Tom Paine, Christianity, and Modern Psychiatry

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Beyond Common Sense, most Americans know little about Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Few know that at the end of Paine’s life, he had become a pariah in U.S. society, and for many years after his death, he was either ignored or excoriated—the price he paid for The Age of Reason and its disparagement of religious institutions, especially Christianity.

Early in The Age of Reason, Paine attacks the hypocrisy of religious professionals: “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury.”

If alive today, Paine may well have been even rougher on psychiatrists. Paine revered science, and he would have been enraged by professionals who pretend to embrace science by using its jargon but in fact make pseudoscientific proclamations that purposely deceive suffering people. “To subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe” is exactly what many modern psychiatrists are routinely guilty of—this by their own recent admissions. Before detailing this “perjury,” a little bit about Paine and his compulsion to confront all illegitimate authorities.

Beginning in 1776, both Common Sense and then The American Crisis made Thomas Paine a hero for insurgent American colonials. Following the successful American revolt against British rule, the globetrotting revolutionary Paine returned to England where his Rights of Man enraged William Pitt. Narrowly escaping arrest by Pitt’s goons, Paine fled to revolutionary France, where Paine then narrowly survived the disloyalty of his “friend” George Washington—a betrayal that kept Paine (a victim of the Jacobins-Girondins gang war) rotting in Luxembourg Prison. Only with great luck would Paine avoid Robespierre’s guillotine so as to return to the United States.

Bertrand Russell (the English philosopher, mathematician, historian, and social critic) observed that Paine “incurred the bitter hostility of three men not generally united: Pitt, Robespierre, and Washington. Of these, the first two sought his death, while the third carefully abstained from measures designed to save his life. Pitt and Washington hated him because he was a democrat; Robespierre, because he opposed the execution of the King and the Reign of Terror.”

No one could intimidate Paine into shutting up, but he could be marginalized. By the end of his life, owing to his The Age of Reason and its disparagement of ChristianityPaine was ostracized, even refused service by many innkeepers. Historian Eric Foner notes: “Paine slipped into obscurity. His final years were ones of lonely, private misery.” Moreover, for many years after his death, Paine was either ignored or attacked by the American political and cultural elite; as even in 1888, Theodore Roosevelt scored political points by calling Paine a “filthy little atheist.”

Paine, in truth, was not an atheist but a deist. He states at the beginning of The Age of Reason: “I believe in one God, and no more.” While it was Paine’s trashing of Christianity in The Age of Reason that made him an outcast, he also made clear in it that “all national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

Paine had respect for Jesus (noting that “He was a virtuous and an amiable man”); however, Paine had no respect for Christianity, for which Paine pulled no punches: “Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.”

As maddening as Christianity was for Paine, unlike psychiatry, Christianity didn’t pour salt into Paine’s wounds by pretending to embrace his beloved science. It is quite possible that Paine would be even more appalled by today’s psychiatrists who claim the authority of science but who, in reality, have debased it. Paine’s rebuke of clergy—“to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe”—perfectly fits psychiatrists with regard to both (1) their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly known as the DSM), and (2) their doctrine that has the greatest effect on treatment, the “chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness.”

The DSM is a publication of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which is psychiatry’s guild organization; and the DSM is often referred to as the “diagnostic bible” of psychiatry. The initial DSM (1952) has been followed by several “new testaments”: DSM-II (1968), DSM-III (1980), DSM-III-R (1987), DSM-IV (1994), DSM-5 (2013, foregoing Roman numerals).

Many mental health professionals have long recognized the lack of scientific validity of the DSM, and its pseudoscience has at times become so obvious so as to be a public embarrassment for psychiatry. Prior to 1973, owing clearly to prejudice and not science, homosexuality was a DSM mental illness. Since what enters and exits the DSM has nothing to do with science (the actual criteria for DSM “illness” being what behaviors make an APA committee uncomfortable enough), homosexuality could only be eliminated as a DSM illness by political activism, which occurred in the early 1970s; and homosexuality was omitted from the 1980 DSM-III.

In that same DSM-III, however, again owning to prejudice and not science, a new mental illness for kids was invented by psychiatry: “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD), the so-called symptoms including “often argues with authority figures” and “often actively defies or refuses to comply with requests from authority figures or with rules.” ODD is categorized as a “disruptive disorder,” and today disruptive-disordered kids are being increasingly medicated.

