ICE and DHS agents roam our streets under the pretext of ridding the country of “the worst of the worst.” In describing their mission to the public, the administration has adopted the metaphor of a diseased body politic infiltrated by dirt or infection that must be purged in order to restore our nation to health.
Meanwhile, alarm is increasing as awareness grows of the DHS plan vastly to expand its network of detention centers, places where, according to the few audits permitted, people are abused, disappeared and even murdered. These sites are being prepared as warehouses for these supposed foreign bodies, i.e., our family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors.
Our current administration has been startlingly vocal in its efforts to define who these so-called foreign bodies are, such that large sectors of the population are now portrayed as “other:” Immigrants are singled out, as are people of color more generally, trans persons, Muslims, those who speak languages other than English, and those who simply voice opinions counter to a narrow set of talking points, all of whom live under the threat of discrimination, disenfranchisement, deportation or worse.
Yet there is another identified group, with even less collective voice, in danger of mass detention without due process: Those diagnosed with mental illness.
Quietly, our country is moving, state by state and executive order by executive order, towards policies that all but dismantle the rights of those deemed mentally ill. In the US, both Republican and Democratic legislators have applauded the trend toward seemingly humane policies that lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric commitment and assertive, non-consensual treatment in the community. What could be better for afflicted individuals and the country as a whole than making sure people are getting the treatment they need?
Of course those who carry a diagnosis of serious mental illness are often precisely the ones with the least opportunity to respond to that question, especially those who consider themselves survivors not of their diagnoses themselves but of the loss of autonomy and personhood they have experienced in their often traumatic interactions with a mental health system that has never successfully served them.
Now, fast forward to July of 2025, when Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” This Order, which appeared roughly contemporaneously with the deployment of troops to American cities, explicitly blurs the lines between mental illness, addiction, homelessness and criminality. It proposes to lift the restrictions on civil commitment for those with mental health problems, essentially authorizing the removal of any person deemed as such, and providing the funds and the force to do so.
Will this Order help to restore those with serious psychological issues to health?
Those who have studied the issue know that forced treatment doesn’t help. There is an abundance of research to indicate that its most common results are an obliteration of trust in the mental health system and the intensification of post-traumatic symptoms due to retraumatization, including an increased incidence of death by suicide.
Meanwhile, such a policy would remove funding from programs that work, as explicitly mandated in the Executive Order. Housing first options for unhoused persons, harm-reduction programs for those who are addicted, and voluntary mental health treatment for those whose psychological issues are severe all have solid research behind them demonstrating that these are initiatives that help. These are precisely the programs that the EO targets.
Further, the terms of the EO are elastic and potentially expansive; for instance, just this week, the administration announced its intentions to claim guardianship for homeless veterans and even those who are merely “at risk of homelessness,” stripping them of the right to self-determination, including access to their own finances and their choice to refuse treatment, and to do so not in response to a specific episode of homelessness or emotional distress, but permanently, since guardianship, once it is established, is often difficult to overturn.
Mental health and civil rights organizations should be sounding the alarm. There are urgent reasons to be concerned that the current administration is readying itself for a program of mass-incarceration and forced “treatment” of those diagnosed as mentally ill. The Make America Healthy Again Commission, chaired by RFK Jr., calls for the removal of those who are troubled to isolated spaces where, it is claimed, they can be cured at “wellness farms” through a diet of organic food (unlikely given the putrid fare provided in existing encampments) and an embrace of “accountability,” ironic given the lack of accountability for insuring basic human rights standards within current detention programs. For instance, a facility under construction in the remote Utah desert is slated to house 1,300 mentally ill inmates who have fallen victim to the “culture of permissiveness” that the current administration sees as a cause of mental illness and addiction.
Such forced treatment is a lucrative business. Companies such as CoreCivic and GEO Group stand to reap huge profits from the creation of thousands of additional mental health beds, hastily erected in repurposed warehouses and encampments, just as venture capital firms such as 8VC will benefit their stakeholders greatly from the sale of long-acting injectables as well as surveillance tools that track compliance with medication regimens, such as medications that contain embedded sensors that notify prescribers when they are ingested.
