Well, total non-cooperation is the first way. So you don’t show up in court or in the psychiatrist’s office unless they have you in handcuffs. And even then, you refuse to talk.
And in the field, police officer or no, you refuse to talk to them.
Okay, but I am not qualified to give legal advice. This is why we need to have the resistance organized by attorneys.
“The 1967 legislation had been years in the making, a bipartisan undertaking that proponents hailed as the Magna Carta for people in state hospitals. It provided patients with basic rights, accelerated the emptying of those antiquated institutions and became a template for states across the country.
”
Rachel, you got a web address or an email address for “Anti-Psychiatry Rising”?
Joshua
Not being an attorney, a psychotherapist is not required to follow case law.
But if they could still get away with it they would still be telling people that they are fantasizing when they talk about childhood sexual molestation.
Today that could violate mandatory reporting.
And if they pooh pooh legal redress, they could be interpreted as giving legal advice, bad legal advice.
A lot of what psychotherapists used to do is no longer legally tenable. So they are effected by case law. Probably they are kept abreast of it by their insurance carriers.
But are they conning clients? Well when the client ends up in the office, what are they believing they will find? I would say that it is that the therapist somehow knows a great deal that they do not, and that the client’s own thinking can be corrected.
But the premise of this expectation is unfounded. Usually it will have been the client who has lived life further out on the margins. They know more how to live when your legitimacy is under attack. The therapist, on the other hand, is a licensed member of a respected profession, so I would say that it is unlikely that they could know anything of benefit to the client.
Now sometimes in the administration of the affairs of juveniles, therapists will get called in to be the decision makers. And I am not challenging this. I do not see it the same as just advertising for psychotherapy clients.
For the same reason that I am objecting to psychotherapy, I also raise objections to Philosophical Counseling. This later diverges from the ideas of Freud, as it did when both Sigmund Freud and Edmond Husserl were both students of Franz Brentano.
What I question in it is that these fee charging counselors are not actually comrades, but they want you to disclose your affairs to them.
Okay, but I have never suggested that talk therapy be outlawed, merely that we no longer allow or government to license it. Adults should be able to talk to and give money to whom every they wish.
Guys pay prostitutes do listen to them. This is known as “emotional work”. I am sure that many find it beneficial and I am not pooh poohing them.
But I still think it best if you can build or join a group of comrades who are fighting for the same objectives as you are. And it is from these comrades that you learn the most, and it us with these comrades that you would likely most want to talk about yourself and your own affairs.
Then your issues are not seen as pathology, but rather as collective injustice which people are working to redress.
I think our society could do much better in dealing with grief and shame, and in recongnizing that we have these and that they should not be pathologized.
Joshua
We need to be rehearsing people in role plays on how to stand up to these Mental and Behavioral Health and Social Workers, and on how to face down the judges in the court room.
They need to know how to maintain the autonomy in their lives, and to keep the needle out of their arms.
Joshua
Ron, we are a society governed by a body of laws, and these include civil court precedents. But far too often these laws only help parents and the powerful to abuse those who do not have power.
What does the psychotherapist do to ameliorate this?
The parents did not like Rachel’s boyfriend, and so they said they were not going to pay for her college or high school.
So she ended up living with the family of a friend. And the father, an attorney, was the one who encouraged a lawsuit. The attorney who handled this Tanya Helfand was a family lawyer. And there are things in New Jersey law which made it more likely that this lawsuit would succeed, like a requirement for paying the child’s college costs after divorce and beyond the age of 18. But these parents were not divorced.
The Family Law section of the ABA watched this suit extremely closely as it could have changed a lot of things. But the suit failed badly, the judge was so ridiculous, and of course the jury never saw any evidence, and Rachel ended up having to do a Mea Culpa in the court room.
The father, a former police chief was accustomed to getting drunk and extremely inappropriate with Rachel. And the money the parents spent on their legal defense was vastly more than what Rachel wanted, just high school and a college she had already won a scholarship for.
Okay, this case is over, but the issue is far from over.
But I ask you Ron, what help does the psychotherapist offer, and do they even try to follow case law? And so isn’t the psychotherapist just conning the client by even getting them into the office and disclosing their personal affairs, so that it can be turned into a self-improvement project?