Thomas Paine would have immediately seen the political/pseudoscientific nature of the DSM; and given how oppositional and defiant Paine was with illegitimate authorities, I think it’s safe to say that he would have mocked specifically ODD and generally the entire DSM, perhaps even more so than he derided the Bible and the New Testament.

What may have inflamed Paine even more than pseudoscientific DSM mental illness proclamations would be psychiatry’s perjury about it. “To subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe” is exactly what has been the case for psychiatry with respect to the DSM. Psychiatrist Allen Frances had been the lead editor of DSM-IV, but in 2010 when the APA was in the process of creating DSM-5, Frances stated in an interview in Wired that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Frances, who lost his DSM-IV royalty share ($10,000 per year) once DSM-5 was available, published Saving Normal in 2014, a book trashing the new DSM-5.

With respect to treatment, even more influential than the DSM has been psychiatry’s “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness,” the doctrine which has convinced emotionally suffering patients that taking psychiatric drugs is as responsible as taking insulin for diabetes.

The lack of science behind the “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness” is no longer controversial. In 2014 in CounterPunch, I documented acknowledgements by establishment psychiatrists of this theory’s lack of scientific validity, including psychiatrist Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Times who stated in 2011: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” In my 2014 article, I also reviewed how psychiatrists justified their promulgating this mythology by rationalizing that it would make it easier for patients to accept their emotional difficulties as illnesses and to take psychiatric medication. Leading psychiatrists actually confessed to pushing a theory that they don’t believe.

There is, however, something even worse than bullshitting about bullshit—that is attempting to bullshit us that one has never bullshitted us about bullshit. The previously mentioned psychiatrist Ronald Pies, whose position makes him sort of a Cardinal Emeritus in psychiatry, is now telling us that his profession of psychiatry is not responsible for the fact that damn near everyone believes in an untrue chemical imbalance theory of mental illness.

On April 30, 2019, Pies told us in the Psychiatric Times that “anti-psychiatry groups are quite right in heaping scorn on the ‘chemical imbalance theory’ of mental illness, but not for the reasons they usually give.” Pies expects us to believe that “psychiatry as a profession and medical specialty never endorsed such a bogus ‘theory.’” For Pies, people wrongly believe in this theory because of drug companies’ mendacity and because psychiatry critics have falsely accused psychiatry of promoting it.

But there is a problem with Pies’s alibi for his profession—the truth. In 2001, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) president Richard Harding, writing for the general public in Family Circle, stated: “We now know that mental illnesses—such as depression or schizophrenia—are not ‘moral weaknesses’ or ‘imagined’ but real diseases caused by abnormalities of brain structure and imbalances of chemicals in the brain.”

Pies, undaunted by the facts, responded in his 2019 article: “Critics of my thesis are inordinately fond of citing a dozen or so statements by various psychiatric luminaries—yes, including two former APA presidents—that do, indeed, invoke the phrase, ‘chemical imbalance.’ By cherry-picking quotes of this nature, anti-psychiatry groups and bloggers believe they have demonstrated that ‘Psychiatry’ (with a capital ‘P’) has defended a bogus chemical imbalance theory. These critics are simply wrong.”

The reality is that the APA itself, even in recent years, has continued to promote the chemical imbalance theory. In Psychiatry Under the Influence, journalist Robert Whitaker and psychologist Lisa Cosgrove point out: “Even in the summer of 2014, the APA’s website, in a section titled ‘Let’s Talk Facts’ about depression, informed the public that ‘antidepressants may be prescribed to correct imbalances in the levels of chemicals in the brain.’”

Noting the obvious, Whitaker and Cosgrove point out: “The pharmaceutical companies couldn’t promote the chemical imbalance story without the tacit assent of the psychiatric profession, as our society sees academic doctors and professional organizations—and not the drug industry—as the trusted sources for information about medical maladies.”

In closing, an odd connection between psychiatry and Thomas Paine in the person of Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), who is well-known among psychiatrists as “the father of American psychiatry,” his image adorning the APA seal.

