It is estimated that the burden of illness, in dollars, from all mental health disorders exceeds that of all cancers. Who is handling all these patients? As the DSM grows, so do the number of people who are sick. Eventually, the system must respond by fielding more mental health care providers. It certainly has. Between 1970 and 1995, the number of mental health professionals quadrupled. People enter the mental health system and are on a perpetual carnival ride. They get sicker and sicker but they cannot get off the nightmare. Billions of dollars of research, millions of hours of counseling, increasing numbers of diagnoses, a nearly bottomless pipeline of drugs -- and not a single illness has been cured. Cancers can be cured, broken bones can be set, infections can be eliminated, once-fatal inborn abnormalities can be corrected, and not one single mental illness can be cured. Once diagnosed, people are always sick. We never hear the term recovering ulcer sufferer, but one cannot listen to the evening news without hearing about a recovering addict of some sort or another. Psychiatry is not in the business of curing. It is in a perpetual business of generating appointments, sessions, prescriptions and the next theory to explain man's behavior. The only cure offered by the mental health profession occurs after the person's insurance benefits are exhausted. Miraculously, they are cured when they can no longer pay.
David Tyler & Kurt Grady, Deceptive Diagnosis: When SIN is called SICKNESS, pg.95
No comments:
Post a Comment