DSM

ADHD and ADD are FAKE disorders stemming from bad schooling practices, HFCS and artificial food coloring

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Image: ADHD and ADD are FAKE disorders stemming from bad schooling practices, HFCS and artificial food coloring

Attention-deficit disorders are defined as brain disorders marked by ongoing patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, to an extent that it interferes with development and functioning. Symptoms include wandering off task, difficulty sustaining focus, disorganization, defiance, constant movement, fidgeting, tapping, talking, and the inability to delay immediate gratification. Sounds like every adult who’s jacked up on coffee while stuck sitting on a hard chair at some boring work meeting while playing on their smart devices and completely disconnected from the speaker and the content being presented.

Today’s elementary and secondary school curriculum and testing is still based on memorizing rote facts (which are mostly inaccurate), filling in the “blanks,” taking multiple choice quizzes and tests, and raising hands to answer questions posed by the teachers.

Meanwhile, most school breakfasts and lunches (including what most kids bring from home) are chock full of processed foods that contain high fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, concentrated salts, pesticides, and fluoride (think of the water fountains). Children and teens are consuming pop tarts, sugar-laden cereals, soda and energy drinks without knowing the detrimental behavior effects. Plus, kids eat candy throughout the day, some coming from home and the rest from teachers who use genetically modified treats as rewards for “good behavior.” How ironic.

What year did Christopher Columbus arrive in America, and what are the long division steps for dividing 2,437 by 389? Exactly. Who cares.

First off, let’s address what kids are learning in school these days, and how most of the curriculum is cannon fodder, including outdated “skills” and “strategies” that don’t even apply to the real world in any form at all. Unless you’re appearing on the Jeopardy game show, trivia doesn’t matter at all. As for long division, nobody needs to know that dead dinosaur at all. We have computers, smart devices and even watches with calculators now.

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Kids don’t engage learning unless they’re engaged in collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking, and citizenship (The 5 C’s of 21st century learning).

Rote memory learning drives any human being crazy. Children are brilliant, and no curriculum in the world that’s based on rote memorization, boring worksheets, and taking multiple choice tests will ever keep them quiet, still, and “paying attention” for more than a couple minutes. Students want to know the answers to their questions like, “What does this have to do with the real world?” and “How does this help us get smarter?”

https://www.real.video/embed/5834171584001

Every single “symptom” of ADHD and ADD is a symptom of poorly planned educational systems, lack of real world connections, and bad diet

In the DSM-IV (The American Psychiatric Association manual and the pages describing diagnostic criteria for Attention Deficit Disorders), any children who can’t pay attention for extended periods of time, who don’t complete their homework, or who are often distracted by “extraneous stimuli” are in need of prescription psyche medications. According to DSM-IV, “symptoms must be present for at least 6 months …” and required to cause “some impairment in at least two settings” for a diagnosis of a brain disorder to be applied. The DSM-V is even worse, and offers no clear guidelines. Well, did the DSM-IV offer any “clear” guidelines? What’s clear is that psychiatrists can now diagnose ANY child or adolescent anytime with ADD or ADHD.

What’s clear is that students need real world education instead of memorizing facts for tests that they completely forget three days later. What’s clear is that science proves that artificial food colorings, soda, and high fructose corn syrup cause severe hypersensitivity reactions, affect behavior, reduce cognition, deplete the retention of information, and cause mental distress. Where’s all that information in the DSM manuals?

15 Million pounds of artificial dyes are put in U.S. foods, drinks, candy, and medicine every year

There has been a 55 percent increase in U.S. toxic food dyes just since the year 2000. There are over 15 million pounds of dyes put in foods, drinks, candy and medicine every year, and the FDA does nothing to protect consumers from the barrage of poison.

Did you know that the industrial-based food dye Yellow #5 affects behavior and induces severe hypersensitivity reactions? Fact: Teenagers who drink more than one large soda (4 glasses) per day experience mental health difficulties, including hyperactivity and mental distress, according to a study recently published in the American Journal of Public Health. Those same soda drinkers also score lower on tests, per the scientific research conducted.

In conclusion, if your child is “suffering” from ADD or ADHD symptoms, before you rush to a medical quack for SSRI drugs that cause severe depression, suicides, and homicidal tendencies, change your child’s diet to organic foods (stop buying school meals all together), and talk to the school’s principals and administrators about engaging the students with some real world curriculum.

