Psychiatry and disease mongering: Road Rage Disorder is latest spontaneously "discovered" disease

Tuesday, June 13, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: disease mongering, psychiatry, Intermittent Explosive Disorder

Disease mongering has reached a new level of ridiculousness with the widely-reported announcement that millions of American now have undiagnosed Road Rage Disorder, also sometimes called Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED). Desperate to scrounge up new diseases that can be treated with high-profit prescription drugs, Big Pharma and its disease-pushing sidekick, psychiatry, is now pulling diseases out of thin air, making them up as it goes along, and hoping enough impressionable consumers (and journalists) can be hoodwinked into thinking every fictitious disease is actually real.

Road Rage Disorder is merely the latest disease quackery drummed up by the pharmaceutical industry. Many people don't know this, but Big Pharma actually hires psychiatrists to invent, then publicize new "diseases." They actually sit around in rooms, brainstorming new disease ideas and figuring out how to convince the public that those diseases exist. That's where they come up with junk science statements like, "This is the most common disease you've never heard of!"

Inventing disease for profit

The psychiatric community has now become the disease invention branch of Big Pharma. Psychiatrists dream up disorders, and drug companies market the "treatment" that just happens to have been recently FDA approved. Notice how new diseases or disorders only get publicized and advertised after the FDA approves a Big Pharma drug to treat them? These diseases apparently spontaneously afflict huge numbers of Americans only in the days following the FDA approval of any drug that might treat such diseases. Imagine the odds.

To think, all these years, we've all been running around with Intermittent Explosive Disorder and we didn't even know it! The horrors!

The crooks running this medical scam are, of course, the drug company executives and psych doctors who have apparently decided they will now do absolutely anything to sell more drugs, including labeling perfectly healthy people as sick. As the number of truly ill people in society is limited, Big Pharma evil geniuses have figured out that the only way to increase their customer base is to start selling drugs to people who aren't sick. And the quickest way to do that is through disease mongering -- inventing, then marketing non-existent diseases to a gullible population that has grown far too comfortable with the idea that every human behavior is now a disease.

This is how we get Road Rage Disorder, Restless Legs Syndrome (an extremely rare condition that drug companies are now trying to push onto half the population) and even the idea that menstruation is now a "disorder" that can be treated with drugs to stop a woman's natural cycles from being expressed. Merely being a woman, apparently, is a state of ongoing disease and biological dysfunction according to Big Pharma's disease pushers.

It's so outrageous, and based on such obvious non-scientific psychobabble, that only a complete fool would actually buy into it. Yet the public, the FDA and the mainstream media are currently exhibiting zero skepticism about these wholly fictitious diseases. Newspapers, magazines and broadcast news programs continue parroting headlines and press release handed to them by the public relations firms bankrolled by Big Pharma. There is no science here; no scrutiny, no genuine journalism and nothing resembling "evidence-based medicine." It's just plain old hucksterism dressed up to look like a mental health discovery.

Got angry? You have a mental disorder.

The whole thing makes me so mad that I could slam my head into the wall. And that, of course, qualifies me as having Intermittent Explosive Disorder, a disease based on such flimsy definitions that you can be qualified as "ill" by simply having three major anger outbursts in your entire life! You read that right: Three bouts of anger, over your entire life, can get you labeled as having this so-called "disease" and put on powerful psychotropic drugs for life.

Is there anyone who hasn't experienced at least three episodes of anger in their life? Let's see... there's the snotty girl who stuffed a slushy snowball down my pants in the third grade, that's one. There was the idiot who slammed into my car at a stoplight because he was on prescription sleeping pills, that's two. And then there was the embarrassing incident involving a circus bear, a unicycle and three flaming juggling sticks that I'd rather not talk about. That's three. Gee, I guess I really am suffering from IED.

You might recognize the three letters, by the way: IED also refers to Improvised Explosive Devices that are killing soldiers in Iraq. So IED is both a road-side bomb and an anger disorder. Sort of fitting, it seems, because when IEDs actually explode and kill American troops in Iraq, the surviving soldiers understandably get more than a bit ticked off and have been known to go door to door shooting civilians in a vengeful rampage. That behavior may actually qualify as some sort of disorder. That's real violence. Going door to door killing women and children with military rifles probably qualifies you as a whacko under any system of medicine. But saying you have Road Rage Disorder because some psychiatrist force-fed a false diagnosis into your impressionable, defenseless brain only qualifies you as gullible.

Pseudoscientific psych surveys

How, exactly, did psychiatrists actually come up with this stunning "discovery" that 16 million Americans suffer from this new disease, IED? Get this: They conducted a survey.

