Psychiatry’s abysmal record has been acknowledged by the then National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director in 2011 (“Whatever we’ve been doing for five decades, it ain’t working”), and again by the New York Times in 2021 (“Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression . . . went the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly”). Despite treatment outcome failure, psychiatry continues to grow in influence because it enables the social order—the megamachine—which in turn rewards psychiatry with status.
What do I mean by the terms megamachine, rightwing bigotry, and progressive bigotry?
The megamachine, a term coined by historian and social critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), is an impersonal hierarchical social system that functions like a gigantic machine in which human beings are cogs stripped of autonomy and meaning. The megamachine is a type of “power system,” which Mumford explains “can operate as a single, largely invisible unit, over a wide area” resulting in the human being becoming “a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.”
Megamachines and power systems have existed throughout history. An ancient example of its cogs are the massive workforce that constructed the pyramids in Egypt when ruled by Pharaohs in a theocratic monarchy. In the modern megamachine, increasingly powerful technologies dominate not simply gigantic corporations and other large bureaucracies, but virtually the entire economic, political, and social system. Examples of cogs in the modern megamachine range from Amazon employees scurrying around giant warehouses with zero human contact and robotically moving boxes, to physicians and patients stripped of autonomy by insurance companies and medical practice bureaucracies.
In the last century, whether the brand of the autonomy-stripping megamachine has been German Nazi fascism, Soviet totalitarian communism, or U.S. corporate capitalism, psychiatry has been an enabler of the megamachine—more later on psychiatry’s role in each of these systems.
Bigotry is a narrow-minded prejudice, an intolerance to those people and beliefs that differ from one’s own, who are seen by bigots as not simply different but as inferior and defective.
When many people think of bigotry they associate it with rightwing bigotry based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Rightwing ideology includes a devotion to the traditional social order and its hierarchy, and so if the social order consists of racial, gender, sexual preference, and religion inequality, then bigotry in these areas is necessary to maintain this inequality and hierarchy. Historically, rightwing bigotry has allowed those at the top of the hierarchy to retain power by: (1) granting some groups superiority on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or religion, thus providing them with psychological and social benefits that foster their loyalty to the status quo system; and (2) creating conflict between the more and less privileged groups, which subverts the unity necessary to overthrow a dehumanizing social system.
Progressive bigotry, in contrast to rightwing bigotry, is directed against all people who do not comply and adjust to the megamachine. The progressive bigotry hierarchy is not based on race, gender, sexual preference, or religious beliefs, but rather on one’s superiority or inferiority of compliance and adjustment to the social system. Progressive bigots view themselves as progressive because: (1) they believe that all people—no matter what their race, gender, sexual preference, or religious beliefs—can adjust to the megamachine and even rise to the top of the hierarchy; and (2) unlike rightwing bigots—who murder, imprison, and enslave those at the bottom of their hierarchy—progressive bigots believe that education, training, and treatment can improve the efficiency of those with inferior compliance and adjustment to the social system.
Psychiatry is today embarrassed by some of its rightwing bigotry; and the professional guild of U.S. psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), has apologized for one component of it—more later on this. Most psychiatrists today would be dumbfounded by the concept of progressive bigotry, as they equate compliance with the demands of the megamachine with “mental health”—more later on this.
Psychiatry also has a history of rightwing-progressive combination bigotry. In this combination bigotry, the rightwing element is the victim of bigotry, which is based on traditional rightwing targets; while the progressive element is a belief in “treatments” aimed at adjustment and assimilation.
Three examples of this combination bigotry include: (1) Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), long considered by the APA to be the “father of American psychiatry,” who targeted African Americans but believed that blackness in skin color was a medical condition which he called “Negritude” that could be cured by medical treatment; (2) targeting of Native American children by psychiatrists (as well as by other mental health professionals and educators), not with the standard rightwing approach of massacre/murder, but by instead using forced assimilation into dominant white society through the use of residential schools aimed at eradicating Native American culture; and (3) psychiatry’s targeting of homosexuality—considered a mental illness until gay activism in the 1970s forced its ultimate illness abolition—which psychiatry believed to be a medical condition that could be treated by various means.
Psychiatry’s Rightwing Bigotry: Acknowledged and Unacknowledged
In 2021, the APA acknowledged its history of racism, issuing the “APA’s Apology to Black, Indigenous and People of Color for Its Support of Structural Racism in Psychiatry.”
In its “Historical Addendum to APA’s Apology,” it mentions drapetomania, the mental disorder attributed to enslaved African Americans who attempted to flee slavery, but neglects to mention that the creator of this so-called mental illness, Samuel Cartwright, was a student and apprentice of Benjamin Rush. It also neglects to mention that Cartwright also created another diagnosis for enslaved African Americans called dysaesthesia aethiopica, leveled at enslaved African Americans who were inattentive, perceived as “lazy,” and otherwise task noncompliant (Cartwright believed that this dysaesthesia aethiopica affected nearly all free African Americans).
Much of the APA apology was about segregated treatment, stereotyping of African Americans, and how historically the APA did not speak out against U.S. racism. The addendum did include a mention of how “late 20th century psychiatrists commonly attributed their minority patients’ frustrations to schizophrenia, while categorizing similar behaviors as ‘neuroticism’ in white patients,” and includes the following: “One study found that a sample of largely APA members diagnosed more Black than white patients with schizophrenia, even when both had otherwise identical vignette-style clinical presentations.”
In a mildly critical article of this APA apology, the New York Times reported, “For critics, however, the A.P.A.’s apology and task force amount to a long-overdue, but still insufficient, attempt at playing catch-up.” Omitted in the APA apology and addendum but reported by the Times, “In the late 20th century, psychiatry’s rank and file became a receptive audience for drug makers who were willing to tap into racist fears about urban crime and social unrest.” The Times noted that in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry in 1974, there was an advertisement showing an African American man with a raised fist that read: “Assaultive and belligerent? Cooperation often begins with Haldol.”
The APA omitted other components of psychiatry’s racism, and it has not apologized for its rightwing bigotry directed against its other victim groups, including women and homosexuals.
Maintaining a patriarchy is a longstanding goal of rightwing bigotry, and women are longstanding victims of psychiatry’s rightwing bigotry. The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) reported in 2018, “By 1952, an estimated 50,000 patients in the United States and Canada had been lobotomized. . . . most lobotomized patients were women, although most institutionalized patients at the time were men.”
CMAJ also reported, “Valium (diazepam), marketed as an antidote for socially dysfunctional women—the excessively ambitious, the visually unkempt, the unmarried and the menopausal misfits—was the best-selling drug in the world as well as one prescribed overwhelmingly to women.” Valium, the benzodiazepine coined “mother’s little helper” in the 1960s, has given way to an array of antidepressants that are also disproportionately prescribed to women.
Antidepressant use for women is more than twice the rate as for men. The CDC reported in 2020, “During 2015–2018, 13.2% of adults aged 18 and over used antidepressant medications in the past 30 days. Use was higher among women (17.7%) than men (8.4%).” Furthermore, 24.3% of women older than 60 who were surveyed reported taking antidepressants. Unlike psychiatry’s embarrassment over its disproportionate use on women of lobotomy and Valium, it is instead troubled that not enough men are taking antidepressants.
Similar to establishment psychiatry’s perspective about the disproportionate use of antidepressants by women is how it views the disproportionate use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) on women. A Journal of ECT 2020 review of the demographics of ECT (commonly called electroshock) on data obtained on 62,602 patients receiving ECT in three states (California, Illinois, Vermont) reported that 62.3% of these ECT patients were women. While much of society views ECT as barbaric—with many people believing that ECT is no longer a psychiatric treatment—psychiatry is proud of ECT, which it deems to be the “standard of care” for patients who are, in their terms “treatment resistant” (its term for patients who do not improve with medications or other treatments).
Psychiatry has routinely pathologized responses to trauma, and so women, who have been disproportionately victims of domestic violence, have been disproportionately victimized by psychiatry through its pathologizing their reactions to trauma. Reactions include rage, anxiety, and hopelessness; and historically, pathologizing these reactions followed by hospitalizations have been used to invalidate, disempower, and control women in legal systems and elsewhere.
In the more anti-authoritarian era of the 1960s and 1970s, prominent feminist authors (including Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Phyllis Chesler, and Judi Chamberlin) had receptive audiences to their critiques of psychiatry’s disempowerment of women via pathologizing reactions to trauma, along with its pacifying “treatments” that included lobotomy, ECT, and drugs used to control women so as to be more obedient.
Today, however, as the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex has convinced the mainstream media and much of society that psychiatry provides treatment rather than numbing pacification, what was once seen as psychiatry’s bigotry toward women is seen very differently. And so while the APA has offered an “Apology to Black, Indigenous and People of Color for Its Support of Structural Racism in Psychiatry,” it has offered no apology to women.
Nor has the APA offered an apology to homosexuals for pathologizing their sexual preference and its aversion therapy treatments, which included electric shock to the genitals and nausea-inducing drugs administered simultaneously with the presentation of homoerotic stimuli (The American Psychoanalytic Association did issue a public apology in 2019 for its past treatment of homosexuality as a mental illness).
Rightwing bigotry, as noted, enables a megamachine hierarchy by granting some groups superiority on the basis of their race, gender, and sexual orientation, thus providing them with psychological and social benefits that foster their loyalty to a social system, and such bigotry also subverts the unity necessary to overthrow it. Psychiatry’s rightwing bigotry has enabled the megamachine’s hierarchical social system, for which the megamachine has rewarded psychiatry with status.
Progressivism, Megamachine Efficiency Devotion, and Psychiatry Bigotry
All megamachines demand machine-like efficiency, and megamachines need a component to deal with “monkey wrenches” that disrupt and interfere with such efficiency. In different megamachines during the last century, the role of psychiatry has been to eliminate noncompliant monkey wrenches and/or to coerce compliance from them.
The early twentieth-century movement called Progressivism was a mixed-bag of ideas aimed at improving society. Today, many self-identified progressives are proud of some of these ideas—such as a belief in greater economic equality, opposition to corporate monopolies, and regulations to create a healthier food supply and safer workplaces. However, a major component of the progressive movement to improve society included a devotion to greater efficiency, which is why progressive causes also included alcohol prohibition, eugenics, and compulsory sterilization.
While progressives’ eugenics movement was initially ignited in the United States and Great Britain, it was Nazi Germany, with massive sterilization and murder, which acted most decisively to accomplish eugenics goals of ridding society of individuals it considered burdensome. When Hitler—an admirer of U.S. eugenic policies—came into power, he sought to first catch up with and then surpass the United States in eliminating psychiatric patients that the Nazi’s infamously labeled as having a “life unworthy of living.” Approximately 200,000 to 300,000 psychiatric patients were murdered in Nazi Germany in what was later referred to as its T4 program.
During the Nazi regime, when word got out about the organized murder of psychiatric patients, there were actually some protests led by prominent religious figures; and in 1941, Hitler ordered the suspension of T4. However, the murdering secretly continued, orchestrated by enthusiastic doctors, including psychiatrists. A 2012 Public Health Reviews article, “How Ethics Failed—The Role of Psychiatrists and Physicians in Nazi Programs from Exclusion to Extermination, 1933–1945,” notes: “Psychiatrists deceived their patients and patients’ families. Physicians were complicit in forcing their patients to be sterilized, arranged their deaths, used them as test subjects for research, performed ‘involuntary euthanasia’ and participated in the Final Solution.”
In the Soviet Union’s totalitarian megamachine, “efficiency” meant compliance with the dictates of the Communist Party/government, and psychiatrists played a key role in marginalizing the monkey wrench of political dissent. Establishment psychiatry acknowledges this political abuse of psychiatry, as a 2009 Schizophrenia Bulletin article (“Political Abuse of Psychiatry—An Historical Overview”) reported that in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, approximately one-third of political prisoners were locked up in psychiatric hospitals.
Individuals who opposed the Soviet regime were diagnosed by psychiatrists as seriously mentally ill, infamously labeled with “sluggish schizophrenia.” While a small group of psychiatrists were following orders from the KGB, for most Soviet psychiatrists, it was not the KGB that was coercing them; rather it was their own belief that “mental illness,” as the Schizophrenia Bulletin article noted, was “a very logical explanation because they could not explain to themselves otherwise why somebody would be willing to give up his career, family, and happiness for an idea or conviction that was so different from what most people believed or forced themselves to believe.”
In “The World of Soviet Psychiatry” (New York Times, 1983), psychiatrist Walter Reich pointed out, “In the context of Soviet society, dissidents constitute a deviant element. They behave and speak in ways that are different from other Soviet citizens, and, for that reason, they come to be seen as strange. After all . . . isn’t it strange when someone openly does and says things that, under the conditions of Soviet political life, everyone knows to be dangerous?” Reich concluded, “The sense that someone is strange is not infrequently followed by the suspicion that the strangeness may be due to mental illness.”
What is crucial to keep in mind is that the majority of Soviet psychiatrists who incarcerated political dissenters in psychiatric hospitals were not coerced by the KGB, but instead were ordinary psychiatrists who viewed maladjustment to a social system status quo as mental illness; and in this sense, they were no different than contemporary U.S. and other Western psychiatrists.
U.S. psychiatry, as noted, has been involved in eugenics and forced sterilization in the manner of Nazi Germany as well as political abuses in the manner of the Soviet Union.
In the early part of the twentieth century, energized by the progressive movement, the United States led the world in forced sterilizations of the mentally ill, and by the end of the twentieth century, over 70,000 U.S. psychiatric patients were sterilized. In 1941, at the annual meeting of the APA, neurologist Foster Kennedy presented a paper entitled: “The Problem of Social Control of the Congenital Defective: Education, Sterilization, Euthanasia.” He argued that “It was a merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective—often tortured and convulsed, grotesque and absurd, useless and foolish, and entirely undesirable—of the agony of living.” In 1942, the American Journal of Psychiatry published that paper.
The practice of psychopathologizing political dissidents is certainly not exclusive to the old Soviet Union or to communist China. In the United States, the practice began at the very beginning of the nation. In 1805, Benjamin Rush, who as noted is considered “the father of American psychiatry,” diagnosed those monkey wrenches rebelling against the newly centralized federal authority as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a form of insanity,” which he labeled as the disease of anarchia.
Both racism and political abuse by U.S. psychiatrists in the 1960s are detailed in Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (2010). In an interview, Metzl stated: “The main story of my book is about Black Power activists in Detroit who were swept up into the mental health system after protesting. They ended up in psychiatric hospitals and diagnosed with schizophrenia.”
Psychiatry Bigotry in the Corporate-Capitalist Megamachine: Enabler and Component
In the contemporary corporate-capitalist megamachine, psychiatry has more prominence than ever. Psychiatry does not simply enable the megamachine in the same manner it has historically done—by pathologizing those deemed “inefficient” and by marginalizing political dissent. In addition, it also is a component of the corporate-capitalist megamachine. Today, psychiatry and its drug company partners financially exploit the megamachine’s monkey wrenches who become markets for their drug products.
An example of how psychiatry has become an even more prominent enabler and component of the megamachine is in its increasing targeting of noncompliant children and teenagers. Such young people are monkey wrenches for the megamachine’s standard school system, and also for some parents who, drained of energy by the megamachine, have reduced frustration tolerance. Moreover, these noncompliant young people threaten the social system by their potential of becoming anti-authoritarian political dissenters.
