From Bad to Worse

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

Once More on Attention Deficit Disorder

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My comment:

From Bad to Worse

Like an introduction of a new smartphone, the American Psychiatric Association will soon announce its DSM 5, the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; the bible of the psychiatric profession. One of the expected consequences is that the new stigmatizing categories allow the pharmaceutical industry to follow up with new miracle drugs in an over-simplified, less thought-consuming marketing. Willing, profit hungry, psychiatrists will against embarrasing, perfectly legal, reimbursements promote anti-psychotic applications / drugs in the different categories, they have established, for the DSM 5.

Seen from our position in 2013, the Big Brother-tyranny, in George Orwell’s “1984”, were more than satirical fiction. However, we can just imagine what Orwell might have invented of futuristic horror fiction from knowing that 6,4 million American school-age children, now receive the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Speaking in Orwellian terms, today the “Ministry of Plenty” and the “Ministry of Love” are satisfied knowing that the pharmaceutical industry is reaping net benefits of, at least, USD 14.600 million a year on anti-psychotic drugs alone. In this task, the industry is being supported by an multitude of respected, professional psychiatrists, many of whom it has turned from talk-therapy to drug-therapy in order to make 150 USD for three 15-minute medication visits, compared with 90 USD for a 45-minute talk therapy session. 

An average psychiatrist treated earlier 50/60 patients in once - or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions. Now many psychiatrists treat as an average 1200 people in mostly 12/15 minute visits for prescription adjustments that are months apart. Then, he knew his patients inner lives better than he knew his wife’s, now, he cannot remember their names. Then, at least his ambition was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled, now, it is just to keep them going.

As long as marketing is fulfilling our real needs and is supplying us with improved quality of life with no hidden disadvantages, marketing is a blessing. However, marketing managed by calculating forces often create habits, which in the long term may be disastrous like tobacco, anti-psychotic drugs and sugar, just to mention 3 of the segments where the wrong side of marketing has been used in a ruthless way.

If just a fraction of the marketing resources, being put into quick fixes and fast satisfactions, had been put into a feeling therapy aimed at reliving repressed pain, we had now had universal access to information that an alternative to the present Orwellian situation actually exists.

Jan Johnsson,

- who was lucky enough to be an ADHD-case when the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric Corps still had not invented this category; my epilepsy and the Primal Principle “saved” me.