The survey asked American adults if they had ever experienced three anger outbursts in their entire life. Not surprisingly, a whole lot of people said they had. From this flimsy evidence -- and this alone! -- the Archives of General Psychiatry (a medical journal that takes loads of money from drug companies) printed the survey results that hype this fictitious disease.

Apparently, surveys now provide all the evidence needed by conventional medicine to scare half the population into believing they suffer from some new, mysterious disease. Promoters of drugs and surgery are proud to proclaim Western medicine is "evidence-based medicine," but they never admit what that so-called evidence is really based on. In this case, it's based on a flimsy survey that was obvious designed from the get-go to "discover" some new disease that could be hyped up in the media.

It's downright sinister, I say. It's a recipe of instilling fear in the public in order to sell more drugs to people who simply don't need them.

So I have a new idea here. Stay with me on this. We're all going to get rich. I'm going to send a survey to thousands of American adults and ask if they've ever experienced hesitations in their breathing, like holding their breath, shallow breathing or rapid breathing (such as during exercise).

When I get the survey results, I'm going to tabulate them and declare that 25 million Americans now suffer from Intermittent Breathing Disoder (IBD), a disease that's "very common even though you've never heard of it!"

Then I'm going to get fast-track FDA approval on drugs to treat IBD. I'll buy full-page ads in medical journals, bribe a few psychiatrists with "consulting fees," and whip out some press releases that will be faxed to all the national newspapers and magazines. Drug sales will skyrocket in no time! Invest in my IBD company now, and we'll all get rich!

Sounds like a con, right? Yet it's exactly what's happening right now with Restless Legs Syndrome, Road Rage Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder and even Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Every one of these is utterly bogus. Completely fictitious. Designed for one sinister purpose: To sell drugs to people who don't need them.

As reported in one news story, "Experts claim IED is caused by inadequate production of serotonin in the brain, which regulates our moods. It is felt that treatment with antidepressants can help the condition."

Ah. Antidepressants. No such disorder is ever publicized, you see, unless there's a "treatment" already available and approved by the FDA. Modern mental health has nothing to do with actually helping people and everything to do with marketing more drugs. No mental disorders exist except those for which medications are readily available.

No pathological basis for disease

Have you ever heard of doctors using a survey to come up with disease definitions? Of course not. A real disease has some observable pathology: A microbe, a physical deformity, a change in chemistry, a measurable malfunction... something that can be used by doctors to actually diagnose the condition.

But none of these psychiatric disorders express any observable pathology. Take IED, for instance:

Can you weigh IED? Touch it? See it? Smell it?
No.

Can you see IED or its effects under a microscope?
No.

Can you measure IED with a blood test?
No.

Is there a carrier for IED such as a virus, bacterium, fungus, prion or spore?
No.

Can you find IED in the genetic code? A CAT scan? An MRI?
No. No. No.

Behavior is a choice

You see, there is no such thing as IED, or bi-polar disorder, or ADHD. These fictitious diseases are diagnosed through interview questions by a psychiatrist and are based purely on behavior, not pathology. And behavior is a choice, friends, not a disease.

That's a big statement, so take it in slowly: Behavior is a choice, not a disease. I fully realize that believing this requires taking responsibility for your own actions... and that's not something many people really want to do. It's easier to accept a label and blame everything on some fictitious disorder.

Kids get away with it all the time. At school, they proclaim, "I'm ADHD!" So they get to take tests with an open book. But at home, they play Halo on the Xbox for six hours without even taking a restroom break. How's that for mental focus? If they have an attention disorder, how can they play Halo for six hours?

Many people, you see, don't want to admit that behavior is a choice simply because that would require acting like an adult. Harsh, but true.

The catch-22 on mental disorders

Psychiatrists don't believe behavior is a choice, either. They believe behavior is a disease, especially behavior that doesn't fit in with the crowd or that questions authority. They even have a name for that one, too: Oppositional Defiance Disorder, described on page 100 of the DSM-IV-TR manual. I'm looking at it right now, and it says this "disease" is characterized by, "...persistent stubbornness, resistance to directions, and unwillingness to compromise, give in, or negotiate with adults or peers."

So if you don't compromise and give in to your peers, you have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Well count me in on this one, too, because I'm not about to join the uninformed masses and do what doctors and psychiatrists insist people should do.

It's a clever Catch-22 medical con, isn't it? If you give in and submit to their disease mongering, they trap you with such sweeping definitions of disease that practically everyone will eventually be put on drugs. But if you resist and claim that modern psychiatry is nonsense, and you don't buy into their pseudoscientific psychobabble, they can label you with a defiance disorder.

