Had you not gone through puberty, would you have developed dysphoria or had it as bad?
dirt
Friday, July 29, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Female Transition and Blind Faith in the Male Medical Machine
Someone sent me THIS video that perfectly summarizes my last post. Here we have a trans trender with a "almond size" cyst on her ovary (I have to wonder if it is due to the T as I didnt see her mention anything about it in her first handful of videos) and she doesnt qualify for a hysto through her insurance due to her trans status. Her ovary is producing "triple" the estrogen in order to counter act the synthetic testosterone being injected into her body, seems this caused the cyst. So what is her doktors solution for treating this issue since she cannot afford a hysto (and is in constant pain)? INCREASE the testosterone!!!! So the thing that has/is causing the problem, rather than stopping that, lets INCREASE that!
But then again were her doktor to stop issuing T to her, then he couldnt bill her insurance company once or twice a month for the rest of her life! Note, in her first video she had no expectation of receiving T on her doktors visit, yet within two hours time she got her "script"! No long term examination of what was informing her trans mindedness, no therapy designed to help her through feeling "male", nothing. Just a few hours and BANG here is your hormone prescription that may eventually kill you since there are no long term studies on it.
Just as was mentioned in the last post per the article, the DSM contains nice, neat lists of symptoms for "disorders" that can be ticked off in a short doctors session to measure if you're suffering from a certain disorder. And if you check more on the list than not, you can walk out of that few hour doctors session with a nice, neat little prescription for whatever ails your "brain". Meanwhile the side effects go ignored, as well as the reason that brought the patient to seek help in the first place.
Clearly the female in this video is not happy or even content, and there is more than a cyst behind that unhappiness.
dirt
But then again were her doktor to stop issuing T to her, then he couldnt bill her insurance company once or twice a month for the rest of her life! Note, in her first video she had no expectation of receiving T on her doktors visit, yet within two hours time she got her "script"! No long term examination of what was informing her trans mindedness, no therapy designed to help her through feeling "male", nothing. Just a few hours and BANG here is your hormone prescription that may eventually kill you since there are no long term studies on it.
Just as was mentioned in the last post per the article, the DSM contains nice, neat lists of symptoms for "disorders" that can be ticked off in a short doctors session to measure if you're suffering from a certain disorder. And if you check more on the list than not, you can walk out of that few hour doctors session with a nice, neat little prescription for whatever ails your "brain". Meanwhile the side effects go ignored, as well as the reason that brought the patient to seek help in the first place.
Clearly the female in this video is not happy or even content, and there is more than a cyst behind that unhappiness.
dirt
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
GID and Blind Faith in the Male Medical Machine
A regular line of defense by the queer/trans minded against the common sense truths of my blog is pointing out that I'm not a doctor, this usually coming from females at that. Females that ignore the historical and present harm the male medical machine has committed against women in order to keep us in line per patriarchal structures.
The queer/trans community finds it much easier to dismiss the common sense logic by someone who isnt a member of the male medical machine than question the utter hypocrisy from those sworn to uphold the Hippocratic Oath. The simple truth is psychiatry, regardless of whether or not those practicing it have an M.D. after their name, isnt a science, despite those with M.D's doling out unnecessary, under studied drugs. Psychiatry is theory based on each Psychiatrists or Psychologists personal beliefs, beliefs informed by personal experience and morals.
But with the introduction of psychoactive drugs in the 1950s, and sharply accelerating in the 1980s, the focus shifted to the brain. Psychiatrists began to refer to themselves as psychopharmacologists, and they had less and less interest in exploring the life stories of their patients. Their main concern was to eliminate or reduce symptoms by treating sufferers with drugs that would alter brain function. An early advocate of this biological model of mental illness, Eisenberg in his later years became an outspoken critic of what he saw as the indiscriminate use of psychoactive drugs, driven largely by the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry.
