But go ahead, take your children to these people.

Ya gotta love how psychiatry, unsatisfied with its failed struggles to develop tests that can identify mental illnesses, is increasingly resorting to developing tests that identify mental illnesses that might in future develop. But gee, wasn’t a fundamental tenet of scientific evidence supposed to be an ability to falsify a particular scientific claim? Yet how can anyone possibly prove false the claim that an illness might in future exist???

Commentator Deborah Kotz rightly raises alarm that certain states have made it illegal for doctors NOT to perform these dubious blood tests on pregnant women. But what’s particularly irritating (and CMM posted a comment on the article) is that then Kotz endorses a question and answer screening test which is even more bogus. CMM did the test, answering honestly, and studiously answering negatively any questions that hinted at possible violence, and guess what — we were still told we should see our doctor asap for possible post-partum depression. Apparently our blog is just one big call for help!

“Caught early, the mental disorders that might otherwise derail young lives can be treated very effectively, said Dr. Stan Kutcher, an IWK Health Centre psychiatrist and Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health at Dalhousie University.”

Unfortunately, this bold, grandiose claim doesn’t square with any scientific evidence that CMM has ever seen. So we’ve sent a letter to Dr. Kutcher personally.  We requested of Dr. Kutcher: “Could you please forward some scientific references… that clearly establish that mental disorders can  be effectively diagnosed and cured or ‘treated effectively’ in children, with unequivocal long term benefits for those children?”

So stay tuned for the sure-to-be-rivetting developments… Are we at CMM going to be forced at last to swallow our own pathetic lack of knowledge of psychiatric science? Or…  what else might happen…?

An aspect of this story that has received almost no coverage, though, was the attack on the Canadian government issued by the Polish Embassy.  When deciding not to lay charges against the RCMP officers, the BC Criminal Justice Branch released this utterly bizarre “assessment” of the case, which is literally nothing more than several pages of  criticism of Dziekanski as a person, and includes essentially no discussion at all of the actual issue, the conduct of the RCMP officers. The Polish Embassy called the BC government’s report “disappointing” and “disconcerting”: “It appears that the main reason for Mr. Dziekanski’s death was his fear of flying, tiredness and lack of ability to communicate in English.” The Embassy also objected to the “factually baseless” but repeated “insinuations” of Dziekanski being an alcohol abuser.

Interestingly, discussion at Maclean’s magazine has focused mainly on how it’s positive to have a “scientist” on the Senate.  Of course, the research shows psychiatry is much more religion and business than science (just read the summary quote from the Research Agenda for the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in CMM’s right sidebar, for example). And indeed, that’s exactly why most people won’t worry about such a blatant conflict of interest — a PhD in Psychiatry inspires such faith.

“In one marketing effort, the company urged geriatricians to use Zyprexa to sedate unruly nursing home patients so as to reduce “nursing time and effort,” according to court documents. Like other antipsychotics, Zyprexa increases the risks of sudden death, heart failure and life-threatening infections like pneumonia in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis.”

We can confirm that Zyprexa is being given to the elderly woman in our aforementioned feature being held in a nursing home against her will who has been diagnosed with heart problems and dementia — showing vividly just how stupid and dangerous average doctors and psychiatrists can be when it comes to prescribing psychotropics.

This relatively short NYT piece is worth reading also because it provides a good overview of the broader problem throughout the drug industry — e.g. pointing out that even this proposed $1.4 billion U.S. settlement barely scratches the surface of the profits Lilly’s illegal actions have brought in.

Obviously, there are many reasons any reasonable person might not want to stay in a typical inner city emergency shelter these days: lack of privacy, bedbug infestations, lack of security, inability to bring in pets, children or belongings, noise etc, not to mention the possibility of being targeted for rerouting to a psychiatric hospital where they could be forcibly treated with electroshock or sedatives. But people like Coleman can apparently still feel a pang of compassion when people actually die as a result of being homeless, so his response is to FORCE them into a shelter to avoid his feelings of guilt.

What Coleman demonstrates, then, is the whole problem that emerges when we over-psychologize what are essentially political and economic problems–problems which, in this case, have dramatically worsened in BC since Coleman and the Liberals came to power. Well, the CMM Thinktank has come up with some radical alternative proposals: What about instead increasing subsidizing housing? What about instead raising welfare rates so people can actually afford rooms and apartments?… Naah, that’s just thinking waaaay too far outside the box, isn’t it? It’s so much easier to just take away even more of people’s most basic rights…