THE DICTIONARY OF DISORDER (a history of the DSM's leading innovator)

[HuckleB]

THE DICTIONARY OF DISORDER

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050103fa_fact

In the mid-nineteen-forties, Robert Spitzer, a mathematically minded boy of fifteen, began weekly sessions of Reichian psychotherapy. Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and a student of Sigmund Freud who, among other things, had marketed a device that he called the orgone accumulator—an iron appliance, the size of a telephone booth, that he claimed could both enhance sexual powers and cure cancer. Spitzer had asked his parents for permission to try Reichian analysis, but his parents had refused—they thought it was a sham—and so he decided to go to the sessions in secret. He paid five dollars a week to a therapist on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a young man willing to talk frankly about the single most compelling issue Spitzer had yet encountered: women. Spitzer found this methodical approach to the enigma of attraction both soothing and invigorating. The real draw of the therapy, however, was that it greatly reduced Spitzer’s anxieties about his troubled family life: his mother was a “professional patient” who cried continuously, and his father was cold and remote. Spitzer, unfortunately, had inherited his mother’s unruly inner life and his father’s repressed affect; though he often found himself overpowered by emotion, he was somehow unable to express his feelings. The sessions helped him, as he says, “become alive,” and he always looked back on them with fondness. It was this experience that confirmed what would become his guiding principle: the best way to master the wilderness of emotion was through systematic study and analysis.

Robert Spitzer isn’t widely known outside the field of mental health, but he is, without question, one of the most influential psychiatrists of the twentieth century. It was Spitzer who took the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the official listing of all mental diseases recognized by the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.)—and established it as a scientific instrument of enormous power. Because insurance companies now require a DSM diagnosis for reimbursement, the manual is mandatory for any mental-health professional seeking compensation. It’s also used by the court system to help determine insanity, by social-services agencies, schools, prisons, governments, and, occasionally, as a plot device on “The Sopranos.” This magnitude of cultural authority, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although the DSM was first published in 1952 and a second edition (DSM-II) came out in 1968, early versions of the document were largely ignored. Spitzer began work on the third version (DSM-III) in 1974, when the manual was a spiral-bound paperback of a hundred and fifty pages. It provided cursory descriptions of about a hundred mental disorders, and was sold primarily to large state mental institutions, for three dollars and fifty cents. Under Spitzer’s direction—which lasted through the DSM-III, published in 1980, and the DSM-IIIR (“R” for “revision”), published in 1987—both the girth of the DSM and its stature substantially increased. It is now nine hundred pages, defines close to three hundred mental illnesses, and sells hundreds of thousands of copies, at eighty-three dollars each. But a mere description of the physical evolution of the DSM doesn’t fully capture what Spitzer was able to accomplish. In the course of defining more than a hundred mental diseases, he not only revolutionized the practice of psychiatry but also gave people all over the United States a new language with which to interpret their daily experiences and tame the anarchy of their emotional lives.

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Long, but worth the read, regardless of your opinion on the DSM.

Salud.

[Dear Maggie]

1. That was interesting - A Chemical also mimicks Psychiatric disorder

Quote, "It’s also used by the court system to help determine insanity"

The chemical I've been learning about mimicks true psychiatric disorder. I think that there are some in mental institutions today who have only been poisoned by 2-butoxyethanol.

It does a lot of bad things to people
http://home.gci.net/~blessing/pages/cfs_overview.htm

I suspect it for being the root cause of many cancers; and the cause of 'gulf war syndrome' Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome and a lot of other things -

Maybe even SIDS - That's what I think http://home.gci.net/~blessing/pages/sids.htm

Maybe even neuroblastoma such as Alex had (the girl with the lemonade stand)
http://home.gci.net/~blessing/pages/alex.htm

I wonder if there really is a cure out there... for the autoimmune hemolytic anemia that will be there ... beneath the other things it can cause? Wouldn't it be sad if there really has been a cure found, but because the medical industry makes so much money on people being sick, they haven't told us about it? (Someone I respect said that this was the case. It is very hard to believe)

http://home.gci.net/~blessing/pages/canine.htm

There was a fine gulf war vet who checked himself into a VA psychiatric institution on Christmas Eve day last year. I don't suppose his 2 boys had a very good Christmas then. He said it didn't help. I'm glad he got out. www.valdezlink.com/chad.htm



Why did I study 2-butoxyethanol?

www.seattlepress.com/features/forum/viewtopic.php?p=134#134


Oh, and I suspect it for causing deaths of Soldiers in Iraq with 'pneumonia' last year.

www.ragereport.com/phpbb/nfphpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1842
Whatever you do, soldier, don't walk into the ARMS room if there's any Corexit leaking!

states 'shatteredLife2,'

"I did spend a lot of time in the arms room and there was a barrel of something (50 gal.) I do slightly remember something in that room... I didn't know what it was though. It also seems like something was leaking... my mind is so messed up I just don't recall things correctly? there may have been a wet place on the floor-- I'll have to try and think back? I believe it was blue though.

I felt fine though while in the arms room. It is what came afterwards though, the grey skin with a red tint to it, bloodshot red eyes, joint pain, body aches, headache, chest pain, nausea, dizziness, malaised, lassitude, disoriented, confused, rapid heart rate, fever, breathing problems, nervousness, yellow thick mucas poured from both nostrils, and severe coughing, and severe fatigue, and I felt 80 years old and had to grab onto the railing after I went up a flight of stairs. I was totally exhausted and my lungs filled with fluid and showed up on the x-ray as totally black in both lobes. I was admitted immediately to the hospital where I stayed for 7 days sick as heck!" 6-13-04

In arms room - blue 50 gal drums - Corexit?

Corexit was sold to the military. It is a very bad mix that is 38% ethylene glycol monobutyl ether and may also have ethylene oxide ... at least some.

With the red eyes, the puddle of it on the floor possibly?

This could be the exposure that has cause this illness

It will make ones body shut down with too much exposure to it.

The arms room, that's it

The arms room!

rapid heart rate? yes this is what 2-butoxyethanol does - quickly causes hemolytic anemia

Lungs filled with fluid? this is a chemical pneumonia what they would say now as the soldiers in Iraq are dying of pneumonia (more correctly it is pulmonary edema) ... I bet this is what is going on & have felt so from the day I first heard of it.

There is a painter I met from Canada last month who said he knew his kidney cancer was from paint. I said, yes, most likely. I asked him if he had flu-like symptoms. He said, 'no' dizziness. When the red blood cells are dying off you are loosing the oxygen that they would carry ... that would be the dizziness & a significant symptom.

At the hot temperatures in Iraq, there's no telling how volatile this chemical would be. I wonder what in the world the military thinks this is good for. It is a horrible experimental chemical invention of the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup and not even selected for use; but since, there is MSDS information that it has been sold to the Dept of Defense, to Australia for their 1995 oil spill cleanup and dumped from airplanes for the Karachi oil spill. Horrible poison/pesticide/solvent that is a hazardous waste, per my thoughts and should be disposed of as such. Not transported, not stored, not used for anything!

www.valdezlink.com/hi.htm

www.valdezlink.com/inipol/pages/2-butoxy_msds.htm