Psychiatry had a powerful weapon that its competitors lacked. Since psychiatrists must qualify as MDs, they have the legal authority to write prescriptions. By fully embracing the biological model of mental illness and the use of psychoactive drugs to treat it, psychiatry was able to relegate other mental health care providers to ancillary positions and also to identify itself as a scientific discipline along with the rest of the medical profession. Most important, by emphasizing drug treatment, psychiatry became the darling of the pharmaceutical industry, which soon made its gratitude tangible.
These efforts to enhance the status of psychiatry were undertaken deliberately. The APA was then working on the third edition of the DSM, which provides diagnostic criteria for all mental disorders. The president of the APA had appointed Robert Spitzer, a much-admired professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, to head the task force overseeing the project. The first two editions, published in 1952 and 1968, reflected the Freudian view of mental illness and were little known outside the profession. Spitzer set out to make the DSM-III something quite different. He promised that it would be “a defense of the medical model as applied to psychiatric problems,” and the president of the APA in 1977, Jack Weinberg, said it would “clarify to anyone who may be in doubt that we regard psychiatry as a specialty of medicine.”
When Spitzer’s DSM-III was published in 1980, it contained 265 diagnoses (up from 182 in the previous edition), and it came into nearly universal use, not only by psychiatrists, but by insurance companies, hospitals, courts, prisons, schools, researchers, government agencies, and the rest of the medical profession. Its main goal was to bring consistency (usually referred to as “reliability”) to psychiatric diagnosis, that is, to ensure that psychiatrists who saw the same patient would agree on the diagnosis. To do that, each diagnosis was defined by a list of symptoms, with numerical thresholds. For example, having at least five of nine particular symptoms got you a full-fledged diagnosis of a major depressive episode within the broad category of “mood disorders.” But there was another goal—to justify the use of psychoactive drugs. The president of the APA last year, Carol Bernstein, in effect acknowledged that. “It became necessary in the 1970s,” she wrote, “to facilitate diagnostic agreement among clinicians, scientists, and regulatory authorities given the need to match patients with newly emerging pharmacologic treatments.”3
The DSM-III was almost certainly more “reliable” than the earlier versions, but reliability is not the same thing as validity. Reliability, as I have noted, is used to mean consistency; validity refers to correctness or soundness. If nearly all physicians agreed that freckles were a sign of cancer, the diagnosis would be “reliable,” but not valid. The problem with the DSM is that in all of its editions, it has simply reflected the opinions of its writers, and in the case of the DSM-III mainly of Spitzer himself, who has been justly called one of the most influential psychiatrists of the twentieth century.4 In his words, he “picked everybody that [he] was comfortable with” to serve with him on the fifteen-member task force, and there were complaints that he called too few meetings and generally ran the process in a haphazard but high-handed manner. Spitzer said in a 1989 interview, “I could just get my way by sweet talking and whatnot.” In a 1984 article entitled “The Disadvantages of DSM-III Outweigh Its Advantages,” George Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote that the DSM-III represented “a bold series of choices based on guess, taste, prejudice, and hope,” which seems to be a fair description.
Not only did the DSM become the bible of psychiatry, but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions. That is an astonishing omission, because in all medical publications, whether journal articles or textbooks, statements of fact are supposed to be supported by citations of published scientific studies. (There are four separate “sourcebooks” for the current edition of the DSM that present the rationale for some decisions, along with references, but that is not the same thing as specific references.) It may be of much interest for a group of experts to get together and offer their opinions, but unless these opinions can be buttressed by evidence, they do not warrant the extraordinary deference shown to the DSM. The DSM-III was supplanted by the DSM-III-R in 1987, the DSM-IV in 1994, and the current version, the DSM-IV-TR (text revised) in 2000, which contains 365 diagnoses. “With each subsequent edition,” writes Daniel Carlat in his absorbing book, “the number of diagnostic categories multiplied, and the books became larger and more expensive. Each became a best seller for the APA, and DSM is now one of the major sources of income for the organization.” The DSM-IV sold over a million copies.