Popular myths about mental illness have made it easier to turn a blind eye to this threat to a vulnerable population. For instance, many still embrace the idea that psychosis is the manifestation of a chemical imbalance in the brain that permanently marks affected individuals as “other,” although this theory has long been debunked by reputable researchers. The general public embraces the idea that people diagnosed with mental illness are a threat to civil society, when in fact most research indicates that those diagnosed are more likely to be victims of violent crime than the average citizen while they commit only a small fraction of the violent crime that occurs. And people believe that mental illness causes homelessness when studies suggest that people most often become homelessness due to systemic issues such as economic inequality, debt including medical debt, and the lack of affordable housing.
All these myths contribute towards seeing the homeless as mentally ill and the mentally ill as irredeemable and “other,” and impede the provision of effective care. We should already know the consequences of such beliefs, as there is a long history of persecution of those deemed mentally ill towards eugenic ends, including through sterilization, confinement and even death. For instance, how easily we forget that the violation and extermination of the Jews from Europe was preceded by the violation and extermination of those the Reich deemed mentally ill, and in fact was modelled on those efforts.
Some say that drawing parallels between current US policies and those of Nazi Germany is exaggerated, that calling detention centers concentration camps is provocative and overblown, despite the explicit embrace of Nazi ideology by many key administration figures.
But history suggests that this rhetoric will prove misguided only if we don’t act now to quash efforts to create the building blocks from which extermination and work camps can be assembled and brought online. For instance, Indiana House Bill 1119, expanding the methods that can legally be used to execute criminals, was defeated not because it failed to garner the majority of yeas from those who voted, but because that majority did not constitute a constitutional majority according to Indiana legislative definition.
People who believe that the mentally ill should not be afforded the same rights as the rest of us find comfort in the idea of a clear distinction between so-called insanity and the forms of reality prescribed by consensus, just as many immigrants who are naturalized citizens voted for the current administration because they felt insulated from deportation threats on the basis of the distinction between “criminals” and themselves.
But fascist regimes are proficient at manipulating the definition of mental illness to fit their needs, and of blurring the boundary between treatment and punishment. There is a well-documented practice of diagnosing mental illness in social justice activists in the former Soviet Union, Post-Soviet Russia, China, Belarus, Romania, Hungary, Cuba, India, Japan, Suriname, and Thailand, for starters, despite the belief by most people that such a practice can’t happen here.
This idea, that “it can’t happen here,” in essence creates its own form of “othering” in its implication of our exceptionalism, its suggestion that “we are not like you and would not do the terrible things that you do.” Yet even at this moment, across the US, the plans are being drawn up and the warehouses are being retrofitted. The time is now to look towards the future with caution and a commitment to act, for the sake of the sanity of America.
Some 70 years of the Denial of Severe Mental Illness has done no one any favours, & i’m Not surprised that now there is a growing backlash to it all.
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Quite the contrary: if there’s a growing backlash, it’s an appropriate reaction to the absurd, scientifically untenable concept that the hundreds of hypothetical disorders arbitrarily concocted by panels of would-be professionals can reliably be ascribed to a verifiable chemical imbalance, defective brain circuits, genetic abnormality, or some or some other ill-defined putative organic pathology.
I’m still waiting to see whatever credible evidence you have to substantiate your constant assertions regarding the existence of severe mental illnesses, when there are no distinct biomarkers for them as yet discovered.
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Spot on!
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Marc,
We don’t deny “Severe Mental Illness” here, we point out the iatrogenic etiology of the “Severe Mental Illness” symptoms.
The ADHD drugs and antidepressants can create the bipolar symptoms (read Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic).
And the antipsychotics (aka as neuroleptics) can create the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, via anticholinergic toxidrome. Not to mention they can create the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, via neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome.
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One day the use of these drugs on people will be seen for the crime against humanity that it is. One day (whether it’s in this life or the next one) these liars and frauds who call themselves doctors will be held responsible for all the people they have harmed. They won’t be able to get away with doing this forever. Every day more people are waking up to their lies, manipulation, and deception. One day they will no longer be able to harm, maim, and kill children, the elderly, and sick people with these toxic chemicals.