Joshua
page 181,
”
Apparently solitude, despite all its drawbacks, is an ecological niche that has some advantages of its own. The the main advantage is simply the other side of the coin of witchcraft; the great personal power that accrues to the sorcerer. It is as if people drew the conclusion that anyone who was able to pull away from the gravitation of the group must possess superhuman powers, and this belief, in itself, is he sorcerer’s power. Society attributes power to those who defy it even out our days, as exemplified by so-called charismatic leaders. Charismatic authority, as Weber suggested, derives from a person’s ability to disregard the rules of the system: “Pure charisma does not know any ‘legitimacy’ other than that flowing from personal strength” Weber 1924, p. 22). The point Weber did not make is that people pay attention to a charismatic leader, not in spite of his rebelliousness, but because of it. Anyone who presumes to hold authority independently of the social order will be thought of either as a madman or as someone with superhuman strength, because only such would dare to defy public opinion, the concentrated psychic energy of the collectivity. The act of defiant individuality attracts attention; it might eventually attract a following, and therefore gain actual power. Students who are loners in high school partake of the same ambivalent image. THey are often ridiculed and ignored, but sometimes they are secretly respected and envied.
.
.
.
In many preliterate societies, only persons who already differ psychologically from the rest of the tribe become involved with magic; they might be epileptics, albinos, or bearers of some other mark that sets them apart. Transition to the life of the hermit — feared and respected, but isolated — is easier for those who fail to fit the system in the first place.
”
Joshua
I think that this Experience Sampling Method that Csikszentmihalyi is influenced by Dabrowski. He wants to know that the teenagers are thinking when randomly polled. There will likely be big mood swings recorded in that.
Csikszentmihalyi sites lots of ongoing conflict with parents and siblings.
pg 153,
“But it is questionable whether the principle of postponing gratification really works as well as the so-called Protestant Ethic suggests. Quite apart from the fact that children who grow up in entropic families are likely to replicate the conflict in their own lives and spread it through their adult relationships, the question is whether one is justified in producing disorder in another person’s experience, no matter how lofty the goal for the sake of which the action is taken.
Joshua
Csikszentmihalyi talks about negentropy:
pg 24,
”
The elements of this state are opposite from those identified with psychic entropy. First, psychic negentropy includes positive feelings toward self and others: happiness, friendliness, and good cheer. This is a common part of adolescent experience, set off by a wink from a girlfriend, a good shot on the basketball court, or just the taste of spring in the air.
”
To me, this author is extrapolating on what Dabrowski made he Theory of Positive Disintegration.
Negentropy includes psychological activation, action follows without the need for thought or hesitation, a sense of energy and competence, intrinsic motivation, effective concentration.
page 25,
”
… it might make sense to conclude that negentropic experiences are incompatible with community order and the goals of development because they drain attention away from more essentially productive tasks. The is the reason for the puritanical aversion to enjoyment that is expressed by the Protestant Ethic.
”
Joshua
Being adolescent : conflict and growth in the teenage years / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson. Basic Books Inc 1984
This book is only so so. As in another Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book I read they are using this Experience Sampling Method, which means they have got a class of 75 adolescents running around with these pager like things that go off sometimes. They have this stack of response forms which they are supposed to fill out.
He wants to know how they spend their time, and with who, and doing what.
This is not really a Gifted Movement Book, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is not really a Gifted Movement writer, but in some ways this makes it more interesting. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a student of Dabrowski, and though he does not mention him in this volume he is clearly influenced by him.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about Entropy: Disorder in Consciousness, as something faced by adolescents, and I think everyone.
pg 19, “The tension between adolescents and the rest of society usually takes the form of a conflict between goals structured by instincts and buy values. On the one hand, a young person develops goals based on sexual desires, the need for dominance, for a social territory, for acceptance by peers. These urges are experienced as coming from the body, and therefore many adolescents accept them as their own, even though, as we have seen, this belief is based on an illusion, because instincts are geared to help the survival of the genes and not necessarily the welfare of the person carrying them.
”
Csikszentmihalyi talks about Entropy: Disorder in Consciousness, at length, and in this he distinguishes himself as a follower of Dabrowski and the anathema of the Mental Health System.