As psychiatry became a drug-intensive specialty, the pharmaceutical industry was quick to see the advantages of forming an alliance with the psychiatric profession. Drug companies began to lavish attention and largesse on psychiatrists, both individually and collectively, directly and indirectly. They showered gifts and free samples on practicing psychiatrists, hired them as consultants and speakers, bought them meals, helped pay for them to attend conferences, and supplied them with “educational” materials. When Minnesota and Vermont implemented “sunshine laws” that require drug companies to report all payments to doctors, psychiatrists were found to receive more money than physicians in any other specialty. The pharmaceutical industry also subsidizes meetings of the APA and other psychiatric conferences. About a fifth of APA funding now comes from drug companies.
Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.5
The drug industry, of course, supports other specialists and professional societies, too, but Carlat asks, “Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.” Unlike the conditions treated in most other branches of medicine, there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness—no lab data or MRI findings—and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that.
Whitaker summarizes the growth of industry influence after the publication of the DSM-III as follows:
While Carlat believes that psychoactive drugs are sometimes effective, his evidence is anecdotal. What he objects to is their overuse and what he calls the “frenzy of psychiatric diagnoses.” As he puts it, “if you ask any psychiatrist in clinical practice, including me, whether antidepressants work for their patients, you will hear an unambiguous ‘yes.’ We see people getting better all the time.” But then he goes on to speculate, like Irving Kirsch in The Emperor’s New Drugs, that what they are really responding to could be an activated placebo effect. If psychoactive drugs are not all they’re cracked up to be—and the evidence is that they’re not—what about the diagnoses themselves? As they multiply with each edition of the DSM, what are we to make of them?
The pharmaceutical industry influences psychiatrists to prescribe psychoactive drugs even for categories of patients in whom the drugs have not been found safe and effective. What should be of greatest concern for Americans is the astonishing rise in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in children, sometimes as young as two years old. These children are often treated with drugs that were never approved by the FDA for use in this age group and have serious side effects. The apparent prevalence of “juvenile bipolar disorder” jumped forty-fold between 1993 and 2004, and that of “autism” increased from one in five hundred children to one in ninety over the same decade. Ten percent of ten-year-old boys now take daily stimulants for ADHD—”attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder”—and 500,000 children take antipsychotic drugs.
There seem to be fashions in childhood psychiatric diagnoses, with one disorder giving way to the next. At first, ADHD, manifested by hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity usually in school-age children, was the fastest-growing diagnosis. But in the mid-1990s, two highly influential psychiatrists at the Massachusetts General Hospital proposed that many children with ADHD really had bipolar disorder that could sometimes be diagnosed as early as infancy. They proposed that the manic episodes characteristic of bipolar disorder in adults might be manifested in children as irritability. That gave rise to a flood of diagnoses of juvenile bipolar disorder. Eventually this created something of a backlash, and the DSM-V now proposes partly to replace the diagnosis with a brand-new one, called “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria,” or TDD, which Allen Frances calls “a new monster.”7
The books by Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat are powerful indictments of the way psychiatry is now practiced. They document the “frenzy” of diagnosis, the overuse of drugs with sometimes devastating side effects, and widespread conflicts of interest. Critics of these books might argue, as Nancy Andreasen implied in her paper on the loss of brain tissue with long-term antipsychotic treatment, that the side effects are the price that must be paid to relieve the suffering caused by mental illness. If we knew that the benefits of psychoactive drugs outweighed their harms, that would be a strong argument, since there is no doubt that many people suffer grievously from mental illness. But as Kirsch, Whitaker, and Carlat argue convincingly, that expectation may be wrong.
At the very least, we need to stop thinking of psychoactive drugs as the best, and often the only, treatment for mental illness or emotional distress. Both psychotherapy and exercise have been shown to be as effective as drugs for depression, and their effects are longer-lasting, but unfortunately, there is no industry to push these alternatives and Americans have come to believe that pills must be more potent. More research is needed to study alternatives to psychoactive drugs, and the results should be included in medical education.