Many monkey-wrench children and teens are diagnosed with a so-called “disruptive behavior disorder.” One such disorder is conduct disorder (CD), which became an official DSM diagnosis in 1968, evolving from what was once called childhood delinquency. For other noncompliant children who, unlike CD young people, are not engaged in any illegal practices, the more popular disruptive disorder is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD)—characterized by defiant, argumentative, and irritable behaviors towards authority figures. ODD became an official DSM diagnosis in 1980.
In 2012, the Archives of General Psychiatry reported that between 1993 through 2009, there was a sevenfold increase of children 13 years and younger being prescribed antipsychotic drugs, and that disruptive behavior disorders such as ODD and CD were the most common diagnoses in children medicated with antipsychotics, accounting for 63% of those medicated.
In addition to these so-called disruptive behavior disorders, attentionally-noncompliant children and teens are now routinely labeled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). While CD and ODD behaviors are overt rebellions in the manner of Samuel Cartwright’s drapetomania (his diagnosis for enslaved African American who attempted to flee slavery), ADHD parallels Cartwright’s dysaesthesia aethiopica (his diagnosis for enslaved Africans Americans who were inattentive and otherwise task noncompliant).
While not every young person labeled with CD, ODD, and ADHD is an anti-authoritarian who is pained and angered by coercion, unnecessary rules, and illegitimate authority, it is far more likely that young anti-authoritarians will get these labels. So, a potentially huge group of young anti-authoritarians is being depoliticized by mental illness diagnoses and by attributions that their disruptiveness is caused by defective biochemistry—and not by their alienation from a dehumanizing megamachine. And most of these labeled young people are being drugged.
One of many examples of psychiatry as a component of the corporate-capitalist megamachine is psychiatrist Joseph Biederman (1947-2023), whose personal obituary proudly describes him as the “father of pediatric psychopharmacology.” Chief of the clinical and research programs in pediatric psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Biederman has been credited for the invention of “pediatric bipolar disorder” and the resulting 40-fold increase in this diagnosis between 1994 and 2003.
In 2008, the New York Times reported that Biederman received “at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007.” Much of that money came from the drug company Johnson & Johnson, makers of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, which is used to treat Biederman’s pediatric bipolar disorder invention. Sales of Risperdal peaked in 2007 at more than $4.5 billion for that year; and overall since its inception, a recent estimate of Risperdal’s total gross sales is approximately $40 billion.
Biederman is by no means alone among psychiatrists who have been on the take from drug companies. In 2021, utilizing the Open Payments database (which resulted from the 2013 federal legislation that requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose their direct payments to physicians), journalist Robert Whitaker reported: “From 2014 to 2020, pharmaceutical companies paid $340 million to U.S. psychiatrists to serve as their consultants, advisers, and speakers, or to provide free food, beverages and lodging to those attending promotional events.”
Open Payments lists 31,784 psychiatrists (roughly 75 percent of the psychiatrists in the United States) who, Whitaker noted, “received something of value from the drug companies from 2014 through 2020.” During that time period, 62 psychiatrists received one million dollars or more; 19 psychiatrists received over two million dollars; and the leading recipient, Stephen Stahl, received over eight million dollars.
Can “Kid Drugging” Become as Embarrassing as Eugenics for the Megamachine?
While Mad in America reports of psychiatry’s failures annoy establishment psychiatry, what scares the hell out of psychiatry is when its failures that have been previously reported in Mad in America then go mainstream—and that is exactly what happened in 2025. One example is the April 13, 2025, lengthy New York Times article “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?” and even more frightening for psychiatry was the lengthy November 19, 2025 Wall Street Journal article “Millions of Kids Are on ADHD Pills. For Many, It’s the Start of a Drug Cascade.” More later on these articles.
Psychiatry, at an existential level, knows that if it retains embarrassing treatments, it will itself become embarrassing in the eyes of the public; and the megamachine will replace it with an entirely different enabling ideology and institution. Thus, during the last century, psychiatry’s treatment technologies such as surgical lobotomy and insulin coma used to coerce compliance, when finally seen by the general public as barbaric, were replaced by psychiatry with other technologies.
While the megamachine needs enabling ideologies and institutions, no particular ideology or institution—including psychiatry—is immune from extinction and replacement. This is evidenced by the historical arc of the eugenics movement.
While the enslavement of African Americans and genocide of Native Americans are known by many Americans to be shameful events in U.S. history, a lesser known shame is “The Eugenics Crusade,” the title of a PBS American Experience 2018 documentary. The eugenics movement was an extremely popular U.S. social movement of the late 19th early 20th centuries, peaking in 1920s and ‘30s.
It is important to keep in mind that the eugenics movement was as mainstream as is contemporary psychiatry. Eugenics was promoted by mainstream scientists and societally respected reformers and intellectuals. It received extensive funding from corporate foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation and from the wealthy Harriman family. This influential movement actively pushed for eugenics legislation and was successful in the passage of sterilization laws in the majority of U.S. states.
So, how did the eugenics movement become a U.S. embarrassment and disappear? A significant blow to the movement was recognition that it had directly inspired Nazi atrocities including murder and sterilization, and so eugenics came to be seen as a Nazi ideology.
Less influential in the eugenics movement’s demise, but not unimportant, was the loss of credibility of its scientific claims, as scientists discovered that the movement’s targeted traits that it sought to eliminate were more complex and heavily influenced by environmental and social factors.
Another factor in its demise is that eugenics-energized sterilizations resulted in a media sensation. Paralleling events of today, when a barbaric technology is applied to poor people, there is no public sensation; however, when the wealthy become involved and abused, the media pays attention. So in 1934, when twenty year old Ann Cooper Hewitt, heiress to one of the largest fortunes in the United States, discovered that she had been sterilized because her mother claimed she was feebleminded, Ann filed a damage claim against the surgeons and her mother for sterilizing her without her knowledge or consent. The story of the “sterilized heiress” became a sensation in 1936, and was a major nail in the eugenics movement coffin.
Is psychiatry’s ubiquitous “kid drugging” also vulnerable to extinction? The mainstream media has finally begun to report on the scientific failure of kid drugging and its tragic outcomes.
In that 2025 New York Times article (“Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?”) the Times actually reported on the 36-month results of the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study (MTA). As Mad in America readers have long known, the MTA study found that after 36 months, the advantage of children taking stimulant drugs such as Ritalin completely disappeared; and that the only long-term effect of these drugs was the suppression of growth, and that nine years later, the height gap remained. The Times also reported that no biological marker has been found for ADHD, and that scientists are now challenging the idea that ADHD is a medical disorder caused by brain deficits requiring medical solutions; and instead, concluding that its symptoms should be seen as a social and environmental problem. And the Times reported on the social and personality price paid by medicated children, who lost their sense of humor and felt less alive.
An even stronger indictment of psychiatry’s kid drugging was reported in the 2025 Wall Street Journal article “Millions of Kids Are on ADHD Pills. For Many, It’s the Start of a Drug Cascade.” The article begins with the plight of Danielle Gansky, who at 7 years old attending an upscale private girls’ school was a bubbly and creative kid, but distracted in class with sloppy schoolwork; and so her school told her mother that the girl should see a psychiatrist, who then diagnosed Danielle with ADHD and prescribed a stimulant. The article continues:
“But the pills made Gansky agitated, moody and angry. So another doctor put her on Prozac. More pills followed. Over the years, Gansky was always on two and sometimes three or more psychiatric drugs at once. By her late 20s, she had taken 14 different kinds of psychiatric pills. None of it ever felt right. The pills dulled her mind and made her irritable or sleepy. But when Gansky complained about the drugs, her doctors would up her dose or try another medication. ‘I was living in a body hijacked by the medication,’ said Gansky, 29, who is still struggling to wean herself off an antidepressant.”
This Wall Street Journal article then makes a case that nondrug therapies would be more helpful. Not only does it discuss behavioral therapy, it includes an entire section on “Unhealed Trauma.”
While this Wall Street Journal conclusion may seem radical to some readers, it is not. As long as misery is seen as caused by an individual defect, even if its source is trauma and not an innate biochemical flaw, a singular focus on trauma-healing treatments does not threaten the megamachine. While those of us who are critics of barbaric kid drugging certainly prefer trauma-healing treatments, a complete emphasis on any individual treatment—absent of efforts at dismantling the dehumanizing social system—is acceptable for the megamachine.
History tells us that it is not impossible that psychiatry’s kid drugging will disappear, as some of its other barbaric biological treatments have disappeared, but only to be replaced by other barbaric treatments. The arc of the eugenics movement also tells us that entire enabling ideologies and institutions, when they become an embarrassment for the megamachine, have also disappeared; and this reality is the major source of establishment psychiatry’s existential anxiety.
Unfortunately, history also tells us that megamachines and power systems rarely disappear, and even when a given variety does, it is replaced by another. For example, Czarist Russia was replaced by Soviet totalitarian communism, which was ultimately replaced by the Putin-topped kleptocracy.
So, we can continue to play the game of whack-a-mole, in which successful discrediting of a psychiatry theory or treatment triggers its replacement by another unscientific theory and damaging treatment. We can even work to whack the entire institution of psychiatry; however, as long as the hierarchical dehumanizing megamachine remains, another enabling ideology and institution will simply replace psychiatry.
So what did Lewis Mumford recommend when it comes to the dehumanizing power system of the megamachine? In The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (1970), he concludes:
“Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal. . . . Nothing could be more damaging to the myth of the machine, and to the dehumanized social order it has brought into existence, than a steady withdrawal of interest, a slowing down of tempo, a stoppage of senseless routines and mindless acts. And has not all this in fact begun to happen?”
Withdrawals of interest can manifest as inattention, substance abuse, dissociation, and depression—and can sometimes be self-destructive. However, not all extrications from the power system of the megamachine are self-destructive, as wise and strategic ones can be quite joyful and rewarding.
Another brilliant, insightful, and timely contribution by Dr. Levine, exposing the historic complicity of the mental health system in the workings of oppressive political, economic, and educational institutions.
I was particularly impressed by his discussion of the connection between psychiatry and the eugenicist movement. Echoes of this connection are still evident, as one can see from recent articles on this website in which academic researchers focus attention on the supposed disproportionate psychopathology of the underclass, implying the need for better access to “treatments.” It doesn’t take much effort to imagine what form they would take.
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Since the first Great Awakening in the 1730s, the United States has had many social movements. Like the KKK and eugenics and alcohol prohibition, some had been bad. Like the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement, some have been good.
The mental health movement has been successful enough to qualify as a “megamachine,” with a widely accepted ideology that human conflict is largely the result of biology. This fits well within the ideology of “biological reductionism,” which culminated in the Nazis and the Holocaust.
While these ideas are wrong, what makes them unacceptable is the use of state-sponsored coercion and force against those who are unaccepting. After all, many religions are also “wrong,” but they are allowed under the U.S. First Amendment as long as they do not use coercion or force.
Thomas Szasz did not believe in astrology. But he spent no time objecting to it because astrologers could not force their views on others.
Dr. Levine is surely correct that we must begin by refusing our assent to the ideology of the mental health movement. We must also not lose sight of the fact that while the ideology is anti-scientific and wrong, its main vice is the use of government to force its views on everyone.
Medical ethics long ago became an oxymoron. But the ultimate protection of the violation of our medical rights is “patient autonomy,” a concept which seems increasingly hard to uphold in the modern era.
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Great comment! At first I thought you were talking about the consumer/survivor movement but then I realized you were talking about all the NAMI de-stigma campaigns designed to reinforce and frame what is known as ‘ mental illness’ as a biologically based disease centered in the individual. Phew! I suppose some may argue that the peer recovery movement has also become a megamachine. Of course, under Trump, many national initiatives of the peer recovery movement are being defunded. It is unclear if this development, i.e. loss of federal funding, will cause the peer recovery movement to regain it’s moral bearings, as the offspring of the rights- based psych survivor movement, and lay to rest any doubt that the peer recovery movement opposes the megamachine and will fight for choices and rights in the mental health system.
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Can’t serve two masters, eh?
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Unless you’re a Christian capitalist, of course—then you can exploit and love others at the same time
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“Love those you exploit!” A new “Christian” dictum!
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Not sure if you guys in the US have “advocate immunity laws” or not.
This alows the likes of the State funded Mental Health Law Centre to take people into their confidence, and then sell them out to the State without any fear of consequences.
So for example, they find out from their ‘client’ what evidence/proof they have of State sanctioned torture, get the hospital concerned to provide them with “edited” legal narrative, and then throw their clients under a bus by playing out a process that creates the appearance of fairness.
And not a chance of holding them to account even with the proof.
Now, combine that sort of power with a lawyer and a psychiatrist getting together (as explained by Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth) and you have more than a new Christian dictum. People we should be able to trust exploiting their positions and the victims unaware until after they have been screwed.
Or was this the whole point of the ‘confessional’ all along? The exploitation of trust, the “elegant method of overcoming resistance”?
Appalling breaches of duty to client and the courts, with no mechanism to hold anyone to account should it be exposed? Payments made in out of court settlements used a a price on the head of the target, and collected by a ‘doctor’ who exercises powers over the individual they don’t actually have? Telling Police the person is an “outpatient” to have them kidnapped? Police acting in good faith on the very trust that is being exploited?
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What’s sick is the so called Christian religions are actually “partner with” the Pharmakia forcers. How ungodly hypocritical can those religions get?
And there is nothing capitalist about an industry that forces people to buy their services and products. Psychiatry is anti-capitalist.
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Really good: “ We can even work to whack the entire institution of psychiatry; however, as long as the hierarchical dehumanizing megamachine remains, another enabling ideology and institution will simply replace psychiatry.”
It’s the systems and institutions of the (“hierarchical, dehumanizing,” might I add “loveless”) megamachine that need to be “whacked”. Until then, they will continue to produce harm as a reliable output of their operation. And someone will always be there to capitalize on that harm so long as they are rewarded for it.
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Keep it simple: psychiatry is a bigotry machine, powered by meaningless labels dressed up as science — perfect for doctors into playing pretend.
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Patriarchy plays a big role in psychiatry: power-obsessed, intolerant of dissent, self-aggrandizing, domineering — invented by people who never grew up.
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I will say the attempted thieving, criminal computer and phone hacking, narcissistic psychologist I refused to hire, but am still dealing with, is all about maintaining the bad and scientifically “invalid” patriarchic systems.
But, aside from being a good computer/phone hacking criminal, which doesn’t make him anything other than a criminal, his maturity level is about at the third grade level.
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Jobs that grant an unusual amount of power often attract those who unconsciously harbor a lot of hidden insecurities, as this provides psychological compensation for how they actually feel underneath the titles they hold.
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I agree.
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🙂
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Have no fear. Word of mouth via the internet — the one force psychiatry never planned on — will be its undoing.
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That’s kind of ironic. If anything it seems like psychiatry has taken advantage of the internet to spread its propaganda even faster. Have you seen what’s been going on over on TikTok & Instagram for the past few years? It’s not the anti-psychiatry movement that’s spreading like wildfire, that’s for sure…
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The social media platforms are wastelands composed of endless advertisements and the megamachine of psychiatry has nearly unlimited advertising power. Our best hope is to root out corruption in the medical training institutions.
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It is ironic. But there will always be fads, and pendulums have a way of eventually swinging in the opposite direction.
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That’s fair. Well, I definitely hope you’re right! Maybe we can organize a movement & try to make anti-psychiatry go viral…
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People tend to resist the unfamiliar. Gentler approaches spark curiosity.
