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To the catalogue of anxieties her patients explore during therapy — marriage, children, and careers — psychologist Alison Howard is now listening to a new source of stress: the political rise of Donald Trump. In recent days, at least two patients have invoked the Republican front-runner, including one who talked at length about being disturbed that Trump can be so divisive and popular at the same time, said Howard, who practices in the District.

Although fewer than 6 percent of American adults will have a severe mental illness in a given year, according to a 2005 study, many more—more than a quarter each year—will have some diagnosable mental disorder. That’s a lot of people. Almost 50 percent of Americans (46.4 percent to be exact) will have a diagnosable mental illness in their lifetimes, based on the previous edition, the DSM-IV. And the new manual will likely make it even "easier" to get a diagnosis. If we think of having a diagnosable mental illness as being under a tent, the tent seems pretty big. Huge,...

President Barack Obama's obsession with a mythical Mitt Romney $5 trillion tax cut raises serious questions about Obama's mental health. The federal government only receives about $1.2 trillion in total income taxes per year. There is no way a $5 trillion tax cut would be possible in the short term. Congress would have to almost eliminate the income tax to produce a $5 trillion cut in 5 years. Cutting $500 billion a year would take 10 years to produce a $5 trillion cut. Cutting $250 billion a year would take 20 years to produce $5 trillion in cuts. I considered...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR) is the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals. A diagnosis of narcissism requires five out of nine characteristics. Note these traits must endure overtime and must not be reactions to a particular situation or environmental stressor: Grandiose sense of self-importance. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, or ideal love. Sense of specialness, belief he can only be understood by or should associate only with other special or high-status individuals or institutions. Need for excessive admiration. Heightened sense of entitlement, leading to unreasonable expectations that others should treat...

"New Ways to Diagnose Autism Earlier" read a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. There is no question that you can diagnose anything as early as you want. The real question is whether the diagnosis will turn out to be correct. My own awareness of how easy it is to make false diagnoses of autism grew out of experiences with a group of parents of late-talking children that I formed back in 1993. A number of those children were diagnosed as autistic. But the passing years have shown most of the diagnoses to have been false, as most of...

There are many articles and books debunking psychiatric diagnoses. The following review is a fair effort in assessing the problems. I am including only the first few paragraphs that deal with the elimination of the homosexual diagnosis. The majority of the review focuses on depression "...In the early 1970s, annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) were home to angry showdowns between the gay rights lobby and organized psychiatry. Activists picketed convention sites, shouted down speakers, and waged ad hominem attacks on psychiatrists who sincerely believed that homosexuality was a sickness. The goal of their flamboyant campaign against the...

EARLIER this summer, the American Psychiatric Association announced that a 27-member panel will update its official diagnostic handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The fifth edition, which is scheduled to come out in 2012, is likely to add new mental illnesses and refine some existing ones. High on the agenda will be the controversial diagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder. Recent data show that office visits by children and adolescents treated for the condition jumped 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. We still don’t know how much of this increase represents long-overdue care of mentally ill youth and how...

CHICAGO - Most of the experts who prepared the world's leading medical guide to mental illness had undisclosed financial relationships with drug companies that presented potential conflicts of interest, according to a new report published Thursday in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. The study is the first to document extensive monetary connections between drug companies, psychiatrists and other scientists responsible for the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM, as it's commonly called, defines all the mental illnesses recognized by psychiatry and outlines the criteria used to determine whether a person has one of these...

California Psychologist Wants 'Extreme Bias' Against Homosexuals Added To 'DSM' January 6, 2006 - In early December 2005, Washington Post writer Shankar Vedantam reported on the efforts of UCLA psychology professor Edward Dunbar to encourage the psychiatric community to add "extreme bias" against homosexuals (or ethnic groups) added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Professor Dunbar is considered an expert on hate crimes and serves as a consultant with the Los Angeles City Police Department, the LA Unified School District and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. The Post article quotes Darrel...

IT'S JAN. 1. Past time to get your inoculation against seasonal affective disorder, or SAD — at least according to the American Psychiatric Assn. As Americans rush to return Christmas junk, bumping into each other in Macy's and Best Buy, the psychiatric association ponders its latest iteration of feeling bad for the holidays. And what is the association selling? Mental illness. With its panoply of major depression, dysthymic disorder, bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, the association is waving its Calvinist flag to remind everyone that amid all the celebration, all the festivities, all the exuberance, many people will "come...