In particular, we need to rethink the care of troubled children. Here the problem is often troubled families in troubled circumstances. Treatment directed at these environmental conditions—such as one-on-one tutoring to help parents cope or after-school centers for the children—should be studied and compared with drug treatment. In the long run, such alternatives would probably be less expensive. Our reliance on psychoactive drugs, seemingly for all of life’s discontents, tends to close off other options. In view of the risks and questionable long-term effectiveness of drugs, we need to do better. Above all, we should remember the time-honored medical dictum: first, do no harm (primum non nocere).
Cutting out and cutting up healthy body parts in order to treat mental issues IS doing harm first! One doesnt require a medical degree to make that assessment, it is common sense. One only needs a medical degree to PROFIT from doing it! The same can be said for synthetic hormones, none of which have any long term studies.
dirt
The queer/trans community finds it much easier to dismiss the common sense logic by someone who isnt a member of the male medical machine than question the utter hypocrisy from those sworn to uphold the Hippocratic Oath. The simple truth is psychiatry, regardless of whether or not those practicing it have an M.D. after their name, isnt a science, despite those with M.D's doling out unnecessary, under studied drugs. Psychiatry is theory based on each Psychiatrists or Psychologists personal beliefs, beliefs informed by personal experience and morals.
The Illusions of Psychiatry
From the article:
One of the leaders of modern psychiatry, Leon Eisenberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins and then Harvard Medical School, who was among the first to study the effects of stimulants on attention deficit disorder in children, wrote that American psychiatry in the late twentieth century moved from a state of “brainlessness” to one of “mindlessness.”2 By that he meant that before psychoactive drugs (drugs that affect the mental state) were introduced, the profession had little interest in neurotransmitters or any other aspect of the physical brain. Instead, it subscribed to the Freudian view that mental illness had its roots in unconscious conflicts, usually originating in childhood, that affected the mind as though it were separate from the brain.But with the introduction of psychoactive drugs in the 1950s, and sharply accelerating in the 1980s, the focus shifted to the brain. Psychiatrists began to refer to themselves as psychopharmacologists, and they had less and less interest in exploring the life stories of their patients. Their main concern was to eliminate or reduce symptoms by treating sufferers with drugs that would alter brain function. An early advocate of this biological model of mental illness, Eisenberg in his later years became an outspoken critic of what he saw as the indiscriminate use of psychoactive drugs, driven largely by the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry.
Psychiatry had a powerful weapon that its competitors lacked. Since psychiatrists must qualify as MDs, they have the legal authority to write prescriptions. By fully embracing the biological model of mental illness and the use of psychoactive drugs to treat it, psychiatry was able to relegate other mental health care providers to ancillary positions and also to identify itself as a scientific discipline along with the rest of the medical profession. Most important, by emphasizing drug treatment, psychiatry became the darling of the pharmaceutical industry, which soon made its gratitude tangible.
These efforts to enhance the status of psychiatry were undertaken deliberately. The APA was then working on the third edition of the DSM, which provides diagnostic criteria for all mental disorders. The president of the APA had appointed Robert Spitzer, a much-admired professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, to head the task force overseeing the project. The first two editions, published in 1952 and 1968, reflected the Freudian view of mental illness and were little known outside the profession. Spitzer set out to make the DSM-III something quite different. He promised that it would be “a defense of the medical model as applied to psychiatric problems,” and the president of the APA in 1977, Jack Weinberg, said it would “clarify to anyone who may be in doubt that we regard psychiatry as a specialty of medicine.”