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Be that as it may, I’m of the mindset that things will continue to get worse. Those that enforce biological mental health are trained in military tactics, as more trauma is inflicted, more will turn to it. The irony of the current US government merely adding fuel to the fire. More individuals join those authoritarian powers for fear of what may happen to them.
I haven’t read the article in it’s entirety, but his premise is not new to me.
In any event, I clicked on my name to edit my profile and wasn’t able to: “No commenter specified. Click on commenters name in post to get comment history.” Could be a glitch on the website?
Hmm, now I see that I have no account with MadinAmerica.com. Have I been removed from this website? Weird, because I keep getting emails from them/it.
If that is the case, please remove my photo and my profile from your website.
And not to be difficult or anything, I now see that only “Doners” can log on. Just curious, has MIA become elitist?
Responses welcome, that is if my profile hasn’t been removed and/or my photo and name is still listed as it is now.
If that’s too complicated for any of the moderators, I’d be more than happy to explain. Have a nice day.
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POSTING AS MODERATOR: I am not responsible for removing photos and the like. No one has an “account” any longer, people aren’t “registered.” I’m not sure where the photos even come from. You should probably talk to James Moore about that.
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Steve,
Does that mean those of us who have commented here, who want their comments saved, should print them out?
David R.,
$20/year is all it takes to be a donor on MiA, that’s not actually “elitist.”
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COMMENTING AS MODERATOR: Not my call. It seems like comments are saved for years and years at this point. But if you want to keep them for later use, you’re certainly welcome to print out or electronically save your comments.
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I hope they’re saved for years and years, thanks Steve.
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I think the photos come from another website that uses them across different platforms.
Gravatar is the site that holds them
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But I did print out all of them a couple years ago.
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Birdsong,
It’s ironic you speak of pendulums, since I’ve got two pieces of artwork, one still in the works, which largely describe the psych system as a pendulum – swinging back and forth between the psychiatric and psychological industries. Maybe I’ll send the finished one into MiA.
Wow, I just went to look for a photo of it, and all my photos since 2011 have also seemingly been stolen by my computer hacking, never hired, systemic child abuse covering, not clinical psychologic criminal nemesis.
Give me my life back, and show me common courtesy and respect, you satanic computer hacking psychologist. All psychologists should be embarrassed.
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Please send the finished one into MiA, Someone Else! A visual representation of the psych system’s own “bipolarity” just might embarrass them…
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Well, the finished one is just a pointillism self portrait reflected in a Foucault pendulum. But I do think the psych industries need to be painted with the psychologic and psychiatric industries painted as the two sides of a satanic pendulum. And maybe I should paint that evil pendulum?
But is it wise to paint the evil, or should I just paint the hope? I’ll take a photo of my pendulum self portrait, and send it to MiA, thank you for asking, Birdsong.
And I know the other pendulum piece would not be a pretty piece, but neither was my anticholinergic toxidrome inspired self portrait, that I’ve already sent to MiA.
But at least all could compare an anticholinergic toxidrome poisoning inspired self portrait with a weaned off the psych drugs, hopeful self portrait. In the hopes the psych lunatics will stop mass drugging the artists.
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I’d love to see whatever you’ve done, Someone Else. I’m sure it’s amazing. I’d never heard of Foucault’s Pendulum until you mentioned it. I asked AI for explanation & pictures, but I still can’t make sense of it. My only reference for pendulums is grandfather clocks!
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Speaking of Pendulums…”It don’t mean a thing unless its got that Swing.” Quote by Ella Fitzgerald about the music of the the Big Band Era.
https://youtu.be/ulK_GE9XjO8?si=jISEDWpYxRDoJQm2
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The psych system swings back and forth, causing havoc all the way around.
I now call the psych system the sick system.
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No coverage of the way whistleblowers (or potential whistleblowers) are being processed in the system Bruce?
Those links between the State and organised criminals that sees the victims subjected to the “elegant method of overcoming resistance” (Frantz Fanon style), given payouts, and then stripped of the money by the thugs waiting at the ATM, in exchange for the silencing of them via ECTs, forced drugging or euthanising?
The savings for the State could potentially be phenomenal. One whistleblower exposing the poisoning of children and the cover up that follows, versus a relatively small sum in payment after a ‘psychiatric report’ results in a compensation payment for psychological damage, that can be stripped by the organised criminals on the ‘other side’ of the agreement.
And what would happen to a whistleblower who dared expose such a system? It’s not like the State is going to provide them with any protection when it is the State that is benefitting from the ‘arrangement’ with the Private Clinic and the means of handing over the ‘experimental material’ to those disposing of the States problems?
I have been informed by ex police that they are being diagnosed with “adjustment disorder” instead of PTSD in order to ensure the liability of the State is minimised when they are injured as a direct result of their work (Psychiatric Diagnosis as Political Device Dr Moncrieff). It’s also a great way of ensuring they are ‘captured’ and can be silenced should they consider speaking openly about their experiences with the ‘service’ and becoming whistleblowers about the links between organised crime and the State.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the use of psychiatry, with your article above in mind, and the way that whistleblowers (and potential whistleblowers) ARE being silenced. It seems almost too obvious a fact for you to have not made mention of the method. Exploit the trust of the potential whistleblower as psychiatrist/ barrister and assess the risk to the State, provide what appears to be ‘assistance’ and obtain a payout, and then leave them to be mugged by organised crims known to be operating in the hospital system who can extract the payout from the victim and conceal it as payment for services rendered. Leave the dribbling mess once it is clear they can no longer count to 5 as a result of the “unintended negative outcome”.
And the response of the State should it be exposed? Contact me and I can show you.
Oh, and this is also true of large Corporations who may wish to silence employees who appear to be ‘unstable’ and might potentially whistle blow on ‘operations’ conducted by said Corp. The company ‘assistance’ program set up to appear to be confidential a sham that reports back directly to the people who pay them for their services. The ‘confessional’ used as a mean to obtain information otherwise unavailable in the situation of conflict between employee and employer. See Nicola Gobbo/Lawyer X as an example of how the symbiotic relationship works.
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Hi Boans,
Here’s an article about silencing Whistleblowers…
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/06/pharmaceutical-industry-fda-use-mob-tactics-silence-whistleblowers/
Here is a poem about an elemental source of sustainable energy that burns “sweeter than revenge. ”
https://youtu.be/WZJToVmneGA?si=zaifFwXzwsNQSQs5
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Thanks for the links Bill.
Whilst Gøtzsche is speaking about ‘industry’ whistleblowers it does apply to the areas I am speaking about also.
It makes me smile to think that our State treasurer had to flee the State as he was a potential whistleblower who police had been dispatched to have him attend a hospital. He was obviously ‘in the know’ as to what the State IS doing to ensure the treasury coffers are protected.
Work it out, $50M (minimum) if the whistleblower is heard and action is taken, or $200k (plus the payment [and ‘favors’] for psychiatrist and lawyer) to have them ‘whacked’ in a system that is “editing” documented legal narratives to conceal public officer malfeasance? And it is of course being done to protect the public when the whistleblower isn’t actually breaking the law with their revelations (and therefore they can not be imprisoned the way David McBride was after the evidence he needed for his defense was “bundled up and run out the back door of the court”). I guess he was lucky in being a lawyer and would know the ‘elegant method of overcoming resistance’ being exploited by the State. A trap so many others have lost their heartbeats too given the method of using ‘external sources’ (Private Clinic to Org Crims once the money has been transferred) to dispose of the problem material.
I’ve been absolutely dumbfounded by the simplicity of it all, and understand why the State would wish to continue with such a ‘program’ (with some arms length supervision of course, they’re cultured killers not savages).
I made the simple mistake of thinking it was over when I made an agreement with the State that I would resign my position and speak no further. They obviously making the agreement to exploit trust and ensure my silence by having a ‘doctor’ remove the compensation via electricity to my head. I slipped the net, not once, but twice….. and managed to keep hold of the factual documents to compare with the fraud provided to the Mental Health Law Centre to enable them to cover up the offending…… and failing miserably. I guess my paranoia in not trusting them as lawyers paid dividends in the end. Quite some model to call people who don’t trust lawyers and doctors who are corrupt, ‘ill’.
“Whistleblowers are commonly fired with little consequence. Some have even had their sanity called into question by being forced to undergo a mental health evaluation due to challenging industry and institutional corruption. Yet, although the consequences for whistleblowers are swift and terrible, the programs and institutions they expose often continue to operate virtually unchanged despite the corruption.”
And there’s where the article describes walking through the gate that reads “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”. Being forced to undergo an ‘assessment’ (for a legal medico report) after months of vicious gaslighting by the State as their employee. And once in that position of being under the ‘care’ of a psychiatrist, the system is easily manipulated to ensure the ‘unintended negative outcome’ the State prefers. Snatched from your bed by police after being ‘spiked’ and delivered to a hospital as ‘experimental material’ with a very short “use by” date.
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When will people/society as a whole truly wake up to this reality?
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That’s a great article. Let me add something – let me give some quotes.. I think these could provide additional insights into the article.
*** *** ***
“The Father of American Psychiatry
THE “FATHER OF AMERICAN PSYCHIATRY”: 1745-1813
Known as the “father of American psychiatry,” Benjamin Rush claimed, “the cause of madness is seated primarily in the blood vessels of the brain” and that mental derangement occurs because the brain is “overcharged” with blood. He advocated bleeding as much as “four-fifths of the blood in the body” to relieve the “excessive action” in the patient’s brain.
“NEGRITUDE”
In 1797, Rush declared that Blacks suffered from a disease called “Negritude.” This he claimed derived from leprosy and caused the skin to be dark. Segregation would, therefore, prevent “infection.” The “cure,” he said, was signified by the skin turning white, at which point the person would be considered sane. He added, “However well they appear to be satisfied with their color, there are many proofs of their preferring that of the white people.”
***
Killing of George Washington
Rush bled a “manic” patient 47 times, removing nearly four gallons of blood. When President George Washington suffered a sore throat, Rush’s bloodletting theories led to the removal of nine pints of his blood in 24 hours, and then to his death. Medical doctors of the time publicly criticized it as a “murderous dose.” The “Father of American Psychiatry” killed the “Father of the United States of America.”?
***
“Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness.” —Benjamin Rush
Introduction to Psychology
Original copy of Wundt’s book, Introduction to Psychology, first published in 1912, written for students new to the subject. Despite the meaning of the word (psyche: soul and -ology: study of), Wundt’s “experimental psychology” laboratory at Leipzig University declared that there was no soul, and that man was merely a pattern of responses, translated through chemicals—no different from an animal (1879).
***
ELIMINATING THE “UNFIT”
The materialistic belief that force can monitor thinking, personality and behavior, laid the foundation for the most destructive era in man’s history. British psychologist developed pseudoscience of eugenics (from Greek eugenes well-born, of good stock, eu- good and genos stock, race), with its ideas of racial purity. They claimed super races could be bred to improve racial characteristics the same way as humans breed horses to develop bigger, stronger animals.
In the mid-1800s, British psychologists toyed with the ideology of eugenics, a term invented by Francis Galton, English psychologist and half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton supported the Darwinian theory that man had evolved from classes of lower animals. He promoted breeding better humans stock and discouraged the reproduction of less desirable people.
In 1870, British psychologist Herbert Spencer claimed that selective breeding of the fittest would bring about a superior race, while the unfit should be allowed to die out. These notions of cultural hierarchy caught on in the United States and by the 1920s, eugenics sterilization was practiced in two dozen states, with California accounting for more than half of the 16,000 operations performed between 1907 and 1933. Beyond that, they formed the basis of much of Hitler’s Mein Kempt and the Holocaust that followed.
***
Redefining Man As An Animal
In 1879, Leipzig University professor Wilhelm Wundt radically changed the course of history when he denounced the soul as irrelevant. Defining man as an animal that could be manipulated as easily as a dog could be trained to salivate at the sound of a bell, Wundt’s experimental psychology found great favor with governments and laid the foundations for Hitler’s Germany.
Although the main-is-an-animal theory is easily debunked (dogs do not drive cars, horses will never paint masterpieces and concertos have yet to be performed by an orchestra of monkeys), psychology and psychiatry drew heavily on Wundt’s theories to measure mental functioning through the brain. Man was declared a victim of his environment with little conscious control over his thoughts and actions – an animal to be shaped by his master.
***
Wilhelm Wundt
WILHELM WUNDT: 1832-1920
MAN IS AN ANIMAL
Psychology and psychiatry have long championed the idea that all human action, emotion, thought and feeling are determined at a physical level by the brain. Reducing life to no more than a chance mix of chemicals, they dictate that the soul and mind are at best “material substances” and at worst, non-existent. The founder of psychological materialism, Wundt, whose scholastic record was “only mediocre, so he did not qualify for state aid,” studied the nervous systems of frogs, dogs and other animals in an attempt to unravel the behavior of Man. He concluded that considering the soul was a “waste of energy” because “human consciousness has developed from a lower form of animal consciousness.” He held that Man’s behavior should only be viewed biologically and that the nature of the psyche was an “aimless discussion.”
***
Adolf Hitler
No man in history has been more prominent in the psychiatric dream of world domination than Adolf Hitler. During the First World War, Hitler ended up in a military hospital where he underwent psychiatric treatment, including hypnosis under Dr. Edmund Forster, chief of the Berlin University Never Clinic. This produced a radical change. He almost immediately joined the German Workers’ Party, advocated to change its name to the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, and was exposed to the psychiatric eugenics theories that gave his own anti-Semitic hatred a “scientific” backing. During World War II, Hitler’s personal doctors, Karl Brandt and Theodor Morell, both eugenicists, piloted the first “mercy killing” on “defective children” and helped psychiatrists draw up the plans for the child-euthanasia program. Throughout the six years of the war, they prescribed Hitler heavy and addictive mind-altering drugs and cocaine.
***
Behind The Holocaust
Long before Hitler came to power, psychiatrists had already originated the idea of killing “undesirables.” In 1895, psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz introduced eugenics to Germany.
By 1932, his racial cleansing theories were taught in 26 courses in German universities. Hitler consulted Ploetz’s work and Fritz Lenz’s treatise, Foundations of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene. They became a basis for his vision of Germany.
Hitler’s avowed intentions were ruthlessly executed in 1939 with his storm troopers herding the Jewish population of Poland’s cities into ghettos for extermination. What followed in Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France is the most graphic and chilling example of what psychiatric theories bring to this world. By 1941, wherever Hitler’s authority extended, extermination by gas chamber became commonplace.
“The significance of racial hygiene did not become evident to all aware Germans until the political activity of Adolf Hitler and only through his work has our 30-yearlong dream of translating racial hygiene into action finally become a reality.” —Ernst Rüdin, Psychiatrist
***
Alfred Ploetz
Ploetz published The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak, coining the word Rassenhygiene, meaning “racial hygiene.” Writing about “the maintenance and development of the race,” Ploetz inspired psychiatrists to assess the “value” of humans and to weed out and kill the inferior. Considered one of the greatest heroes of the Nazi cause, in 1936 he was awarded the Goethe Medallion, Germany’s highest honor for achievement in science and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. The fact must be squarely laced. Why should society not dispose of the criminal and insane in a more economical manner?” – Dr. Alexis Carrell, Nobel Prize Winner
***
Nazi Eugenics
The Nazi state rested on what Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, called “applied biology.” It passed biological laws such as the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring”. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, stated in 1938: “Our starting point is not the individual, the goal is healthy people.”
