Life As A Psychiatric Disorder

"The insurance companies told the rehabs they would no longer pay for inpatient rehab for heroin, cocaine, or alcohol unless there was also another Axis 1 psychiatric disorder like bipolar disorder or depression."
"I was working in a drug treatment facility when the change happened. Since addicts typically complain of anxiety and depression, a completely understandable emotional response to their toxic lifestyles, it was no problem to add a new label and throw a few psychiatric drugs at their now-[re] labelled 'dual diagnosis'."
Phil Sinaikin, psychiatrist, author: Psychiatryland

"[National Alliance of Advocates for Buprenorphine Treatment has] received donations from pharmaceutical companies; its mission fairly straightforward, to:] Educate the public about the disease of opioid addiction and the buprenorphine treatment option; help reduce the stigma and discrimination associated with patients with addiction disorders; and serve as a conduit connecting patients in need of treatment to the buprenorphine treatment providers."
National Alliance of Advocates for Buprenorphine (NAABT)

Well, that's quite the exchange; help to create a social environment of complete personal exoneration of responsibility for succumbing to addictions : to food, to alcohol, to drugs, to any kind of destructive lifestyle habit, in exchange for a general acceptance that what is involved is not a lack of willpower and the inability of many people to make sensible choices for themselves, but a psychiatric disorder that is responsible for destroying their lives.

And thanks to a collaboration between the psychiatric industry and their counselling services in conjunction with pharmaceutical companies which fund their studies in return for their professional medical opinions diagnosing certain conditions then prescribing drugs purported to have been especially engineered to solve those problems of lack of will power and positive discrimination in choices, an industry servicing those two powerfully mendacious professions is born.

There is a huge demographic evidencing the need for some solution to the pandemic of overweight and obese people, weighing down universal health systems and creating for themselves miserable lives of pain, disease, and early deaths. Over two thirds of American adults are considered overweight, matching the 50%-plus of Canadians who are also overweight. Although the medical profession is beginning to go along with the pleas that people are innocent of having contributed to their impaired health conditions, obesity is mostly a symptom of over-consumption.

Just as alcoholism is a symptom of over-consumption, even while medicine points to inherited familial pre-dispositions, and just as drug-dependency as well symbolizes an entrapment mostly of willpower with, undeniably a certain amount of prescribed exposure in protocols gone dreadfully wrong. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the compilation of recognized health disorders recognized controversially throughout North America now lists Binge Eating Disorder as a mental illness.

Just coincidentally, many of those professionals who write the DSM have financial links to Big Pharma. New "diseases" have a tendency to coincide at the junction where Pharma stands to make huge profits from new drug formulas geared to solve newly-identified mental disorders handily appearing in the DSM. The definition of alcohol abuse has been "upgraded" from the previous edition of the manual, to the point now where in the most current version, DSM-5, craving alcohol itself can scoop up more people to fit the criteria of mental illness.

Addiction psychiatry is a booming business, matched with pharmaceutical companies who just cannot make enough profits to suit long- and short-range aspirations. Rehabilitation of alcoholics traditionally meant that people would seek out sources like Alcoholics Anonymous to enable them to become alcohol-free and leave their dependency behind. But in this new era of combined addiction psychiatry and Pharma, counselling has been set aside for the effectiveness of pill treatment of all those addiction ills.

In the States, the FDA is amenable enough, since unrestrained capitalism is the lifeblood of the economy, so three drugs have been approved for treating alcoholics: naltrexone, acamprosate, and disulfram. Buprenorpine, marketed as Suboxone for opioid addiction, as an example, is a troubling addition to the pharmacopoeia since it is as addictive as the drug it is meant to replace as a curative, and just as difficult to stop using, valued for its own "high".

As for overeating in a society long grown accustomed to easy access to processed foods and savoury snacks available wherever one looks from school canteens to hospital snackbars to street vendors  and car washes, little wonder people are always grazing. Advertising and public relations extolling the virtues of sugar-fat-salt-laden food cleansed of all its nutritional properties encourages people to overeat. Life has become a disease.