Psychiatrists and the mental health industry claim that mental disorders, such as "ADHD," "obsessive-compulsive," and "bipolar" are medical conditions that are brain-based, due to a chemical imbalance or other physiological medical cause. This claim is used to justify the use of electroshock, psychosurgery and psychotropic drugs to treat the so-called medical condition. This claim — that psychiatric disorders are no different than medical diseases — is fraudulent.

Real diseases, such as diabetes or cancer are demonstrable by physical evidence. For example, there are tests that show the elevated glucose levels that occur in diabetes. Cancer can be proved by the existence of cancerous cells.

Psychiatrists frequently cite "chemical imbalance" as the cause. This is nothing more than another psychiatric theory that has never been proven. This popular misconception is due to nothing more than heavy public marketing; we've just been hearing it for so long that many take for granted that it is true. It is not true and has in fact been thoroughly discredited by researchers.

Psychiatry has no objective tests that prove the existence, cause or physical basis of a single psychiatric disorder. Psychiatrists merely observe a behavior or set of behaviors and give it a name. It looks like medicine and it sounds like medicine and that is where the similarities end. The American Psychiatric Association admits as much in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM, psychiatry's dictionary of behaviors): "For most of the DSM-III disorders...the etiology [cause] is unknown. A variety of theories have been advanced...not always convincing — to explain how these disorders come about."

If they don't know the cause, then asserting that it is physical, chemical, biological or brain-based is fraud.

A new study published in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (Volume 75, Issue 3, April 2006) illuminates a new aspect of this fraud: the study's authors reported that 56% of the psychiatric experts who developed the most recent edition of the DSM (published in 1994) had one or more undisclosed financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. It found even higher percentages for panels that developed particular sections of the manual: the schizophrenia and "mood disorders," groups consisted 100% of experts with financial ties to drug makers and more than 80% of panel members for "anxiety disorders," "eating disorders," "medication-induced movement disorders" and "premenstrual dysphonic disorder" had financial ties.

Additionally, said Lisa Cosgrove, University of Massachusetts psychologist and lead author of the study, "No blood tests exist for the disorders in the DSM. It relies on judgments from practitioners who rely on the manual."

Yet psychiatry has continued to assert that these disorders are actual medical diseases. So, the public becomes the victim of psychiatry's "misrepresentation, concealment or nondisclosure of a material fact…resulting in injury" when they accept a psychotropic drug, electroshock or psychosurgery for what they have been deceived into believing is a physically-based disease.

All patients who manifest "mental illness" are no doubt suffering. But their suffering is generally traceable to a definite physical condition that can be isolated, tested for and corrected with proper medical treatment or other non-psychiatric approaches.

Case in point: an Indiana housewife contacted CCHR in July of 2003 to report that she had gone to the hospital feeling depressed. Over months, she was given one label after another ("severe depression," "bipolar disorder," "borderline personality disorder") as the psychiatrists failed to treat her. She was finally labeled with "post-traumatic stress disorder" though neither the label nor the drugs they prescribed for it succeeded in improving her condition. She stayed on the drugs until November 2004, when she suffered a grand mal seizure. A proper medical examination revealed a tumor in her brain about the size of a tennis ball which doctors said had to have been there for at least 10 years. Her depression lifted following removal of the tumor.

CCHR receives many such reports.

Every person who has ever been given a psychiatric label such as "ADHD," "bipolar," or "obsessive-compulsive," — all based on the chemical imbalance lie — and treated with heavy psychoactive drugs or other psychiatric approaches is the victim of misdiagnosis, negligence and malpractice. Every such patient may have a valid cause of action (basis for a lawsuit) against the psychiatrist for neglecting to perform a full physical examination to detect the actual physical causes of their symptoms.

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