But however much the Nazis boasted about the ruthless pursuit of their biological goals, the establishment in 1939 of the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness, and its program of mercy killings took place in utter secrecy. It was code-named “T4” after its location at Number 4, Tiergartenstrasse, in Berlin.
T4 psychiatrists churned out death sentences by the truckload, receiving handsome fees for deciding who should be exterminated. Even before the Holocaust, gas chambers were constructed in hospitals. By August 1941, 70,000 people had been murdered in the psychiatric hospitals’ gas chambers. The T4 program was transferred to the death camps including Belsen, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkeanau—the main centers of extermination.
In their quest to cleanse the nation of impure and undesirable elements, psychiatrists invented examination equipment to measure eye and hair color and facial dimensions to determine whether someone was Aryan (German) or alien.
In 1939, psychiatric institutions began murdering children deemed “racially inferior” by food poisoning and lethal injections. Their brains were used for psychiatric research.
***
Control “Science”
1500s: Inmates at the infamous “Bedlam” mental asylum in London were chained, beaten, fed rotten food and subjected to regular bloodlettings. The only “beneficiaries” of this treatment were the asylum attendants, who displayed their unfortunate victims like a circus sideshow to anyone willing to pay admission.
1676: France established the Bicêtre asylum for men and Salpêtrière for women to incarcerate and control “troublesome” and “disturbed” individuals—including those who drank or spent excessively, the “immoral” abusers of God and “free thinkers.”
1684: In England, Dr. Thomas Willis authored a text on insanity, claiming: “Discipline, threats, fetters [shackles], and blows are needed.” “Truly nothing is more necessary and more effective for the recovery of these people than forcing them to respect and fear intimidation.”
1700s/1800s: Patients were confined to cages, closets, cellars and animal stalls. They were chained naked to walls, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience.
1752: Pennsylvania Hospital was the first American state institution to incarcerate the disturbed. While huge amounts of money were spent on buildings, virtually nothing was spent on patient care. Such institutions were called “pauper palaces” and “lunacy cathedrals.”
1793: French asylum director Philippe Pinel abolished the use of chains at Salpêtrière Institution (commemorated by this silver medal). In their place, however, he instituted straitjackets and punishment by flogging. Patients who misbehaved were threatened with “10 severe lashes.”
1800s: Asylums were described as “snake pits,” a term derived from the practice of throwing the insane into serpent-filled holes to “shock them back to their senses.”
1808: Germany’s Johann Christian Reil coined the term psychiatry. The word literally means “healing the soul” from the Greek “psyche.”
1812: Dr. Benjamin Rush, the “father of American psychiatry,” published the first American textbook on psychiatry. Masturbation and too much blood in the brain were considered causes of madness.
1844: The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane was founded. In 1921, it became the American Psychiatric Association.
1879: Germany’s Wilhelm Wundt established the first “experimental psychology” laboratory in Leipzig University, officially rejecting the existence of the soul and declaring that man was merely a product of his genes. In his words, “If one assumes that there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain and a nervous system, then one must try to educate by inducing sensations in that nervous system.”
1883: Emil Kraepelin, German psychiatrist and Wundt’s student, bequeathed the term “paranoia” to the world. A proponent of and supported sterilization to prevent “defective genes” from being passed on, Kraepelin invented a psychiatric “diagnostic” system based on observations of physical symptoms only.
1900s: Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams and developed psychoanalysis, believing that unconscious desires, fears and anxieties were caused by the suppression of the sexual instinct in childhood.
***
Bad Science
BAD SCIENCE CREATES RACISM
Racist psychiatric and psychological theories have fueled the criminal abuse of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. Bogus psychological tests justified labeling such groups inferior, thereby giving legitimacy to inadequate education, segregation, enforced sterilization and other violations of fundamental human rights.
Since the 18th century, psychological, psychiatric and eugenics theories have fueled racist hatred:
(….)
1972: “Segregation was a unique institution, and in many ways worked quite well.” —Henry Garret, psychologist
1999: U.S. psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint lobbied the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to include racism as a mental illness in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The only reason the APA rejected this proposal was because they believed so many people are racist that the condition is normal. Had racism been approved as a disorder, any race–related hate crime would be excused as an illness to be treated with drugs, rather than punished as a violation of civil rights.
***
Oppressing Blacks and Minorities
The artificial separation of humankind by color has been with us for a very long time. But it was psychiatry and psychology that provided the “scientific” justification for racism, apartheid, and the assault and genocide of ethnic groups.
The progression from Wundt’s man-is-an-animal theory to the breeding doctrines of eugenics was a natural one.
In the name of science, psychiatrists invented tests to identify the less suitable, unfit, and undesirable and provided governments with the full range of psychiatric solutions—from enforced sterilization to involuntary incarceration and genocide.
Even the Tuskegee Experiment on African Americans (1923 – 1972) was steeped in eugenics. All three researchers studying untreated syphilis in Blacks had graduated from the medical school at the University of Virginia, a center of eugenics teaching, where students were trained to think about race as a key factor in both the cause and the natural history of syphilis. Subjects were told they were being treated for “bad blood” and penicillin, when it became a standard treatment for the disease, was denied them.
***
Psycho-Politics in Russia
“By certifying people who were undesirable for the State as insane, it was possible to isolate them in psychiatric hospitals without court actions or public, internal or international upset.” – Anatoly Prokopenko, Historian and Professor
(…)
***
Psychosurgery: Destroying the Brain
The radical change from man as a spirit to man as an animal in the 19th century brought with it the idea that to change behavior required changing the structure of the brain. Although never proven, this conclusion was forced to fit like a round peg in a square hole. As so many psychiatric theories, the “proof” of the premise arrived wholly by accident, when a railroad worker had an iron rod driven into his frontal lobes and lived to tell the story. The fact that the poor man was not able to sustain a normal life after the accident was of less importance.
This freak accident set the stage for psychiatry’s “miracle cure”: psychosurgery. Tearing the frontal lobes of the brain with a scalpel or burning it with electrode implants—destroying healthy portions of the brain and crippling the patient. It is commonly believed that this notorious form of “treatment” is no longer practiced. This is not true. Afraid of legal, political and regulatory repercussions, the practice has been redefined in medical terms to conceal its use.
***
Electroshock: Ruining the Mind
In light of psychiatry’s history of experimental treatments for the mentally disturbed, it was only a matter of time for someone to try electricity as the new “miracle cure” for insanity. But when electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was first introduced in the late 1930s, 40% of patients suffered bone fractures. To remedy this problem, psychiatrists began to use muscle relaxants and anesthesia, promoting the modified ECT as safe and effective. But muscle relaxants and anesthesia did not reduce the impact of the shock on the brain. The resulting brain damage, including full-blown epileptic seizures and loss of memory, remained the same.
Modern shock treatment involves soaring the brain 180 to 480 volts of electricity enough electricity to drive heavy machinery in a steel mill. Two-thirds of the victims are women, 50% are the elderly.
The FDA reports the following effects:
Miscarriage
Severe memory loss
Seizures
Tremors
Dementia
Severe weight loss
“A flash of fire erupted across the patient’s right cheek, resulting in mostly 1st and 2nd degree burns. The physician extinguished the flame immediately and provided treatment.”
***
Increasing Drug Sales
PSYCHIATRY’S BRAVE NEW DRUG WORLD
In 1967, psychiatrists and medical doctors met in Puerto Rico to develop their plan for “Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000: Use by Normal Humans.” This included drugs to: maximize the “potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act,” help a person to remember or forget a pleasant or unpleasant experience, replace punishment, improve married life by bringing to one’s mate “the feeling of fresh wonder that often characterizes the initial or early experiences.”
Today, millions of Americans take psychotropic drugs. Internationally, more than 50 million people use antidepressants. These drugs are so widely prescribed that British scientists discovered one antidepressant, Prozac, is consumed in such large quantities that traces of it are now in the county’s drinking water. Member of the Parliament, Norman Baker, called it “mass medication on the unsuspected public…”
INCREASING DRUG SALES
Used only to suppress symptoms but never to cure, mind-altering psychiatric drugs generate billions of dollars in sales, putting profits before patients’ lives.
***
Drugging For Profit
By 1950, the public outcry against the practices of psychosurgery and electroshock created a need for other methods of controlling mental patients. Developed in a Nazi laboratory in Paris, the first in a long series of psychotropic (mood-altering) drugs arrived in psychiatric institutions across the globe: Thorazine, part of a class of drugs called antipsychotics and compared in strength to a lobotomy. Within eight months of its release, psychiatrists had administered Thorazine to an estimated two million patients, three-quarters of them outside of institutions.
First used only on the insane, psychotropic drugs and the staggering range of addictive chemicals that followed were increasingly prescribed for more minor disabilities and, finally, to perfectly normal people. In a truly incestuous relationship, psychiatrists invent diseases and drug companies follow with new drugs to cure them.
“It’s big money,” according to Peyton Knight, legislative director of the American Policy Center. The more diagnoses there are every year, the more mind-altering drugs they are going to be able to market and sell.
***
Failed Mental Health Plan
In accordance with the 1940 psychiatric Master Plan, community mental health centers infiltrated the United States in the 1960s and spread to other countries in the 1980s. Psychiatrist Robert Felix, first head of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), was a key lobbyist for the psychiatric industry and his efforts brought billions of dollars of government funding to NIMH and community mental health (see photo).
William Menninger, another psychiatrist, was highly influential in getting legislation passed that provided government funding to psychiatry. His historic 1963 meeting with President John F. Kennedy at the White House (right) led to legislation that established outpatient community mental health clinics across the United States. The law legally empowered the clinics to force patients to take psychotropic drugs or face committal to an institution.
Dr. Thomas Szasz said, “Community mental health centers were touted as providing the least restrictive setting for delivering the best available mental health services. Such were the claims of psychiatrists to justify the policy of forcibly drugging and relocating their hospitalized patients. It sounded grand. Unfortunately, it was a lie.” The plan enabled psychiatrists to drug 10 times the number of people they could in psychiatric institutions.
***
Profit With Poison
PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS: FROM “MAGIC” BULLETS TO SPENT SHELLS
The evolution of psychiatric drugs has been a procession of claimed “miraculous” new developments that were, one for one, later revealed to be harmful, even deadly.
1884: CLAIM: Sigmund Freud, a cocaine addict, praised it as a magical substance that could cure depression, morphine addiction and sexual impotence. The 1985 Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry claimed that cocaine “creates no serious problems.”
FACT: Cocaine is highly addictive.
1904: CLAIM: The first barbiturate (sedative-hypnotic drug) was marketed as “absolutely safe and without toxic effects.”
FACT: Barbiturates are more addictive than morphine and cause irreversible damage to the brain and nervous system. They harm the patient both physically and mentally. Thousands of people who have taken barbiturates have wound up addicted and have lost their jobs and families.
1930s: CLAIM: Amphetamines (Benzedrine and Dexedrine) were introduced as non-addictive antidepressants.
FACT: Amphetamines cause addiction, nerve toxicity and amphetamine psychosis manifested by hallucinations and delusions of persecution. They also trigger violence and suicide.
1937: CLAIM: Amphetamines were approved as effective treatment for children with behavioral problems.
FACT: Amphetamines change a child’s personality, are addictive, and cause toxic psychosis; suicide is a serious risk during withdrawal.
1948: CLAIM: LSD was introduced into the U.S. for use with psychotherapy and hailed as a cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behavior, sexual perversions and alcoholism.
FACT: LSD causes hallucinations, flashbacks, birth defects, psychosis and its use was made illegal in 1966.
1949: CLAIM: Lithium, a salt substitute, was used to sedate manic-depressive (bipolar) behavior and promoted as a mood stabilizer.
FACT: The dosage used is so poisonous it can cause heart irregularity, seizures, thyroid problems, diabetes, slowed intellectual functioning, birth defects if given to pregnant women, kidney and brain damage, and death.
1954: CLAIM: Thorazine, the first of the major tranquilizers (or neuroleptics, meaning nerve-seizing drugs) was considered a revolutionary treatment that would free patients from institutions and save governments money.
FACT: Thorazine causes irreversible damage to the nervous system and 100,000 Americans died from its side effect, neuroleptic malignant syndrome. It also causes heart irregularities, heat stroke, impotence, obesity, blood disorders, seizures and death.
1957: CLAIM: Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) (a chemical process) antidepressants were said to block the action of an enzyme in the brain to improve mood.
FACT: The original version was withdrawn from the market because it caused hepatitis. MAOIs cause muscle tremors, confusion, memory problems, impaired liver function, heart palpitations and mania.
1958: CLAIM: Tricyclic (a chemical structure) antidepressants were “wonder drugs” for dulling depression and promoted as faster acting, with fewer side effects.
FACT: Tricyclic antidepressants frequently cause sedation, drowsiness, difficult thinking, a deadening effect, headaches and weight gain. In children, they can cause partial paralysis of the bladder.
1950s: CLAIM: Psychiatrists claimed Ecstasy enhanced psychotherapy.
FACT: Ecstasy causes hallucinations, depression, anxiety, chills, tremors, involuntary teeth clenching, swelling of the brain, memory damage, liver failure and death.
1960s: CLAIM: Minor tranquilizers (known as benzodiazepines) such as Librium and Valium were promoted to provide relief for anxiety, neurosis and tension.
FACT: Both drugs are addictive within four weeks. Epileptic seizures and death can occur if intake of these drugs is suddenly stopped.
1961: CLAIM: Ritalin was approved as safe for use in children with behavioral problems and hyperactivity.
FACT: By 1971, Ritalin and other stimulants were scheduled in the same abuse category as morphine, cocaine and opium. Ritalin is more potent than cocaine and causes stunted growth, weight loss and psychosis. Stimulants are habit forming. Suicide is a major complication during withdrawal.
1975: CLAIM: Cylert (Pemoline) was introduced as a new stimulant to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) with fewer side effects.
FACT: Cylert causes hallucinations, increased irritability, involuntary movements of the face, eyes, lips, tongue, arms and legs and seizures. It can cause severe liver complications, liver failure and death.
1987: CLAIM: Prozac, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant, was marketed as safe and virtually side-effect free for everything from weight gain and depression to jealousy and pulling out one’s hair. By 2004, another nine SSRIs were in use.
FACT: These drugs cause anxiety, agitation, insomnia, bizarre dreams, sexual dysfunction, confusion, suicidal thoughts, hostility and violent behavior. Suicide is also a serious risk during withdrawal from some SSRIs.
1990s: CLAIM: New atypical neuroleptic drugs were hailed as breakthrough treatments, with less side effects than Thorazine.
FACT: These drugs cause leaking breasts, liver and kidney problems, life-threatening diabetes, respiratory arrest and heart attacks.
1994: CLAIM: Nefazodone (Serzone), a Norepinephrine (neurotransmitter/brain chemical) Reuptake Inhibitor (SNRI) antidepressant, was said to have fewer side effects, such as sexual dysfunction and insomnia, than SSRI antidepressants.
FACT: This drug soon became associated with irreversible liver failure that could kill the patient.
1996-2003: CLAIM: New stimulants (Adderall, Concerta, Metadate, Focalin) and the non-stimulant ADHD drug, Strattera, were said to be safe and effective for children and have fewer adverse effects than Ritalin.
FACT: These drugs are mind altering and prescribed for a disorder that doesn’t medically exist. Adderall and Concerta cause psychosis, heart irregularities and depression. Within a year of Strattera being marketed, it was found to cause severe liver problems and the FDA ordered a “black box” label be added, warning that it can cause suicide.
