NO MORE PSYCHIATRIC LABELS - MAD AMERICA - PROFESSOR SAMI TIMIMI

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NO MORE PSYCHIATRIC LABELS: VIEWS OF A CRITICAL PSYCHIATRIST

Sami Timimi is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and a Visiting Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry based in Lincoln, UK. He writes from a critical psychiatry perspective and has published many articles and books including Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD, and the Role of Culture (2005), A Straight Talking Introduction to Children’s Mental Health Problems (2009) and most recently The Myth of Autism: Medicalising Men’s and Boys’ Social and Emotional Competence (2010). He is founder member of the International Critical Psychiatry Network and recently launched the No More Psychiatric Labels campaign to abolish formal psychiatric diagnostic systems.

No More Psychiatric Labels
Posted on January 29, 2012 by Sami Timimi, M.D. RSS


I would like to let readers know about a campaign called ‘No More Psychiatric Labels’ that I started a few months back. The subtitle is “Campaign to Abolish Formal Psychiatric diagnostic Systems like ICD and DSM”.

I started the campaign on the back of the recent protests about the forthcoming DSM 5, feeling that these don’t go far enough as they protest that DSM 5 is not following a proper scientific process, whereas the lack of a coherent scientific basis is common to all psychiatric diagnostic systems. My conclusion having looked at a range of evidence over many years is that we will never reach a diagnostic system that will help advance scientific knowledge or clinical practice and so my position is that they should no longer be used and mental health services will have an opportunity to be so much better once this happens.

In summary I concluded that Psychiatric diagnoses are not valid, use of psychiatric diagnosis increases stigma, using psychiatric diagnosis does not aid treatment decisions, long term prognosis for mental health problems has got worse partly because of the diagnostic constructs, it imposes Western beliefs about mental distress on other cultures, and that alternative evidence based models for organizing effective mental health care are available. You can read the full article at Criticalpsychiatry.net.  You can add your name to the cause here.
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