When Spitzer’s DSM-III was published in 1980, it contained 265 diagnoses (up from 182 in the previous edition), and it came into nearly universal use, not only by psychiatrists, but by insurance companies, hospitals, courts, prisons, schools, researchers, government agencies, and the rest of the medical profession. Its main goal was to bring consistency (usually referred to as “reliability”) to psychiatric diagnosis, that is, to ensure that psychiatrists who saw the same patient would agree on the diagnosis. To do that, each diagnosis was defined by a list of symptoms, with numerical thresholds. For example, having at least five of nine particular symptoms got you a full-fledged diagnosis of a major depressive episode within the broad category of “mood disorders.” But there was another goal—to justify the use of psychoactive drugs. The president of the APA last year, Carol Bernstein, in effect acknowledged that. “It became necessary in the 1970s,” she wrote, “to facilitate diagnostic agreement among clinicians, scientists, and regulatory authorities given the need to match patients with newly emerging pharmacologic treatments.”3
The DSM-III was almost certainly more “reliable” than the earlier versions, but reliability is not the same thing as validity. Reliability, as I have noted, is used to mean consistency; validity refers to correctness or soundness. If nearly all physicians agreed that freckles were a sign of cancer, the diagnosis would be “reliable,” but not valid. The problem with the DSM is that in all of its editions, it has simply reflected the opinions of its writers, and in the case of the DSM-III mainly of Spitzer himself, who has been justly called one of the most influential psychiatrists of the twentieth century.4 In his words, he “picked everybody that [he] was comfortable with” to serve with him on the fifteen-member task force, and there were complaints that he called too few meetings and generally ran the process in a haphazard but high-handed manner. Spitzer said in a 1989 interview, “I could just get my way by sweet talking and whatnot.” In a 1984 article entitled “The Disadvantages of DSM-III Outweigh Its Advantages,” George Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote that the DSM-III represented “a bold series of choices based on guess, taste, prejudice, and hope,” which seems to be a fair description.
Not only did the DSM become the bible of psychiatry, but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions. That is an astonishing omission, because in all medical publications, whether journal articles or textbooks, statements of fact are supposed to be supported by citations of published scientific studies. (There are four separate “sourcebooks” for the current edition of the DSM that present the rationale for some decisions, along with references, but that is not the same thing as specific references.) It may be of much interest for a group of experts to get together and offer their opinions, but unless these opinions can be buttressed by evidence, they do not warrant the extraordinary deference shown to the DSM. The DSM-III was supplanted by the DSM-III-R in 1987, the DSM-IV in 1994, and the current version, the DSM-IV-TR (text revised) in 2000, which contains 365 diagnoses. “With each subsequent edition,” writes Daniel Carlat in his absorbing book, “the number of diagnostic categories multiplied, and the books became larger and more expensive. Each became a best seller for the APA, and DSM is now one of the major sources of income for the organization.” The DSM-IV sold over a million copies.
As psychiatry became a drug-intensive specialty, the pharmaceutical industry was quick to see the advantages of forming an alliance with the psychiatric profession. Drug companies began to lavish attention and largesse on psychiatrists, both individually and collectively, directly and indirectly. They showered gifts and free samples on practicing psychiatrists, hired them as consultants and speakers, bought them meals, helped pay for them to attend conferences, and supplied them with “educational” materials. When Minnesota and Vermont implemented “sunshine laws” that require drug companies to report all payments to doctors, psychiatrists were found to receive more money than physicians in any other specialty. The pharmaceutical industry also subsidizes meetings of the APA and other psychiatric conferences. About a fifth of APA funding now comes from drug companies.
Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.5
The drug industry, of course, supports other specialists and professional societies, too, but Carlat asks, “Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.” Unlike the conditions treated in most other branches of medicine, there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness—no lab data or MRI findings—and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that.
Whitaker summarizes the growth of industry influence after the publication of the DSM-III as follows:
In short, a powerful quartet of voices came together during the 1980’s eager to inform the public that mental disorders were brain diseases. Pharmaceutical companies provided the financial muscle. The APA and psychiatrists at top medical schools conferred intellectual legitimacy upon the enterprise. The NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] put the government’s stamp of approval on the story. NAMI provided a moral authority.
Like most other psychiatrists, Carlat treats his
patients only with drugs, not talk therapy, and he is candid about the
advantages of doing so. If he sees three patients an hour for
psychopharmacology, he calculates, he earns about $180 per hour from
insurers. In contrast, he would be able to see only one patient an hour
for talk therapy, for which insurers would pay him less than $100.