2002-2005: CLAIM: The antipsychotic (neuroleptic), Abilify, was marketed as safe and effective, with fewer side effects than other antipsychotics.
FACT: Abilify and other antipsychotic drugs were soon exposed as causing diabetes and a potentially fatal heart-rhythm irregularity. Abilify can be addictive.
TODAY’S WARNINGS
In a series of public warnings in 2004, the FDA ordered “black box” labeling for antidepressants to warn that they can cause suicide in children and adolescents. Within eight months, the FDA began warning of the risk of suicide for adults taking antidepressants. In 2005, Europe’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use issued the strongest warning that antidepressants can cause suicidal behavior, hostility, aggression, anger and mood instability in children and adolescents.
Hallucinations; psychotic, violent and aggressive behavior and suicide are now FDA acknowledged risks of stimulant drugs. Strattera, for example, can cause liver injury leading to death, and Adderall now carries a warning that sudden death from heart problems is a risk. The FDA warns that antipsychotic drugs may cause death in the elderly, while for the general public there is a risk of diabetes.
“BLACK BOX” WARNING
The “black box” labeling is intended to warn parents of the risk of suicide in children and adolescents taking antidepressants. In practice however, this vital information is buried in the voluminous, small print supplied by the drug company.
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Harming the Elderly
Psychiatrists have a lucrative market in the elderly, who are mercilessly drugged and electroshocked. According to the U.S. Office of the Inspector General, nearly 305,000 elderly nursing home residents are given dangerous and often deadly antipsychotic drugs. Studies show that these can double the risk of death and triple the risk of stroke for seniors.
Other side effects include cardiovascular death, cognitive slowing, sedation, and uncontrollable movement of the face and extremities. Close to a million are prescribed antidepressants, increasing the risk of falls and fractures. And those 85 years and older subjected to electroshock are six times more likely to die within a year than those who don’t receive this barbarity.
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Involuntary Commitment
In the United States today, one person is involuntarily incarcerated in a psychiatric facility every 40 seconds. Before you finish touring this exhibit, more than 30 people – perhaps a friend, a family member, or a neighbor – will have been committed and, more often than not, will then be brutally treated or even killed.
Normal and basic human rights, granted even to killers or terrorists, are denied those labeled “mentally disordered.” The burden of proof for involuntary commitment is largely based on “probable cause” rather than the burden of proof for criminal incarcerations “beyond reasonable doubt.” Once committed, patients have no rights, can be held for days, weeks, months or even years while being subjected to debilitating drugs and electroshock against their will.
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Destroying Artists
TARGETING HOLLYWOOD
At the beginning of the 20th century, psychiatry and psychology infiltrated Hollywood, redefining creativity as a form of neurosis.
In 1916, psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, a student of Germany’s Wilhelm Wundt, wrote The Film: A Psychological Study. “The movie screen,” he wrote, “ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests.” Münsterberg was one of the first to suggest that psychologists, as self-appointed experts on the mind, should be hired to advise the film industry.
According to Professors Krin and Glen Gabbard, between 1957 and 1963, Hollywood began to portray psychiatrists as the “authoritarian voices of reason, adjustment and well-being.” By legitimizing itself on the silver screen, psychiatry popularized the notion that drugs, analysis and other psychiatric treatments held the secrets to happier living. Ironically, these same practices, applied to individual artists, have inflicted a staggering loss of talent in many artistic fields.
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“What these shock doctors don’t know about writers and such… What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?” —Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning Author
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: 1899-1961
Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, ill with diabetes, was talked into admitting himself to a psychiatric institution and given more than 20 electroshock treatments. Later he told a friend, “It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.” In July 1961, days after being released from the Mayo psychiatric clinic, Hemingway committed suicide.
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ROBIN WILLIAMS: 1951 – 2014
The beloved actor/comedian Robin Williams tragically committed suicide, with the medical examiner reporting the antidepressant, mirtazapine, (also known as Remeron) was in Williams’ system at the time of his death. There are at least 10 international drug regulatory agency warnings on the causing of suicidal thoughts. The powerful antipsychotic Seoquel was also found in his home and had been prescribed to Williams seven days prior to his suicide, with the bottle missing 8 pills. Side effects associated with Seroquel include psychosis, paranoid reactions, delusions, depersonalization and suicide attempt. Williams’ long-term mental health problems clearly had not been cured or even helped by the treatment prescribed him. If only the sentiments from one of his fines roles in Awakenings had been taken literally in his personal life: “The human spirit is more powerful than any drug and that is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter.” In 2015, Robin Williams’, widow, Susan, said her husband had been suffering from Lewy body dementia.
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MARILYN MONROE: 1926-1962
Actress Marilyn Monroe was under psychoanalysis for years, then was referred to a psychiatrist who prescribed addictive drugs. On her last day, she saw psychiatrist Ralph Greenson for six hours before dying of a drug overdose. In the seven years prior to her treatment, Monroe made 23 films; in the following seven she made only six.
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OZZY OSBOURNE: 1948 –
The rock star legend was fighting substance abuse when an “addiction specialist” prescribed 13,000 doses of 32 different drugs (opioids, tranquilizers, amphetamines, antidepressants and antipsychotics) during one year, which turned Osbourne into an incoherent stumbling wreck. “I was wiped out on pills.” Said Osbourne, “I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t walk. I could barely stand up…” The pills cost $58,000 and the doctor’s “services,” $850,000.
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ERIC DOUGLAS: 1960-2004
Kirk Douglas’ son, Eric, died of “acute intoxication” from prescription tranquilizers and painkillers combined with alcohol. Official records indicate that Douglas’ demise stemmed from treatment by a psychiatrist whose license has since been revoked by the California Medical Board. A lawsuit against the psychiatrist was settled in May 2004.
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Ect. ect. (….)
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“We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions… the two most difficult are law and medicine… Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.” -Psychiatrist J. R. Rees, 1940
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A Criminal Organization
“The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely. If the race is to be freed from the crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.” –G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist, 1945
There is only one passion that truly motivates the psychiatric industry—money. Inventing diseases is a way for psychiatrists to make more money. Every psychiatric solution—incarceration, psychosurgery, electroshock, the drugging of populations—was embarked upon, not on the premise that it might help, but to generate a new source of income when the cash flow of the prior solution began to dry up.
More psychiatrists and psychologists have been criminally charged than any other sector of the health care industry.
On an international scale, hundreds of billions of dollars are lost each year to psychiatric and psychological insurance fraud. A study of U.S. Medicaid and Medicare insurance fraud reveals psychotherapists to have the worst record for fraud of all those in the health care disciplines. A review of more than 800 convictions of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists over a six-year period shows 43% were convicted of fraud, theft and embezzlement; 32% for sex crimes; 7% for patient assault and violent crime; 6% for drug offenses and 6% for manslaughter and murder.
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Mind Control & Terrorism
MANUFACTURING TERROR
“While political terrorism has been capturing widespread attention for some time, almost nothing has been made public of how psychiatrists today use their knowledge and skills in its support to deliberately destroy minds and bodies.” — Gordon Thomas, veteran foreign affairs correspondent and author of Journey into Madness.
Long before anyone had heard of a Manchurian Candidate—someone programmed to kill—psychologist George Estabrooks reported during World War II: “The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man’s personality, or creating multi-personality, with the aid of hypnotism. This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it.”
Since the 1960s, an explosion of violence has terrorized the world. Research into the engineers of terror attacks shows a dominance of psychiatric and psychological practitioners and the typical tools of their trade: drugs and coercive methods.
“The psychological structure of a suicide bomber is that of an individual who loves life. This may seem strange to people who are incapable of understanding the suicide attack because their cultural structure has no concepts such as self-sacrifice and honor. It is a transition to another, more beautiful, world.” —Dr. Adel Sadeq, Chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association, head of the Department of Psychiatry, Cairo’s Ain Shams University
***
A Profile of Psychiatrists
In 1997, Psychology Today reported, “Suicide, stress, divorce—psychologists and other mental health professionals may actually be more screwed up than the rest of us.”
–Psychiatrists commit suicide at about twice the rate of physicians.
–Psychiatrists top the list of health practitioners most likely to be divorced.
–Drug addiction rates of psychiatrists are significantly higher than those of the general population.
–At least 10% of all psychiatrists and psychologists admit to sexually abusing their patients.
–Forty percent of all American psychiatrists are sued for malpractice during the course of their careers.
Clearly, psychiatrists are the last people courts, schools, governments or anyone should defer to as experts on criminal or other behavior.
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Diagnostic Manual Destroys Rights
Today, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a compendium of untested and unproven “mental illnesses” which are voted into existence by APA members, is used to:
– Remove a child from the custody of his or her parents,
– Deprive a person of his or her right to vote in some countries,
– Determine whether a person is fit to plead guilty to having committed a criminal offense,
– Incarcerate a defendant indefinitely in psychiatric care rather than being convicted of a crime and serving a finite sentence,
– Invalidate a person’s will,
– Break legal contracts and override a person’s wishes regarding business or property,
– Involuntarily incarcerate a person in a psychiatric institution where electroshock and drugs can be forcibly administered, and
– Defraud a person’s health insurance.
***
“The low level of intellectual effort was shocking. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so let’s go to a cafeteria. Then it’s typed into the computer.” — Renee Gartinkel, psychologist at DSM-III Hearing
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Pseudoscience
“We can manufacture enough diagnostic labels of normal variability of mood and thought that we can continually supply medication to you. But when it comes to manufacturing disease, nobody does it like psychiatry.” – Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, Pennsylvania Medical Society, psychiatrist, 2004
To ensure a continuously consuming market, one has to come up with more products and better reasons to buy. Psychiatry saw the need to expand its market with a new array of mental illnesses to guarantee profits. In the late 1940s, private health insurance began and psychiatrists saw a lucrative source of income. Hence the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, and the mental disorders section of the International Classification of Diseases.
With these publications and their ever-increasing lists of mental disorders, psychiatry secured a firm share of the medical market and a very profitable partnership with the pharmaceutical industry.
A 2006 study by Lisa Cosgrove with the University of Massachusetts, and Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University Professor, exposed the extent of this “joint venture”, finding that the majority of psychiatrists determining the criteria for DSM disorders had undisclosed financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drugs to treat them.
This alliance between the psychotropic and pharmaceutical industries has resulted in international psychiatric drug sales of 84 billion dollars a year.
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ORIGINS OF PSYCHIATRY
Brutality and Terror
“Institutional Psychiatry’s most important social characteristic is the use of force and fraud.” —Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, co-founder of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights
Psychiatry has infiltrated our education systems, courtrooms, governments, legislatures, churches, and homes. The state of society today is not a “symptom of the times,” it is a result of psychiatry carrying forward its stated 1940 Master Plan.
Wearing the mantle of scientists, psychiatrists destroy lives with brutal cures and addictive mind-altering drugs. During a 40-year period, nearly twice as many Americans died in government psychiatric hospitals as Americans soldiers killed in battle in all wars the United States has fought since 1776, including the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
How is it that such barbarism is allowed to continue? Psychiatrists have convinced society they are authorities. To help understand how this could be, a brief look at their history reveals a great deal.
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Barbaric & Inhuman Conditions
“If you are incarcerated in a mental hospital, you are in prison. You are not treated or cured.” —Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry
Some of the worst human rights atrocities in the world are committed inside psychiatric institutions, which are funded by billions of dollars in government appropriations.
Trusted with the care for the mentally disturbed, psychiatry has failed to provide basic humane solutions to their plight.
Instead of receiving comfort and proper care, psychiatric patients are detained against their will, restrained, shackled to furniture, tortured with electric shock, forced to ingest toxic substances, sexually abused, beaten, denied medical care, experimented upon and locked up in isolation.
*** *** ***
NOTE: These quotes are taken from the CCHR’s “Psychiatry is a Death Industry” virtual museum. There were many more, but including them here would be both inappropriate and unethical. Those interested can visit the virtual museum at this address.
https://www.cchrmuseum.org/virtual-tour
Bruce Levine, this was a wonderful article. I’ve included these as a contribution. I hope they have been helpful. Best regards.
With my sincerest wishes. 🙂 Y.E. Researcher blog writer (Blogger)
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Hi… After rereading the article and the quotes above… it reminded me of “conclusions I had drawn from my previous research.”
If you’ve read the quotes above… you’ll understand that Adolf Hitler was “controlled” by psychiatrists.
So, what does this remind you of?
The psychiatrists and their weapons (psychiatric drugs, hypnosis, ECT, etc.) that controlled Adolf Hitler and turned him into an “aggressive, violent, mentally ill, and psychopathic” individual are still being used in the same way today. So, in essence, mainstream psychiatry has been using its own weapons (psychiatric drugs, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, ECT, etc.) for decades to transform healthy people into “truly mentally ill” individuals.
This is, in fact, a tactic that mainstream psychiatry has been using for decades to “CONFIRM” the mental illness label (diagnosis) in order to transform healthy people into “real mentally ill” individuals.
How?
—-
Mainstream psychiatrists…
– First, they label healthy individuals with one of thousands of “imaginary mental illness” labels.
– Then they prescribe “psychiatric drugs” that cause “real mental illness.”
– And then they start waiting for “all that will happen”—that is, waiting for individuals to experience “real symptoms of mental illness.”
– When individuals… begin to experience “real symptoms of mental illness” caused by psychiatric drugs… they will return to mainstream psychiatry.
– Thus, when an individual returns to mainstream psychiatry, mainstream psychiatrists… have CONFIRMED the “fictitious mental illness label (diagnosis)” they placed on the individual. In other words, mainstream psychiatrists… have CONFIRMED the “”imaginary (fictitious) mental illness label (diagnosis)” because individuals have been transformed into “real mentally ill” individuals by psychiatric drugs.
—-
This might seem like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not. Here’s why… Look at how mainstream psychiatrists, who used Adolf Hitler, are now using tens/hundreds of millions of healthy people worldwide. These include politicians, heads of state, party leaders, artists, journalists, and writers, etc.
“Psychiatric drugs… “enslave” people and allow them to be “controlled.”
Imagine being “managed and directed” by people who are “enslaved and controlled” by psychiatric drugs… Mainstream psychiatry… has been using “biopsychiatric treatments and interventions” such as “psychiatric drugs, ECT, hypnosis,” etc., for decades. Mainstream psychiatry (and probably politicians along with it)… seems to be using all these biopsychiatric interventions… not to treat people… but to “control them as they see fit.”
“Like the saying, ‘Of the visible village, needs no the guide.” or “”The obvious needs no explanation.'” Look at what we’ve been living through for decades.
***
Let’s go back to Adolf Hitler… During Adolf Hitler’s era, a policy of genocide was implemented. However, this policy of genocide… had been conceived as an idea by mainstream psychiatry long before Adolf Hitler came to power. Psychiatrists of the time advocated the idea and policy of killing the “undesirables” before Adolf Hitler came to power.
The psychiatrists of that era had embraced the idea of ”killing the unwanted.” They needed a “scapegoat” for this. And that scapegoat was Adolf Hitler, who was admitted to a mental hospital. They probably hypnotized Adolf Hitler with biopsychiatric interventions and used him for years. Adolf Hitler was, in fact, a “scapegoat” who took on the responsibility for the genocides that the psychiatrists were going to commit.
Probably… they used Adolf Hitler to implement this genocidal policy. And they put him at the head of the German Nazi party and had the party’s name changed. And they brought him to the German presidency through so-called political elections. And the psychiatrists implemented their “genocidal policy”… using Adolf Hitler.