Either way, according to modern psychiatry, virtually everyone is "sick" and needs treatment. This astonishing claim is the cornerstone of the psychiatric mantra you often find repeated in news stories: The plea for treatment. It goes something like this: "Millions of people have this disorder, but are going without treatment. We must find a way to treat them!" The implication, of course, is that all patients should be "treated" because we don't want people to go without treatment, do we?

But it isn't treatment. It's the exploitation of a human being to generate corporate profits.

Consensus hallucinations

The idea that all these psychiatric disorders exist at all isn't based on good science, or genuine pathology, or anything with scientific merit. Rather, these diseases only "exist" in modern society because of consensus hallucination.

What is consensus hallucination? It's when a large group of people all agree to hallucinate something that isn't there. IED doesn't exist in the real world, of course. You can't find it in nature, nor in the body or brain tissues of a human being. It only exists as a false concept, an idea that is being hyped as real even though it isn't.

With enough media coverage and advertising, the public can be convinced to hallucinate practically anything: Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Housing prices will keep going up forever. The U.S. economy is strong. Imperialism is freedom. And most of the population suffers from a variety of mental disorders that must be treated with psychotropic drugs. These are all consensus hallucinations. There are many more, in case you're curious.

During the dot-com boom, the consensus hallucination was that PE ratios meant nothing, that the laws of economics had changed, and that everybody was going to get rich selling each other little scraps of paper with increasingly large numbers written on them. In the cheap-money housing boom right now, the consensus hallucination is that buying a home, no matter how high the price, is always a good investment because home prices will rise forever. They won't, of course. This boom will bust much like the dot-com boom. But that reality doesn't keep people from investing in the consensus hallucination.

Modern psychiatric medicine is based almost entirely on the invention and marketing of consensus hallucinations. And as long as they can get away with it, there's no stopping the disease mongers from exploring even greater degrees of scientific fraud in their efforts to market drugs to people who don't need them.

Every bodily function and behavior may be declared a disorder

How far will the drug companies go before lawmakers, journalists and citizens come to their senses and finally ban direct-to-consumer drug advertising? You can expect them to try anything to sell more drugs. No bodily function, emotion or behavior is safe from Big Pharma's disease mongering racket.

It won't be long before we hear about IFD. That's Intermittent Farting Disorder, in case you were wondering. It's the early expression of CFD, Continuous Farting Disorder, which is far more dangerous. Farting, you see, is a disease. You can tell by the way it makes you dizzy and socially unacceptable. Farting, the studies show, actually leads to Social Anxiety Disorder and, in extreme cases, paranoia. Fortunately, there are drugs available to help you.

Buying in to the hallucination

Since when did virtually the entire medical community, the public, the FDA and the press all buy into the Big Pharma hype that says every human action must be chemically assisted? We all need drugs, we're told, to pee, defecate, fall asleep, wake up or get an erection. We need drugs to feel happy, confident, sexy or sane. Only through drugs, we're told, can we stop pain, socialize with peers, control blood pressure, gain mental concentration, lower cholesterol or prevent cancer.

This is the con that drug companies want us to believe. They want us to think that we're born diseased, powerless to take control over our own health, and that we must rely on doctors, drugs and radical surgical procedures to "manage" all our metabolic processes.

I tell you, there is no greater con in the history of the world than this con being perpetrated by Big Pharma and all the major players in conventional medicine: The FDA, medical journals, psychiatry, med schools and even the mainstream media (which, remember, accepts hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies, thanks to the fact that direct-to-consumer drug advertising is still absurdly legal in this country).

You want the blunt truth on all this? Here it is: Healthy people take no drugs, period. Taken for anything other than short-term acute conditions, drugs make you sick, not healthy. And drugs that mess with your head make you mentally sick. The more drugs you take, the more side effects you're going to start experiencing, and you'll be trapped in the racket of conventional medicine and its toxic medications.

If you aren't as healthy as you want to be, look to your diet and exercise. That's where the root cause of virtually every major degenerative disease is really found. You do not have a "deficiency" of brain chemicals or anything else conventional medicine is trying to push on you. Don't fall for the false authority, the pseudoscience, the psychobabble, the drug pushing and the disease mongering that now defines modern medicine in the West.

Mental health is a genuine problem for psychiatrists

Although IED, ADHD and many other so-called diseases are consensus hallucinations, the obvious question is: Are there genuine mental health disorders?