Carlat does not believe that psychopharmacology is particularly
complicated, let alone precise, although the public is led to believe
that it is:
Patients often view psychiatrists as wizards of neurotransmitters, who can choose just the right medication for whatever chemical imbalance is at play. This exaggerated conception of our capabilities has been encouraged by drug companies, by psychiatrists ourselves, and by our patients’ understandable hopes for cures.
His work consists of asking patients a series of questions about their
symptoms to see whether they match up with any of the disorders in the DSM.
This matching exercise, he writes, provides “the illusion that we
understand our patients when all we are doing is assigning them labels.”
Often patients meet criteria for more than one diagnosis, because there
is overlap in symptoms. For example, difficulty concentrating is a
criterion for more than one disorder. One of Carlat’s patients ended up
with seven separate diagnoses. “We target discrete symptoms with
treatments, and other drugs are piled on top to treat side effects.” A
typical patient, he says, might be taking Celexa for depression, Ativan
for anxiety, Ambien for insomnia, Provigil for fatigue (a side effect of
Celexa), and Viagra for impotence (another side effect of Celexa).
While Carlat believes that psychoactive drugs are sometimes effective, his evidence is anecdotal. What he objects to is their overuse and what he calls the “frenzy of psychiatric diagnoses.” As he puts it, “if you ask any psychiatrist in clinical practice, including me, whether antidepressants work for their patients, you will hear an unambiguous ‘yes.’ We see people getting better all the time.” But then he goes on to speculate, like Irving Kirsch in The Emperor’s New Drugs, that what they are really responding to could be an activated placebo effect. If psychoactive drugs are not all they’re cracked up to be—and the evidence is that they’re not—what about the diagnoses themselves? As they multiply with each edition of the DSM, what are we to make of them?
The pharmaceutical industry influences psychiatrists to prescribe psychoactive drugs even for categories of patients in whom the drugs have not been found safe and effective. What should be of greatest concern for Americans is the astonishing rise in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in children, sometimes as young as two years old. These children are often treated with drugs that were never approved by the FDA for use in this age group and have serious side effects. The apparent prevalence of “juvenile bipolar disorder” jumped forty-fold between 1993 and 2004, and that of “autism” increased from one in five hundred children to one in ninety over the same decade. Ten percent of ten-year-old boys now take daily stimulants for ADHD—”attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder”—and 500,000 children take antipsychotic drugs.
There seem to be fashions in childhood psychiatric diagnoses, with one disorder giving way to the next. At first, ADHD, manifested by hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity usually in school-age children, was the fastest-growing diagnosis. But in the mid-1990s, two highly influential psychiatrists at the Massachusetts General Hospital proposed that many children with ADHD really had bipolar disorder that could sometimes be diagnosed as early as infancy. They proposed that the manic episodes characteristic of bipolar disorder in adults might be manifested in children as irritability. That gave rise to a flood of diagnoses of juvenile bipolar disorder. Eventually this created something of a backlash, and the DSM-V now proposes partly to replace the diagnosis with a brand-new one, called “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria,” or TDD, which Allen Frances calls “a new monster.”7
The books by Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat are powerful indictments of the way psychiatry is now practiced. They document the “frenzy” of diagnosis, the overuse of drugs with sometimes devastating side effects, and widespread conflicts of interest. Critics of these books might argue, as Nancy Andreasen implied in her paper on the loss of brain tissue with long-term antipsychotic treatment, that the side effects are the price that must be paid to relieve the suffering caused by mental illness. If we knew that the benefits of psychoactive drugs outweighed their harms, that would be a strong argument, since there is no doubt that many people suffer grievously from mental illness. But as Kirsch, Whitaker, and Carlat argue convincingly, that expectation may be wrong.