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This is a nice thought, but have you ever seen it happen?
Certainly the beings who today push false “treatments” on people just to make a nice living will have to personally face what they have done. But will this result in their further spiritual fall or something more beneficial? If all doctors simply become hopeless or self-destructive, that will leave us with no more doctors, and we need doctors; just real, honest ones.
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Americans with serious mental illnesses should consider exile as possible road to health. America is a failed state. Its inhumanity, violence, vulgarity and racism are enough to drive anyone mad. Those who are already mad have a greater challenge in recovering than they would in a normal society.
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Robert, while I share your animus toward the inhumane aspects of American society in general, I cannot agree with your uncritical acceptance of what you call madness and severe mental illness, which properly speaking are not medical conditions but artificial constructs that have meaning only in a given social and cultural milieu. The history of psychiatry, from drapetomania and phrenology to the current bogus categories of the scientifically invalid DSM, makes this abundantly clear.
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Dear Joel, I agree with almost everything that you say. We are both radically anti-psychiatry. However, I do not know how to replace terms like “madness” and “severe mental illness,” except by other psychiatric terms like psychosis and schizophrenia. Do you deny that psychosis exists? My psychosis was a real psychosis, even if it was the result of psychiatric malpractice. What should I call it? Have you ever been psychotic? If so, how do you refer to it?
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Robert, your questions are eminently reasonable and appropriate.
I simply argue for a new, non-medicalized vocabulary to describe modes of perception, emotional reactions, and patterns of behavior that are hypothesized, but not definitively proven, to originate in some type of organic pathology. Facile pseudo-scientific conflation of psychiatric and medical terminology is not only semantically misleading but also fraught with potentially harmful consequences for clients stigmatized by concocted labels and subjected to various brain-disabling treatments.
Addressing your question about psychosis, I would say the experiences commonly associated with this term (which in mainstream psychiatry always carries highly pejorative connotations), such as ecstatic visions and voice-hearing, undeniably exist. The meanings attached to them, however, vary according to a given cultural and social context, as any student of spiritual traditions throughout the ages can readily attest.
I myself have never suffered from “psychosis” as commonly defined by the DSM criteria, but why should its wholly subjective criteria for hundreds of putative disorders deserve universal credibility and acceptance? That, in my opinion, would greatly constrict and impoverish the full range of human experience, including mystical revelation and insight, which can be a source of sublime literature and art (the poetry of Coleridge, Sufi philosophy, or the works of William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg, to cite a few random examples).
In short, the western psychiatric biomedical paradigm should be regarded not as a universally valid template for assessing “normalcy,” but as a cultural artifact that embodies the tenets of reductionist scientism. I can only surmise what form its eventual replacement might take.
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Hello Joel, I appreciate everything that you say to criticize psychiatry. Psychiatrists destroyed my life, walked away with thousands of dollars that they made doing so and never apologized. I think that all psychiatrists are charlatans. They are only interested in their own power, prestige and money.
Now I have a question for you. You do not like psychiatric terms like psychosis and schizophrenia. You do not like popular expressions like craziness and madness and insanity. You do not like terms of sickness and disorder pathology. My question is this: what term would you choose to use for the state of being that led to my being incarcerated for fifteen months in insane asylums during my adolescence? How would you call it? If I said that I was having a dark night ot the soul, few people would understand.
I highly recommend that you read A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking by Wouter Kusters. Kusters was a panelist on the Mad in America webinar on February 2nd, and that is how I discovered him. I have written my reation to his book, which will be published by Mad in America on March 31st.
