Diversity is not Disease is a new Daily Kos forum for organizing resistance to the US Big Pharma / American Psychiatry complex. The group is not intended to discourage people from seeking the help of mental health professionals nor from using psycho-pharmaceuticals should they choose to do so. But it is intended for those who think that mental diversity is not automatically mental pathology. If you have ever wondered whether your kid really needs to take Ritalin, or whether "Autism Spectrum Disorders", "Gender Identity Disorder", or countless other "disorders" might simply be natural human variation -- then this is the forum for you.
In addition to inventing "disorders" for the purpose of expanding drug markets, American Psychiatry misappropriates the concept of "function" from physical medicine, where measurable biological functions such as a cardiac function curve or glomerular filtration rate (kidney function) are a standard part of diagnosis. But the so-called "global assessment of functioning (GAF)" used in psychiatry and clinical psychology are not objective measurements. They are at best subjective assessments of superficial symptoms, but quite often are nothing more than societal or personal prejudices against certain kinds of people -- kids who can't sit still all day (something a child's developing brain was never evolved to do), kids who are smarter than average and stigmatized for it, people who don't obey conventional gender norms, etc.
In past, American psychiatry stigmatized Eastern European immigrants who spoke poor English as "feebleminded" and performed forced sterilizations on them to keep their "feebleminded" genes out of the general population. Suffragettes, protesting for Votes for Women, were "diagnosed" with "hysteria". Gays and lesbians, who were considered to be "mentally ill" until 1973, were treated with reparative (conversion) therapies. Gender variant children today -- e.g. boys who play with girls' dolls -- are still officially "mentally ill" and are still treated with reparative therapies by major authorities in American Psychiatry. This is now illegal in one state -- California -- but it remains the officially recommended practice for gender-variant children.
Diaries describing bad experiences with the American psychiatry/drug company complex are welcome in this group. But we also want to go farther, and discuss ways of organizing resistance to this corrupt commercial juggernaut. One possible approach might be to work to remove DSM -- the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) -- from its current status in the US, particularly in the insurance industry.
There is an international code -- ICD -- maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO) that can be used instead of DSM. The main advantage of eliminating use of DSM in favor of ICD would be to disempower the corrupt APA. The recent release of DSM-V has been the subject of so much controversy about Big Pharma corruption and low replicability of its "diagnoses", that the National Institute of Mental Health has rejected use of the DSM in its research program and has begun a long term project to replace it with a system based on objective measurements such as biomarkers and brain activation scans.
UPDATE: A number of people seem to feel that the name "psychiatric survivors" implies Scientology. Scientology doesn't own the psychiatric survivors movement, but Scientology may have poisoned the term.
For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Scientologist. I don't make nearly enough money for them to want to fleece me.
NEW UPDATE: I have renamed the group Diversity is not Disease. Thanks to Dogs are Fuzzy for sparking that idea!