At the very least, we need to stop thinking of psychoactive drugs as the best, and often the only, treatment for mental illness or emotional distress. Both psychotherapy and exercise have been shown to be as effective as drugs for depression, and their effects are longer-lasting, but unfortunately, there is no industry to push these alternatives and Americans have come to believe that pills must be more potent. More research is needed to study alternatives to psychoactive drugs, and the results should be included in medical education.
In particular, we need to rethink the care of troubled children. Here the problem is often troubled families in troubled circumstances. Treatment directed at these environmental conditions—such as one-on-one tutoring to help parents cope or after-school centers for the children—should be studied and compared with drug treatment. In the long run, such alternatives would probably be less expensive. Our reliance on psychoactive drugs, seemingly for all of life’s discontents, tends to close off other options. In view of the risks and questionable long-term effectiveness of drugs, we need to do better. Above all, we should remember the time-honored medical dictum: first, do no harm (primum non nocere).
Cutting out and cutting up healthy body parts in order to treat mental issues IS doing harm first! One doesnt require a medical degree to make that assessment, it is common sense. One only needs a medical degree to PROFIT from doing it! The same can be said for synthetic hormones, none of which have any long term studies.
dirt
Monday, July 25, 2011
Michfest, WBW Policy and Lesbians Fighting Back
Michfest is upon us again, but this year there is something in the Michigan air that hasn't been sniffed in decades, the whiff of lesbians taking a SERIOUS stand for the WBW (womyn-born-womyn) policy!
I suspect this is for several reasons: 1) because of the justifiable anger over the various attacks (see here and here) made by Camp Trans members on Michfest last year. And 2) the more current attack on the WBW policy and the threats made on the life and livelihood of a long time Michfest member.
Many Michfest women who attended Fest last year, while some still fearful of the threats and violence from Camp Trans, have bravely let their anger surpass their fears and have formed a serious group hell bent on maintaining the WBW policy. There is much planned in the fight to keep Michfest what it was intended for, a few days in a private area where women can escape the male gaze and ever so briefly experience freedoms unknown in our daily lives under patriarchy. One such way this brave group of women had lined up for the fight was to have a few T shirts made up in support of WBW policy. This is in effort to counter the many many organizedqueer straight women and transmen wearing pro transwomen tees who passed out hundreds of flyer's along the same lines at last years event.
A long time Festie who owns and operates a popular gay and lesbian Tshirt company designed a few tees for this years event. The shirts simply said something like 100% WBW, a way to support policy but also a way to embrace the awesomeness of being a woman for a few short days of the year. No sooner were these tees posted on her website when both the website and her Facebook account were bombarded with hate filled comments about her "transphobia". The woman in question's phone number was found out by these haters, she received many phone calls ranging from hang ups, hate filled messages to being threatened with violence.
That wasnt enough punishment for her supporting the love of women and private women's spaces, no. The trans group behind the hate, contacted PFLAG whom the woman had a standing deal with regarding tees. The Trans group pressured PFLAG to halt their deal with the woman in question. The larger LGBT Press got a hold of the story and questioned why an LGBT member was selling "transphobic" tees! Between the threats of violence from the trans community and the pressure from the LGBT press the woman removed the WBW tees, issued a statement of apology and has now even refused to sell them within the grounds of Michfest.
While this may be a small defeat, (other T shirt designs are already in the works) scores courageous women are coming together to organize many actions aimed at strengthening Michfest's WBW policy, which is long over due! Sharing the female experience with other females sans the male gaze even for a moment is a rarity, not to be cosmetically duplicated by men sporting cheap wigs and Lee Press on Nails in order to please their dicks, intact or mutilated! And the only phobia is the constant Femalephobia coming from the Trans community whenever females seek out a space of our own in which to share the uniqueness of the female experience.
A serious stand on the WBW policy at Michfest has been needed for a long time. I leave with some words from one of the women taking that serious stand:
Those of us who support the intention of MWMF have sat quietly for too long. We believe that our experiences as those assigned female at birth are significant, that growing up as girls is significant and the process by which we claimed our womonhood under the patriarchy is significant. We will be visible and vocal about our right to gather around these experiences en masse this year.