Once again I want to thank you for all that you have done for us victims of psychiatric abuse. Of course I am curious why you show such interest in the subject. Take care. R
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I have wanted to leave this country for years. I know that I have no place here. I have been sick with Lyme disease for years now and have been denied the help I need numerous times. Nobody cares if I am being tortured to death by the actions of cruel and sadistic people who work for the government. Judge benson, Adam cox, and others who work for the social security administration have humiliated me, degraded me, and insulted me for having a serious illness. They are terrible people. They take an immense amount of enjoyment when they deny help to people like me. They are the mentally sick ones who need help to stop being abusive. This country is a failed state. Instead of helping people who are sick this country abuses them and makes their illnesses worse. I was also denied the help I need by the department of transitional assistance multiple times. They are also awful people who didnt care how sick I was and took away the small amount of money I was receiving. It’s like they want to provoke people into doing something that will get them locked up in a psych ward or prison. All of this is more sinister than people want to admit. They are too afraid it could happen to them if they ever get sick. They are too cowardly to admit that vulnerable people are being injured and killed by the actions of people like those I listed above. This country makes me sick. There’s always more money to go kill women and children in the middle east but there’s never any help for people that have been suffering for years here. It’s beyond disgraceful. This entire thing is a nightmare. They want to push us into doing violent things or taking our own lives. It’s a dark and twisted game they are playing with our existence.
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I’m in complete agreement with the author’s concerns about the real and potential harm caused by misguided policies to people experiencing states of emotional distress. However, I think it worth noting that she practices psychoanalysis–a faux profession whose entire raison d’etre is the erroneous notion that mental disorders are real, discrete conditions that, like pathological diseases, can be reliably defined, classified, and treated by self-styled “experts” on human cognition and behavior.
I contend that it’s this very notion that provides a convenient rationale for proponents of forced confinement and psychiatric abuse, administered under the guise of medical therapy, to label and isolate society’s powerless, immiserated, outcasts–NOT the privileged players who create, maintain, or support political and economic systems that pose the greatest danger to our health and well-being.
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I appreciate your concern, but I have worked psychoanalytically for 35 years with people diagnosed with psychosis, as have many of my colleagues, and have seen so many lives transformed. People who never had the opportunity to be heard and had their minds respected find partnership and possibility in this work. In my experience in many settings, it is the psychoanalysts who are leading the charge around the dangers of rigid diagnosis, overmedication, reductionism, dehumanizing treatment and the authoritarian stance of many mental health professionals.
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The fact remains that there is simply no credible, scientifically valid body of knowledge that endows ANY so-called mental health professional with the supposedly superior wisdom, insight, and skill set to analyze and diagnose, much less treat, various ill-defined states of emotional distress–including such conditions that you pejoratively label “psychosis.” (Need I remind you that political dissidents in the USSR were routinely hospitalized as schizophrenics, and devout Muslims in communist China are considered to be mentally disturbed and sent to “rehabilitation camps”?)
As for support, partnership, and understanding, all this can be found in peer groups of empathetic intelligent people with similar lived experience. I see no need for a credentialed “expert” peddling a certain brand of therapy, with its inherent power imbalance, for the very few who have the wherewithal to afford a customarily exorbitant fee.
I highly recommend Jeffrey Masson’s “Against Therapy: The Myth of Emotional Healing” for confirmation of this basic truth.
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Nancy, I believe that the very concepts of diagnosis and medicalization (i.e. administration of chemical lobotomies) in regard to emotional states without a demonstrated physical etiology are misleading and fraught with potential harm–as the accounts on this website by numerous psychiatric survivors convincingly show.
What you call “rigid” diagnosis and “overmedicalization” are purely subjective judgments.
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“In my experience in many settings, it is the psychoanalysts who are leading the charge around the dangers of rigid diagnosis, overmedication, reductionism, dehumanizing treatment and the authoritarian stance of many mental health professionals.”
My experience is the opposite of yours, Nancy. But I do agree, today’s psychologists should definitely stand against the systemic neurotoxic poisoning of the public, by today’s psychiatric industry. But, in my experience, it is the psychologists who worked to railroad people into the psychiatric system.
I’m pretty certain it’s the ethical journalists and psych survivors who “are leading the charge around the dangers of rigid diagnosis, overmedication, reductionism, dehumanizing treatment and the authoritarian stance of many mental health professionals,” not the psychologists.
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That’s because this system was never designed to help anyone. From the very beginning it was created to harm and control people. The precursors to antidepressants and antipsychotics were developed by Nazis in the death camps. That should tell people all they need to know about what’s going on here. Yet these frauds and liars called doctors keep telling people these toxic chemicals will help them when they were designed to harm them, sterilize them, and kill them from their inception.