So how did the psychiatrists… manage this?
—–
“Long before anyone had heard of a Manchurian Candidate—someone programmed to kill—psychologist George Estabrooks reported during World War II: “The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man’s personality, or creating multi-personality, with the aid of hypnotism. This is not science fiction. This has and is being done. I have done it.”
“Since the 1960s, an explosion of violence has terrorized the world. Research into the engineers of terror attacks shows a dominance of psychiatric and psychological practitioners and the typical tools of their trade: drugs and coercive methods.”
““We can manufacture enough diagnostic labels of normal variability of mood and thought that we can continually supply medication to you. But when it comes to manufacturing disease, nobody does it like psychiatry.” – Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, Pennsylvania Medical Society, psychiatrist, 2004”
“Used only to suppress symptoms but never to cure, mind-altering psychiatric drugs generate billions of dollars in sales, putting profits before patients’ lives.”
——-
What do we know about biopsychiatric treatments – especially psychiatric drugs?
Almost all psychiatric drugs are “mind-altering drugs.” Hypnosis has the same property. ECT does too – at least partially. And other “biopsychiatric interventions” that we haven’t thought of yet are also like that.
Because all of these… target people’s healthy brains. They try to change brain chemistry. And when people’s brain chemistry changes… their minds probably start to change too – (positively/negatively…).
– If you know “how to control” a person’s brain chemistry… you can control that person “as you wish.”
– If you don’t know “how to control” a person’s brain chemistry… you cannot control that person “as you wish.”
You cause them to “get out of control.” And you cause enormous – permanent and fatal – harm, both mentally and physically, to both that person and those around them. These that is precisely what mainstream psychiatry does today.
Modern mainstream psychiatry uses its weapons (biopsychiatric interventions) to:
1) transform healthy people into “truly mentally ill” individuals,
2) thereby control them, and
3) cause them to inflict “deadly harm” on themselves and those around them. They control them with these weapons.
Healthy individuals exposed to the weapons of mainstream psychiatry (biopsychiatric interventions)… especially when they experience “real mental illness symptoms” caused by psychiatric drugs… become unable to control themselves.
So what happens next? :
A) and most likely they either return to mainstream psychiatrists… or
B) they begin to inflict “deadly harm” on themselves and those around them.
These are both things that mainstream psychiatry wants. They are two arguments that mainstream psychiatry uses to “justify” itself. They “confirm – validate” the “imaginary mental illness” label (diagnosis) they’ve placed on healthy people through psychiatric drugs.
And just imagine, this has been going on for decades. What a terrible situation, isn’t it? Is this a “conspiracy theory,” a “figment of the imagination,” or “the hidden truths of mainstream psychiatry”? You decide. Best regards. 🙂
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Yea…stating Hitler was “controlled” by psychiatrist, and pretty much every other claim therein, is precisely the kind of ammunition the psychiatric establishment loves to use to discredit this site and pretty much all principled mental health analysis. Man oh Man…with all the inexhaustible grounded reasons to criticize psychiatry, Hitler ranks below the earthworm for both cause and consideration.
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Hi, Kevin Smith… you’re right about both points. The answer to both questions is obvious:
In fact, the reason why mainstream psychiatry… employs a “policy of discrediting” those who criticize them, and why it is so powerful within the mainstream medical community… is that “policy, political, financial, and economic forces” are behind psychiatry.
These are typically found among “political and policy forces,” including “politicians, states, local governments, etc.” Financial and economic forces generally include “pharmaceutical companies and state financial resources.” These financial and economic forces provide billions of dollars in “financial gains” to the mainstream medical community and the mainstream psychiatry sector.
Especially pharmaceutical companies… help politicians and political parties with “election campaigns, propaganda, etc.” in terms of “financial gains” amounting to thousands/millions/billions of dollars. (This isn’t a conspiracy theory. For example, this was revealed during the Obama administration. It’s likely that politicians and parties who have come to power for decades have been supported in this way.)
—
Mainstream psychiatry’s… the “financial gain” connections between pharmaceutical companies and governments…
To our knowledge, pharmaceutical companies… only provide “financial” support to politicians and parties’ election campaigns in the US. Other countries in the world don’t provide this support. They don’t because… the US government seems to be the only country that controls both “pharmaceutical companies” and “scientific research related to drugs.”
It is also said that the world-renowned so-called scientific medical journals that publish drug research are under the control of the US administration (and/or its regulatory official health organizations/authorities).
If “scientific studies and publications” are made about the “harmful effects of the drugs (especially psychiatric drugs)” produced by pharmaceutical companies, these “regulatory official health authorities” in the US, which control these so-called scientific medical journals, intervene.
But on the other hand… they publish almost every kind of “pseudo-scientific study and publication” on the “benefits of medicines” without question. They deceive and mislead people, societies, and governments in this way. They provide misleading informations. Anyway…
And there’s this: “Whatever path the US takes… other countries in the world follow.” – Pharmaceutical companies know this, and that’s why they can only interfere in this way (in terms of financial support) “only in US election campaigns.”
This is why mainstream psychiatry has survived for decades – until now. It’s because political forces are behind psychiatry. In the mainstream psychiatry sector and the mainstream medical world, “money” speaks. Pharmaceutical companies buy political powers (local governments, states, etc.) with money. These political powers, in turn, protect both pharmaceutical companies and mainstream psychiatry from external “legal and media attacks” or discredit such attacks. This is how they protect mainstream psychiatry and ensure its survival for decades.
—-
In conclusion… Mainstream psychiatry… loves to produce conspiracy theories and in doing so, it uses the so-called scientific – mainstream medical community. Together with pharmaceutical companies, they prepare fake “scientific studies” and use this “false and fabricated scientific data” to protect themselves. They buy off “scientists, politicians, and health organizations, etc.” with money to support these things. They do this by receiving “financial” support and assistance from pharmaceutical companies. (These are not conspiracy theories… these are facts revealed by honest scientists, journalists, etc. If anyone wants to learn more… they can research the internet and organizations like CCHR, etc.)
Therefore… Mainstream psychiatry… is a “money-making industry” that produces the most conspiracy theories in the world. Furthermore, mainstream psychiatry… loves individuals and organizations that criticize them and make supposedly unfounded (unsubstantiated) claims. Mainstream psychiatry… labels its critics as “conspiracy theorists” and (as you said) “are ammunition for mainstream psychiatry.” It uses this to “discredit” individuals and organizations that criticize it.
NOTE: In fact (reality), those who criticize psychiatry without basis (without sources) have extremely solid sources, but even the critics themselves and most people are unaware of this. Psychiatry has committed so many crimes… no matter what criticism you make of psychiatry… you will eventually see that these (unsubstantiated) criticisms may have one or more sources. Therefore, no matter what you say about criticizing psychiatry – without basis (without sources) – you will eventually realize that there is a logical explanation for it. And you will see it.
“Criticisms that appear to be conspiracy theories… – have a strange habit of “having already happened” and/or “turning into reality later.” 🙂 Best regards.
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“There’s so many gut basic root flaws that how do you change that? Let’s just start by scrapping the diagnosis and the DSM entirely. But the problem is even if you do that, you still got these troubled people [therapists themselves] who have a of power and have a lot of arrogance and can do a massive amount of harm whether there’s a DSM or not. And what I see is a huge number of people who aren’t looking at their core issues are in the positions of the modern priests and gurus and they’re called therapists and psychiatrists, then nothing’s going to change and they’re more similar to each other than they’re not… So, they’re going to close ranks.” – Daniel Mackler: A Former Therapist’s Critique with Leah Denton @Podcast.psychotherapy
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Learning the dynamics of bigotry—in all its forms—is incredibly freeing.
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Wow, this is one of the best articles I’ve read on here in a while. This really helps answer that question so many of us have: Why do most self-proclaimed “liberals”/”progressives”/”leftists” endorse psychiatry & misunderstand the psych abolition movement, when they so aptly recognize other human rights violations & stand against THOSE forms of oppression & support THOSE social justice movements? Why aren’t they able to see the parallels? It make me think of the prison abolition movement & how so many supporters believe in “increased access to mental healthcare” as an alternative to the prison industrial complex, totally oblivious to the realities of the mental health industrial complex.
My only concern is that the conclusion of this article makes it sound kind of hopeless. Like every megamachine or oppressive system will one day be replaced by another, so there’s no use in even fighting it. I don’t believe that. Mostly because I don’t WANT to believe that. I’m sure many would call me naive or idealistic. But I think we can do better. How will we know until we try?
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“Why do most self-proclaimed ‘liberals’/’progressives’/ ‘leftists’ endorse psychiatry & misunderstand the psych abolition movement …?”
Because they’ve internalized the dominant narrative.
“How will we know until we try?”
Systems resist change. Minds less so. Change enough minds, and systems fall on their own.
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Jasmine, you’re neither naive nor idealistic for thinking we can and must do better. You’re paying attention and looking ahead.
All too often any idea of a different way is rejected out of hand—even by those who not only recognize a need to change, but might be clamoring for it.
Why? Well . . . because it’s just not the way it is. (Ugh.) Fear, mostly, and dependence on historical inertia and tradition.
From this position comes the suggestions of naivety and idealism, or a more thoughtful dismissal: “that’s interesting.” Faced with change, suddenly the way it is inevitable and preferable to any alternative. Even if the way it is is killing us. But then, “It’s too late now.”
What should scare people who are concerned about humanity is the reality of our dysfunctional way of life and the consequences of NOT changing.
But why fix what has become unmanageably complex when it can be kicked down the road for future generations to deal with? (Bystander mentality.)
If kids of the future want to change it, would their elders allow this transformation? Not likely: “It’s just the kids being idealistic.”
It’s not kids being “idealistic” that’s a problem, or even a valid criticism. The problem resides with the established and invested thwarting changes to the unfair, dysfunctional, unsustainable systems they depend upon to live comfortably.
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Dan, sudden change is too disorienting for most people. It’s also the recipe for backlash.
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Agreed. That’s why we might consider fundamental change but on a smaller scale.
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Yes. Smaller bites give people a chance to chew on things. Also means less indigestion.
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To my mind you’ve raised a very, very important question, Jasmine: “Why do most self-proclaimed “liberals”/”progressives”/”leftists” endorse psychiatry & misunderstand the psych abolition movement, when they so aptly recognize other human rights violations & stand against THOSE forms of oppression & support THOSE social justice movements?”
Well, I’d like to take a crack at answering your important question, not so much from an “abolition” perspective, but from the POV of a ‘system’ that has gone off the rails with impunity.
1. Because so called liberals and progressives have been systematically educated to be disciplined technicians to manage conflict and people, rather than critically educated professionals to understand, resolve, and mediate complex structural phenomena and prodigious contradictions with big picture ramifications. Moreover, their formal education and career obligations (grad school on) are as politically informed as they are depoliticizing incentivized; which is to say that “its hard for person to understand a thing when his/her job depends on them not understanding”, save having no power to change in the first place. Worse, still, there is a critical thinking crisis throughout higher education-of which I can cite troubling data, surveys, etc.
2. Liberal and progressives tend to see themselves as defenders of progressive virtues, yet fail miserably to see the myriad of ways they blindly enable and exacerbate the very inequities and injustices they virtue-hoard take credit for embodying and upholding. Though I can cite dozens of critiques/books and thinkers here, I’ll just cite Musma Al Gharbi’s brilliant book, “We Were Never Woke”, for a big picture systemic critique, and Alex Karakatsanis, book “Copoganda” for the insipid ways professionals/institutions selectively and selfishly exploit facts and knowledge to bolster their own careers and class interests, whereby they effectively distort and corrupt much of what is utterly necessary for a civil society; and lastly, moral philosopher Susan Niemen’s short book, “Left Is Not Woke”. On the political side of our collective faux liberal crisis, one can download Norman Solomon’s PDF book, “How the Democratic Party Paved the Blue Road to Trump Hell”, for “some” of the ways faux liberals are little more than the left hand of fascism, anti-democratic governance, virtue hoarding deception and false representation of democratic and morally and intellectually sound principles/practices/policies. (Yea…I’m outraged and not a little despairing).
3. Liberals and progressives have been particularly socialized to believe/deify the inherent goodness and values of education and professionalism, and thereby particularly rewarded (status, $$$$, authority, etc.) for their (unconscious) institutional fealty. Simply put, in the best sense the liberal and faux progressive technician- managers are deeply conflicted and professionally constrained to affect dynamic responses that are more critically and ethically informed within the neoliberal dictates they are tasked to administer; and at worst-though far from rare, confuse their privilege for moral and intellectual supremacy (it bears repeating).
4. For these reasons and many, many more, far too many so called liberals and faux progressives are unable to advocate for a just and substantive epistemological, ethical, and humanely informed mental health care system. But, if my fears of an approaching dystopian world are actually on the horizon, maybe when/if AI replaces todays intellectually and ethically challenged mental health care clinicians at scale, perhaps the blowback will be sufficient to forge the kind of care your questions beg answered? If not, the rapidly approaching age of “absolute megamachine-power”, could also very well be the age of absolute psychiatry.
Sorry for the rant. My bullshit cup runnith over these days.
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Not that it matters in the least, I just need to clean up my poor language to describe the mental health system. It “hasn’t gone off the rails”, but, rather, is broken, lost, and any dozen or more accurate descriptions.
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Hi Kevin, I think you did quite well in describing the pseudo of it all!!!
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Hi Bill, Big thanks!
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Jasmine, your post reminds me of journalist Chris Hedges’ statement: “I don’t fight fascists because I think I’ll win: I fight them because they’re fascists.”
Neoliberal corporatism (in support of which mainstream psychiatry performs an integral role, just as it does in any oppressive system) will eventually collapse from its own internal contradictions, but there’s no guarantee that it will be replaced by anything more humane. With the growing power of technofeudalists and the rapid development of AI surveillance and genetic engineering, a much bleaker future looks increasingly possible.
Nonetheless, fighting the megamachine is worth the effort, if only to preserve a remnant of human autonomy. Opposition to psychiatry’s fallacious and harmful biomedical dogma is an essential component of that struggle, regardless of its ultimate outcome.
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Excellent article Dr. Levine. Very enlightening and sure dispels the self-serving myth by psychiatry that they are all about providing ‘help’.
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Megamachines serve a psychological purpose: keep fear at bay… and psychiatry eases that fear.
A match made in Heaven.
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Well said. Fear is a central tool here. People are afraid of their own freedom and terrified of others’ freedom, it seems. The impulse to control others often isn’t about genuine care, but about managing the discomfort, anxiety, or fear provoked by behaviors outside one’s own control.
Often arising from positions of ignorance and (self-anointed) moral high ground, alarmist warnings about safety, risk, or harm might suggest a deeper fear or unease. Instead of understanding the issues, or questioning systems that force people into rigid routines, constant performance, dysfunctional roles, or unnatural pressures, authority is asserted over individual experience. “These folks need to be controlled–or who knows what might happen to our long-heralded (yet dysfunctional) way of life?!”
Studies abound asserting the need for various treatments and controls to assure conformity. But did the 55 guys who established our form of government (via the Constitutional Convention) ever conduct any long-term studies regarding the impact of capitalism or representative democracy on the well-being of a population? Did they conduct any studies AT ALL to establish this mess? Yet to change today what was decided long ago as “best” for everyone, we need all kinds of studies and evidence and proof and “honest debate” between congressional representatives who don’t effectively represent anybody (perhaps not even themselves). What could go wrong?