Femalephobes, the fight is on!
dirt
We will be Invincible
This bloody road remains a mystery.
This sudden darkness fills the air.
What are we waiting for ?
Won't anybody help us ?
What are we waiting for ?
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
This shattered dream you cannot justify.
We're gonna scream until we're satisfied.
What are we running for ? We've got the right to be angry.
What are we running for when there's nowhere we can run to anymore ?
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
And with the power of conviction there is no sacrifice.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
Won't anybody help us ?
What are we running for when there's nowhere
nowhere we can run to anymore ?
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
And with the power of conviction there is no sacrifice.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
I suspect this is for several reasons: 1) because of the justifiable anger over the various attacks (see here and here) made by Camp Trans members on Michfest last year. And 2) the more current attack on the WBW policy and the threats made on the life and livelihood of a long time Michfest member.
Many Michfest women who attended Fest last year, while some still fearful of the threats and violence from Camp Trans, have bravely let their anger surpass their fears and have formed a serious group hell bent on maintaining the WBW policy. There is much planned in the fight to keep Michfest what it was intended for, a few days in a private area where women can escape the male gaze and ever so briefly experience freedoms unknown in our daily lives under patriarchy. One such way this brave group of women had lined up for the fight was to have a few T shirts made up in support of WBW policy. This is in effort to counter the many many organized
A long time Festie who owns and operates a popular gay and lesbian Tshirt company designed a few tees for this years event. The shirts simply said something like 100% WBW, a way to support policy but also a way to embrace the awesomeness of being a woman for a few short days of the year. No sooner were these tees posted on her website when both the website and her Facebook account were bombarded with hate filled comments about her "transphobia". The woman in question's phone number was found out by these haters, she received many phone calls ranging from hang ups, hate filled messages to being threatened with violence.
That wasnt enough punishment for her supporting the love of women and private women's spaces, no. The trans group behind the hate, contacted PFLAG whom the woman had a standing deal with regarding tees. The Trans group pressured PFLAG to halt their deal with the woman in question. The larger LGBT Press got a hold of the story and questioned why an LGBT member was selling "transphobic" tees! Between the threats of violence from the trans community and the pressure from the LGBT press the woman removed the WBW tees, issued a statement of apology and has now even refused to sell them within the grounds of Michfest.
While this may be a small defeat, (other T shirt designs are already in the works) scores courageous women are coming together to organize many actions aimed at strengthening Michfest's WBW policy, which is long over due! Sharing the female experience with other females sans the male gaze even for a moment is a rarity, not to be cosmetically duplicated by men sporting cheap wigs and Lee Press on Nails in order to please their dicks, intact or mutilated! And the only phobia is the constant Femalephobia coming from the Trans community whenever females seek out a space of our own in which to share the uniqueness of the female experience.
A serious stand on the WBW policy at Michfest has been needed for a long time. I leave with some words from one of the women taking that serious stand:
Those of us who support the intention of MWMF have sat quietly for too long. We believe that our experiences as those assigned female at birth are significant, that growing up as girls is significant and the process by which we claimed our womonhood under the patriarchy is significant. We will be visible and vocal about our right to gather around these experiences en masse this year.
Femalephobes, the fight is on!
dirt
We will be Invincible
This bloody road remains a mystery.
This sudden darkness fills the air.
What are we waiting for ?
Won't anybody help us ?
What are we waiting for ?
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
This shattered dream you cannot justify.
We're gonna scream until we're satisfied.
What are we running for ? We've got the right to be angry.
What are we running for when there's nowhere we can run to anymore ?
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
And with the power of conviction there is no sacrifice.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
Won't anybody help us ?
What are we running for when there's nowhere
nowhere we can run to anymore ?
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
And with the power of conviction there is no sacrifice.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
We can't afford to be innocent
stand up and face the enemy.
It's a do or die situation - we will be invincible.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)