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What struck me, by readig the Executive Order, is that it considers homeless people as potential sexual criminals ; ironically, Mr. Trump was a very good friend of Mr. Epstein, to say the least.
Or that this Executive order is made, officially, to restore order while this President makes so many people feel unsafe. It makes me lauch a bit because I live in France, not in the US. If I were to be targeted by such inhumane policies, it wouldn’t make me laugh at all. This shows the US president is a fascist, all simply.
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Trump is a terrible human being and like you said, a sexual predator himself. Yet the morons in this country elected him twice despite knowing that he was a criminal. The serious issues in this country began long before this societal reject was elected. You could say many of the country’s problems began when the colonists started harming native Americans, not honoring treaties, destroying nature, and taking whatever they wanted for themselves whether that was land, plants, animals, or other people. This country has a troubled history of domination and control and this legacy is reflected in the corrupt and unethical medical system which is really a system of abuse and torture masquerading as a healthcare system. What a dark society we live in. The wrongdoings of the past will always return to haunt us all.
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And they have elected many other “criminals” to office, as well, but never – or too late – learned of their crimes. The Bushes were not criminals? The Clintons?
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Nancy,
A thoughtful and most important piece. The historical parallels provide us perspective and demonstrate the necessity of every manner of protest.
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I think it might be a good to look into how creatives were treated and the connection tin to Nancy Andersaan MD and the Iowa Writers Workshop. Theodore Rotheke and James Wright endured ECT. Nancy was big on labels and used schizophrenia for many of he writers. Psychoanalysis abd psychiatry very interested and in the volumes of psychoanalytic journals much writing on creativity . I think some jealousy ( heading of a great teacher is how did you come up with that ? As polite curiosity not I will co opt this idea as soon as possible) and inability to grasp the forces behind creativity which can be at times from trauma but not an origin story more temperament and one has it or not and like handiness. Viva la difference! They fear it those folks. And Hemingway was correct he was being monitored by the FBI. And welll yes if you knew of Hoover yes makes sense whether it was completely awful or no I can see him doing this and he did so why they didn’t see that unless they were aware of and told not to acknowledge his fear.
We just are uncouth more than not though some of us have tried and sometimes a good and sometimes not so great work. And from the other side of the desk I have seen beyond yuck. All tools created by humans. So a very mixed bag depending on each persons moral and ethical core.
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I read your story. Keep up the good work. I am the author of the book, “Going Crazy in Alaska.” As bad as the lower 48 is, Alaska in some ways is 30 years behind best practice, especially when it comes to psychiatric patient grievance procedure.
Alaska has a gender choice of staff for intimate care law, but there is no enforcement. Psychiatric facilities implement their own patient grievance procedure with no input from the state. What could possibly go wrong with that system? Everything.
Alaska is special, they have a Mental Health Trust Authority. Next Tuesday I have a meeting with the management. That’s it for now.
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Ugh. Thanks for your work. Do you know Jim Gottstein?
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The tragic thing with Hemingway is that he killed himself after being forced to ensure more than 30 ECT “treatments”. He was literally being tortured to death and couldn’t take it anymore. He begged his wife not to send him for anymore ECT. Sound like he was surrounded by abusive people and was doomed to this fate once the presence of those people had become solidified in his life. Such a tragedy that his life was cut short because of the unethical and immoral actions of others. He is one amongst millions who have been harmed or killed by this system of corruption which claims it is there to help people. We realize the truth though. That the medical system and any organizations associated with it are not designed to help anyone. They were created to control and harm people who stand out or who are different in any way. It’s a sick and twisted game these liars are playing with our lives.
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—People who believe that ‘the’ mentally ill should not be afforded the same rights as the rest of us
Yes there are still those among us who view “the” mentally ill as a generic.
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Maybe mental illnesses and disorders are so ubiquitous that each one is properly given a name to distinguish it from the next. In many cultures, those names would include first, middle, and last names. But generically, we usually just call them “people.”
Last I checked, that would be over eight billion current cases?
