who receive no counseling.”49
A Boston study on the long-term effects of aviation crash
survivors found that “The psychological well-being of airplane
crash survivors compared to air travelers who have never been
involved in any type of aviation accident or crash was much
better on all the levels measured. The crash survivors scored
lower…on emotional distress than the flyers who hadn’t been
in an accident.” “...Among the survivors who did not want
or need counseling immediately following the crash, many appeared
to be the least troubled by the crash experience and reported
the least amount of distress among the survivors.”50
An editorial in the October 2000, British Medical Journal
noted several studies showing that Debriefing Psychology methods
don’t help and, in fact, may harm. Justin Kenardy, an associate
professor in clinical psychology, cited studies that questioned
the validity and workability of psychological trauma counseling.51
8.0 What They Say:
“Medical science is in an era where we can accurately
diagnose mental illnesses and treat those afflicted so that
they can be productive.”52 Mental
Health Parity should be broadened to include all disorders
covered by the APA Diagnostic & Statistical Manual for
Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).
8.1 What They Don’t Say:
Psychiatric “disorders” can neither be reliably, nor accurately
diagnosed. On the contrary, evidence points to the fact that
there isn’t any reliability in psychiatric or psychological
diagnoses. This is because it subjectively gives opinions
about symptoms—not diseases—and based on a checklist, denotes
what mental disorder the person has.
Professor Stuart A. Kirk (who holds the Marjorie Crump
Chair in the School of Public Policy and Social Research at
UCLA, and has served as Dean of the School of Social Welfare
at the State University of New York, Albany) and Herb Kutchins
(Professor in the School of Health and Human Services at California
State University) wrote “The Myth of the Reliability of DSM,”
published in The Journal of Mind and Behavior in 1994. This
cites study after study of there being no reliability in using
the DSM for diagnosing mental illness. The authors
state: “The reliability of psychiatric diagnosis as it has
been practiced since at least the late 1950s is not good”
and “...the latest versions of DSM [DSM-IV]
as a clinical tool are unreliable and therefore of questionable
validity as a classification system.”53
In their 1997 book, Making Us Crazy, Kirk and Kutchins
provide a clear cut warning of having any legislation based
on the reliability of DSM: “If DSM is unreliable,
it cannot be used to distinguish mental disorders from other
human problems. In practical terms, this means that many people
will be diagnosed with the wrong disorder and that clinicians
will frequently disagree about which one is correct. It means
that some people who do not have any mental disorder (although
they have other kinds of difficulties) will be inappropriately
labeled as mentally ill and those who may have a mental disorder
will not have it recognized. It means that reimbursement systems
tied to diagnostic categories will be misused.”54
Tana Dineen, Canadian psychologist and author of Manufacturing
Victims, says that adding up the total reported number
of sufferers of 17 different disorders alone, “the number
of Americans who are mentally ill reached 560,950,000—more
than double the population of the country!”55
Robert J. Franciosi, Research Fellow of The Goldwater Institute
says that “Advocates of mental health parity often cite contradictory
statistics regarding the need for and cost of mental health
parity….The Oklahoma Psychiatric Association claims that the
average person faces a 22% to 33% chance of developing mental
illness; that heart attack victims have an 18% chance of developing
major depression; and that those hospitalized with a major
medical illness have a 20% to 40% chance of being depressed.
The most common drugs prescribed in Oklahoma are for treating
depression and anxiety. Yet at the same time, backers claim
the cost of a mental health parity mandate is negligible.
Robert J. Franciosi points out that statistics are as high
as 48% of Americans “will suffer from a mental illness in
their lifetime” but “many of the complaints found by the surveys
are normal, temporary reactions to the ordinary stresses of
living, and do not necessarily require treatment.”56
9.0 What They Say:
Psychiatric disorders are “brain disorders” which, “like
heart disease and diabetes, are legitimate medical illnesses.
Research shows there are genetic and biological causes for
psychiatric disorders, and they can be effectively treated.”
Therefore, equal insurance coverage should be given to mental
health in the same way as it is given physical disease.
9.1 What They Don’t Say:
There is no scientific proof that mental illness or disorder
has genetic or biological causes. Psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen,
clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,
wrote in 2000: “We do not yet have proof either of the cause
or the physiology for any psychiatric diagnosis. In every
instance where such an imbalance was thought to have been
found, it was later proven false.…No claim of a gene for a
psychiatric condition has stood the test of time, in spite
of popular misinformation.”57
Review any studies that purport there is a biological cause
for mental disorder or “brain scans” that make it so, and
you will find the words, “suggests,” “suspect,” “believe,”
“may,” “could,” “think,” “probably,” “perhaps,” “argue” and
every other conceivable verbal safety-valve possible. Theories
perpetually stay theories; never move any closer to facts
or laws. Prediction—a key expectation of a true science—is
impossible. “Clinical intuition” is how Professor of Psychology
at Boston University, Margaret Hagen, coins it.58
Furthermore, close scrutiny of the current brain scans being
touted around to “prove” that mental illness is a “neurobiological
brain disease,” and you will find that the studies fail to
or insufficiently mention that the research subjects had been
on psychiatric drugs, which do alter brain chemistry.
