In today’s open access to information, any amateur can stuff any claim with enough sweetened pie charts and cherry statistics to make any ideology appear appetizing. Truth has always been hard to come by, but nowadays is obscured by the relatively even ability of anyone with WiFi to pontificate publicly. And then, a pandemic. When the stakes are high, lives on the line, suddenly the blasé allowance of conflicting ideas becomes a liability. People will die without accuracy.
And so, as legitimate fear seeks the comfort of direction, a new way of talking about medical information appears. Attach a prefix, dis- or mis-, and good ideas shall trump the bad. Personally, I appreciate the thrust of such moral yearning. In a utopian world where absolute truth is decipherable, we are surely obliged to separate fact from fiction. But in a corruptible world, it’s worth remembering that medical patients (though not psychiatric ones) are encouraged to seek a second opinion in matters of life and death.
Human beings, no matter how credentialed, are fallible participants in the mysteries of life, and doctors institutionalized with narrow sets of knowledge can therefore make errors of judgement. Not because they’re evil: because they’re limited. All of us, and our certainties, are subject to revision.
Given that, the question becomes who is certain enough of their knowledge that they may damn medical information in prefixes for us all?
Major online content platforms have an answer. They defer to institutions authorized by government bodies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization. These elite bodies of experts provide sets of standards that demarcate medical truth from falsity, which a hodgepodge of third-party fact-checking organizations then rely upon to hunt down bad information across the web.
Now, in the old days, censorship meant blacklisting (which still happens), but in an internet age where liabilities for unfairness are more visible to the public square, online companies more often engage in a soft censorship—allow the dissenter to speak, but lessen the chances they’ll be heard. As Facebook puts it, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution so that fewer people see it…and we show strong warning labels and notifications to people who still come across it, try to share it or already have.”
Perhaps you believe that demoting bad medical information during a pandemic is a necessary strategy for saving lives. Surely there’s a compassionate case to be made that the common good is more sacrosanct than an individual’s liberty to vibrate their vocal cords in whatever contortions they want, wherever they want, no matter the ruin. The trouble is, new powers of authority rarely contain themselves. Instead, incrementally, they parasitize new territories.
So I was unfortunately unsurprised to see the New York Times—paper of record—publish a recent opinion piece titled “Joe Rogan is a Drop in the Ocean of Misinformation.” The authors, who worked on the imperiously-named Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges, insist we are living in a manipulated marketplace where specious cures for anything and everything find their way far too easily into ailing bodies.
Their solution: the soft censorship of not just pandemic unorthodoxy, but bad information across all medical fields. We must, they propose, regulate flows of information to ensure that whatever medical advice we encounter online is best for us. Of course, they fail to mention who will lead that discernment, but we can hazard a guess they’d prefer a cosmopolitan run-of-the-mill MD over your village witch, a psychiatrist over their client.
Let us apply these authors’ suggestion to mental health, now that the field has graduated in the public eye into a bona fide hard science worthy of the designation “medical.” How might the downgrading of dissent in mental health impact accessibility to knowledge?
Imagine a Facebook group called “Coming Off Antipsychotics,” thousands of members strong. A commenter claims antipsychotics cause brain damage, maybe coaches another member restrained by a court-order on how to quit taking them without getting caught. Now imagine that group in the censorious crosshairs of fact-checkers following standards set by major psychiatric institutions.
Indeed, to a profession that regularly uses coercion and force to keep clients medicated, any information that’s dissuasive against treatment is hazardous. This is why, for instance, a peer support worker in a conventional setting might be eagerly invited to share their recovery process when it follows protocol, but discouraged when it includes non-compliance: Saying “I got better when I accepted my illness, went to group, and found the right med” is much preferred by the authorities to “I got better when I ditched Haldol, took up kratom and weed, hooked into poker night at the local bar, and joined a cult that worships Bastet the ancient cat Goddess.”
I fear a public health approach to so-called mental illness in the internet age will soon entail demoting online talk of violating treatment. To get rolling, all that’s needed is one incident wherein a member of that aforementioned Facebook group quits medications and acts dangerously in public view, for force-supporting organizations lie in wait ready to capitalize on the public’s fear.
And let’s be honest, when prefixes land on mental health information, they’re going to tag alternative modalities like Reiki, claims against the damage of shock, unconventional theories of causation, criticism of diagnoses as bogus constructs, folksy herbal cures, and so on. Never mind that my own saving grace has been the renegade psychiatric survivor movement, wherein I’ve met others who speak on their own terms, who’ve helped me clarify mine, who’ve never read me through a hospital note but asked that I narrate my reality instead.
