Collaborative Alternatives to Diagnosis and Drugs: An Opening Conference
This is first to alert you to a conference taking place in Drammen, Norway, June 26-28, 2014. Beyond the Therapeutic State Collaborative Practices for Individual and Social change To fill out the picture: Mental health costs are soaring, drug prescriptions skyrocketing, diagnostic categories multiplying, and an ever-increasing number of people believe they are mentally...
The Medicalization of Children’s Normal Healthy Behavior by Big Pharma
The practice of medicating children with large doses of toxic and potentially dangerous drugs in response to questionable diagnoses is an international scandal that endangers these vulnerable clients and their long term best interests. The Mental Health Capital of a society is enhanced by its equality of opportunity across social groupings, cultural diversity, creative...
There’s Madness in our Methods
When scientific methods are used appropriately, that is, when the method matches the question, the results can be extraordinary. We have learned how to send small numbers of people to outer space and large numbers of people from continent to continent. We can build bridges that span great distances and withstand the vagaries of...
My Question to the Participants of this Summit: What do you bring to this Platform?
While I was toying with what to write for this post, for many an idea tossed in my brain, but I needed more time to organize them, I thought I want to know what everyone who is here on the DxSummit is thinking, and it ought to be known to everyone else as well....
Far from Rotten in the State of Denmark
Psychotropic Drugs and their Use as Agents of Social Control and Alternative Philosophies in some Western Societies Many international surveys, such as the one done by the World Health Organisation in 2009, show Denmark in a very positive light in terms of its Welfare State and treatment of vulnerable groups in society. Renowned as...
An Interview with Thomas Scheff
Chloe Detrick interviews Thomas Scheff, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on the topic of shame and how it relates to today’s society, the DSM-5, and a cross-cultural social system.
Objections Invited to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10-CM)
Deadline: November 15 In what follows here, I am forced to dip my toe into a very complex process that involves a lot of details. I beg pardon for any confusions this may create. My purpose is to invite readers to contribute objections to the oversight committee for the International Classification of Diseases, in...
Safeguarding a Generation of Children from Over-diagnosis and Prescription of Psychotropic Drugs
Our children are our collective messengers to a future that we will neither see nor inhabit. What messages do we, as a progressive society, want to transmit to future generations about the way we have chosen to treat children with behavioral differences today? Our society – in the form of an increasing number of...
The “Mental Illness” Paradigm: Itself an “Illness” that is Out of Control
For those of you who haven’t read this story in the New York Times, I highly recommend it. It is essentially a woman’s (Linda Logan’s) rich and moving autobiographical account of her struggle with “bipolar disorder.” The main message that I imagine most people will take away from this story is that the current...
Toward an In-Person Summit
While DxSummit continues to offer opportunities for critique of traditional DSM-style diagnosis, its main goal has been to provide a place for the discussion of diagnostic alternatives. To wit, many posts have attempted to sketch out, in basic form, what diagnosis in the helping professions might look like in the future. Some of the...