In the end, it’s about the imposition of worldview. Fear becomes moralized and elevated above other people’s freedom to live differently. The differences themselves feel threatening and produce discomfort. This discomfort is converted into justification for (systemic) control. One person’s fear (or fear shared by a group of people) is treated as more important than another person’s right (or a group of people’s rights) to a life shaped by their own experience. Conformity (to a bad idea) is the important thing, of course.
Psychiatry soothes the fear and cognitive dissonance naturally generated by these dysfunctional societal structures and helps enable their acceptance despite the harm they cause. So I agree, it’s a perfect match for the megamachine.
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Thank you, Dan. You’ve beautifully articulated the point I was trying to make.
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Thank YOU. From what I can tell, you need no help articulating your points. When your succinctly loaded points resonate with my way of thinking, it’s heartening and satisfying to unpack them a bit (from my understanding of them, anyway).
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Thanks again, Dan. I always enjoy reading your well-thought-out comments. I wish I possessed your depth of knowledge and gift of expression. I just speak from intuition, or what some people call “gut instinct”.
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Thanks, Birdsong. I hope y’all don’t mind if I add a little more:
Why do some people feel the need to control what others do with their bodies—who they love, what substances they use, or how they make life more tolerable in the bodies they were assigned?
What should it matter to anyone what consenting adults do behind closed doors?
In the case of substances, the problem isn’t initially some misguided issue of morality; it’s a problem born of mobility. It’s the system we’re forced to live in. We’re dependent upon societal structures that ignore any natural right to land or homesteading, where people might live slower, more locally, and more interdependently. (Incidentally, a scale at which love could effectively replace currency.)
Instead, (most) everyone is forced to participate in a money-based system that requires constant mobility and speed. Everybody needs to be somewhere else—often at the same time—to wit: rush hour.
When everyone has rent or a mortgage to pay, people are forced to scurry around unnaturally just to survive. Accidents are inevitable in a system requiring precision mobility from unreliably precise humans. We can predict with certainty that accidents will happen tomorrow. Yet when they do, we blame individuals instead of questioning the mobility-dependent structure that produces them.
We’re told that if we effectively punish impaired drivers, we’ll solve the problem. But roughly 70% of accidents are caused by people who aren’t impaired at all. The system itself—the speed, the pressure, the constant movement—is never questioned. Are humans designed for the busy precision required of unnatural speeds on congested roads? The natural world can’t support this unnatural mobility habit, yet we insist.
If people were home tending gardens, repairing their roofs, and caring for their families, many accidents would never occur in the first place. But the system doesn’t allow that.
And so substance use becomes “everyone’s business.” Even marijuana—despite evidence that it doesn’t impair regular users the way alcohol does—is treated as proof of addiction, pathology, and moral failure.
The same logic of fear applies to gay people. But what possible harm is done when two consenting adults (or even a group of them) choose to love one another in private? No elevated potential for car wrecks here. So why does this “nonconformity” provoke such fear? Until the 1970s, gay people were considered insane according to the DSM of the time.
That fear isn’t explained by the experts or the “leaders”—it’s justified. Lacking understanding, people blame individuals for outcomes produced by systems, whether those outcomes involve sexuality, race, religion, substance use, or “mental illness.” And not knowing if the results we witness are the results of natural systems, artificial ones, or artifactual ones (or a combination thereof) and unassignable to any individual.
Once blame is assigned, however, control is obviously the next step to alleviate fear. After all, merely assigning blame (especially where it doesn’t belong) doesn’t do anything useful. Trying to control what we don’t understand, though? Now THAT’s useful–everyone knows THAT.
History shows this pattern clearly: first we pathologize difference, then we regulate it if we can’t abolish it. But the problem has never been difference—it’s our refusal to question the systems that make difference feel threatening and in need of control.
It seems the logic of fear and the logic of hatred might have significant overlap on a Venn Diagram, no?
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That’s an interesting insight, Dan.
I’d never heard of the ‘logic of fear’ or the ‘logic of hatred’ before. According to AI, both are ancient survival strategies—fear protects while hatred projects.
But there’s nothing ancient about how these logics operate today. Case in point: psychiatry is made of both.
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Friedrich Nietzsche claimed the logic of hatred permeates our systems. I don’t think he was wrong.
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“Claimed” isn’t accurate. It might be more accurate to say Neitzsche saw that the logic of hatred permeates our systems. He had a mistrust of systems and systematizers in general—something else he wasn’t wrong about.
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Good ol’ Freddie was right.
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Thank you Mr.Levine.
Life Support. An Interview.
https://youtu.be/kwzkLNFBm48?si=7szJG74csyX5pQXe
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We Are The Change Makers.
https://youtu.be/HpdKYw5DCzk?si=e8ZRmZMEiqqC8evE
One World.
https://youtu.be/XHhbeRJudY4?si=L1iv4qBG85ejhn4Y
Call Your Spirit Back.
https://youtu.be/ul5fVXH7Ur4?si=5Ive-lmGL2tfc2qP
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The Fight.
https://youtu.be/Ks4o2QBmS60?si=fbhvr9LQ1GBFmpQ9
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Perhaps a new movement The Anti Calumny Society. Focus on truth not lies and fraud. We we have all been touched in some way by several mega machine systems and much fraud and more lies.
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I don’t always agree with your analysis of the origin story of “serious mental illness” — I believe there may be cases involving biological causation — but when it comes to the psychological, social and political breakdown of oppression, manipulation, exploitation and industry-corrupted grift I’m fully on board.
I’ve read all your books and articles and there’s a reason for that: they’re frighteningly accurate, and these things need to be said. This article, in particular, hit home. When you’ve personally been the recipient of destructive and demoralising psychiatric harm and abuse, and only managed to escape by the skin of your teeth, then of course it’ll hit home.
But these necessary apologies you and any conscious person would demand aren’t going to kick in any time soon. They know once you open that can of maggots the whole venal, let’s-pretend farce would vapourise into evil residue and shameful rebuke.
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Also, some “enlightened and compassionate” recovery community, alternative and religious responses to Psychiatry Incorporated seriously piss me off. Having a benign, gauzy, tepid neutrality in the face of psychiatric darkness is not mature, even-handed or “spiritual,” it is not radical acceptance, it is simply gutless evasion, dissociation and bypassing. Injustice must be bluntly confronted, not accommodated with a shit-eating grin to complement middle-class niceness and beige cardigan meekness.
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On Music and Trauma. Indigenous Perspectives.
https://www.youtube.com/live/r1LWWSulGbs?si=AROPrdMTUZ6GcgHA
Keynote Presentation for Restorative Justice.
https://youtu.be/zTktPGH-hzM?si=RZ45LxL8Betn1USH
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The concluding quote from Mumford is anticlimactic as an adequate response to the “dehumanized social order (the myth of the machine) has brought into existence.” “Quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal” sound less like assertion of the primacy of the person and more like resignation and retreat powerless before human alienation in public space by “technopoly” (Neil Postman). And it echoes bourgeois bias enjoying leisure largely unknown to laboring masses caught up in the gears of the megamachine, as Charlie Chaplin reminds us in Modern Times (above).
Mumford’s words echo a different time of history, the 60s (ca. 1955-75), when slowing down to smell the roses (getting back to nature) and dropping out of the rat race (voluntary simplicity) characterized a countercultural movement and zeitgeist. Ironically, such withdrawal then was invaded by colonizing forces of the dominant culture of the corporate state, from counterinsurgent ops to convert communes and concerts into MK-Ultra mind control labs for mind-altering substances like LSD, to market commodification of lifestyle and generational brands of rebellion.
From ancient pyramids of pharaohs to modern pyramid schemes of capitalists, the constant foundation of Mumford’s megamachine has been labor power. The great masses of humanity have remained undifferentiated cogs in machinery of production for the few who live atop a pinnacle of power and privilege that may as well be another planet. Our independence from being at the disposal of these parasites and predators is why powers that be come up with mechanisms, mental as well as material, by which to hold us captive. Our dystopian distinction today is to be living in a time when technology has become totalitarian, such that we will finally merge with the Machine and forever lose our agency and autonomy, that is if we don’t wake up and rise up.
Rather than going into hiding or subsiding after WW2, eugenics was reinvented and revitalized among ruling institutions of the scientific-industrial complex, as with genetic and biotech R&D to patent and manufacture all life in labs, and neo-Malthusian propaganda of a “population bomb” (Paul Ehrlich) inevitably leading to emergency on earth requiring drastic measures (see also pandemics and global warming/climate change as global threats necessitating global rule). And with the revolution of the digital (c)age, biodigital convergence in a totally engineered techno-totalitarian world is now underway, as should be obvious with the presently accelerationist rollout of AI, digital identity, digital currency, biometrics, brain-computer interface, 5/6G control grids, full spectrum surveillance and (in)security from smart dust and nanobots to satellites and drones, and more. We are being marched into a prison planet within the carceral institutions of the corporate state that have come to dominate us. And the endgame is to leave us with nowhere to withdraw. Our only option is revolution against a social system which serves the psychopathy of power seeking absolute control.
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
—Mario Savio
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Well said, John. Our systems are designed to elevate those laser focused on their own personal success (at whatever cost to others or to the world). That’s why the most lost among us aren’t troubled in the least by the inequities created by our systems. They aren’t struggling or suffering under the machinery of these oppressive systems. Instead, they’re running the show and enjoying every moment of it. From their perspective, the systems elevating them to the top of their hierarchies are working perfectly.
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Don’t know that such people ever really enjoy anything. But for sure, they are quite satisfied with the system as it is!
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Steve, such people do derive a certain perverse enjoyment from accumulating resources and from dominating and manipulating others. In this way they indulge their lust for unlimited power, which they seek to prettify with grandiose self-serving and self-glorifying rationales (Rand’s Objectivism, the Transhumanist movement, Greenspan’s “free market” libertarianism, etc.), all of which in essence are a reflection of narcissistic thinking transposed to politics, economics, and science.
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Exactly. This is why I can’t really get behind sayings like “hurt people hurt people” or “all abusers were once abused themselves” or “you know they’re only acting that way because they’re insecure/miserable with their own life.” Like, no actually, they’re not the secret underdog/victim here! They’re feeling pretty damn good about themselves & that’s why they feel entitled to treat other people like shit! They’re pretty happy & satisfied with the status quo. Though it may be a superficial kind of happiness because they’ve severed themselves from the part of their humanity that is capable of experiencing deep joy & love, and their “satisfaction” may come at the cost of never TRULY being satisfied with anything because nothing’s EVER enough for them– but still, that doesn’t make them the secret victim of it all somehow!!
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That’s right! A lot of “hurt people” go far out of their way NOT to hurt people! Though I’d go with “satisfied” over “happy.” Like I said, I don’t think such people could possibly be truly “happy” or they wouldn’t get enjoyment out of making others suffer. But abusing others is always a choice. “Severing themselves from part of their humanity” is probably necessary to make that choice. I can’t claim to really understand what it feels like to be such a person, but it seems likely to be kind of ugly. But I can’t spend a lot of energy trying to empathize until they stop hurting others for amusement!
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Yeah, maybe “happy” isn’t quite the right word, but I think we’re on the same page here. 100% agree!!
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“A lot of ‘hurt people’ go far out of their way NOT to hurt people!”
Indeed, some of us do a lot of research, and share it for free, in the hopes of ending systems that are harming and killing innocent millions, for profit.
“Though I’d go with ‘satisfied’ over ‘happy.’”
Yes, when one is disgusted by the intentional harm of innocent others, one tends to be ‘satisfied,’ when trying end the massive societal psych industries’ harm for profit, over ‘happy.’
But being ‘satisfied’ with oneself, is not a bad place to be.
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The Power & Control Wheel.
https://www.theduluthmodel.org/wheels/understanding-power-control-wheel/
All abuse has one goal, one single purpose: to exert domination/power and control over another person or persons. In an abusive situation both parties – dominate-subservient – need help to learn how to break the vicious cycle of abuse. However it only take one person to learn how then the other person has two choices: change or go. Nobody deserves to be abused. There are people who take their feelings out on other people, kick the dog, and/or take their feelings out on themselves. Abuse is a complex issue. A sibling can be abused by a parent and then pass the abuse onto another sibling-bullying. So some hurt people hurt people, and some hurt people self harm and hurt themselves, and some suffer in silence.
Abusive people will confer with other abusive people about where to hit their partners and children so the marks don’t show so they can’t be prosecuted because there’s no evidence. Batterers can get away with verbal, intellectual/mental, and emotional abuse.
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Good thing there are statutes of limitations protecting child abusers from actions having life-long impacts for the abused.
Often times, troubles stemming from abuse administered during childhood arise only later in life—long after the statute of limitations expire. Once enough time has gone by, a person is viewed as being fully responsible for the cascading consequences of the abuse they suffered. (Despite all of the research cataloging common cascades following abuse during brain development.)
If still within the statute of limitations, the abuse must be proven in a court of law—with receipts, of course. That experience itself must be sooo helpful to the abused kid, too.
Although some states in the US are eliminating statutes of limitations for sexual abuse, that’s just one (nasty) form of abuse with life-long consequences.
Maybe little kids just need to get better at taking their abusers to court at an early age—early enough for effective legal intervention? Because legal remedy (“justice”) decades later when (predictable) troubles arise may be unavailable.
Nice system, huh?
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It truly is sick, Dan.
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Indeed, Someone Else. From the perspective of status-quo loyalists and system stabilizers, the answer is to add another procedural layer of “fairness”—to make more fair and functional systems that are inherently unfair and dysfunctional.
So in this case, maybe the logical fix would be to update the elementary-school curriculum to match our legal reality.
Introduce a course called “Surviving Child Abuse.”
It might include modules like: “Identifying Abuse,” “Preserving Evidence While Still Dependent on Your Abuser,” and “Finding and Affording a Lawyer Before the Statute of Limitations Expires.”
THEN the system would be much improved and more fair. And the status-quo loyalists could sleep better at night knowing all is well.
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Hurt people DO hurt people, while others don’t mind if they do.
It’s important not to think the worst of someone until you know what’s going on with them. Only then is it fair to draw any conclusions.
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I’m not saying it never happens. Some hurt people go on to hurt others. Some don’t. And many people who hurt others are not doing so because they were/are hurt themselves. I think it’s a myth that abuse (always) causes people to become abusive, or that (all) abusers were abused.
As Steve said, abusing others is always a choice.
Trust me, anyone who knows me would tell you that I’m not a person who assumes the worst of others. Quite the opposite, actually. (Sometimes to my own detriment.)
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I agree it’s myth that abuse always causes people to become abusive, or that all abusers were abused. Not sure that there’s always a choice, though… severe and prolonged childhood abuse and cultural conditioning plays a big part, although I’m not a big believer in wholesale forgiveness by any means, because I happen to believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt—for my sake as much as theirs until their actions prove otherwise.
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As James Joyce once said, “Trust everyone, but always cut the deck!”
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@Birdsong, I would say it sounds like we’re mostly on the same page then!
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Trust is earned. If trust is broken, sometimes it can be re-earned.
There are three fundamental, foundational requirements for healthy relationships: Equality, Mutual Respect and Mutual Trust. The health of relationships is everyone’s responsibility. If the relationship gets unhealthy it’s everyone’ s responsibility to get it back on track if and when possible The day we’re born most people around us give us their respect because we’re human beings, we don’t have to earn it. If you’re a good athlete or politician you can earn respect for what you do. Some people play games with respect and their respect is conditional-you have to live up to their terms. Whose rights get respected? It depends who’s in authority. Who gets Free Speech? Depends on who you talk to.