“Health misinformation,” such as the kind that challenges psychiatric orthodoxy, “is a serious threat to public health,” proclaims the US Surgeon General. “It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.”
“Limiting the spread.” Apparently, misinformation is now a virus capable of inoculating vulnerable hosts with discursive toxins that “undermine” public health. The task upon us is “moral,” and we do our “civic” duty when ensuring people accept doctor knows best.
For what it’s worth, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, welcomes prefixes on bad information. As Joseph Bernstein notes in his illuminating article, “Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation,” these companies’ bottom line, always cash, is not threatened by framing the problem as one of information itself. Such myopia ensures the trust-busters, who could use anti-monopoly powers to weaken social media’s sway, instead stay at bay, while allowing propaganda-producing algorithms to remain obscure to regulation and consumer control.
More importantly, it strategically obfuscates the structural reasons why people gravitate towards bad information—their economic lives are ruined, their communities have fallen apart, their religions are disintegrating, healthcare is bankrupting their families, drugs are destroying their neighbors, their traditions are losing meaning. In the midst of such politically-induced rot, people quite reasonably distrust institutions and their sneering spokespeople who lied to them about WMDs, the 2008 financial crisis, the return of good jobs, the addictive nature of opioids, and on and on it goes.
So let me end with an anecdote—mark of unscientific knowledge—for I’ve tasted my own flavor of rot: that of my body, decaying in autoimmune disease. When my spine was so bitten that I could no longer bend over to pull up socks, I too did something crazy (as pain will have you do). I sat down at my computer, googled “Ankylosing Spondylitis natural pain relief,” and through a series of meandering clicks, headed ever further into an unguarded dungeon where risky potions lie. Eat poop? Get bitten by the Mexican bark scorpion?
Nah, I settled on an industrial solvent, a purely chemical byproduct from large-scale wood manufacturing. Even though the product’s intended use as a skin applicant was deemed dangerous by credentialed sources, I went further. I popped open the cap, recalled my halcyon days with Mr Jack Daniel’s, flipped my head back and gulped down a bitter shot. Like everything else, authorized or not, it didn’t take away the pain. But I felt a tingling sense of pride, maybe a little free. The Surgeon General would’ve been horrified.
Pretty good stuff. Almost too casual, though. The pseudoscience drug racket social control grid of psychiatry is as pernicious as it gets. Evil incarnate. Yeah, I said that. I mean it, too. I’m a survivor of the LIES of pharmaceutical psychiatry. I’ve been in FakeBoof jail several times. We’ll have our civil war of words. I have TRUTH on my side….
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Hey Bradford, yes, there’s been tremendous harm caused by psychiatry since its incarnation. I recognize that my specific experiences with them have colored how far I’m willing to go with castigating their practices. I appreciate your perspective.
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Psychiatry exists as it does today, thanks to the pharmaceutical industry. As other critics have shown, psychiatry is in fact better seen as part of the criminal justice system. Either way, it’s about the Hole Trinity of the Globalists, MONEY, POWER, and CONTROL. As a kid in 10th grade, I didn’t know better, when my parents took me to a shrink, who gave me a bogus “diagnosis”, and an Rx for neuro-toxins. Only after years away from all psych drugs & psychiatry, did I fully, and deeply realize, that ALL of my so-called “symptoms” were in fact caused by the drugs. Psychiatry did me FAR MORE HARM than good. This isn’t so off=topic as it might seem. For any FRAUD, or HOAX, such as psychiatry, to continue, they MUST LIE, even to themselves. It is almost scary, the censorship being put in place, and the more that’s coming. But, I do have faith that the GREAT AWAKENING will defeat “The Great Reset”. That’s the binary, 2-sided “war” being raged for the minds of people globally….The liars will lose. So will we all…..
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Excellent perspective! This is an important article. You see clearly that information is becoming a major theme of control and human conflict in this era. As realistic as your article is; however, I want to invite you to see the same situation from a slightly different perspective. While information, misinformation, and disinformation are coming to the forefront of our social conversation, it is imperative to never forget that our mental health system, ideologically informed by psychiatry, is itself the promoter of disinformation. Furthermore, major names in the field have publicly acknowledged that they mislead their clients and the public. That is, they have acknowledged that they are the source of the disinformation!
Add to this the “Jerry Springer”-like controversy that characterizes the professional conversation in the broad field of mental health and this is a social powder keg waited to burst. Society loves controversy and the professional “debate” in the field of mental health is likely one of the most controversial debates in our modern world. What could be more controversial than, “You all torture and abuse people, including children!” “No not us, we don’t do that, we just treat them” At some point, one of these sides will win the ongoing argument as that argument is far from over. If the public could truly appreciate this internal controversy, they would have a never ending source of drama to talk about.