Even the World Health’s 2001 Mental Health Report refers
to the biological and genetic causes in terms of “may” and
“it is possible.”
The U.S. Surgeon General’s definitive report on mental
health also admits that “No single gene has been found to
be responsible for any specific mental disorder” and “It is
sometimes difficult to determine when a set of symptoms rises
to a level of a mental disorder.”59
As for the “brain imaging” that supposedly shows mental
disorders are brain-diseases, Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist
at New York University, said of neuroimaging, “You find somebody
who has a particular problem, and you see a red spot on the
front of cortex and you say, ‘Okay, so that spot of the cortex
is the site where you have bad thoughts.’ It’s absolutely
incredible! The brain does not function as a single-area organ!”
He compared this to phrenology, described by John Horgan in
The Undiscovered Mind, as “the 18th century pseudoscience
that divided the brain into discrete chunks dedicated to specific
functions.” Llinas states, “You have a patient, and you put
the patient into the instrument, and you write a paper, because
you can just see it. It’s phrenology.”60
According to Horgan, “Neuroscientists have sought to find
physiological correlates of schizophrenia and other disorders
by probing the brains of the mentally ill with PET [Positron
Emission Tomography that monitors, through x-ray photography
short-lived radioactive isotopes of oxygen that have been
injected into the blood] and other imaging technologies. So
far these efforts have yielded frustratingly ambiguous results.”
One of these studies was hailed in 1990 by Lewis Judd,
then the director of NIMH, as a “landmark” that provided “irrefutable
evidence that schizophrenia is a brain disorder.” Unfortunately,
the researchers could not establish whether the enlarged ventricles
were a cause of an effect of schizophrenia—or of the drugs
used to treat it. Follow-up studies also showed that many
normal people have relatively large ventricles and many schizophrenics
do not.61
Elliot S. Valenstein, Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain,
says that the arguments that a chemical imbalance is at the
root of mental disorders “rests on shaky scientific foundation,”
are “ideas” which are “simply an unproven hypothesis” and
are “most likely wrong.”62 “The theories are held
on to not only because there is nothing else to take their
place, but also because they are useful in promoting drug
treatment.”63
As Valenstein and others point out: “There are no tests
available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s
brain. While there are some reports of finding evidence of
an excess or deficiency in the activity of a particular neurotransmitter
system in the brains of deceased mental patients, these claims
are controversial, as other investigators cannot find any
such relationship.”64 “Moreover,
the brains of some ‘normals’—people with no history of mental
disorder—may show signs of some excessive or deficient neurotransmitter
activity.”65
New York psychiatrist Ron Leifer says, “There’s no biological
imbalance. When people come to me and say, ‘I have a biochemical
imbalance,’ I say, ‘Show me your lab tests.’ There are no
lab tests. So what’s the biochemical imbalance?” 66
Margaret Hagen, Ph.D., psychologist and lecturer at Boston
University writes, “…the APA’s [American Psychiatric Association]
assumption of a biologically determined cause for every mental
disorder in their nine-hundred-page diagnostic manual has
led clinical practitioners in a stunning logical non sequitur
to attribute all bad behavior to brain damage, and, indeed,
to dismiss the whole idea of personal responsibility for behavior.”67
In 1996, psychiatrist David Kaiser wrote: “...modern psychiatry
has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of
any single mental illness....Patients [have] been diagnosed
with 'chemical imbalances' despite the fact that no test exists
to support such a claim, and...there is no real conception
of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”68
Jeffrey A. Schaler, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Chestnut
Hill College in Philadelphia warns that: “Legislators and
the general public should not be hoodwinked....Behaviors cannot
be diseases.”69
Mary Ann Block, author of No More ADHD (Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) states: “Let me clear this
up right now. ADHD is not like diabetes and [the stimulant
used for it] is not like insulin. Diabetes is a real medical
condition that can be objectively diagnosed. ADHD is an invented
label with no objective, valid means of identification. Insulin
is a natural hormone produced by the body and it is essential
for life. [This stimulant] is a chemically derived amphetamine-like
drug that is not necessary for life. Diabetes is an insulin
deficiency. Attention and behavioral problems are not a [stimulant]
deficiency.”70
Next:
Mental
Health Parity Analysis continued 
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