Psychiatric orthodoxy

I've just taken the Amen Clinic ADD type questionnaire. I didn't know that Daniel Amen had suggested there are 7 types of ADD: classic, inattentive, overfocused, temporal lobe, limbic, ring of fire and anxious; and that this matters for treatment. For today's special price of $77, I could have started healing my ADD, but I decided not to go ahead, despite the marketed attractive benefits of "improving attention and focus, boosting positive behaviour, and reclaiming my mental edge".

A Washington Post article called Daniel Amen the most popular psychiatrist in America. I doubt whether Amen likes critical psychiatry, which doesn't have that much of a following. I'm obviously not making enough outlandish claims (eg. see previous post). Amen recommends a SPECT brain scan as part of psychiatric assessment, when it isn't indicated. As the Washington Post article says, Amen's "claims are no more than myth and poppycock, buffaloing an unsuspecting public". In a Telegraph interview, he defends himself by saying, "If I'm defrauding them [patients] how would I stay in business for decades ... ?". The answer is that regulation of his practice is poor. As the Washington Post article, again, says "the man has grown fabulously wealthy — he lives in a $4.8 million mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean — by selling patients a high-priced service that has little scientific validity, yet no regulatory body has made a move to stop him".

Gina Pera, who recently called Peter Kinderman a 'nincompoop' (see his Mad in America blog post), was influenced by Amen. I've said before (see previous post) that Peter can express the essence of critical psychiatry better than me, although I don't totally agree with his views. To take a quote from his Scientific American blog:-

It’s all too easy to assume that mental health problems — especially the more severe ones that attract diagnoses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia — must be mystery biological illnesses, random and essentially unconnected to a person’s life. But when we start asking questions about this traditional disease-model way of thinking, those assumptions start to crumble.

Amen and Pera may have taken the biomedical assumption to extreme, but it's still the same biomedical assumption. Trouble is that Peter and I are more likely to be seen as unorthodox than them.