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It's not a theory, it's a wild conjecture. Where is your evidence for a rise in misdiagnosis?

Oh, I don't know - maybe the fact that this study is based in the US, which has a track record of "over-diagnosing" mental health disorders in children, such as ADHD ( http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd..., http://www.psychiatrictimes.co...).

Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!

ADD/ADHD stopped being the trendy diagnosis last decade. Now the kids with behavioral problems get put on the "autistic spectrum".

I'll have to look that up. It does appear that several disorders have become routinely abused, including ADD/ADHD, autism, and bipolar disorders.

-FL

And why is that bad? Would you rather have sociopaths committing armed robbery or selling bogus software?

Anyway, I'm a little tired of the way sociopaths tend to dominate every discussion of criminal penalties. Most criminals aren't sociopaths, and trying to design your criminal justice system around sociopaths is stupid. That system is supposed to deter and rehabilitate, and those are things you can't do with outright sociopaths.

Show me one study that wasn't widely criticized for having basic flaws.

The flawed studies I've seen have been those finding no effect - the points used were not selected on the basis of a proper CM assessment, or they used acupressure as a control for acupuncture, or "inactive" points were used, without understanding that the points of "Traditional" Chinese Medicine represent only a recently-standardized subset of points.

The only effect those quacks seem to have is a complete lack of understanding how to do a proper double blinded test.

The double-blind model works well for drugs but less so for manual therapies. How many double-blind tests of surgical techniques do you know of? (In fact the only blinded tests of surgical techniques I've come across have had negative findings, and surgery is orders of magnitude more dangerous than acupuncture, so if you're going to go after therapists without double-blind tests to support them, you should be criticizing surgeons...)

The best blinded tests of acupuncture I'm aware of is the work of Allen, Schnyer, et. al., where participants receive genuine acupuncture therapy that is targeted at either the condition under investigation or for an unrelated complaint, with the assessing and treating handled by different therapists to create a blind condition. However, this eliminates patient feedback - the sensitivity of points and the sensation of "de qi" is diagnostic - so therapy under these conditions would certainly be less effective. Nonetheless, positive results have been found.

First, the rate of usage is about 100 per 1000 people, in the US.

Second, anti-depressants do not prevent suicide and in some cases appear to even increase suicide rates.

Third, anti-depressants are a major money earner for drugs companies, who continously need to develop new drugs as older ones become commoditized.

That is what this study is about... setting the stage for new anti-SAD drugs. This is big pharma marketing.

What's the point here? Perhaps that a huge majority of people who take anti-depressants are actually being abused. I hardly think this is a radical statement: it's just valium all over again.

For many people, their drug is their problem.

My list of cures basically comes down to "get a life" and although I've every faith that drugs can solve some problems, they should be the last solution, not the first.

I can see your point. Since I'm talking about US game company being sued in the US, I must naturally be talking about EU laws. :)

I live in the US.

You can't buy X-rated TV unless you're an adult either. Basic Cable, or Satellite TV doesn't come with it. Once you put it in your home, be it games, movies, magazines, or TV all bets are off, but buying them is a strictly opt-in type of thing.

what effects the psyche more then something else is an unsubstantiated opinion

Just because I didn't substantiate it doesn't mean there is no real evidence.

Will you listen to evidence at all? Its all I can provide here. Most psychological studies aren't kept on the internet, so I can't provide one that covers the effect of books on desensitization.

Its harder to prove a negative. Why don't you prove that books have a measurable effect? Its makes more sense to prove that images have an effect that to prove that books don't have much of one because the effect from images is so much more noticable.

If you don't accept psychiatric study as evidence, there's really nothing that can change your mind, is there? You must have read something like this before since it is currently the prevailing opinion in the psychological community, and you obviously have an opinion on the subject (you'd be hard-pressed to not find a result like this if you tried to learn anything about the subject). There are journals brimming with studies, but your claim that it has no mental effect becomes untestable if you don't accept measurements of mental effects as evidence.