ATLANTA (AP) - Representatives of the nation's top psychiatric group approved a statement Sunday urging legal recognition of gay marriage. If approved by the association's directors in July, the measure would make the American Psychiatric Association the first major medical group to take such a stance. The statement supports same-sex marriage "in the interest of maintaining and promoting mental health." It follows a similar measure by the American Psychological Association last year, little more than three decades after that group removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The psychiatric association's statement, approved by voice vote on the first day...

By a vote of its House of Delegates, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disordered conditions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of the profession. The change came about not because of new research. Scientists had made no groundbreaking discoveries. No, the change because of a political coup engineered by homosexual activists, a process documented by pro-gay writer Ronald Bayer.18 Dr. Charles Socarides, a practicing psychiatrist who witnessed events at APA conventions, including threats of violence by homosexual activists, said, "The APA could only take the action it did by disregarding...

The marriage seemed to come loose at the seams, one stitch at a time, often during the evening hour between work and dinner. She would be preparing the meal, while he kept her company in the sun room next to kitchen, usually reading the paper. At times the two would provoke each other, as couples do - about money, about holiday plans - but those exchanges often flared out quickly when he would say, simply, "O.K., you're right," and turn back to the news. "Looking back, instead of getting angry, I was doing this as a dismissive way of shutting...

The American Psychological Association – which a few years back came under fire for promoting adult-child sex in its peer-reviewed journal – has endorsed homosexual "marriage" at its annual convention. "The APA also opposed discrimination against lesbian or gay parents adoption, child custody and visitation, foster care and reproductive health services," said the group's news release. Condemnation was swift and strong. "The APA does whatever the radical homosexual lobby tells it to do," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, according to a Baptist Press account. "It's nothing more than a professional lobbying group...

"Should These Conditions Be Normalized?" American Psychiatric Association Symposium Debates Whether Pedophilia, Gender-Identity Disorder, Sexual Sadism Should Remain Mental Illnesses By Linda Ames Nicolosi On Monday, May 19th, 2003 in San Francisco, at a symposium hosted by the American Psychiatric Association, several long-recognized categories of mental illness were discussed for possible removal from the upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders. Among the mental illnesses being debated in the symposium at the APA's annual convention were all the paraphilias--which include pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism. Also being debated was gender-identity disorder, a condition in which a...

Again, and for all the wrong reasons, we can't take our eyes off Michael Jackson. Whether or not the allegations are substantiated, the question is in the air: Is pedophilia a disease to be treated, or a crime to be punished? Are people who seduce minors sick or evil? Our current legal and medical systems blur both views. We call for the most draconian punishments (life imprisonment, castration, permanent exile) precisely because we view these acts as morally heinous, yet also driven by uncontrollable biological urges. If sex with children is truly the product of freely made moral choices, then...

When a mighty force overstuffs a container, it shatters. Scott Trobec shattered, in 1996, after a lifetime of never saying an angry word to anyone. Sound impossible? Not to mental health experts who counsel men suffering from what could be called anger over-management. These men don't know how to get mad. They are not just gentle or easy-going types, the experts stress. They are the opposite extreme of the common view of men and anger -- violent, out-of-control guys who stab their wives or beat their children or shoot up the office where they got fired -- and they leave...

When a mighty force overstuffs a container, it shatters. Scott Trobec shattered, in 1996, after a lifetime of never saying an angry word to anyone. Sound impossible? Not to mental health experts who counsel men suffering from what could be called anger over-management. These men don't know how to get mad. They are not just gentle or easy-going types, the experts stress. They are the opposite extreme of the common view of men and anger -- violent, out-of-control guys who stab their wives or beat their children or shoot up the office where they got fired -- and they leave...

Medical Downside of Homosexual Behavior A Political Agenda Is Trumping Science, Says Rick Fitzgibbons WEST CONSHOHOCKEN, Pennsylvania, SEPT. 18, 2003 (Zenit.org)- Amid the push for same-sex unions in Canada and the recent overturning of Texas' sodomy law, an aspect of the underlying issue is sometimes overlooked: the medical consequences of homosexual behavior. To shed light on the medical and scientific research into same-sex attraction and homosexual behavior, ZENIT approached Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons. Fitzgibbons is a principal contributor to the Catholic Medical Association's statement on "Homosexuality and Hope." Q: Could you explain why homosexuality is not normal, from a medical standpoint?...

<p>Washington -- Democratic presidential candidates running in the 2004 election are more sympathetic to gay and lesbian issues than any field in history, according to a report released Wednesday.</p> <p>A study by the country's oldest national gay and lesbian political organization details differences among the nine announced Democratic candidates, from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's support for federal civil unions to Florida Sen. Bob Graham's opposition to allowing gays to serve openly in the military.</p>