Mental Health ACCESS Act of 2012
The International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP) commends Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, for her introduction of the Mental Health ACCESS Act of 2012.
The Act is designed to improve mental health treatment of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan by:
Providing enhanced oversight for Department of Defense (DOD) suicide prevention and resilience efforts;
Expanding services for the families of soldiers;
Improving the training and education of providers; Increasing peer-to-peer counseling opportunities; and Improving timely access to effective mental health services.
ISEPP has mounted an initiative to work with the DOD and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to improve the treatment of soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by stopping the use of psychotropic drugs as the primary modality of treatment and using non-drug approaches that have been proven to be safe and effective.
ISEPP is encouraged by recent moves by the DOD and VA to use non-drug approaches to helping soldiers suffering from PTSD. Steps such as the Army Surgeon General’s recently released guidelines that discourage the use of psychotropic drugs and encourage non-drug approaches such as sensorimotor psychotherapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, cognitive processing therapy and other trauma-informed approaches, are especially important.
ISEPP strongly encourages the DOD and VA to continue to respond appropriately to the high rate of suicide and sudden cardiac arrest deaths of soldiers that have been linked to the use of psychotropic drugs. ISEPP believes the Health ACCESS Act of 2012 will be helpful in directing and supporting the DOD and the VA’s efforts.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM)
It is the position of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP) that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), a publication of the American Psychiatric Association, is a political rather than scientific document, one which damages human beings. Despite the position of its authors that it is primarily descriptive, the DSM supports the perpetuation of myths about mental, emotional, and behavioral disturbances in individuals which favor pseudoscientific, biological explanations and disregard their lived context. The evolving editions of the DSM have been remarkable in expanding psychiatric labels for alleged “mental illnesses” with no scientifically substantiated biological etiologies.
The forthcoming DSM-V edition continues this process while attempting to deepen indoctrination of mental health providers, consumers, and third-party payers into the fallacy that problems in living result from problems in biology. Adherents of biopsychiatric explanations and pharmaceutical manufacturers are the primary benefactors of public acceptance of this myth. Beyond research and technical studies which repeatedly demonstrate the inherent lack of validity and reliability of the DSM as a nosological system, psychiatric labeling has real consequences in discriminating against and oppressing the disadvantaged, creating unnecessary obstacles to employment, housing, and social acceptance, lending false credibility to the concept of psychiatric disability, assaulting self-worth and self-efficacy, and undermining reestablishment of positive life-striving by inducing “behaviors to label” among people who have been so labeled.
In ISEPP’s view, conscientious and ethical provision of services to those suffering from mental, behavioral, and emotional disturbances is primarily a moral, social, political, and philosophical enterprise. ISEPP supports helpers who wish to eschew use of the DSM-V and its prior systems. ISEPP recommends public scrutiny and skepticism regarding the DSM as well as a constructive dismantling of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex through which it is continually supported and redeployed.
