According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, you are mentally ill if you:
Are addicted to coffee —Caffeine-Related Disorders, page 212,
Have trouble speaking in public —Expressive Language Disorder, page 55
Can’t handle math problems —Mathematics Disorders, page 50
Can’t write a good essay —Disorder of Written Expression, page 51
Don’t think you're crazy? Then you’re suffering from Noncompliance With Treatment , page 683.

"To read about the evolution of the DSM is to know this: It is an entirely political document. What it includes, what it does not include, are the result of intensive campaigning, lengthy negotiating, infighting, and power plays."
—Louise Armstrong, And They Call It Help: The Psychiatric Policing of America’s Children, 1993 (Addison-Wesley)

"I would like to give the penultimate word on the handbook’s unwarranted aura of scientific precision to Matthew Dumont, a psychiatrist who has written about the DSM Work Group’s hollow pretensions to scientific authority:

I read the [DSM-III-R] compiler’s Introduction (will I be the only person in the civilized world, except for a few copy editors, to have done so?) and found it an interesting statement, part apologia, part three imperious knocks from the wings. The humility and the arrogance in the prose are almost indistinguishable, frolicking like puppies at play. They say: "…while this manual provides a classification of mental disorder … no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept…" [APA, 1987]. They then provide a 125-word definition of mental disorder which is supposed to resolve all the issues surrounding the sticky problem of where deviance ends and dysfunction begins. It doesn’t.
They go on to say: "…there is no assumption that each mental disorder is a discrete entity with sharp boundaries between it and other mental disorders or between it and no mental disorder" [APA, 1987].
This is a remarkable statement in a volume whose 500-odd pages are devoted to the criteria for distinguishing one condition of psychopathology from another with a degree of precision indicated by a hundredth of a decimal place."

—Paula J. Caplan, Ph. D., They Say You’re Crazy—How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal (1995, Addison-Wesley) P 223

So Who’s Normal?

"The numbers related to the above-mentioned diseases, syndromes and disorders apply mainly to adults. So if you believe the statistics, 77% of America’s adult population is a mess. And we haven’t even thrown in alien abductees, road ragers or Internet addicts.
But give the experts a little time. With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts."
—Jim Windolf, Exec. Ed. of the New York Observer, "A Nation of Nuts" (reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22, 1997)

"In fact, if we were to follow logically, the medical approach, almost everybody would be mentally "ill." The present official classification of psychiatric "diseases" is already so broad that there is a real question whether anybody can claim to not fit into the category. To do so, one would have to be free of everything from anxiety...to acute alcohol intoxication. In short, all you have to do to qualify as "normal"...is to be a bowl of jello."
—Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, The Death of Psychiatry, (Chilton Book Company) P. 54

Psychs On Psychs

"Joy and sadness, fear and elation, anger, greed—all human aspirations and passions—are thus interpreted as the manifestations of unintentional, amoral, biochemical processes. In such a world nothing is willed; everything happens."
—Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus.

"Suicide, stress, divorce—psychologists and other mental health professionals may actually be more screwed up than the rest of us. The occurrence of suicides by psychiatrists is quite constant year to year, indicating a relatively stable oversupply of depressed psychiatrists."
—Psychology Today, Why Shrinks Have So Many Problems (1997)

"From talk-shows to courtroom commentaries to news bites, psychologists inundate the public with their messages such that the cumulative effect has been to change peoples’ beliefs about their own competency and the way they look at life. Intruding not only into the bedrooms of the nation…but into the schools, workplaces, and the courts of the nation, psychologists have embarked upon activities of self-promotion, both to expand the demand for their services and to set themselves apart as superior."
—Dr. Tana Dineen, Author, Manufacturing Victims.

"…Modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness… Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and … there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like."
—David Kaiser, psychiatrist (1996)

"We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will never be aware of their loss of personhood."
—Carl R. Rogers, Former President of the American Psychological Association.

"…drunk or high therapists are a special threat to clients, according to Nathan and others. In fact, Nathan estimates that 40 percent of cases of sexual misconduct by psychotherapists involve alcohol or drugs."
—Robert Epstein, Ph.D., "Why Shrinks Have So Many Problems," Psychology Today, July/August 1997

"Having therapists testify about the need for psychotherapy is about as smart as answering an insulation ad that promises Free Analysis of Your home’s Heating Efficiency."
—Margaret A. Hagen, Ph.D., Whores of the Court—The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (1997, ReganBooks) P. 10

"...These "therapies" have nothing in common with real therapies in medicine except the label. To categorize insight into one’s unconscious with penicillin, renal dialysis, and an appendectomy is to approach asininity. You can stamp a caduceus onto Santa Claus’s forehead, too, but that will not make him a doctor."
—Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, The Death of Psychiatry, (Chilton Book Company) P. 34

Guilty—But "Not Responsible"