Sources for this article include:

HelpforADD.com

NIMH.nih.gov

TotallyADD.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

NCBI.nlm.nih.gov

Food.news

Biologically-Inspired Biomarkers for Mental Disorders

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In a study published in Nature in February 2017, investigators from the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) described promising findings in screening children for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Using brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess cortical development and brain volume, investigators were able to predict in infants as young as 6-12 months of age at risk for ASD—that is, with an ASD-affected sibling—which children would develop ASD by 24 months of age. While this study requires further validation in a larger cohort—15 of 106 high-risk subjects ultimately developed ASD—it speaks to the vast unmet medical need of biomarkers for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. This need is especially striking given evidence that early intervention may be critical for correcting an array of mental illnesses. For instance, with particular regard to ASDs, a long-term follow-up of the parent-mediated social communication therapy for young children with autism (PACT) controlled trial, published in The Lancet in November 2016 showed that autistic children receiving therapy between 2-4 years of age showed clinical improvement up to six years after the therapy had ended.

The global burden of mental illness is staggering, with recent data published in The Lancet in February 2016 suggesting that psychiatric disorders are the leading cause of years lost to disability. These data are simply estimates, though, largely confounded by how mental illnesses are classified and diagnosed. At present, the approved diagnoses of all psychiatric disorders—from schizophrenia and major depressive disorder (MDD) to obsessive-compulsive disorder and ASDs—are arrived at through reporting of mental and behavioral symptoms by patients or caregivers to mental health professionals. Many disorders catalogued in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or International Classification of Diseases describe a spectrum of symptoms. For example, for a diagnosis of MDD, a patient must display at least five of nine symptoms in the DSM. It is therefore feasible that two patients, both with MDD, share only one common symptom. Cultural and social norms and stigmas can further complicate patient and caregiver reporting of symptoms or how these symptoms are interpreted by mental health professionals. Co-morbidities with other psychiatric disorders are also not uncommon and contribute to a dizzying heterogeneity in possible diagnoses. Clinical biomarkers could help transcend these limitations.

Unlike many other diseases, there are no approved clinical tests for psychiatric disorders beyond mental and behavioral evaluation. There are no presymptomatic risk prediction tests, like the PLAC test to measure lipoprotein phospholipase A2 for risk of cardiovascular events. There are no diagnostic or monitoring tests, like blood hemoglobin A1c for diabetes management. There are no prognostic tests, like the gene array MammaPrint in breast cancer for risk of tumor recurrence. Despite considerable maturation of fundamental neuroscience in the last decades, owing largely to technological advances allowing sophisticated interrogation of the brains of model organisms and humans, our understanding of the biological underpinnings of psychiatric disease is still in its infancy.

There is considerable optimism, though, that we are nearing a turning point in psychiatric disease research, which could pave the way not only for much-needed new therapies, but also for the critical risk assessment, diagnostic, and prognostic clinical tests required to identify and monitor disease. Initially proposed in 2008, the National Institutes of Mental Health at the US NIH proposed a new way of categorizing mental illness—bridging genetics, neuroscience (looking at molecules, cells, neural circuits, and physiology of the brain), and behavioral science. These Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) aspire to classify illness based on observable behavioral and neurobiological measures.

In keeping with the RDoC ethos, a number of independent researchers and large consortia aim to address mental disorders from a quantifiable biological perspective. Among many others, several consortia include: the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC), looking for genetic relationships to disease; brain banking repositories from the Stanley Medical Research Institute and Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium, looking for molecular, cellular, and anatomical markers of illness; repositories of resting state and functional MRI or positron emission tomography (PET) imaging data, including the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) group, Functional Imaging Biomedical Research Network, and the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange. Further strategies include looking for blood-based biomarkers of disease using proteomics and metabolomics, along with profiling the gut microbiota of patients, as the latter has recently been associated with various mental disorders. Along with approved diagnostic criteria, many clinical trials are now investigating some or all of genetic, imaging, electrophysiological, and blood-based profiling as secondary readouts of therapeutic interventions. Perhaps the largest problem in translating ever-expanding datasets into clinically-relevant outputs will be in integrating the gathered information. However, consortia such as PGC and ENIGMA also aim to bring together data scientists to share algorithms for mining data and turning it into a framework for so-called computational psychiatry.

Recent genomics and transcriptomics studies have already begun to bear fruit, discovering genetic loci and transcriptional profiles associated with increased risk for schizophrenia, ASDs, MDD, and other mental illnesses. A number of these findings suggest many psychiatric disorders are genetically complex, without a single causative variation. Defining polygenic signatures of disease remains an obstacle to overcome. Another obstacle regards brain imaging data. Because of the infrastructure required to perform these studies, they are often too underpowered to confidently assign hallmarks of disease. It is hoped that a multi-center consortium approach will allow researchers not only to image the healthy brain to arrive at a “gold standard”—another factor sorely lacking when compared to, say, a normal range of hemoglobin A1c levels in healthy and diabetic patients—but will also identify clinically-relevant image-based biomarkers for psychiatric illness. Perhaps the closest to clinical utility for psychiatric biomarkers will be in patient stratification and pharmacogenomics-based drug responses. For instance, recent studies have identified biomarkers for prediction of treatment response to antipsychotics in schizophrenia or to lithium in bipolar disorder. Identifying the most efficacious treatment regimen as early as possible could have longstanding benefits for patients, as exemplified by the PACT trial.

