Psychiatry's first DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) (1952) and its DSM-II (1968) listed homosexuality as a mental illness. Only because of a fierce political fight waged in the 1970s by gay activists did the APA abolish homosexuality as an illness and eliminate it from its DSM-III (1980). Gay activists ’fight was not only a victory for themselves but a service for everyone else, as it made public the important scientific problem of psychiatric disorder invalidity. Specifically, are psychiatric disorders scientifically valid illnesses, or are they simply behaviors that create discomfort for some authorities at a given moment in time?

While psychiatry lost homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1980 DSM-III, the APA (the American Psychiatric Association) found other groups it could pathologize, groups that could not mobilize and resist, most notably children, who are now routinely given psychiatric diagnoses for behaviors that many of us view as normal for their ages.
https://www.cchrint.org/2012/01/06/7-reasons-americas-mental-health-industry-is-a-threat-to-our-sanity/

Just as nothing was more important in selling the Iraq war in 2003 than the Bush administration’s certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, nothing has been more important in selling psychiatric drugs than psychiatry’s certainty of biochemical brain imbalances as the cause for mental illnesses.
Prior to psychiatry’s proclamation that depression was caused by too little of the neurotransmitter serotonin, few Americans were taking antidepressants. But by declaring that depression was caused by a serotonin imbalance analogous to diabetes and an insulin imbalance, depressed Americans became far more receptive to serotonin-enhancing drugs such as the “selective-serotonin-reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs) Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.
Psychotropics can make some depressed people feel better; however, alcohol makes some shy people less shy, but that’s not enough evidence to say that shyness is caused by an alcohol imbalance. The truth is—and scientists have known this for quite some time—that serotonin levels are not associated with depression.

Knowing nothing about the mind, the brain, or about the underlying causes of mental disturbance, psychiatry still sears the brain with electroshock, tears it with psychosurgery and deadens it with dangerous drugs.
“CCHR is calling on anyone whose family member or friend has been the victim of dangerous psychiatric drug prescription practices or electroshock and other brain-intervention psychiatric therapies; sexual assault, billing fraud, negligence or any other crime or abuse committed in the mental health system to contact CCHR.”
cchr.org
cchrint.org
CCHR created the psychiatric drug side effects search engine to provide the public with easily understandable information on the documented risks of psychiatric drugs.
It is provided as a free public service by CCHR International: https://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/
Your search will yield a summary of the following three different sources of data on documented psychiatric drug risks:

1. International drug regulatory warnings.
2. Studies published in worldwide medical journals.
3. Adverse reaction reports filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 2004-2012, by doctors, pharmacists, health care providers, attorneys and consumers.
Only by providing all the facts about the risks of psychiatric treatment can we possibly reduce the number of victims who unfortunately learn this truth through personal tragedy.
CCHR provides information that psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies do not want you to know.
By educating yourself with the facts about psychiatry, you will have the information you need to never become a victim of this vicious pseudo-science.
https://www.cchr.org/download-material/education.html

Report Adverse Reactions to Psychiatric Drugs
https://www.cchr.org/take-action/report-adverse-reactions.html

Report Psychiatric Abuse — It’s a Crime
https://www.cchr.org/take-action/report-psychiatric-abuse.html