Suicide, Ketamine, the Propaganda Model and the New York Times

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At the time, toward the end of 2018, it didn’t seem completely irrational to submit an op-ed to the New York Times. I had felt compelled to respond to a lengthy NYT op-ed “Can We Stop Suicides?” authored by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, who had offered what I considered to be a fairly insane solution: “an old anesthetic called ketamine that, at low doses, can halt suicidal thoughts almost immediately.”

I knew that Janssen/Johnson & Johnson was attempting to get their esketamine—a ketamine based nasal spray—approved by the FDA to be used as an antidepressant, and I recognized how much power the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex has over the NYT. But I had thought, geez, this is ketamine—“Special K,” which at high doses can result in a “K-Hole,” an out-of-body experience; which has been utilized as a date-rape drug and is officially classified as a “dissociative anesthetic” with adverse effects that include numbness, depression, amnesia, hallucinations, and potentially fatal respiratory problems.

Ordinarily, I am hopeless about the NYT publishing anything that honestly examines a proposed psychiatric drug in the context of the history of psychiatric drugs, but this was Special K, the notorious street drug! What further energized me to submit an op-ed was that I believed that Velasquez-Manoff’s NYT piece might be considered “radical” even by some NYT editors since (1) there is no data—not even the usual drug company pseudoscientific data—on ketamine’s long-term effects and potential risks, and (2) ketamine has not even been approved by the FDA for depression.

However, I hesitated to submit the op-ed. I’ve long known that the NYT and the mainstream media has “filters” that they use in their publishing decisions, some of them detailed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent. Two filters that Herman and Chomsky describe in their “Propaganda Model” that are most relevant to the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex are: “advertising as the primary income source of the mass media,” and mainstream media’s reliance “on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.”

It is simply bad business for the NYT to offend their many readers who are utilizing psychiatric drugs for themselves or their children—readers who have religiously bought into psychiatry as a legitimate authority—and it is even worse business for the NYT to offend their drug company advertisers. Thus, there is little incentive for the NYT to challenge “official authorities” who are promulgating propaganda posing as science.  In 2008, when the NYT must have had—or should have had—sources telling them about the massive amount of drug company money being funneled to thought-leader psychiatrists such as Charles Nemeroff, Joseph Biederman, and several others, the NYT reported on this only after Congressional investigations exposed it, which gave the NYT “cover” to do so. While the NYT and the mainstream media, at times, does investigative journalism, it’s always filtered by the political and profit-making ramifications for the NYT.

The NYT proudly calls their filtering process “all the news that’s fit to print.” Journalists who are “fit” for the NYT internalize these filters, and so they genuinely believe that they are, as Herman and Chomsky observed, “operating with complete integrity and goodwill . . . able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news ‘objectively’ and on the basis of professional news values.” The reality is that rather than functioning as actual journalists—who should be skeptical of the motives of “official authorities”—it is politically and financially safer to simply report what official authorities assert.

There were a couple of other rationales for why I gave the NYT op-ed a shot, which, in retrospect, were more based on my hope than reality. In 2014, the NYT had actually asked me to write a piece for them, which they had actually published, so I thought they might take my submission seriously; however, my 2014 published NYT opinion piece was not about the mental health profession but a response to their “Room for Debate” question: “Why We Like to Watch Rich People.” My silliest rationale (which I even knew at the time was silly) was that I thought that maybe 2018 was my lucky year with op-eds, as I had two op-eds published in the only daily newspaper in my city, the Cincinnati Enquirer; but here again, neither one of these op-eds were about the mental health profession (the most recent one, Another Sad October for Reds Fans, slammed our losing baseball team’s management, an op-ed which actually made me quite popular in Cincinnati).

In retrospect, it now seems quite humorous to me that I had believed that there was any chance that the NYT would run my response, but when I wrote it, I mostly focused on overcoming one major hurdle: the bland New York Times style. My favorite story about NYT style comes from Paul Zimmerman, a legendary New York City sportswriter. Zimmerman had been asked by the NYT to write a book review for them, and after he noticed that a couple of passages in the book that he was assigned to review had been plagiarized from his own book, he wrote in his review: “What a bad break, lifting from a guy who happens to be reviewing your book. Tough luck. Just ain’t your day, kid.” After Zimmerman submitted his review, the NYT book review editor responded, “Well, your review is kind of rough. Can you bland it down a little?” Zimmerman refused, and his review never ran, and the NYT never again asked him to write another piece.

It was so important for me to get my response published that I even tried to bland it down so as to fit NYT style. Then I followed all the rules of the NYT “How to Submit an Op-Ed Essay,” and I sent it off. But my hopes were dashed immediately. I received an automatic response that proclaimed another rule, one that had not been stated in the submission rules: “We discourage essays that are primarily responses to other opinion articles, columns or editorials in The Times.”

So, I chuckled about my NYT op-ed publication delusion, put color back in the piece, changed the title, added a snarky crack about the NYT in the first paragraph, and submitted it to another publication—the muckraking CounterPunch, whose readers know what the NYT is all about. You can read the piece by clicking The Ketamine Chorus: NYT Trumpets New Anti-Suicide Drug.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

17 COMMENTS

  1. I’m not surprised to see you rejected by NYT. Counterpunch is the only news outlet I pay for. NYT (and it’s main competitor, WaPo) are best used for toilet paper and fire starter. Rarely, a sane op-ed comes out of those two.