The real challenge is to get the wider public to take the time to really watch this controversy and to recognize medical disinformation when its sources tell them to their face! I agree that as simple as this sounds, it is not an easy task. However, it represents the optimistic perspective on the same situation which you have described in your article. Thank you for sharing your important perspective!
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Hey Sean, thanks for this perspective. I appreciate the optimism in it that because of the shaky (or cracked, or non-existent) foundations of mental health, eventually the truth will prevail. I have to say, however, I’m cynical and pessimistic in this regard. As I’ve been tracking mental health since my own personal involvement the last couple of decades, I see the arrows and stats heading constantly in the wrong direction. You’re right that psychiatry will eventually have to abandon its current frameworks to survive, but I think it will do so aptly. In fact, all the research is doubling down on the medical model, looking ever more closely at molecular transactions. In my view, and this is a much longer conversation, the medical model that dominates all health is a machine model. The body is a machine (thank you Descartes!). Until that basic premise is attacked and discarded, I’m frankly hopeless there’ll be much progress to my liking. There’ll always be interesting theories and practices at the margins, however. They’re never as clarifying though as the reductionistic, mechanistic view that carries extraordinary power in its simplicity of explanation. And when things are hard, clarity is attractive.
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Thanks Steven, for this balanced approach to this difficult topic. I do wonder about when things I and others I respect might be labeled as “misinformation” by powerful parties who don’t want to have their own ideas be critiqued, or their lies identified. We will have to find ways to fight back.
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Thanks Ron. Yes to finding ways to fight back. I’m at a complete loss for what those might look like. I’m definitely a fan of busting up these platforms and praying that smaller entities competing with each would setup a different incentive structure for censorship. But who knows, for all the pushback against the medical model of mental illness, I see a parallel movement of people internalizing these concepts to such a degree that they’re fought for on the grounds of an innate identity (I was part of that for awhile), and identity claims are powerful (thus the trouble in elevating something as all-encompassing and vague as “lived experience”), and very difficult to critique. So, there’s the issue of allowing dissenting voices to be heard, but also, the issue of ensuring dissent still has relevance.
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Agree, that’s why I’m not totally unsympathetic to anti-vaxxers although I disagree with their stance on this particular issue (the medical-health complex is massive and mostly interested in making money, your health is a secondary concern).
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I like the idea of more sympathy. And yes, regardless of one’s view on the pandemic and its attendant policies, we ought to be very weary of how the money-makers utilize crises to further their monetary aims (those aims also include control…not just of the market…but of desire).
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“Anti-VAXXER” is a slur, just like TERF. And anyone who has studied the genesis of these so called covid “vaccines” should be more than “not unsympathetic.”
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And will do
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This is horrifying! Self-help is a human right! To criminalize or allow Tech Bros to erase discussion about health/healthcare experiences really IS a “high tech lynching”. Abstaining from psychiatric narcotics has saved my life, and I probably would not have successfully abstained without Mad/prescribed harm online communities. Members of those communities need to contact their representatives in Congress TODAY!
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Unfortunately I don’t have much trust that Congress will take our side. If the social media companies get in bed with censoring mental health information, it’s going to be under the auspices of reducing suicide, or improving treatment outcomes. Everyone will be thinking they’re doing the right thing (even if FB’s motivation is really to save their bum from regulation).
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Pretty soon accurate info on the “mental illness” industry will be banned from social media (and most other media).
Still too many here trying to “improve” psychiatry — where did you get such a notion?
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Hey yinyang, I’m not sure if you were asking me that question at the end rhetorically or not. I’m pretty cynical about reform of most major institutions, including psychiatry. That said, I’m pretty weary of the revolutionary mindset that wants to dismantle everything. So, I don’t hold a particular view, at this stage, of the best direction forward, particularly regarding mental health. A lot of my energy is focused on ecological collapse. I believe, in a collapse scenario, that mental health will take on new connotations, with new kinds of approaches (I also believe ecological collapse scenarios are somewhat playing out right now). I’m not hopeful those new approaches and connotations will be less restrictive, at least those coming from or authorized by the state. I do think small-scale, local, community-based, cultural ways of understanding relationality and the mind can continue to provide some respite from and transformation of distress.