After Paine immigrated to Philadelphia in 1774, he and Rush became friends. At first somewhat protective of the audacious Paine, Rush cautioned Paine against his use of the then-taboo word independence in Common Sense, but Paine disregarded Rush, using that word many times in it. Later on, after The Age of Reason made Paine an outcast, Rush refused to see Paine.

In addition to abandoning Paine, Rush attempted to gain favor with the new ruling class in the United States another way. In 1805, Rush diagnosed those rebelling against the newly centralized federal authority as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a species of insanity,” which he labeled as the disease of anarchia—this an earlier version of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). In this and several other ways, Dr. Benjamin Rush is the perfect person to be the father of psychiatry.

Rush was a progressive of his era, but “liberal” in the same sense that Phil Ochs—nicknamed “Tom Paine with a guitar” —mocked hypocritical liberals. For example, Rush proclaimed himself a slave abolitionist, however, he had purchased a child slave named William Grubber in 1776, continued to own Grubber after he had joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society a decade later, and would own Gruber until 1794 when he freed him for compensation. Rush’s “progressive” views on race also included his idea that blackness in skin color was caused by leprosy, and Rush advocated “curing” skin color, changing it from black to white. Rush believed he could abolish slavery by curing black people’s blackness.

Rush also invented some frightening treatments. Based on an earlier imbalance theory that improper flow of blood caused madness, Rush devised two mechanical devices to treat madness: a “tranquilizing chair” and a “gyrator,” not any fun for patients unless they enjoyed being strapped down, immobilized, and violently spun.

Rush considered himself as an expert not just on madness but on every illness, and for virtually all of them, Rush utilized bloodletting as his primary treatment, even at a time when bloodletting was falling out of favor. In “Benjamin Rush, MD: Assassin or Beloved Healer?” (2000), physician Robert L. North reports that in Rush’s era, “The majority of the medical community, especially the members of the College of Physicians, rejected Rush and his cures, using terms and phrases like ‘murderous.’”

William Cobbett, a journalist in Rush’s era, mocked Rush’s treatments (which also included mercury) as “one of those great discoveries which have contributed to the depopulation of the earth,” and Cobbett accused Rush of killing more patients than he had saved. (Cobbett is better known today for his ill-fated plan to provide Thomas Paine with a proper heroic reburial by moving Paine’s remains back to England.)

By the early twentieth century, medical historians were viewing Benjamin Rush as one of the most embarrassing figures in the history of American medicine. North quotes the 1929 History of the Medical Department of the United States Army on Rush’s disastrous impact: “Benjamin Rush had more influence upon American medicine and was more potent in propagation and long perpetuation of medical errors than any man of his day. To him, more than any other man in America, was due the great vogue of vomits, purging, and especially of bleeding, salivation and blistering, which blackened the record of medicine and afflicted the sick almost to the time of the Civil War.”

You would think that the American Psychiatric Association would not want such an historical embarrassment as their father figure. But perhaps the APA believes that the prestige of Rush being a signer of the Declaration of Independence trumps both his being a slave owner and his lethality as a physician.

Actually, Rush was not a complete loser, as he sued the journalist Cobbett for libel and won; and perhaps this legal triumph is inspirational for the APA and modern psychiatrists—providing them with hope that they too can triumph over truth tellers.

***

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.

36 COMMENTS

  1. Yes, Paine is most interesting. And I agree that Psychiatry and Psychotherapy are much like Christianity.

    And so this is what should really scare people, the two joining together:

    http://hope4mentalhealth.com/act/start-your-own

    And government and the Recovery Movement have already joined together with Warren’s Celebrating Recovery Program, offered in most state prisons.

    5 min, Second Chance Grace Place, and Everybody Needs Recovery
    https://saddleback.com/watch/summer-sermons-2011/what-is-a-saddleback

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  2. A great piece of truth telling about psychiatry, Bruce, thank you. I do agree that our religions are problematic, and have lost their Way. And oddly, they have adopted the belief system of the “material world” only believing, Holy Spirit blaspheming psychiatrists and psychologists.

