Hearing voices could just be a sign of stress and NOT schizophrenia: Study finds HALF of patients with the symptom may just have anxietyStudy of 54 patients diagnosed with disorder found just 26 actually had it
Schizophrenia is diagnosed too quickly in those who 'hear voices in their head'
Common symptoms include hallucinations, delusions and muddled thoughts
By ALEXANDRA THOMPSON SENIOR HEALTH REPORTER FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 10:39, 26 April 2019 | UPDATED: 16:33, 26 April 2019
www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6962855/Half-schizophrenia-patients-just-anxiety.htmlHopkins Study: Half Of Schizophrenia Cases Misdiagnosed, Most Just Have Anxietywww.studyfinds.org/hopkins-study-half-schizophrenia-cases-misdiagnosed-anxiety/BALTIMORE — A significant number of people declared schizophrenic by their doctors may be misdiagnosed. New research concluded from a small study of schizophrenia patients referred to the Johns Hopkins Early Psychosis Intervention Clinic (EPIC) found that about half didn’t have the disease at all.
Schizophrenia is a severe, chronic mental disorder typically characterized by disordered thinking, emotions, and behavior. The study showed that most misdiagnoses of these referrals were of patients battling anxiety or other mental conditions, with many wrongly classified for reporting that they heard voices.
Hopkins researchers say the results call for second opinions at specialized schizophrenia clinics after the initial diagnosis. This could reduce the risk of misdiagnoses and ensure fast and appropriate patient treatment.
“Because we’ve shined a spotlight in recent years on emerging and early signs of psychosis, diagnosis of schizophrenia is like a new fad, and it’s a problem especially for those who are not schizophrenia specialists because symptoms can be complex and misleading,” says Krista Baker, manager of adult outpatient schizophrenia services at Johns Hopkins Medicine, in a statement. “Diagnostic errors can be devastating for people, particularly the wrong diagnosis of a mental disorder.”
Theor Med Bioeth
. 2010 Feb;31(1):5-17. doi: 10.1007/s11017-010-9132-2.
False positives in psychiatric diagnosis: implications for human freedomJerome C Wakefield 1
Affiliations expand
PMID: 20232254 DOI: 10.1007/s11017-010-9132-2
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20232254/Abstract
Current symptom-based DSM and ICD diagnostic criteria for mental disorders are prone to yielding false positives because they ignore the context of symptoms. This is often seen as a benign flaw because problems of living and emotional suffering, even if not true disorders, may benefit from support and treatment. However, diagnosis of a disorder in our society has many ramifications not only for treatment choice but for broader social reactions to the diagnosed individual. In particular, mental disorders impose a sick role on individuals and place a burden upon them to change; thus, disorders decrease the level of respect and acceptance generally accorded to those with even annoying normal variations in traits and features. Thus, minimizing false positives is important to a pluralistic society. The harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder is used to diagnose the sources of likely false positives, and propose potential remedies to the current weaknesses in the validity of diagnostic criteria.
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Mental Illness as Metaphor: A Logical Fallacy
How we define the term "mental illness" matters.Posted Jul 04, 2018
www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freud-fluoxetine/201807/mental-illness-metaphor-logical-fallacyIt is frequently asserted by those associated with anti-psychiatry that "mental illness" is nothing more than a metaphor, a figure of speech, used to describe socially deviant persons. Since there exist no biological tests for mental illness, it is alleged that mental illness is a merely a myth whose only purpose is to justify psychiatric coercion. First espoused by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz in his classic 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness and 1960 paper of the same title, this is an argument I am well familiar with and supported for quite a few years.
Yet, in the face of the clinical realities of psychotherapy practice and emergency room psychiatry, I began to question the veracity of the Szaszian position on mental illness. While it is easy to endorse such a view while sitting in a university lecture hall or even working with mildly disturbed people in outpatient psychotherapy, it becomes much more difficult to do so when evaluating the incoherent or catatonic patient in a psychiatric emergency room.
The Dangers of Mental Health Misdiagnosis: Why Accuracy MattersAugust 4, 2017, Elisabet KvarnstromBridges to RecoveryLOGO
www.bridgestorecovery.com/blog/the-dangers-of-mental-health-misdiagnosis-why-accuracy-matters/Mental health misdiagnosis is an alarmingly prevalent phenomenon that keeps you from being able to achieve psychological wellness. By recognizing the causes of misdiagnosis and its effects, you can better understand how inaccurate identification happens, why it is so damaging, and why achieving diagnostic clarity is essential to the recovery process.
In 2015, Magda stepped into a psychiatrist’s office for the first time. “I was feeling so terrible,” she tells me. “I was sad all the time, I felt the world closing in around me, I saw no way out.” It wasn’t the first time Magda had felt this way—for the past two years, she had struggled with periods of darkness that overtook her seemingly at random. “When I stepped into that doctor’s office, I thought it would be the beginning of recovery. That’s the way it’s supposed to go; you’re sick, you go to the doctor, you get better.”
