His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness,” (Dec.27, 2010).
I know. That’s a year and a half ago. But guess what? Major media never picked up on it in any serious way. It never became a scandal. It managed to fly below the radar.
Editors and reporters at major media outlets have an uncommon nose for avoiding the sort of trouble Greenberg’s piece would have created, were it to be unleashed on the population—and although they like to call themselves journalists, that’s a myth even they don’t really believe anymore. They’re mutts on short leashes.
Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder in the known universe. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”
Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.
Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“
There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bull****. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
BANG.
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/the-liars-liar/