by Kieron McFadden
The latest fad in the pharmaceutical-driven drug addiction treatment gravy train is so-called "co-occurring" disorders. This means that an individual is said to have a substance abuse disorder AND one or more mental disorders....
The Diagnose-and-Drug Psycho-Pharmacy Gravy Train.
The latest fad in the pharmaceutical-driven drug addiction treatment gravy train is so-called "co-occurring" disorders. This means that an individual is said to have a substance abuse disorder AND one or more mental disorders.
The addict is having a hard enough time already contending with the very real agony of his addiction to drugs without being glibly informed after a cursory examination by a psychiatrist that he has a diseased brain as well - the remedy for which is, believe it or not, to take some drugs!
The aforementioned disorders can be found in psychiatry's very scientific-sounding Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which contains hundreds of the ruddy things.
The Manual lists so many disorders, covering such a broad spectrum of human behaviour that it opens the door for almost anyone crossing the path of a psychiatrist to be labeled mentally ill and prescribed a drug. Prescription medications themselves are highly addictive and millions of people, believing them safe as they were prescribed by a doctor, have gone on to become fully addicted to them. All of this is of course highly profitable for the Psycho-pharmacy
I have covered the subject of prescription drug addiction in another article. Similarly just how a mental disorder gets "discovered" and voted into the Manual by a show of hands at psychiatric conferences and without the intercession of inconveniences such as science is also covered in other articles. However, the basic nature of this money-spinning ruse and its dire consequences for the addict are worth going over:
The ruse works this way:
Psychiatry invents a mental illness by simply thinking one up, giving it a name and voting it into its diagnostic manual. No real science is involved. The new illness describes some aspect of human behaviour, enabling a large percentage of people to be diagnosed as suffering from it.
People thus diagnosed can be prescribed medication, which presents fat profits for drug manufacturer and for psychiatry which can bill for its service without having to do anything much more strenuous than write out a prescription.
Now, I've no wish to vilify the psychiatrist who does do his best for his patient and does not suffer from the Pharmaceutical Drug Prescription Compulsion Disorder (PDPCD) of the majority of his fellows. I am sure that such people must exist somewhere in the ranks of the psychiatric profession but the aforementioned is by and large a summary of the basic process by which an awful lot of money is made.
Now, we have someone addicted to, say, heroin - or indeed a prescription drug. He winds up in the hands of a psychiatrist who instead of doing something about his addiction (he doesn't know how) diagnoses him as suffering from a co-occurring disorder, requiring more drugs.
According to the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, as many as 10 million individuals in the United States "have at least one mental disorder as well as [emphasis added] an alcohol or drug use disorder."
Further, as long ago as 1999 the U.S. Surgeon General reported on mental health: "Forty-one to 65 percent of individuals with a lifetime substance abuse disorder also have a lifetime history of at least one mental disorder, and about 51 percent of those with one or more lifetime mental disorders also have a lifetime history of at least one substance abuse disorder."
As a result more money is being allocated through state and federal agencies for the study and treatment of patients with a co-occurring disorder, while - purely coincidentally of course - more organizations are developing more drugs to address this new problem and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is donating millions of dollars to states to address co-occurring disorders. Those tax dollars ultimately wind up in the coffers of the psychopharmacy.
The problem however, and one studiously ignored, or perhaps drowned out by the sound of the taxpayer's hard-earned cash sloshing through the system, is that there isn't any evidence to base any of these "disorders" on! The language in studies and reports on the subject rather tellingly is highly conjectural and includes words such as "may" and "suggests" without any actual proof.
There is simply no science behind these things and the great mystery is how governmental agencies, while spending our money so freely, completely fails to notice such a trifling detail!
Although the alleged phenomenon of co-occurring disorder, (also known as dual diagnosis or comorbidity) bears psychiatry's typical absence of hard facts and rides almost entirely on opinion delivered loftily by a doctor-ish looking bloke in a white coat, most of the treatments for these disorders require psychotropic drugs.
There is of course something very telling that is completely missing from this picture.
What's Missing?
Nowhere is there any mention of co-occurring untreated physical illness, allergies, infections, glandular disorders, dietary deficiencies and so forth, all of which are known to produce depression, anxiety, insomnia, restlessness, agitation and so forth, in fact any of the "mental disorders" psychiatrists are so fond of diagnosing - INCLUDING drug addiction and substance abuse.
Nowhere is there any mention of sending the person to a nutritionist and a doctor to get his underlying illness found and treated BEFORE we start drugging the poor devil.
Although some small attention is paid to the person's socio-economic environment as a co-factor in his " mental illness," nowhere in this great psycho-pharmaceutical scheme - and this utterly beggars belief - is his nutrition and physical health looked at.
Given the modern state of knowledge as regards the intricacies and role of nutrition and the superior medicine of food itself, this places psychiatry and those in the corridors of power it seems to hold spellbound by its mantra of "drug, bill, drug" trailing at least half a century behind current understanding.
One can only hope those entrusted with their nation's future can snap out of it, move out from under the psycho-pharmacy's spell and catch up with present time before many more people get killed.
Meanwhile, real science continues to advance and researchers in nutrition and allied fields continue to push back the frontiers.
In the specific case of substance abuse, there are simple and extremely effective rehabilitation strategies that don't use drugs to treat and embody that state-of-the-art understanding. One such program is called the Narconon Drug Rehabilitation and Education Program. I recommend that you check it out.
