In case you are wondering about all the people around you that you have considered “normal” but now have a psychiatric diagnosis of some sort you are not the only one. All over the world the number of people on disability secondary to a mental diagnosis is increasing. At the same time more and more psychiatrists as well as psychologists are speaking out on the over diagnosis of mental disorders. Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist once dubbed as the most influential psychiatrist in the US and one of the scholars that formed the DMS-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association offering the common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders) that came out in 2000 is one of them. In a hilarious preface to his book “Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life” that was published in August, 2014 Dr. Frances describes his concerns with the updating of DSM-IV to DSM-5, the newest version of the DSM manual. He goes as far as saying that this latest version “threatens to turn everyday living into psychiatric disease”

The number of disorders has increased

Indeed each edition of the DSM leading up to the DSM-5 has increased the number of disorders. The first one, DSM-I, that came out in 1952 listed 106 disorders. The DSM-III from 1980 listed 265 disorders and the DSM-IV listed 297. There seems to be some debate on the number of disorders listed in the newest version; DSM-5. Some 15 new diagnoses seem to have been added but others revised or taken out leading some sources to declare the total number being less than the 297 listed in the DSM-IV but others that they are over 300.

Psychologists as well as psychiatrists criticize the DSM system

Psychiatrists are not the only ones criticizing the DSM system and Peter Kinderman, a professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool goes as far as to say that we need to abandon the disease model of mental health care and stop medicalizing normal life. In his new book “A Prescription for Psychiatry” he argues that services should be based on the premise that the origins of distress are largely social but not diseases. Thus the role of clinicians should be to support people who are distressed as a result of their life circumstances.

Have we reach an era where normal responses to life’s’ challenges are being diagnosed as illnesses? Should people be diagnosed with depression when they are experiencing sorrow after a loved one has passed away? What about the ones that have been abused or suffered severe trauma? Are they suffering from an illness or are they showing normal response to difficult challenges? Maybe they need help temporarily but should they have to carry a mental diagnosis for the rest of their life? Because that seems to be what happens; once a person is diagnosed with a mental disorder it tends to stick.

Wrong information?

From early childhood on we are made to believe that the more milk we drink the stronger our bones will become. We get bombarded with this message from every direction; in school, on posters, in ads and from our parents. Now more and more research is showing that actually the opposite could be true; that the more milk we drink the weaker our bones become. It was more than 25 years ago that I first read about milk not being as healthy as it was promoted to be. Unfortunately I didn’t keep track of the research that I came across at that time but I remember that some of them suggested that drinking milk changed the acidity of the blood causing calcium to be leached from the bones. Looking at the literature today I stumbled upon research like the one that was performed in 1994 in Sidney Australia and looked at elderly men and women showing that higher dairy product consumption was associated with up to double increased fracture risk. Similar findings were confirmed by Karl Michaëlsson, a lead researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, who along with his associates published a study in BMJ in October 2014. The study looked at two large Swedish cohorts who were administered food frequency questionnaires. The results showed that high milk intake was associated with higher mortality in one cohort of women and in another cohort of men, and with higher fracture incidence in women.

How can milk consumption lead to fractures and shortened lifespan?

The Swedish authors speculate if high intake of milk might have undesirable effect because it is the main dietary source of D-galactose. Milk contains essential nutrients such as calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D whose intestinal uptake is enhanced by the enzymatic capacity to digest lactose into D-glucose and D-galactose by mutation in the lactase gene, a variant common in those with northern European ancestry. Experimental evidence in several animal species indicates that chronic exposure to D-galactose has deleterious effects on health inducing changes that resemble natural aging in animals, including shortened life span. This is caused by oxidative stress damage, chronic inflammation, neurodegeneration, decreased immune response, and gene transcriptional changes. The increase of oxidative stress with aging and chronic low grade inflammation has been connected to cardiovascular disease and cancer in humans as well as being mentioned as a possible mechanism of age related bone loss.
It could also be mentioned here that the Physicians Committee that combines the expertise of more than 12,000 physicians points out that ecological studies suggest higher mortality rates from fracture and ischaemic heart disease in countries with high milk consumption.

I don’t know about you but after reading about these studies I feel kind of funny when I see the ads recommending increased milk intake for prevention of fractures and improved health.

Is cheese and yogurt ok?

There is one thing that we can be glad about though i.e. the fact that the Swedish research showed that consuming cheese or fermented milk products like yogurt seemed to have the opposite effect of drinking milk.  Thus women with a high intake of cheese or fermented milk products had lower mortality and fracture rates than women who consumed less of the same.