Equality is not available in patrimonial, authoritarian, hierarchical relationships; consequently those relationships will never be healthy because someone else always has the upper hand. State rights can preempt community rights. Sometimes Domination is purposely built in so the relationship is rigged from the start. In power struggles, when one side wins, both side lose because the power isn’t shared.
I previously posted a link to “The Power and Control Wheel.” There is also an “Equality Wheel.” I’ll try to post the link.
https://www.theduluthmodel.org/product/equality-wheel-poster-large/
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Can’t say I didn’t understand why the psychiatrist arranged to have me euthanised in the ED. His wife looking down the barrel of some serious prison time. And people pulling strings to provoke that fear in him to see where he would run. Left me with the proof until they had rudely interrupted the attempt, and then got the documents back (or so they thought) and provided the fraud to the lawyers.
Evil? Not sure that killing for the State in a hospital can really be justified, especially as a means to cover up and dispose of whistleblowers. The shock is how easily it can be done. They’re not the first though, and won’t be the last no doubt. Mind you, they do give awards for war crimes in this country, so a little internal abuse would be even easier to conceal.
Such a conflict of interest given the marital relationship determining the choice to euthanise. The person who interrupted having a much better ‘independent’ method of dealing with covering up kidnappings and torture of citizens……that is, perverting the course of justice with fraudulent documents and gang stalking individuals using the resources of the State. What would one expect from a Prof of Cardiology (real medicine) who had been subjected to a ‘mental health intervention’ when he was nearly held accountable for some ‘experimental material’ he had some problems with.
So much dirt under that rug and the left me with a broom and told me to sweep under it.
The State gets to dispose of the whistleblowers, the lawyers and doctors get to split the money used to tag the victim, and the victim gets to rest in psychiatric slander.
Purely economic decisions. How much would the whistleblower cost the State? Tag them with 1/10th of the money and leave the psych/lawyers to run them through the ‘process’
“The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie” Mark Twain.
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But even after hearing “all about” what’s going on with someone, there may still be more to the story that should be taken into consideration before drawing conclusions, no?
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Well, yes Dan. I think there’s always more to the story. I’m not a big believer in drawing hardline conclusions about anyone, either way. But forgiveness gets misused a lot, especially when it’s been coerced. Too often it becomes a way to repress real hurt, or to let people off the hook who haven’t earned it. It does have its place, somewhere down the line, but living in revenge forever isn’t the answer either.
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I would say so too, Jasmine. We’re singing from the same hymnal, just in slightly different keys, sometimes.
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Making a killing on the market and laughing all the way to the bank.
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John, this is a brilliant analysis of the dilemma facing people caught in the crushing maw of the technofeudalist Moloch–an image memorably brought to the screen by Chaplin in his 1936 film “Modern Times.”
As for the merging of man with machine, that has always been the more or less conscious aim of the capitalist system, from nineteenth-century Taylorism to present-day offshoring and robotics, in which everyone and everything become objectified, commodified, and sacrificed to the fetish of ever-increasing productivity and profits, regardless of the ultimate harm to man’s health and welfare and the physical environment.
Isn’t the mass drugging of schoolchildren with neurotoxins that blunt their emotions in order to convert them into mindless obedient corporate cogs also a logical consequence of this entire system? I think the answer should be self-evident.
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Yes, Taylor is an important point of reference.
If you’re not already familiar, a classic historical analysis of the logic of his scientific management is Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.
You also might like Scott Noble:
Human Resources
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/
(I find all his docs – Plutocracy, The Power Principle, Counter-Intelligence, and more – worth the watch).
And yes, children have long been treated as ideal resources for manipulation, from ancient spoils of war to cultural genocide in schools for indigenous peoples (concentration campuses). Modern science of social engineering targets the young through schooling, and even more electronic media conditioning, to adapt to rapid change on a routine basis with if not within every generation; much like Max Planck’s observation that scientific revolutions don’t prevail among established theories until their proponents die off and are replaced with new (or freshly molded) minds. The dark history of psychiatry in mind control is certainly relevant.
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John, I understand and agree with your spot-analysis. However, I don’t think there’s any denying how much the internet has changed the equation.
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John, I think Bruce is right. Extricating oneself from the power systems of the megamachine can be very joyful and rewarding.
Standing against bigotry matters, of course — but it’s just as important not to lose yourself in the process.
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The greatest joy and reward?
Finally reclaiming the ability to laugh at the absurdity of it all—and finally reclaiming faith in oneself.
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“Stop Explaining. Detach Quietly. Let Life Expose Everything” | Buddhism @Silent-Mind-Temple, @Dream Sparks
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I did notice this by the other side of the pond long ago (Spain). I was born in Madrid, 72 and as soon as learned from TV appearances that Rojas Marcos was chief AND pPsichiatrist in charge in New York, I understood that the ®and®ll Star was going to be just like vaseline for our arses.
Since then, the subject has been comodified in manu ways and lately the media and popularised with the petty issues of personalities of the show from other stars i’m they film and pop industrias, to serve as a sweet pill to all, patients cause could identify with or and non mad due to relieve or hate.
It has reached such a powerful and pathetic way that becoming a psychiatrist has also become hereditary status, thus in my country we find families around the former dictator as military men and mass killers, or lately Opus Dei members as well and passing a torch used to burn as the light of wisedom
I wanna die.
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To really absorb and reflect on the reference to Lewis Mumford, the idea of his historical writing reminded me of his letter to me while working on my MA. One of his books, The City in History suggests the Pentagon is not a beautiful facility being five sided. And oddly, early in becoming involved with advocacy in the early 90’s, a poster was made for a conference at Crystal City in D.C. (near the Pentagon) The title of the poster “Research Beyond the Individual and Service Levels: My Work as an Urban Planner/Customer.” Years earlier, while working on the MA, time was spent reading Mumford’s book, Green Memories about his son names after Patrick Geddes. Mumford’s only son was lost in WWII. In writing to Mumford when letters were more of the norm, he would respond advising when his current book was finished, then time would made available for an interview. Thus, while we are creating our history beyond the notes taken when we were patients or being committed to a pharmacology against our will, then at what point does the discourse shift? And a different economy, not just in chanted words, begin to be anchored in appropriate value with values. Is the issue discrimination and bigotry of self or more of incredible empowered belief systems that are self-perpetuating in pard due to the speed at which individuals, collectives and even tribes create impereable boundaries? And can the exchange of knowledge being created create the hope and joy to become who one intends to be and become?
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Two Links on the topic of “Recovery.”
https://youtu.be/d2NsqnNgVX4?si=zLteBzhS6hWLdZt2
https://youtu.be/XHhbeRJudY4?si=hFeJETX7zSqj3tsG
Bonus Link.
https://youtu.be/Ks4o2QBmS60?si=X6RtqAkjxTTUBvuX
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Poems about “Lived Experience.”
https://youtu.be/a1cK_vok5MU?si=xN3kW9lSyM7X–vc
Change Makers.
https://youtu.be/HpdKYw5DCzk?si=VCP_FVBuAXg2vnK2
Drop the Disorder.
https://youtu.be/2Mlw_GTN17o?si=SG_QKKzp26G81EOe
Song of Survival.
https://youtu.be/wVlP0Nr4Ak0?si=zHHV8ekAJ81zoiUQ
Reminder. Quote by Dr. Jacqui Dillon.
“Don’t Buy Into Their Reality. Hold On To Your Own Truth.”
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Arguing with people who lack emotional range is a losing battle.
Those who refuse context refuse humanity.
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Non-Profit Website Link.
https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/index-of-articles/1021/
Challenging, daunting, and a tall order.
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The right moralizes.
The left medicalizes.
Neither wants to feel anything real.
Emotional immaturity doesn’t discriminate.
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To Birdsong…Birds and Their Songs Boost Our Mental Health.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/bird-birdsong-mental-health-study/
Daycare Forests.
https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/adirondacks-almanack/daycare-forests/?utm_source=Adirondack%20Explorer&utm_campaign=99ba1e1da4-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3a0c6b0008-99ba1e1da4-47413324&mc_cid=99ba1e1da4
It Is Dawn. Wake Up Time.
https://humansandnature.org/wake-up-time/
HOZHO
https://youtu.be/4tAo9puhnNs?si=vkj7Q5rzzhbZfw3h
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Thank you, Bill. I am one sixteenth Cherokee and have felt a deep kinship with nature as long as I can remember.
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… and the cosmos…
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What Happened To The Tribes Of Europe?
https://youtu.be/K2wGOlVDsRw?si=6CnSXK7RqCFfYIP3
Thanksgiving.
https://youtu.be/7vHVxr7txqU?si=lynStZpBF9biApvg
Under The Big Sky. Parallels and similarities amongst people with “lived experience” of Inter and Multi generational mental and emotional distress and trauma.
https://youtu.be/b3KHTuZN3oE?si=WPosxOfP7iL5lm5C
Warriors Prayer.
https://youtu.be/mu9928h4hBs?si=PB0mutaJVzcnU9Bz
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This is a really fascinating and important article. However, I would like to point out that the quote from Foster Kennedy’s article referred to children with severe intellectual disabilities. Kennedy wrote that such children should be “relieved… of the agony of living” after reaching the age of 5 or more.
As to psychiatric patients, he actually wrote that if they were “wiped out”, “we would produce a population of Babbits, of mediocrities, capable of pushing but not of leaping; and it’s the leap that counts” (the article is available in open access at this link: https://www.pismin.com/10.1176/ajp.99.1.13).
I would also like to emphasize that the Soviet Union was the first country to ban lobotomy, in 1950. In 1952 it also banned ECT for more than a decade (https://scispace.com/pdf/use-of-electroconvulsive-therapy-in-central-eastern-european-4lf5ijt5e6.pdf).
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Our Spirits Don’t Understand English. (Our Spirits Don’t Understand the Pseudo-Medical Model Babble.)
https://youtu.be/qDshQTBh5d4?si=BtPMkmB_OOoPJZWj
Native American and Canadian Boarding School Genocide. (Also Slow Death Genocide currently caused by complications of synthetic chemicals used in psych drugs.)
https://youtu.be/DsRcPZp7RHA?si=f2LLmMCElKG1f5BZ
Boarding School by Lyla June.
https://youtu.be/JilCdIBAzvA?si=cXEOXLdELIDULBda
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Time Traveler by Lyla June.
https://youtu.be/ulK_GE9XjO8?si=DGv6uwiC1dpFjckP
HOZHO by Lyla June.
https://youtu.be/WZJToVmneGA?si=HdeqB390DJa1QnUu
Calling Back The Spirit.
https://youtu.be/ul5fVXH7Ur4?si=ggfO5osAjQtC0Tk0
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Epistemicide: Intellectual Genocide and Eurocentric Modernity.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/04/13/epistemicide-intellectual-genocide-and-eurocentric-modernity/
Objectivity Isn’t Neutral.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/04/objectivity-isnt-neutral-how-standardization-in-psychiatry-can-undermine-epistemic-justice/
Does Calling Addiction a Brain Disease Create Epistemic Injustice?
https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/10/does-calling-addiction-a-brain-disease-create-epistemic-injustice/?mc_cid=2d76632c6c
Don’t ostracize drug users – empathize with them. (Please pay close attention to the second from last paragraph where it mentions “First Nations.”)
https://youtu.be/2Mlw_GTN17o?si=jVv2Ag2garEHcPFo
It’s Not A Disorder, Disease, Sickness, or a “Family Disease” Because…
https://youtu.be/2Mlw_GTN17o?si=jVv2Ag2garEHcPFo
Introduction and Poem at around the 14 minute mark.
https://youtu.be/3GVqupEXSCM?si=seO4MI9inAYC40xL
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“How To Never Get Angry Or Bothered By Anyone — Again” | Buddhism @Silent-Mind-Temple, @DreamSparks34
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Hi Birdsong, I did search the web and found the title you posted above about anger mgmt. Big psych/pHarma has, and will continue to spread a lot of misinformation in order to manipulate as many people as possible. My anger about all the deaths, corruption and abuse is justified. I try to caution people to beware about psych chemicals.
I have a relative and her two children were “diagnosed.” I sent appropriate information and my relative decided to go with a non-drug approach for her adopted children.
Some sensible Activism can go a long way.
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Bill, your anger is absolutely justified. And I see no conflict in anger management and activism; if anything, the former strengthens the latter.
My video suggestions weren’t intended for you specifically.
I like what you did as I believe people in distress need appropriate information presented in a non-confrontational way that doesn’t overwhelm or scare them off.
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Decolonizing our Minds.
https://beyondmeds.com/2009/03/15/decolonizing-our-minds-freeing-our-spirits-guest-blogger-leah-harris/
Survivor Spoken Word: Leah Harris. Madness Radio
https://www.madnessradio.net/madness-radio-survivor-spoken-word-leah-harris/
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Psychiatry Beyond the Current Paradigm. Psychiatry in Crisis. Dr. Jacqui Dillon.
https://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/docs/keynote-speech-jacqui-dillon.pdf
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Psychiatry didn’t invent bigotry; it’s just the latest expression of a Western moral psychology built on sin, suffering, martyrdom and guilt. Thankfully, not every worldview is based on self-negation.
Let Go Quietly — Love Yourself Enough to Heal | Buddhism @Silent-Mind-Temple
Awareness, compassion, and self-regard — that’s what creates alignment.
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Clarification: … a Western moral psychology built on sin, suffering, martyrdom, guilt, and FEAR.
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I agree. Sometimes it seems people are being encouraged to commit philosophical suicide of our authentic selves and philosophical amputations cutting off parts of ourselves.
WE SHALL REMAIN.
https://youtu.be/Gs0iwY6YjSk?si=Ah0fgLKbpbOroYTR
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Society implictly teaches us not to trust our intuition.
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The Enduring Story (Myth) For The American Empire: Domination.
https://open.substack.com/pub/stevennewcomb/p/the-enduring-story-myth-of-1776-for?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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MIA Search for Whack-A-Mole.
https://www.madinamerica.com/?s=Whack-A-Mole
Bruce Levine’s previous article on an alternative for Whack-A–Mole.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/03/do-critics-of-biological-psychiatry-have-an-alternative-to-a-life-of-whack-a-mole/
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Psychiatric Incarceration Isn’t Treatment – It’s Violence, Survivors Say.
https://truthout.org/articles/psychiatric-incarceration-isnt-treatment-its-violence-survivors-say/
Roots Up Advocacy Newsletter.
https://preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webview/1942796/176675647287985427
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Hello “Ladies & Gentlemen.”
How the United States Tried to Crush Native American Matriarchies.
https://youtu.be/bLUYHLNeSkM?si=FBCNO79RM6jGhHbC
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Hello Warriors…
https://youtu.be/N-DbzNFFAtg?si=6kUuwoHQvM8dawmk
Hello Birdsong…
https://youtu.be/9REHsnwO7pY?si=_PTTueiU2lC7DG8Y
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Thanks for the video, Bill. I’ve never had a DNA test. I just go by what my father told us.
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BONUS THOUGHTS…
https://youtu.be/jEyHT0jPvsc?si=PHkrTSqwfZE3TyZA
Friends. (Please turn on captions-translations)
https://youtu.be/CqwrwwOzVcQ?si=k3hUXAw65iR4nphx
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