    To the extent that they are actually teaching the DSM “bible” theology in the religion’s seminaries today. But the religions and their hospitals are child abuse and rape cover uppers and profiteers, in conjunction with their psychiatric and psychological partners-in-crime, and it’s not just the Catholics.

    https://virtueonline.org/lutherans-elca-texas-catastrophe-coming-lesson-episcopalians

    https://books.google.com/books?id=xI01AlxH1uAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

    https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo

    https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/

    But these “mental health” and religious leaders are all merely money worshipping, hypocritical, “omnipotent moral busy bodies.” For the war mongering and profiteering, bailout needing, “banks stole trillion in houses,” globalist banksters, who create money out of nothing, and want to turn us all into slaves, or kill us.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfEBupAeo4
    https://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/unsealed-court-settlement-docu.html

    People need to wake up, including the religious leaders, “mental health” workers, and doctors. And realize the wrong banksters, who funded your miseducation in the universities and via pharmaceutical misinformation, took over America long ago.

    By the way, Chicago should be embarrassed they have a hospital named after Rush.

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  3. A very interesting and informative blog Dr. Levine.
    “Paine revered science, and he would have been enraged by professionals who pretend to embrace science by using its jargon but in fact make pseudoscientific proclamations that purposely deceive suffering people.”
    Psychiatry is so corrupt they believe their own lies and continue to try justify them. They are relentless in beating down any truth teller. Maybe it is fitting they have such a lethal physician adorning their APA seal.

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  4. The thing about Thomas Paine, and the thing that separated him from so many of his contemporaries, that was so admirable was his, comparatively speaking, incorruptibility. He went to prison for his beliefs, and he almost lost his head for opposing the french terror. I have to agree with you that he would probably have found himself in disagreement with psychiatry as it has developed today, basically, because that would-be science itself is so prone to succumb to the temptations of corruption. The lie plays out very well within psychiatry whereas the truth tends to fare much more poorly. I don’t see Paine as one who would excuse a great deal of falsehood, and in psychiatry, the excuse is very big indeed. I always admired Thomas Paine as one of our founding fathers. I find it amusing that Alexander Hamilton, big in the creation of the American banking system, has become a hit musical, and a box office success. Hamilton, of course, is one of my least favorite among the founding fathers. I don’t see anyone, fortunately, trying to transform the life of Thomas Paine into shim shim she-ree, or, basically, dinner theater, an aid to the digestive tract.

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  5. Thank you for a very interesting article. I did not know that Paine was a deist who also had respect for Jesus. He has mostly been portrayed as an evil atheist by Christians. Yet these same Christians claim to be followers of Jesus while ignoring his main message, that is, to love your neighbor. I see many parallels here between the leaders of the Christian church and the leaders of psychiatry today. The church leaders sought to enrich themselves by convincing people that they were all evil. Modern psychiatry seeks to enrich itself by convincing everyone that they are sick. Reason would tell us that we are not all evil or sick, just humans struggling to survive. Keep on telling the truth Dr. Levine!

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    • “Sick” is a synonym for evil as far as psychiatry goes.

      “Why did that man murder that kindergarten class?” With the understanding that his ex taught the class.

      The normal person says the man was evil.
      The mainstream shrink says he was “sick.” Then he calls a bunch of law abiding citizens “sick” as well so he has an excuse to treat them like criminals.

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  6. James Hillman on “biological psyche”-

    “Robert Plomin, on whose passionate, prolific, and perceptive writings this chapter has frequently relied, urgently warns against using genetics in a simplistic manner. He states: “Genetic effects on behavior are polygenic and probabilistic, not single gene and deterministic.” I gather from him a warning to psychiatry: Do not capsize your noble vessel under the weight of pharmaceutical, insurance company, and government gold, and do not set your compass toward Fantasy Island, where genetics will define “disease entities in psychiatry.” “We have learned little about the genetics of development [how genes act and interact over time] except to appreciate its complexity.” Therefore we can never arrive at that equation where one defective gene equals one clinical picture (except for true anomalies like Huntington’s chorea).

    These warnings have little effect; simplistic thinking fulfills too many wishes. The heads of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are carved into the Mount Rushmore of the mind. The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation–especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.