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My interpretation is that increased poverty and homelessness after 2008 is permanant and increasing as Trumps tarrifs increase consumption costs. This will lead to more homelessness and poverty which will lead to more madness, alcoholism and drug use. It is possible to reintergrate people into society using intense social support but that isn’t wanted as automation and AI reduces jobs, especially skilled jobs, so assess as many homeless and poor people as mad as possible then lock them up in institutions run by big business which capital invests in and which is paid for out of taxation. Its an extension of what Clinton did with his Three Strikes and Your Out laws where lots of poorer mainly black people were locked up and forced into low paid labour for what was essentially petty crime as a way to mop up unwanted unemployed or low paid folk.
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Simply put, what you have outlined follows the inexorable logic of neoliberalism, capitalism’s latest rationale for greed and ruthless exploitation. One doesn’t need an advanced degree in sociology or economics to grasp the workings and consequences of such a system; the blue-collar laborers who staged strikes at Ford and other auto companies in the 1930s understood this inhuman process perfectly.
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Thats right, except we are now in post neoliberalism, but the logic of capitalism rolls on. Psychiatry has always had a role in mopping up those that don’t fit into capitalism, thats how it started in the early 1800’s. As society changes psychiatry changes in response.
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What do you mean by “post-neoliberalism” and how does the current psychiatric paradigm reflect and support it?
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Exactly. We have all these people receiving “advanced” degrees but none of them truly help anyone in society. All they do is reinforce a system of abuse, coercion, manipulation, and lies. They should be ashamed that their actions are harming other people but they aren’t because they are too prideful to admit they are supporting an unethical paradigm. These people can’t admit when they’ve done anything wrong or made a mistake. They will be damned if they let anyone point that out either. They are willing to harm millions of people rather than admit the system they support is corrupt.
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I am sorry if you think homelessness and poverty lead to madness and addiction.
The people who create homelessness and poverty are madder and more addicted and dangerous than their victims will ever be. They are the first problem. I believe focusing on “capitalism” clouds your thinking. Criminal personalities are our problem, not ideologies. They will adapt to whatever ideology is popular at the moment, as we have seen them take over (it appears) the Trump Presidency.
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Capitalism enables and encourages people to be abusive and manipulative though. People aren’t rewarded for being honest and decent people. People who do the most work to keep society functioning (blue collar workers) are not fairly paid for sacrificing their bodies and time. That’s beyond unethical. We ask so much of blue collar workers but don’t even fairly compensate them for the value they provide to us all. Instead people who lie, deceive, manipulate, abuse, coerce, and force others into doing things are rewarded under capitalism. This system encourages the worst types of people instead of punishing them for harming others. Nothing will change until people realize that the entire system is completely corrupt from the top all the way down to the bottom. Blue collar workers are some of the only decent people left in this god forsaken place.
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I only argue that “capitalism” or any other “ism” is incapable of enbling or encouraging anyone to do anything. It is those who preach its ways, under its banner, who do the enabling and encouraging. And if they are criminals, as many capitalists are, and many communists, and many socialists, then they will encourage people to behave in a criminal manner regardless of what banner they preach under.
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Robert Dole, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to label the emotional distress you felt after your unfortunate experience with the mental health system.
As for my own interest in the topics featured on this website, I’m simply fascinated by the nature and limits of human consciousness, including inexplicable psychic phenomena, a subject that the psychiatric establishment, with its reductionist tunnel vision of reality, commonly dismisses as hoaxes or hallucinations.
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I have decided to call it “metaphysical inquietude.”
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Brilliant!
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Thank you for this thoughtful and insightful call to action.
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While these concerns may be well-founded, they lose their relevance if the bigger picture is not fully grasped.
Is it the full self-determined choice of every person deemed “mentally ill” or homeless to be in that state and live that way? I know for a fact that it is not. Like children who have lost their way, they need help. Some are too proud to accept it; fine. But others will if it is honestly offered and effective in their own eyes.
What we have now is a system of “help” that is not honest nor effective. It is often run by people who deserve to locked up much more than the people they target. It is this great inversion of thought and awareness that must be handled. It is not a question of leaving all these people to their own devices. It is a question of how to help them effectively in their own eyes.
The challenge is truly enormous because we understand people so poorly. The route to better outcomes is through better understanding. It is a terrible shame and a real condemnation that the academic world and its affiliates has failed in this regard. It has apparently been taken over by dark entities. It has become part of our problem.