In the current issue of EBioMedicine, Chattopadhyay et al. highlight the above themes of early intervention and biomarker discovery in psychiatric disorders. Imaging adolescents with MDD, the authors found high resting state connectivity in brain regions involved in emotional processing, unlike adult MDD patients. Importantly, this connectivity dysfunction could be normalized when subjects were assigned to a cognitive behavioral therapy intervention. Indeed, finding reliable biological signatures of mental illness can not only inform diagnosis of patients, but also allow physicians to monitor patient responses to therapies, critical issues in psychiatric disorders where subjects may—thus far, unpredictably—experience waxing and waning bouts of illness and remission. With the emergent technologies in the neuroscience toolkit to probe the brain, broad multi-center collaboration to allow sufficiently-powered experiments, large data-mining efforts, and increasing social acceptance of psychiatric disorders to encourage participation of subjects in research studies, we look forward to what we believe is a new dawn for biologically-inspired classification of mental disorders.

Source:EBioMedicine

Internet Addiction is the New Mental Health Disorder.

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The next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders(DSM) – often referred to as the ‘s (APA) diagnostic “bible” – is due out in May 2013.

In this latest edition, DSM-5, “Internet use disorder” will be recommended as an area that needs further study.

While you won’t be able to be diagnosed with Internet use disorder just yet, recommending it for further study puts it squarely on the psychiatric radar, which means it’s likely to be bumped up to an actual mental health disorder very soon.

What is Internet Use Disorder?

As defined by the APA, Internet use disorder includes many characteristics of anyaddiction, such as experiencing withdrawal symptoms when the object of addiction is taken away, an inability to control its use, developing a tolerance to it, deceiving family members about its use, and losing interests in other hobbies. In this case, of course, the object of abuse is the Internet.

According to the APA, you might have a problem if you display these symptoms:1

Preoccupation with Internet gaming Withdrawal symptoms when Internet is taken away Tolerance: the need to spend increasing amounts of time engaged in Internet gaming
Unsuccessful attempts to control Internet gaming use Continued excessive Internet use despite knowledge of negative psychosocial problems Loss of interests, previous hobbies, entertainment as a result of, and with the exception of Internet gaming use
Use of the Internet gaming to escape or relieve a dysphoric mood Has deceived family members, therapists, or others regarding the amount of Internet gaming Has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of Internet gaming use

 

Certainly, some may have a legitimate problem with spending too much time online, in the same way that people become addicted to gambling, television, pornography… the list is endless. It’s quite possible to become addicted to virtually anything if it is used to the point where it interferes with other aspects of your life and puts your health, financial stability or relationships at risk…

But by making Internet addiction a certifiable mental illness, it then becomes treatable by drugs and billable through insurance companies – and morphs into a “disorder” that is likely something that will stigmatize your health records for the rest of your life. Not to mention, over-treatment is a very real risk… as has occurred with depression, ADHD, insomnia, and countless other conditions, many people with only “mild” cases may be diagnosed, and given drugs, when they are not at all necessary.

It is often the case that the newest mental health disorders are also those that happen to create the largest new drug markets. Millions of Americans, including me, use the Internet on a daily basis, many for hours on end, so the potential treatment market for “Internet use disorder” is huge.

Grief: Another “Disorder” Being Added to DSM-5

Grief is a highly individual experience, but for most people it takes two to six months to “run its course” – and sometimes much longer, all of which is normal and to be expected in the face of a significant loss. But according to DSM-5, you may actually have an “Adjustment Disorder” related to bereavement if:2

“Following the death of a close family member or close friend, the individual experiences on more days than not intense yearning or longing for the deceased, intense sorrow and emotional pain, or preoccupation with the deceased or the circumstances of the death for at least 12 months (or 6 months for children). The person may also display difficulty accepting the death, intense anger over the loss, a diminished sense of self, a feeling that life is empty, or difficulty planning for the future or engaging in activities or relationships.”

These all sound like normal reactions following the death of a loved one, but the DSM-5 also proposes further study for Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder, with the purpose being to “develop the best empirically-based set of symptoms to characterize individuals with bereavement-related disorders.”