    Ever since French rationalism of the seventeenth (Marin Mersenne, Nicolas de Malebranche) and eighteenth (Etienne de Condillac, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie) centuries and right through to the positivism of the nineteenth (Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Auguste Comte) in which all mental events were reduced to biology, a piece of the collective Western mind had been yolked like a dumb ox to the heavy tumbrel of French mechanistic materialism. It is astounding how people with such subtle taste as the French and with such erotic sensibility can go on and on contributing so much rationalist rigor mortis to psychology. Every import that arrives from France must be inspected for this French disease, even though it carries the fashionable label of Lacanism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, or whatever.

    Today rationalism is global, computer-compatible every-where. It is the international style of the mind’s architecture. We cannot pin it to a particular flag, unless to the banners of the multinational corporation that can spend big bucks turning psychiatry, and eventually psychological thinking, and therefore soul control, toward monogenetic monotheism. One gene for one disorder: Splice the gene, teach it tricks, combine it, and the disorder is gone, or at least you don’t know you have it. The narrow path leads back to the thirties and forties of psychiatric history, though in a more refined manner and with better press releases. From 1930 into the 1950s, correlating specific brain areas with large emotional and functional concepts provided the rationale for the violence of psychosurgery and the lobotomizing of many a troubled soul at odds with circumstance.

    The narrow path is yet more retro, going back to the skill analysis of Franz Josef Gall (M.D., Vienna, 1795), who settled in Paris and was much appreciated by the French. From him came the “evidence” that skull bumps and declivities could be correlated with psychological faculties (a system later called phrenology). Much as they are today, the faculties were given big names, such as memory, judgment, emotionalism, musical and mathematical talent, criminality, and so on. Refinement in methods over the years does not necessarily lead to progress in theorizing: 1795 or 1995–material location, and then reduction of psyche to location, prompts the enterprise.

    The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. If environment means literally what’s around, it must also mean whatever is around. This because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects, as the days’ residues in dreams show. We do dream of the damnedest things! Much of each day is never noticed or recalled, but the psyche picks up the environmental flotsam and delivers it to the dream. The dream–a processing plant recycling the environment, finding soul values in junk. The dream–an artist, appropriating images from the environment for recollection in tranquility.”

    James Hillman

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    • Maybe there’s something in the French consciousness. The Maginot Line was also a product of French thought. Although it is apparently a great place for growing that French delicacy, mushrooms (except for truffles, of course).

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    • If someone is presenting themselves as a psychotherapist and getting people to disclose all their personal things, but they are not a fighter, then they cannot be a comrade. They are duping their clients. Its not just the collection of money, its in getting people to disclose their personal affairs. And it is also in how the therapist will present themselves as an interested party, interested in the affairs of your life. They present themselves as interested, when really they just see the client as someone who is living in error.

      Hillman tried to do right, but he never burned his psychotherapy shingle. So no, we should not deal with him or his ideas at all.

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    • I was disappointed in the Dick Russell biography of Hillman because it is one of several volumes. The other volumes did not seem available. I want to see if Hillman ever renounced the practice of Psychotherapy. It is a con, a predatory con. I still don’t know if he held to it and was still profiting from the misery of others.

      Giving talks for the Mytho Poetic Men’s Movement is fine with me. I don’t pay it that much heed, but Hillman is as good as any of their other people.

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  7. Very enlightening article about Thomas Paine, whom I only knew by name. it reminds me of a quote I will paraphrase- I am fine with Jesus its his followers I don’t like. Anyhow, I took a trip over to the APA web-page and clicked under APA sites I found PsychiatricNews (APA created I suppose) endorsing a partnership with Pentecostal ministries for recovery. Its all about drug addiction recovery, and fits well with my experience in psychiatry and drug recovery circles- God and Pharmacology. Both are modern day opium for the masses. Proof is in the pudding- Psychiatry, as the article demonstrates is trying to learn something, or expand its market, from religion. Wow! They must really be short on ideas. Well, here is the article. https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.6a8

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  8. Well, it would be interesting to know if Paine ever discussed any of this with Rush (who also considered “Negritude” to be a disease).

    There is a larger problem here in portraying the essence of psychiatric oppression as residing in the DSM.

