As I was sitting around catching up on some mental health news on Saturday, I inadvertently stumbled upon another manufactured news cycle about the DSM 5. Considering no new significant research findings were released in the past week on the DSM-5 revision efforts, I was a little surprised.

This latest fake news cycle started on Thursday, apparently with the release of a Reuters news story from Kate Kelland. Kelland notes the newest concern comes from “Liverpool University’s Institute of Psychology at a briefing in London about widespread concerns over the manual.” There’s no link to the briefing. And I’m not sure what a “briefing” is — a press conference? (And since when is a press conference a news item? It’s not really equivalent to a new research study, is it?)

Kelland fails to note that Europe and the U.K. don’t actually use the DSM to diagnose mental disorders — it’s a U.S. reference manual for mental disorders diagnosis. So while it’s nice that some Europeans are expressing concern about this reference text, their concern isn’t exactly much relevant. Context is everything, and Reuters failed to provide any useful context in that article.

Sadly, Reuters is a brand name. And once you write an article under that brand name, it cascades down an entire news cycle. Let’s follow it for fun!

As folks get ready to watch the Super Bowl on television this Sunday in the U.S., many of us will be joining or attending Super Bowl viewing parties. If you’re like most Americans, you’ll probably drive to get to that party.

But unlike most Sundays, when you drive this Sunday coming home from your Super Bowl Party, be especially careful. Why?

Because unlike other Sundays when a football game is televised, researchers found that both non-fatal and fatal car accidents increase 41 percent on average. The risk is highest within an hour of the game’s end, when most people are driving home.

What causes this rise in automobile accidents? Not surprising, alcohol was involved in most fatal injury accidents, as well as a majority of non-fatal accidents. Inattention and fatigue are two additional factors implicated.

Why does the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) misrepresent psychological research?

For instance, in its post on its website titled, “STUDY: Manic Symptoms Linked to Specific Criminal Acts,” the unattributed and undated article suggests that a new study was released that demonstrated a causal link between manic symptoms, and well, specific criminal acts.

But when I read the study, and compared it with what was in the article on the TAC website, I saw a complete misunderstanding (or misrepresentation, whether intentional or not) of the new study.

It now makes me question the validity of any information published by the Treatment Advocacy Center on their website, because it appears their bias — to drive home the mistaken idea that mental illness = increased risk of violence — affects their ability to even deliver research news objectively.

You might ask, “Why would anyone want to fake attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?”

Many years ago, when ADHD was first proposed as a diagnosis, you would’ve been right — few people would’ve bothered faking the diagnosis because it brought you little reward to do so.

But as ADHD diagnoses bloomed over the past two decades, so did special accommodations in the school systems for children and teenagers diagnosed with the disorder. And one of the primary treatments for attention deficit disorder is stimulant medication, something that can be used for less-than-legitimate reasons.

Could teens today really be faking ADHD to get into college?

Welcome to the world of unintended secondary gains and rewards.

If companies are people, my friend, like Mitt Romney famously described in Iowa in August 2011, then we’re feeling a little bad for our fellow person called Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of health care giant Johnson & Johnson.

They just got dinged with a $158 million settlement in a Medicaid fraud case in Texas for “making false or misleading statements about the safety, cost and effectiveness of the expensive anti-psychotic medication Risperdal, and improperly influencing officials and doctors to push the drug.”

But we won’t feel too badly, because Janssen got off easy with this one. They don’t have to admit to any liability with the settlement, and Johnson & Johnson — who made billions off of the sale of Risperdal — will barely blink their corporate eyeballs as they make out the check.

It’s been heating up now for the past few weeks as a charge led mainly by professionals. And it has caught the eye of the mainstream media. I’m talking about the revision process for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5), the reference manual mental health professionals and researchers use to treat patients and design reliable research studies examining mental illness.

The latest upset? The fact that the new DSM-5 suggests that depression could co-occur with grief. Critics see the changes as suggesting the DSM is trying to “medicalize” normal grieving. Anyone who experiences grief after a tragic or significant loss will now be at risk for receiving — heaven forbid — mental health treatment and a diagnosis.

We’ve covered this ground here on more than one occasion, but it appears time to talk about whether depression can occur at the same time as grief or not. My first reaction was — grief is grief, depression is depression, and the two never really co-occur. But a few years ago, I read a piece here on World of Psychology by Dr. Ron Pies which completely changed my perspective.