"Narcissism" might not be an accepted medical term, but Narcissistic Personality Disorder is. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), assigns it code number 301.81. That code number is what a therapist would put in the diagnosis section of a bill. Health insurance companies require an official diagnosis for reimbursement, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder counts as one. Of course, people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder rarely seek therapy, given the nature of their disorder. Also of course, the fact that insurance companies recognize it does not prove that it is universally accepted, or scientifically valid.

The DSM-IV disorder that most closely matches Psychopathy is 301.7, Antisocial Personality Disorder. However, see Robert D. Hare's 1996 article in the Psychiatric Times for a discussion of the controversy surrounding the switch from the term Psychopathy to Antisocial Personality Disorder, and the reworking of the diagnosis itself.

This kind of controversy is common in psychology, and much less so in medicine. Everybody agrees on what a broken bone is, and strep throat can be diagnosed with a throat swab and a microscope. The diagnostic criteria for mental disorders are often fuzzy, and not universally agreed upon. So I would not be surprised to find that a later revision of the DSM restores the diagnosis of Psychopathy, and I wouldn't object to it either.

Most psychopaths (with the exception of those who somehow manage to plow their way through life without coming into formal or prolonged contact with the criminal justice system) meet the criteria for ASPD, but most individuals with ASPD are not psychopaths. [Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder: A Case of Diagnostic Confusion]

The bottom line is that Jeffry Dahmer was not only a sociopath, but also a psychopath. Not all sociopaths, however, become psychotic.

RTFA. Excerpt: "Cobblestone-like walking paths are common in China. The activity is rooted in traditional Chinese medicine and relates to some of the principles of reflexology, in that the uneven surface of the cobblestones stimulate and regulate "acupoints" located on the soles of the feet."

Then TFA is blowing smoke. There is only one TCM acupoint located on the sole of the foot, Kidney 1; and CM has no relation at all to reflexology.

But what about all the times that it doesn't work? And there are many. The trouble with things like this is people focus more on the times they succeed and tend to forget about all the times that things failed.

Of course. The same is true for any treatment, conventional or complementary. Western physicians aren't immune to believing in treatments that don't work. Hell, just a few decades ago your doctor would be telling you to take up smoking to help lose weight.

There is a huge difference between a medical doctor prescribing you a treatment that has been properly scientifically and medically proven and tested...

But very few of the treatments used in standard Western medicine have been so tested! Please show me a controlled double-blind study of coronary bypass surgery.

You simply have to submit the practice to a real scientific double blind-placebo controlled test. Fancy that, here is an example: http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/143/1/1 0

A study with only two fatal flaws:

• "A prescription of acupuncture at fixed points may differ from acupuncture administered in clinical settings". In other words, what was tested was nothing like acupuncture as it is actually applied.
• part of the control group received "noninsertive simulated acupuncture", which will also stimulate points - in some cases, as effectively as needle insertion. Those of us who practice acupressure and ABT stimulate points without needle insertion all the time

So you've cited a study that has no bearing on clinical acupuncture.

A better example of a double-blind controlled methodology for acupuncture research is that developed by Allen and Schnyer, where the control is geniune acupuncture adminstered for a condition other than that under investigation. They found:

Thus, based on a small outpatient sample of women with major depression, it appeared that acupuncture provided significant symptom relief at rates comparable to standard treatments such as psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy. The effect sizes observed in this small sample were at least as large or larger than those seen in trials of antidepressant medication or psychotherapy, and they suggest that a larger clinical trial is warranted.

Yeah, and smoking isn't addictive. How far did we have to push the tobacco companies to admit that?

How do you explain that?

Pretty easily. 80% of so-called double-blind studies are transparent: the patients can tell whether they are on the drug or the placebo. This more than accounts for the 5-10% that any of these drugs outperforms the placebo.

I guess schizophrenia is just a matter of self discipline as well?

Your statement apparently demonstrates your ignorance. You know nothing about schizophrenia, and assume that no-one else does - just for the sake of an argument.

Schizophrenia has never been scientifically linked to a chemical imbalance. If you want to get the inside story from somebody who actually successfully treats schizophrenia start reading here.

Dave (clinical psychotherapist), http://www.deep-trance.com