    Many mental health professionals have long recognized the lack of scientific validity of the DSM, and its pseudoscience has at times become so obvious so as to be a public embarrassment for psychiatry

    This is the cup calling the saucer white. For “mental health professionals” — who by definition accept the notion of “mental health,” itself inherently lacking in scientific validity — to smugly talk about the DSM lacking the same is so hypocritical as to be tragic. The implication is that there are indeed “mental illnesses” but the DSM just goes “too far.”

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  9. Thank you for comments which I’ve just read. First, to clarify, this piece was written for a CounterPunch audience, many of whom are critical thinkers who know much more about American history than psychiatry, and so I first try to get their attention and interest. CounterPunch ran it as one of their top stories on June 14 for their weekend edition at https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/14/tom-paine-christianity-and-modern-psychiatry/, and MIA chose to “cross-post” this as a “non-featured blog.”

    For many critical readers in the general public, I’ve found that psychiatry’s bullshit is simply too boring so they don’t read it. And so I try to come at it from an angle to make the bullshit of the DSM, chemical-imbalance theory, etc. more interesting to them.

    If we want to reach open-minded, critical thinkers outside of the MIA orbit, I believe that we need to put energy into discovering ways on a personal level and in our writings, talks, films, music, and other means of expression to be stimulating and entertaining enough so that open-minded, critical thinkers — ordinarily bored by psychiatry and other religious dogma — will be interested.

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    • And so I try to come at it from an angle to make the bullshit of the DSM, chemical-imbalance theory, etc. more interesting to them.

      The only “angle” you need is to point out that according to the rules of LANGUAGE — not medicine — it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a “mental illness,” so any attempt to “treat” same is absurd on the surface. Just as absurd as calling the SPCA when it’s “raining cats & dogs.” One either gets this or doesn’t, it’s an Emperor’s (or Empire’s) New Clothes situation. To do “research” on a soporific metaphor only perpetuates the absurdity.

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    • Thank You, Bruce! I do like how you tie history into the tapestry of psychiatry’s utter BS. I was aghast that Benjamin Rush is even remembered at all considering his messianic and paternalistic madness, not to mention his wack theories that killed god knows how many. I imagine that most psychiatrist have never even investigated him but are glad to take the Benjamin Rush award for achievement which I found on the APA site. My experience with psychiatrists, and especially interns in hospitals, is that they are rather an obedient lot. I started reading the studies they do and just the language is so inflated e.g. “mental illness” is called neuropsyche impairment or some other invented phrase. As a side note, I had a Nurse practitioner with eyes wide like a religious fanatic show me a circled paragraph that read, ” Zyprexa, lithium, and Risperdal increase the growth of brain cells! Of course, which they proved in a p-hacked study on rats after 7 days of trials. I looked it up. Its scandalous that they dress all this up in science, of course, no one is analyzing the studies in the actual field. These drugs actual curtail intelligence just take one and wait for the drool to hit your chin! Also, there are very few studies on Tardive Dyskinesia from anti-psychotics- which essentially is brain damage. They seem to never mention or care about that- I guess its just a side effect in between growing new brain cells. Welcome to to the brave new world.

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  10. ‘Rush prided himself on his powers of observation. He carried a notebook with him everywhere and, in his highly disciplined way, recorded conversations, observations, thoughts, about everything under the sun. He appeared to have abandoned this habit during the epidemic, perhaps because of his frenzied practice. There can be no question that Rush’s mercury purges and copious bloodletting were profoundly erroneous and sometimes fatal. How many hundreds of deaths Rush watched during the epidemic is not known, but in each case he found some way to exonerate his “remedies” as a cause. Many people that Rush should have respected, including most of his professional colleagues, pointed to their own observations that Rush’s treatment was often worse than the disease and murderous in its consequences. As the controversy became more public and strident, Rush’s defense of his treatment, always vitriolic, took on increasingly paranoid overtones. He truly believed that he had been chosen by God to save the people of Philadelphia and that opposition to his views was heretical and sacrilegious.’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1312212/#B3

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  11. Wilhelm Reich, did he renounce Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis? How about one of his followers, the occultist and chiropractor Israel Regardie, did he renounce Psychoanalysis? He had started as a Jungian, then neo-Jungian, then Reichian, then neo-Reichian?

    Deleuze and Guattari speak of Reich, in effect acknowledging him, but they also break with him.

    Want to read this:

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1561841080/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i22

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