Close to 2.5 million Americans die each year, and the number of those experiencing grief as a result is far higher. This is the market the pharmaceutical industry stands to gain, thanks to the APA’s trigger-happy attitude when it comes to labeling normal human emotions as psychiatric “disorders.”

Who Really Needs Their Heads Examined?

The APA works in tandem with the drug industry, “creating” more and more “psychiatric diseases,” which are appearing in the literature all the time:

  • Do you shop too much? You might have Compulsive Shopping Disorder.
  • Do you have a difficult time with multiplication? You could be suffering from Dyscalculia.
  • Spending too much time at the gym? You’d better see someone for your Bigorexia or Muscle Dysmorphia.
  • And my favorite – are your terrified by the number 13? You could have Triskaidekaphobia!

Each of these new “diseases” gets added to the next edition of the DSM if enough people show up with those traits. And increasingly, the criteria for inclusion involves whether or not the disorder responds to a category of drugs. If it does, the phenomenon is dubbed a disease.

Of the 297 mental disorders described in the DSM, none can be objectively measured by empirical test.3 In other words, they’re completely subjective! Mental illness symptoms within this manual are arbitrarily assigned by a subjective voting system by a psychiatric panel. So, they’re essentially making up diseases to fit the drugs – not the other way around.

According to marketing professional Vince Parry in a commentary called “The Art of Branding a Condition“:4

“‘Watching the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) balloon in size over the decades to its current phonebook dimensions would have us believe that the world is a more unstable place today than ever.’ …Not surprisingly, many of these newly coined conditions were brought to light through direct funding by pharmaceutical companies, in research, in publicity or both.”

A former chief of the American Psychiatric Association even admitted that some of the “mistakes” the APA made in its diagnostic manual have had “terrible consequences,” which have mislabeled millions of children and adults, and facilitated epidemics of mental illness that don’t exist.5

It’s almost impossible to see a psychiatrist today without being diagnosed with a mental disorder because so many behavior variations are described as pathology. And you have very high chance – approaching 100% – of emerging from your psychiatrist’s office with a prescription in hand. Writing a prescription is, of course, much faster than engaging in behavioral or lifestyle strategies, but it’s also a far more lucrative approach for the conventional model. Additionally, most practitioners have yet to accept the far more effective energetic psychological approaches, like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

Do You Suspect You’re Spending Too Much Time Online?

Getting back to the topic of Internet addiction, it’s quite possible to overdo your time spent online. But psychotropic drugs are not likely to give you the solution you’re after. For starters, they have no known measurable biological imbalances to correct – unlike other drugs that can measurably alter levels of blood sugar, cholesterol and so on.

How can you medicate something that is not physically there? The answer is, of course, you can’t – and doing so is a dangerous game. In other words, drugs are probably not the answer to solving your Internet addiction.

What, then, is?

First of all, I want to point out that it absolutely is detrimental to your physical and emotional health to spend too much time in front of a computer. For one thing, it’s way too much sitting. “Screen time” – more than two hours a day in particular – is associated with increased physical, emotional and behavioral difficulties, regardless of the time spent exercising. Research has shown:

  • A study of more than 17,000 Canadians found that the mortality risk from all causes was 1.54 times higher among people who spent most of their day sitting compared to those who sat infrequently.6
  • Sitting time is a predictor of weight gain, even after accounting for calories consumed and leisure time physical activity, such as exercise time.7
  • The risk of metabolic syndrome rises in a dose-dependent manner depending on your “screen time” (the amount of time you spend watching TV or using a computer). Physical activity had only a minimal impact on the relationship between screen time and metabolic syndrome.8
  • Children who spent more than two hours a day watching TV or using a computer were 61 and 59 percent more likely to experience high levels of psychological difficulties, respectively.9

If online gaming or gambling is involved, the problem could seriously escalate, as well as if you’re neglecting your other responsibilities in order to participate in online gaming or other online activities.

If you suspect you have a problem, I suggest giving EFT a try. EFT is a form of psychological acupressure, based on the same energy meridians used in traditional acupuncture to treat physical and emotional ailments for over 5,000 years, but without the invasiveness of needles. Instead, simple tapping with the fingertips is used to input kinetic energy onto specific meridians on the head and chest while you think about your specific problem – whether it is a traumatic event, an addiction, pain, etc. – and voice positive affirmations.

This combination of tapping the energy meridians and voicing positive affirmation works to clear the “short-circuit” – the emotional block – from your body’s bioenergy system, thus restoring your mind and body’s balance, which is essential for optimal health and the healing of physical and emotional disease.

Source: Dr. Mercola