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Interesting take on things, Larry. I’d say, actually, the problem is best stated like this:
We HAVE a system-centered system, with a process-centered process….
We NEED a services-centered system, with a person-centered process….
Yes, it really is that simple, Larry.
And, even if you want to cry “conspiracy theories”, please don’t do that….
For 1,000’s of years, the World has largely been run by satanic pedophiles.
I’m including child sacrifice under that umbrella.
And, starting 100’s of years ago, the World has been run by the “GREG B.’s” –
The Global Ruling Elites, and Globalist Banksters.
They have fully infiltrated most Western religions & National governments, etc.,…
While it’s important to understand “what’s REALLY going on”, it’s not needed to begin to make the changes required.
We CAN BEGIN to make the system more services-centered, and the process more person-centered, simply by raising our awareness, – raising our consciousness, by WAKING UP!….
That’s the path forward, toward the SOLUTION, and away from the problem….
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In my mind, waking up only results in a need for change.
I am speaking to those who have already woken up. What they need is a proper understanding of how to move forward. Though some will work on waking more people up, there is much more to do and learn.
In your concept, who is “we” and how do you propose to “make a system more services-centered?”
Are you aware of the beings who helped created the current GREGBs as you call them? What do you intend to do about them?
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1. First….”beings”?….do we agree they are human?….
2.”We” is whoever is us, or chooses to be us….
3.By explaining this, over and over and over and over and that’s the best anybody can do….
The system CAN be moved from system-centered to services-centered, and from process-centered process, to person-centered process….
It’s not complicated, or difficult….
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The beings who put the GREBS there and keep them active are human-like but NOT human. Here we are only speaking about biologies.
I am not interested about whether reform, or meaningful change, might or might not be complicated or difficult. I am interested in whether it is possible.
I see no “we” organized enough to make the changes you envision. That is not to say that there are no individuals or groups stepping up. But my group, for instance, though very organized, is not directly working to replace publicly-available health services at this time. We are willing to train and mentor people who might be interested in giving this a try. But that’s about it. Beyond that, I see a lot of people with their own ideas. I hope the best ideas will be embraced, but they can also be suppressed.
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I agree with Bill. All of those things can be done easily and that’s the type of system we need to be moving towards. But the powers that be won’t let that happen. They would lose control over people. That’s why we need to stop letting them having a say to begin with. They can no longer be allowed to control people and tell us how to go about receiving assistance. That is up for us to decide and our input is supposed to matter. We live in such a repressive society that those in control have either silenced, censored, drugged, traumatized, or otherwise harmed anyone who has spoken out against their blatantly abusive system.
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Larry
One of the many issues is that some of the ideas people have are nothing but attempts to keep this same system of abuse around. They don’t actually want to get rid of any of it. They just want to be the ones in power instead. Nothing will change until the system is abandoned entirely in favor of a system that upholds the human and constitutional rights of everyone. There is no alternative to that if we want to create a better world. The problem is that we still have to beg those in power to respect our human rights. There is something seriously wrong here as you’ve noted. The fact that so many of us let all of this happen without even speaking out concerns me immensely. What this means to me is that in the future many people will remain silent and complicit when they notice abusive behavior. There’s already a precedent for people to act that way and unfortunately it goes back to ancient history. We need a complete paradigm shift and people need to change their ways of perceiving others who are struggling in life. Nothing will change if people don’t do that.
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So Matthew, how to you propose to make this happen? Do you have a new “system” in mind? A new paradigm? How do you intend to persuade “us” to support it?
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All by design. It’s not that the people in power don’t understand how to help others, it’s that they don’t want to. They want to punish anyone who doesn’t conform to this corrupt system or who refuses to go along with their agenda. They don’t like anyone who steps out of line. In this country you either conform to this system of abuse or you are thrown to the fringes of society and expected to survive with nothing. They do all of this on purpose to cause as much chaos, division, anger, and sadness as possible. They want to see people fall if they don’t support this immoral system. They want to see people like us in prison, in a psych ward, or dead. Continuing to live is an inconvenience for the powers that be.
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