But Magda didn’t get better. After receiving a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, she began taking a daily dose of an SSRI antidepressant. “I remember feeling such hope when I filled that prescription,” she says. “But it didn’t help.” Nor did any of the other SSRIs she cycled through over the next year. In fact, her mood became increasingly unstable, and her depression reached new depths. “I thought I was going crazy. I had done everything I was supposed to do and yet there I was, sicker than ever.” There was a reason Magda wasn’t getting better: she didn’t have major depressive disorder.
Sitting in her psychiatrist’s office with tears in her eyes, talking about her sense of dread, her lethargy, her pervasive sadness, she certainly appeared depressed. But the psychiatrist wasn’t there on the weeks of elevated energy, the nights she forewent sleep, the days her thoughts raced with excitement, nor was she ever asked if she experienced such episodes. Magda never mentioned them because she didn’t recognize them as part of the problem. Those times were when she felt most alive; they were a respite from the pain of her depressive episodes, not something alarming that needed treatment. And so her bipolar disorder went unrecognized, her hypomania remaining invisible to both her and her physician, and the resulting mental health misdiagnosis prevented her from healing.
Psychiatry: The Hoax ExposedSeptember 22, 2015 By Phil Hickey |
www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2015/09/22/psychiatry-the-hoax-exposed/It’s no secret that at the present time, psychiatry is reeling under a barrage of scrutiny and criticism. Their long-standing contention that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses “just like diabetes”, which need to be “treated” with drugs and high-voltage electric shocks to the brain, has been thoroughly discredited. And yet they go on peddling their spurious , self-serving ideology and the products of their pharma partners.
The great mystery in all of this is why has the mainstream media been so slow to pick up the story. This is the greatest hoax in history being played out right under our noses. People’s lives are being destroyed, and our cultural resilience is being systematically eroded by psychiatric “diagnoses” and “treatments”. In recent years, we have seen some increase in media scrutiny, but it’s been relatively circumscribed, and way outnumbered by the media’s faithful regurgitation of pharma-psychiatry’s press releases, extolling the latest “great breakthrough” in the “treatment of brain illnesses”.
But perhaps the dam has finally broken. On September 14, Britain’s Daily Mail.com ran an article by Peter Gøtzsche titled Prescription pills are Britain’s third biggest killer: Side-effects of drugs taken for insomnia and anxiety kill thousands. Why do doctors hand them out like Smarties? Dr. Gøtzsche is a Danish physician, Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen, and leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center, Copenhagen. Smarties are British M&M’s.
The article is a plain-spoken, no-holds-barred attack on psychiatric research and practice. Here are some quotes:
“More than 80 million prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are written in the UK every year. Not only are these drugs often entirely unnecessary and ineffective, but they can also turn patients into addicts, cause crippling side-effects – and kill.”
“And the death toll from these pills has been grossly underestimated. As I reveal in a new book, Deadly Psychiatry And Organised Denial, the true figure is terrifying: according to my calculations, based on data from published and unpublished sources, psychiatric drugs are the third major killer after heart disease and cancer.”
“…for instance, finding that the number of suicides among adults and children taking antidepressant drugs is actually 15 times greater than the number calculated by the U.S. drugs watchdog, the Food and Drug Administration.”
“Just this month, for instance, a study published in the BMJ found that thousands of people in England with learning difficulties are routinely prescribed antipsychotic drugs: these drugs do nothing to help these patients but are used as a chemical cosh.”
“…antipsychotics are licensed if they show an effect in two placebo trials, no matter how small that effect is.”
“…an analysis of trials by Cochrane Collaboration a global independent network of researchers, professionals, patients, carers, and people interested in health found that when the placebo was designed to cause similar side-effects to the drug, the psychiatrists reported just as good results from both groups.”
“Based on the same sort of flawed trials, antidepressants are also being handed out for conditions such as binge eating, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and menopausal symptoms.”
“The claimed benefits can be ludicrously small, for instance: they cut the rate of hot flushes from ten to nine a day.”
“Most of us could get one or more psychiatric diagnoses if we consulted a psychiatrist or GP.”
“When they try to come off the pills and experience very unpleasant side-effects, patients say they are told their symptoms are the result of their illness coming back.
This ignores the fact that the drugs’ withdrawal effects can mimic the symptoms of psychiatric disorders. It also doesn’t fit in with what happens when patients in desperation reach for the drugs again: within a few hours they can be feeling better. Real depression doesn’t fade that fast.”
“My proposal is to start a campaign to Just Say No – it is time for a war on psychiatric drugs.”