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I believe, that when all available statistics are carefully, accurately, & rationally analyzed, the unavoidable conclusion is that “mental health treatment”, and especially psych drugs, actually INCREASES both attempted and completed suicides…. After all, FDA-mandated suicide warnings/”black box warnings” began appearing on so-called “anti-depressants” in the 1990’s….Numerous court cases, BOTH civil and criminal, have found various pharmaceuticals guilty & culpable in cases of violence, suicide, & murder…. The tide HAS TURNED against psychiatry & psych drugs…. Thank God!….
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“Health misinformation,” such as the kind that challenges psychiatric orthodoxy, “is a serious threat to public health,” proclaims the US Surgeon General.
Yes it is, but somehow damaging status quo psychiatry is still getting away with slow but sure murder.
Wow. I just got out of the hospital after hip replacement surgery. Criminal psychiatry unchecked mentally tortures me and impoverished me, so I found myself playing ox to keep warm three winters I lived pretty much off the grid. Collecting and dragging wood kept me in tune with nature, which was very healthy, but destroyed my hip. Lack of dental care hastened some strong arthritis. Add it all up? Hip replacement on government assistance, Medicaid. Simultaneously, crying while stuck in mental torture, minus justice or public acknowledgement for my hell story, my hell story stuck in my throat has contributed to achalasia, which destroys needed muscles in the esophagus. Yesterday, I was in the hospital unable to have anybody listen to me or help me when a swallowing episode cropped up post surgery, after my concrete job offer with a power company made moves to rescind the much needed offer. The hospital staff took away morphine at the same time, so I was slammed. How much more trauma before my body permanently fails? My life has become so beyond scary.
I am an experiment in criminal mental health care, actual violations of the existing mental health care code in Michigan, and the negative effects of stress on physical well being. Not sure how I am supposed to recover or survive if I can’t even swallow water. I called the gastrointestinal medical office from the hospital and a someone called me back while I was still in the hospital, my esophagus spasming, to say, they could not help me with the intense not-swallowing, upper sphincter esophagus episode I was having. I know trauma brought on the episode.
Add homelessness? It’s too much. The job offer may be rescinded due to my background check, which includes a bogus stalking misdemeanor, as retaliation for asking for justice for criminal psychiatry. (All claims documented. Not even on these pages have I read a story like mine.) I had already cleared the back ground check hurdle months ago, but it came back around again, after a formal job offer had been made and a start date set after surgery, April 11.
Cut off from morphine the day after major surgery, not being able to swallow, esophagus choking, being kicked out of a chaotic orthopedic ward (standard procedure to send people home the next day), and facing further economic devastation, all because of criminal psychiatry?
I am still hoping this magazine will publish part II and part III of my story. Fallout from criminal psychiatry is still psychiatry at work, ruining lives. Things only become more grim in my life.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/10/people-dont-recover-criminal-psychiatry/
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Damn Gina, that’s a harrowing set of circumstances, and it sounds like you’ve been treated completely awful. My heart goes out to you.
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This is an important topic. I absolutely can see censorship of mental health positions that are not popular with certain influential groups. That’s why I’m opposed to censorship of anything that does not defame individuals. I don’t believe that “demoting bad medical information during a pandemic is a necessary strategy for saving lives.” Who is to decide what is bad medical information? The Facebook censors? The FDA? The groups that initially censored anyone who even suggested that Covid may have started in a Wuhan lab? At one time it was bad medical information to claim that many stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection or that radical mastectomy was overused. Today many object to the routine use of antipsychotics in first episodes of schizophrenia? Should they be censored?
In order to protect unpopular but possibly accurate information we should tolerate points of view which we are certain are false or even possibly destructive. Censorship has already gone too far.
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Hi Marie, I agree with your analysis. I understand the impulse to want to censor bad medical information (assuming the “bad” is actually legitimately “bad”), but I’m with you that such power is too easily corruptible to be entrusted in the hands of a few—and, as you note, what’s bad yesterday is good today, and there are hundreds of examples of this kind of flip-flopping.
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As soon as it was announced (years before covid) that FB would be censoring anti-vaccine info I knew that anti-psychiatry info would be next.
Censorship has already gone too far, but it’s only beginning.
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Steven,
I had no intention of reading a blog at the moment. I was reading the criteria for writing a blog since I am beginning to write one and clicked on “past blogs”. Scrolling down I saw your name and had to open it. When our paths crossed briefly quite a few years ago I was impressed with your intelligence, moral fortitude, your character, your work, your ethics…
Thank you for writing your edgy, pissy, thoughtful and thought-provoking blog. You make me proud to re-embrace my label of “psychiatric survivor”.
Let’s keep stirring up good trouble.
Together-
lauren spiro
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Thanks Lauren; I appreciate this!
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