    As for Ketamine, well I just have to say it once again goes to show that drugs are bad unless and until they come from a doctor /pharma or are otherwise taxed and regulated so as to benefit the state like alcohol and legal cannabis are.

    While I believe all drugs should be legal (and addiction treated as a public health instead of a criminal issue) I don’t believe for a second that ketamine is the answer to my depression but I’ll bet someone along the way is making a profit (or a name for themselves in research) off of it as a newfound “treatment”. I also have to wonder if there will soon be a legal to illegal pipeline for ketamine the way there currently exists for prescribed opioid dependency leading to heroin use. Ketamine doesn’t permanently erase depression. What’s going to happen to users who lose access? PCP and/or illicit ketamine on the streets for some of them would be a logical assumption.

    Thanks for raising the alarm about ketamine, Bruce.

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  2. Well, you wouldn’t expect the Times to feature something like the mega B1 that the late Gertrude Black, MD used to use for her patients- 500mg. B1 immediately, then 100mg. of same per hour up to 5 hours until ideation fades. That isn’t high tech enough, plus it’s using nutrients- plus the MD wasn’t (and had no intentions of becoming) a psychiatrist.

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  3. Ketamine is “best known as a psychedelic club drug that makes people hallucinate…” “Ketamine is most commonly classified as a ‘dissociative anesthetic,’ and its adverse effects include numbness, depression, amnesia, hallucinations, and potentially fatal respiratory problems. Termed ‘Special K’ on the streets, at high doses, ketamine users experience an effect referred to as ‘K-Hole,’ an out-of-body experience. Since the ketamine user can find it difficult to move, it has been used as a date-rape drug.”

    So, similar to the SSRI antidepressants, ketamine creates the symptoms of the more serious “mental illnesses,” contrary to the claims of the “mental health professionals.” They believe their drugs are “wonder drugs” which never have any adverse effects.

    But since the antidepressants are the drug class that the medical community uses to reel healthy people into their disempowering “mental health system,” I see why they’re promoting this drug. But is it wise, from a societal perspective, to mass produce and prescribe a known date rape drug? Especially since we already live in a rape culture, at least according to the many #MeToo rape survivors.

    This is an excellent point, Bruce. “Specifically, a society that relies totally on medicine to fix suicide is one that has abdicated power to transform itself into a more humane society that does not breed suicide. The increasing medicalization of suicide enables a society to relinquish responsibility for creating genuinely caring communities.”

    Maintaining the current, flawed, perhaps even evil, status quo, is the primary function of the “mental health profession.” And let’s be real, “creating genuinely caring communities” is NOT in the financial best interest of the mental illness creators.

    “Has psychiatry established the track required for such a claim to be trusted?” No, any research into the history of psychiatry shows their “invalid” industry always ultimately brings about psychiatric holocausts. And this is exactly what they’re doing to all of Western civilization today.

    https://www.naturalnews.com/049860_psych_drugs_medical_holocaust_Big_Pharma.html

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  4. Just as the NYT offers a narrow continuum of general political discourse, one can see the narrow range in the letters the NYT published in response to Velasquez-Manoff’s piece, which you can see at:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/opinion/letters/treatment-depression.html

    There are two letters. One is a testimonial letter singing the praises of ketamine treatment. The other so-called “critical” letter comes from a psychiatrist named Caroff whose “criticism” is really more a defense of current psychiatry, as he states” “If depression is diagnosed, there is hope amid an array of proven and highly effective interventions, including psychotherapy, medications and even electroconvulsive therapy.”

    There is, of course, NO response, like my CounterPunch piece, that questions the legitimacy of psychiatry as an authority.

    Thanks for the comments which I read — Bruce

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    • Here’s another curiosity about ketamine. It’s related to PCP, the get simple and delirious mainstay of 1970’s simpletons seeking chemical adventures. Emergency room adventures were frequently the consequence of such chemical adventures, particularly since antipsychotic drugs made the PCP delirium worse. Is this also the case for ketamine, a drug with a similar method of chemical action?
      This could become a serious problem, since drug cocktails are all the rage in present day psychiatry, raising the likelihood of drug-induced delerium when antipsychotics and ketamine are used together. I suspect few ER’s will use multiple grams of l-glutamine to treat ketamine related deleriums (deleria?), preferring emergency room excitement to using non-drug substances. (by the way- I have successfully used glutamine for PCP on the rare occasion I’ve seen this problem, but then I’m just a crazy without respect for the alleged therapeutic qualities of such drugs)

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  5. The general public is simply not skilled/trained enough in critical thinking to realize that websites/papers like the NYT, and other mainstream outlets (CNN, MSNBC, magazines) are not journalism at all. The propaganda and lies promoting the psych industry in these publications are not a misunderstanding or an accident. NYT and other MSM is carefully crafted and curated to reinforce ONLY the version of reality that the violent profiteers controlling our society want people to believe. So that they can continue their financial gain via suppression of the fact that cruelty and exploitation cause all human suffering, not some mystery disease. When will the public wake up?

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  6. Very good article on CounterPunch Bruce. Shame on the NY Times. Seems Ketamine can become another way for psychiatry to experiment on people regardless of the harm it causes. Thanks for your excellent work and getting the word out on the dangers of Ketamine.

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  7. Great opinion, and thanks for the warning on ketamine.

    Just one thing: “Thus, there is little incentive for the NYT to challenge “official authorities” who are promulgating propaganda posing as science.”

    I am not going defend the NYT because I don’t really like them, but to their credit, they did publish an article about discontinuing antidepressants: Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Can’t Quit

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