Sure there are. And the behavior of modern psychiatrists probably demonstrates several such genuine disorders. What kind of doctor would exploit patients for his own financial gain, cursing them with the label of some fictitious disease and using the power of placebo against them? Psych doctors, that's who.

I've seen homeless people wandering the streets talking to themselves about things that don't exist. But at least they're not hurting anyone. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, talk to each other about things that don't exist (like IED) and then go out and push that consensus hallucination onto the world, drugging up untold numbers of Americans on medicines that can only harm them.

So who's crazier, the homeless guy who harms no one, or the psychiatrist who puts perfectly normal patients on powerful psychotropic drugs that they don't need? By any reasonable standard, I'd say the inmates are running the asylum in modern medicine. The psychiatrists are crazier than the patients they're diagnosing with fictitious disease. We've let this dark branch of conventional medicine run amok, and now drug companies run psychiatry.

Don't believe me? Just consider the recent finding that one hundred percent of those psychiatrists who wrote the behavior disorders guidelines in the DSM-IV manual (the psychiatry "bible") have undisclosed financial ties to drug companies. Not ninety percent, not ninety-five percent, but one hundred percent.

And, unbelievably, they insist there's no conflict of interest even though they're taking money from the very companies who financially benefit from their disease mongering. How's that for classic self delusion?

What real brain medicine looks like

You want real brain medicine? It doesn't come in a pill, and it's not made by a drug company.

Real brain medicine includes sunshine (which actually enhances brain chemistry), exercise, fish oil supplements, omega-3 oils and nutritionally dense fruits like blueberries, goji berries and pomegranates. Real brain medicine comes from nature, not drug companies, and it includes things like bilberry, camu camu berries and astaxanthin.

Psychiatrists don't have a clue about real brain medicine. These nutritionally illiterate hucksters don't even believe that food has anything at all to do with mental health -- an idea so preposterous that only delusional health professional could possibly believe it. And yet it's widely believed throughout psychiatry today: Food and mental health are not related, they declare.

Astonishing.

Who's qualified to talk about mental health anyway?

Critics of my criticism of psychiatry will no doubt say I'm not qualified to talk about mental health. In fact, I am unique qualified to talk about this subject because I possess genuine objectivity (I take no money from drug companies, unlike virtually 100% of psychiatrists) and clear-headed thinking (because I take no drugs whatsoever).

How many psychiatrists are there who can say they have never taken money or gifts from any drug company, and that they take absolutely no drugs themselves? (No prescription drugs, no caffeine, no sugar, no alcohol, nicotine, etc.) The answer is, well, just about zero, except for the whistleblowers in the Critical Psychiatric Network and other reform-oriented medical groups. And so the majority of psychiatrists themselves can't even attain clear-headed thinking because they're influenced by drug company money and distorted by their own substance abuse habits.

The few who have managed clear thinking on this issue are now increasingly speaking out against their own industry! I've been in touch with several psychiatrists who are so outraged at the lies and corruption they see in their industry that they're looking for ways to blow the whistle on this scam. To anyone who can think with even a little clarity, the con is obvious: Drug companies bankroll psychiatry, and in return, psychiatrists invent new diseases to enrich drug companies.

It's a classic conspiracy, right here in front of us. And for the moment, they're actually getting away with it!

You can help stop the insanity and save yourself (and your children, perhaps) from being diagnosed with yet another fictitious mental disorder. Take this article and post it on your website (with author credit and a link back, please), or forward to friends. Also, visit www.StopDrugAds.org, a grassroots campaign to end direct-to-consumer drug advertising.

Having a bad day is perfectly normal

By the way, if you had a bad day, got angry at a crazy driver on the highway, couldn't fall asleep one night, forgot where you put your keys or felt nervous at a social gathering, there's nothing wrong with you.

It's called "life." Sometimes stuff happens. Every day isn't perfect, and if you think that chemicals will make your life better, you're kidding yourself. That old slogan, "Better living through chemistry" was a cruel joke.

Don't fall for the con of psychiatric medicine and its incessant disease mongering. There's nothing wrong with your head. You just need what we all need: Less stress, more exercise, better nutrition (especially the minerals), more time with nature and loving, supporting relationships. It isn't complicated.

But if reality sounds too challenging, I'm sure there's a psychiatrist willing to medicate you instead. You can always choose to let the chemicals run your thoughts and emotions, sleep-walking through life like the rest of the zombies who have surrendered their free will to psychiatric medicine.

Psychiatrists are promising mental paradise, but delivering mental prison. Don't become enslaved by chemicals.