"For instance, a dentist who pleaded guilty to having fondled between one hundred and two hundred young girls and women patients…has now sued his insurance company, claiming that his ‘sexual disorder’ makes it impossible for him to work as a dentist, so the insurers should give him $5,000 a month in disability payments. Harold Lief, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, supported this claim, telling the court that the dentist suffered from ‘frotteurism,’ a compulsion to touch women’s genitals."
—Paula J. Caplan, Ph. D., They Say You’re Crazy—How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal (1995, Addison-Wesley) P. 276

"Charles J. Sykes, author of A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character takes note of a man who, having embezzled money and lost it in Atlantic City casinos, sued to win back his job because he was a victim of "compulsive gambling syndrome," and of a school administrator, fired for constantly missing classes, who calls himself a victim of ‘compulsive lateness syndrome.’"
—Joe Sharkey, Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy, (1994, St. Martin’s Press) P. 146

"A typical case is that of the employee fired from a radio station in Washington state for offensive on-the-job behavior who recently was awarded $900,000 by a jury for a discriminatory firing and for the psychic injury done to her by the discrimination. Her poor job performance, according to professional opinion, was produced by a mental disability and therefore occurred entirely outside the realm of personal responsibility."
—Margaret A. Hagen, Ph.D., Whores of the Court—The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (1997, ReganBooks) P. 9

On Religion

"Religious feelings in man may be destroyed if too extensive an operation is performed on the frontal lobes."
—William Sargant, British psychiatrist

"…Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern [psychiatric] treatments."
—William Sargant , British psychiatrist

On Children

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane, because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity."
—Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Psychiatrist

"…the family is now one of the major obstacles to improved mental health, and hence should be weakened, if possible, so as to free individuals and especially children from the coercion of family life."
—One of the plans put forth at an inaugural conference of the World Federation of Mental Health (1948)

"We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers and others with vested interest in controlling us. ‘Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil’, good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to prevent free thinking, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage… the inevitable results are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in."
—G. Brock Chisholm, Former president, World Federation for Mental Health

"I thought I had seen psychiatry at its worst with its fixation on barbaric practices such as electroshock treatment. I was wrong. Nothing compares to the viciously covert mental and physical abuse that is dealt innocent children through psychiatric drugging and psychology-based curricula today."
—Michael Chavin, M.D.

"Schools will become clinics whose purposes is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists. This will include bio-chemical and psychological mediation of learning, as drugs are introduced experimentally to improve in the learner such qualities as personality, concentration and memory… Children are to become the objects of experimentation." (Emphasis added)
—A U. S. National Education Association report, titled: Education in the 70s.

"OBE [Outcome Based Education] and Goals 2000 will complete the transformation of schools from places children should receive an academic education into mental health clinics. This transition is already far along: the increase in illiteracy and tragically worsening social indicators, such as drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, abortion, and increased suicide amongst children attest to this."
—Dr. William Coulson , Psychologist, Director of the Research Council of Ethnopsychology.

"‘Anyone can submit a ‘Behavior of Concern’ referral for a student: teachers, counselors...concerned community members...’

"Completed forms were submitted anonymously to "student assistance counselors," school employees who could-and did-receive secret payments from psychiatric hospitals for each kid they referred..."
—Joe Sharkey, —Joe Sharkey, Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy (1994, St. Martin’s Press) P. 121

"Infants will not be exempt from biological research interventions. In fact they will be a central focus, with many of the studies beginning at birth. The NRC [National Resource Council] wants to look for ‘biological and behavioral characteristics of infants that increase their risk of growing up to commit violent crimes.’"
—Dr. Peter R. Breggin & Ginger Ross Breggin, The War Against Children, (St. Martin’s Press) P. 24

"Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished."
—Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus.

ADHD and Ritalin

"We are not "overdrugging" or misdiagnosing" ADHD—ADHD is a total, 100 percent fraud. The many millions of schoolchildren around the world who are being drugged have no disease.
—Fred Baughman, Jr., M.D. Child Neurologist and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.

"Parents are seldom told that Ritalin is ‘speed’—that it is pharmacologically classified with amphetamines, has the same effects, side effects, and risks. Yet this is well-known in the profession...."
—Dr. Peter R. Breggin & Ginger Ross Breggin, The War Against Children, P. 84

"...But because ADD is so vaguely defined, even for a psychiatric disorder, it is tailor-made for bogus claims. There are, as the American Psychiatric Association’s latest diagnostic manual concedes, "no laboratory tests that have been established as diagnostic" for "Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder." [emphasis added]
—Richard E. Vatz, Professor, Towson State University, "Attention Deficit Delirium," The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 1994

"The diagnosis of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is entirely subjective… There is no test. It is just down to interpretation… The lines between an ADD sufferer and a healthy exuberant kid can be very blurred."
—Dr. Joe Kosterich. Chairman of the Australian Medical Association. Sydney Morning Herald (Feb. 6, 1999)