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Money and madness: why mental-health parity is a costly fraud! U.S. surgeon general admits diagnoses of psychiatric mental disorders is not science
Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 by Kelly Patricia O'Meara
But nowhere in the surgeon general's report was there any reference to a single confirmatory, diagnostic test that proves any physical abnormality in any psychiatric diagnosis. More importantly, several chapters into the report the surgeon general admits what Baughman and other neurologists have been saying for years: "The diagnosis of mental disorders is often believed to be more difficult than diagnosis of somatic or general medical disorders since there is no definitive lesion, laboratory test or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify the illness" [emphasis added].
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Naturally, one might assume, it would be difficult to diagnose a mental illness if there were no confirming physical evidence that one exists. And one might even ask the surgeon general how he could make the statement that "mental disorders collectively account for more than 15 percent of the overall burden of disease" when he admits later in the report that there is no physical proof thus far of mental disease in any of the psychiatric diagnoses.
More important, critics say, is his honest admission that there is no proof of any physical abnormality that causes any psychiatric mental disorder. This begs the question: If there is no way to prove that a single psychiatric mental illness exists in life or death, how does one diagnose something that doesn't exist and then require insurance companies to pay for treatment?
While the observations of the nation's top medicine man seem crystal clear--and are, in fact, a carbon copy of what critics such as Baughman long have been saying about mental disorders--apparently the sponsors of the pending legislation missed the surgeon general's report. According to Allison Dobson, communications director for Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), a cosponsor of the Senate bill, "We know that mental illness is valid based on the volumes of science that have been presented to the senator. The mental illness thing has pretty much been proved by science."
Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), the biggest cheerleader for requiring mental-health parity, didn't respond to INSIGHT'S calls. But Michael Zamora, the policy adviser for Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), a cosponsor of the House parity legislation, tells INSIGHT: "We've had a number of specialists from NIMH who have talked about what they're doing. While they don't have any diagnostic criteria developed yet, they are making advances and starting to document the linkages between the physical and mental. But they haven't necessarily been able to establish yet exactly how these are working."
Indeed, says Kennedy's spokesman, "I'm pretty confident and trusting that the science base of the National Institute of Health, the surgeon general and Nobel laureates have researched this stuff when they say there is a science base behind mental illness. I know that the congressman is confident that the surgeon general and our premier medical-research facility, NIMH, is not full of quacks."
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