Over-Medicated: ‘Turning Common Fears into Treatable Conditions’

If you find yourself standing in a group of four, odds are increasing that one of you is on prescription medication for mental illness. That’s because over 67 million Americans have taken medication for depression alone, and this is not to mention all the other treatable mental illnesses that are treated with medication. In his article “Are We Really That Ill?” Christopher Lane reveals these and other startling statistics about the mental health industry.

After virtually setting in on the DSM-III gathering through access to unpublished memos and letters from the debates over admitting new diseases to the manual, Lane found that “the overall approval process was more capricious than scientific.”¹ Illnesses that were vigorously proposed include “chronic complaint disorder,” which would have been diagnosed by patients exhibiting excessive “moaning about taxes, the weather, and even sports results.”²

Notes:

^{1., 2.} Christopher Lane, “Are We Really That Ill?” New York Sun, March 26, 2008.

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/are-we-really-ill.