Family members with schizophrenia, one of the more frustrating mental illnesses to treat, often face a bumpy treatment road filled with potholes and setbacks. Many people with schizophrenia believe there’s nothing wrong with them. Or the medications they take often have significant, negative side effects.

So even though schizophrenia can often be treated fairly effectively with medications and psychotherapy, it often is not because medication compliance becomes a significant ongoing issue.

This results in many people with schizophrenia going in and out of inpatient care. Because inpatient psychiatric care is virtually non-existent in most states any longer, this means a primary treatment point for people with chronic, serious mental illness defaults to the local hospital emergency room (ER).

While most ERs are setup to handle people with a serious mental illness fairly well, ERs aren’t exactly known for their warm-fuzzy, emotionally-supportive environments. So people slip through the cracks.

In this case, the woman with schizophrenia who slipped through one hospital ER’s cracks was Cindy Ciarafoni, a mother of two, who died when she apparently wandered out of the ER and tried crossing a busy highway. She was struck by a car and later died from her injuries. Now her family wants to know what happened, but the hospital is being tight-lipped.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Faith Deeter. 

On November 18, 2011, it became legal to slaughter American horses for human consumption in the United States. What?! Americans don’t eat horses. We ride them, groom them, love them, use them in therapy, and make movies about them. Imagine sitting through two hours of War Horse, only to watch “Joey” get slaughtered after his brave and heroic service. Unthinkable? Think again.

During a closed-door-session, a few members of Congress slipped language into an appropriations spending bill which reversed a five-year ban on horsemeat inspections. With the pressure of a government shutdown looming, and despite his 2008 campaign promise to ban horse slaughter and the export of horses for slaughtering, President Obama signed it. There was no media coverage until ten days later.

How could this happen?

“Mary Moe,” a mom with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in Massachusetts, hasn’t had a great past few months. In October, she showed up at a local hospital emergency room and was found to be pregnant. Mary Moe is on medication for her psychiatric concerns. Doctors who examined her in the E.R. concluded that taking her off the medication would be risky for her, given her pregnancy.

But unlike a lot of people with psychiatric disorders, Mary Moe apparently didn’t have the same freedoms you and I take for granted. Such as the freedom to decide what to do with our own bodies.

Or whether to give birth if we’re pregnant.

In Mary Moe’s case, the state Department of Mental Health intervened on behalf of Mary’s parents. They filed a petition to have the woman’s parents named as guardians. Why?

So the parents could give their consent for an abortion.

Then it got even more scarier when the case ended up in a local Massachusetts courtroom and the judge sided with the parents. And went one step further…

Does depression have an upside? Is there some sort of evolutionary advantage for a person to become depressed, for instance, to re-evaluate their lives or perhaps a choice they made that led to their current depression?

Most people who are depressed certainly wouldn’t think so. (I don’t either.)

But it doesn’t stop evolutionary psychologists and other researchers from positing that there may indeed be some sort of evolutionary reason for it.

Richard Friedman, MD, writing in the New York Times today, explores the issue.

A friend of mine went on vacation for just a few days the other week out-of-state. She called me in a panic.

“I forgot my meds!”

“I wish I could help you out. Have you tried calling your doctor?”

“I did, and I got this weird message about needing to unblock my phone, press *87 for a callback. That was hours ago, and still no call back!”

Hmm, no callback after hours?

So I offered to call her doctor for her on a landline, got right through, and got a real phone number that she was then able to use with little trouble. However, she still had to leave a message for the physician on call, and is still sitting there, waiting patiently for a callback that may or may not come.

It got me to wondering… Shouldn’t there be a more reliable system in place for people who are taking everyday medications, but forget them when they go away? Or, inadvertantly run out of them and get them through mail-order?

“It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.”
~ Sir William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)

Most psychiatrists, and many patients, sense that psychiatry is in trouble these days. The reasons are complex, but boil down to a crisis of confidence: many in the general public — if they ever had faith in psychiatry — have begun to lose it.

Many psychiatrists who, like me, began their careers with hopeful idealism are now expressing pessimism or cynicism. Here, too, the reasons are complex, and have much to do with the sense that psychiatry has drifted away from its core values and central mission: the relief of human suffering and incapacity. Of course, the corrosive influence of “Big Pharma” and the gradual decline in the use of psychotherapy have contributed to this down-beat attitude.

And the highly-publicized dust-up over revision of psychiatry’s diagnostic classification — the DSM-5 (what the media love to call, “Psychiatry’s Bible”) — has certainly not filled psychiatrists with joy.