The Crisis Creators: Why Behavioral Health Makes Everything Worse
Republished with permission from AbleChild.
If anyone hasn’t figured out yet where too much of America’s health problems begin, look no further than the behavioral health industry. It’s time to take a serious look.
While the federal government is in an all-out offensive to uncover fraud in State Medicaid programs, the real fraud lies in the psychiatric diagnosing that has gone unchecked for a hundred years and brought the nation to a mental health crisis.
Just this month alone, the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has begun a national campaign to reduce the use of psychiatric drugs by publishing “deprescribing” guidance and training for doctors for any number of the tens of millions of Americans who are taking Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) commonly referred to as antidepressants.
Here’s the truth. The modern mental health model of diagnosis and drug treatment is an enormous failure. People have been harmed for years using antidepressants, and go figure, the medical community admits it’s hard to get off prescription mind-altering drugs. The goal of the HHS Secretary is to finally make drugs one of many options for “treatment” of mental illnesses. But is that enough? Is that really the answer to over-prescribing?
It’s a fact. Americans can’t get the drugs without a mental disorder diagnosis, and the diagnoses are not based on science. In other words, there isn’t anything broken in anyone’s brain that can be medically measured…no X-ray, CAT Scan, blood or urine test can identify any of the alleged mental disorders. And, the fact is, if an abnormality was discovered in the brain, most likely a neurologist would be utilized…not a psychiatrist. Neurologists study brain disease, and psychiatrists study behavior. A very big difference that has been ignored in the modern mental health model.
Depression, anxiety, bipolar, ADHD, and all the rest of the druggable mental disorders are completely subjective, and no one can argue that the psycho/pharma industry hasn’t found an extremely lucrative incentive to overdiagnose. Moreover, given that Medicaid is the largest payer of psychiatric services, including drugs, the US taxpayers are all too happy to pick up the outrageous bill for this failed mental health lollapalooza.
It’s reported that anywhere between 44 and 60 million Americans take at least one psychiatric drug. For that matter, one in six Americans takes at least one antidepressant, and women are drugged at the rate of one in four and are twice as likely as men to take psychiatric drugs.
And let’s not forget the kids who are on prescription psychiatric drugs that often are prescribed “off-label” because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hasn’t approved the drugs for use in children. As of 2021, nearly 1.5 million children between the ages of 0 and 17 were prescribed an ADHD drug, and more than two million among the same age group were on at least one antidepressant.
The problem with this data is that all these drugged Americans were diagnosed with a mental disorder that cannot be proven as a medical abnormality. Are they depressed? Yes. Do they have anxiety? Yes. But the drugs that are being prescribed do not “treat” any known abnormality. Worse, the pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs admit that they have no idea how the drugs “work” in the brain as “treatment.”
The same thing is true of the Autism diagnosis. People often are unaware that any autism diagnosis is a psychiatric diagnosis, not a neurologic diagnosis. The autism diagnosis, like all other psychiatric diagnoses, is based on a checklist of subjective behaviors.
And it should be noted that psychiatrist Allen Frances, who was responsible for expanding the spectrum of Autism by introducing Asperger’s Disorder into the APA’s 1994 revamped DSM-IV, admits that broadening that definition “lowered the bar” for diagnosis.
Since lowering the bar in 1994, the number of cases of autism has skyrocketed from 1 in 150 to now one in 31. No one doubts that the increase is largely due to the expansion of the criteria that determine autism…that “lowering the bar” thing. Autism is also very lucrative to the psycho/pharma industry.
Since Dr. Frances “lowered the bar” of autism, the spending has accelerated massively, and in eight states that were reviewed for providing autism therapy, the spending increased from $347 million to over $2.2 billion in the last few years. This autism “treatment” billing grew nearly 800% in just five years.
Dr. Frances reports that “…for the vast majority of people who carry the diagnosis now, it’s questionable, and second and third opinions would be useful.” The good doctor further explains, “Asperger’s is a very mild version of classic autism and therefore more common and much more easily mistaken for other mental disorders or for normal eccentricity and social withdrawal. So, the 60-fold increase was largely started by the change in definition in the DSM-IV…”
Yep. Thanks to the American Psychiatric Association, one little change and suddenly autism therapy is the fastest growing Medicaid benefit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Does the pattern look familiar? Whether it’s depression, ADHD, or Autism, the behavioral health industry is behind America’s mental health crisis. HHS Secretary Kennedy wants to help to those Americans suffering from years of mind-altering antidepressants by offering “deprescribing” services.
AbleChild would recommend that the Secretary consider a comprehensive review of the psychiatric diagnosis that must be made before any “treatment” can be offered. It seems logical that while the federal government finally seems ready to address Medicaid fraud as it relates to behavioral health programs, and as it is the largest payer of mental health services, the fraud of the diagnosis might be of interest.
Think about it for one minute. Whether it’s depression, anxiety, bipolar, OCD, or Autism, all are subjective diagnoses, and all increase exponentially every year. With behavioral health, that area of “medicine” that requires no abnormalities, the diagnoses increase, the “treatment” increases, and the billing increases…every year.
Since the taxpayers are on the hook for paying for these ever-expanding services, they may want to ask lawmakers to explain how that very subjective diagnosing behind the mental health crisis actually works.
AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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The post ABLECHILD: The Crisis Creators – Why Behavioral Health Makes Everything Worse appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
ABLECHILD: The Crisis Creators – Why Behavioral Health Makes Everything Worse –
The Crisis Creators: Why Behavioral Health Makes Everything Worse Republished with permission from AbleChild.
The post ABLECHILD: The Crisis Creators – Why Behavioral Health Makes Everything Worse appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The Crisis Creators: Why Behavioral Health Makes Everything Worse Republished with permission from AbleChild.
The post ABLECHILD: The Crisis Creators – Why Behavioral Health Makes Everything Worse appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.