Click here to watch: “Allen J. Frances on the Overdiagnosis of Mental Illness” via YouTube. The video comes from his lecture, Diagnostic Inflation: Does Everyone Have a Mental Illness?
Please see below for some commentary from our Managing Editor, N. Szajnberg, MD.
This is a crisp, forthright account of “rising” incidence of psychiatric disorders in the US (especially when compared to other Western societies) and the social/fiscal factors that artificially inflate “diagnoses,” outside of scientific or clinical considerations.
Listen to the numbers for instance: twenty percent of all Americans have psychiatric diagnoses; fifty percent have a psychiatric diagnosis over a lifetime. For children, Bipolar, once rarely diagnoses, now is forty times “more prevalent”; for autism, the ‘rise’ in diagnoses went from 1/2000 to 1/88 overall (1/40 for boys); for ADHD, diagnoses rose from 3% to currently ten percent of all children. Four percent of American children are currently medicated for ADHD, many if not most by pediatricians, (In Israel, many children were medicated by neurologists).
For more discussion on this topic, click here to read “Diagnosing the D.S.M.” also by Allen J. Frances from The New York Times on May 11, 2012.