Everything in the article will be familiar to those of us on this side of the issue. Indeed, I think it will be familiar to psychiatrists also, but they allow self-interest to dull their critical faculties.
But the important point is that this hard-hitting, outspoken piece is being run by the Daily Mail, Britain’s second largest print daily newspaper, and its largest online newspaper!
In an addendum to the article, there is a personal account by Luke Montagu, heir to the Earl of Sandwich. Luke recounts that when he was 19, he had a sinus operation that left him with headaches and “a sense of distance from the world”. His GP told him – guess what? – that he had a chemical imbalance in his brain!
Luke describes briefly but convincingly his experiences with psychiatrists and other doctors over the next 25 years. He finally managed to taper off the drugs, and describes the detox as “…nearly seven years of hell”. Then:
“About three years ago, I very slowly began to recover. I still have a burning pins and needles sensation throughout my body, loud tinnitus and a feeling of intense agitation.
But my mind is back, and I’m determined to try to help others avoid this terrible trap.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Again, all, or most, of the material here is familiar to us, but it’s extremely well put together, and Luke Montagu’s personal struggle with psychiatric drugs will, I think, resonate strongly for many individuals who have been similarly mistreated.
But the important point is that this message is being publicized in a mainstream media outlet. Please take a look at this article, and pass it on to others.
The tide is coming in, and psychiatry’s bloated sandcastle is being washed away.
Why Getting Medically Misdiagnosed Is More Common Than You May Thinkwww.healthline.com/health-news/many-people-experience-getting-misdiagnosedIn the United States, 12 million people are affected by medical diagnostic errors each year.
An estimated 40,000 to 80,000 people die annually from complications from these misdiagnoses.
Women and minorities are 20 to 30 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed.
Darlene Anita Scott, 45, has been a physically active, healthy person her entire life.
So, it was a surprise when the distance runner started experiencing fatigue and shortness of breath while training for her seventh marathon back in 2016.
“I noticed I was out of breath after just the first mile while I was training, but it wasn’t something I was associating with anything wrong,” Scott told Healthline.
“I had a pretty active professional life. I’m a professor who was just promoted to an administrative position, I was keeping an active research schedule, I was traveling. I’m also an artist. So, I was keeping a very active calendar… I have a busy life, I thought fatigue was coming from the busy part,” she explained.
Scott, who works as an associate professor of composition and creative writing at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, just assumed that her hectic lifestyle was contributing to the fatigue. It wasn’t anything too serious.
That sense was compounded by the diagnosis from her primary care physician, who said she must have asthma or allergies.
He gave her an inhaler prescription. With that, she assumed she had a clear answer for what was wrong.
She was told that since she was a transplant to a new place, like many people who move from one part of the country to another, she was more susceptible to developing allergies and having allergy-induced asthma.
To Scott, it was a diagnosis that didn’t cause much concern.
“Whatever it was, it was ‘something small,’ I thought. I thought it was something to treat ‘today’ and get back to life. I ramped up training, added new workouts, and since it was the summer and I didn’t have to be in the classroom, I had reduced workload and was able to sleep more,” she said.
That was the summer, but Scott’s fatigue and trouble breathing failed to quiet down.
After an initial pulmonology test seemed to show her lungs to be in good shape, additional testing and a chest X-ray showed something else.
A cardiologist eventually diagnosed her with heart failure. She had an enlarged heart, or cardiomyopathy.
Within the next year, she was given a pacemaker and also diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease also associated with heart failure.
For Scott, learning she didn’t have asthma or allergies, but a much more serious diagnosis, was jarring, life-altering even.
“First, I was like, ‘Let’s fix this.’ I believed myself to be healthy, and I felt like I can heal myself fairly quickly,” she recalled.
“Then, I was a little bit angry, because of my lifestyle — if you’ve been doing things that are supposed to keep one healthy, you think, ‘Why is this happening?’ There’s shock and anger and a little bit of denial.”
Medical misdiagnoses are more common than most people realize
Scott’s story of originally receiving a misdiagnosis isn’t that unusual.
In fact, about 12 million people are affected by medical diagnostic errors in the United States each year, according to a 2014 report from the journal BMJ Quality & Safety.
The researchers estimate that about half of those errors could be “potentially harmful.”
The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) reports an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 people die annually from complications from these misdiagnoses.
It’s an under-discussed issue that touches all aspects of the healthcare field — from physicians and healthcare systems themselves to, most crucially, the patients whose lives might be on the line as a result of an inaccurate initial diagnosis.
It’s also a complex issue to address. This isn’t like finding a new treatment for a single disease. It’s about addressing systemic problems embedded in healthcare.
Tackling how to make diagnostic error less common means tackling everything from human mistakes to traditional but flawed procedures for treating and diagnosing conditions.
It also includes finding ways for medical providers to adapt to the technology shifts and innovations that seem to be constantly changing healthcare.