And it applies to adults just as much as it does to adolescents.
Csikszentmihalyi also talks about Negentropy: Order in Consciousness. What he really means is self-oganization, inner direction.
The 2nd law tells us that entropy is always increasing, never decreasing. But living things are self-organizing, so it looks like entropy is decreasing. It can be like this because living things can never be closed systems. They have to be be open systems, and it only looks like entropy is decreasing. Living things are more properly categorized as dissipative strutures. They are self-oganizing and they can be like this because they are not in thermal equilibrium with the environment.
And then Negative Entropy or Negative Temperature, these are things that come up in some unusual non-equilibrium structure. What is important here is that our author is talking about some situations when adolescents in particular are clearly very highly self directed. And though he does not come out and say this, we have to keep the mental health system away from them.
pg 23,
“Regard of the specific activities, people mentioned a set of consistent elements that related to the optimal experience. They described profound involvement with their activity, which combined a loss of self-consciousness with deep concentration. The experiences was subjetively pleasing — compelling enough to inspire rock climbers to risk their lives — and at the same time required highly complex use of mental or physical skills. Many respondents used the word “flow” to describe the effortless buoyancy of the experiences.
This state of consciousness we will call psychic negentropy, literally “negative psychic entropy.” It is a condition in which one feels whole and acts with clarity, commitment, and enthusiasm.
”
(It is interesting, I and a friend used to talk about flow in exactly the same way that this author does. And to find the things you really should be doing, your life’s calling, you look for that flow. But I fear, I know that in adolescent or an adult, the mental health people would call this manic. And in a pre-adolescent child they would call it autism.)
Joshua
Megan wrote: “I used to think therapy could be beneficial if only you went through the trials of finding a good therapist—and by “good,” I mean one that is not only well-trained/well-educated, but one that is a “good fit” for you in particular.”
Megan, I think this is what gets a lot of us hooked into it and keeps us hooked. With a therapist one is investing so much time and money, but you still don’t know what the therapist’s actual views are.
But then, why should you care, why should you be telling them any of your personal stuff? They aren’t going to the one representing you in court, and they aren’t going to be out on the barricades either.
And if you want to live in this world you need public honor, not just to have found a therapist who sees things your way.
Joshua
Very glad Rachel to have met you online and I am so glad that you are off of drugs.
Joshua
Anti-Psychiatry Rising?
I’m already interested, and I agree with everything you have posted.
But I also think we need to do something about psychotherapy, not to outlaw it but just to cut off the government support for it. Prohibit our government from licensing it, and clarify mandatory reporting so that anytime a child shows up in their office they have to report it to Child Protective Services. This will shut off the Fix-My-Kid doctors.
Foucault, Michel (1997). “Psychiatric Power”. In Rabinow, Paul (ed.). Ethics, subjectivity and truth. Translated by Robert Hurley and others. New York: The New Press
”
For many California college students, navigating homelessness or overcrowding has become part of getting the degree.
Five percent of University of California (U.C.) students and 10 percent of California State University (CSU) students are homeless during the academic year, according to one state estimate. The two public university systems have a combined 16,000-person waiting list for on-campus student housing.
Meanwhile, those in search of private, off-campus housing describe a punishing months-long grind of Craigslist searches and competing with 40 other applicants for the chance to rent a single room in a 50-year-old home.
“You’d regularly see the street lined with students sleeping in cars,” says Nolan Gray, research director at California YIMBY and a PhD student at UCLA. “I had students in classes that I helped teach who were sleeping in cars, sleeping two to three people to a bedroom while still paying $1,000 a rent. ”
”
”
Debates about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Courts program have raged across the state in recent months. A major point of contention is whether Californians with mental health challenges will be helped or hurt by being pushed into the legal system.
In Portland, Oregon, there is a different approach that has proven successful for many years.
Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs) (Mobile Crisis Services) work with local crisis centers to “provide people in mental health crisis the care they need instead of incarceration” …. “Community Mental Health Programs in collaboration with local law enforcement agencies have established CIT programs across the state to de-escalate crisis situations involving individuals with serious mental illness.”
CITs Mobile Services respond to a mental health crisis in the community, with police normally already at the scene. The Mobile Services deescalates the situation–without using force–to get the person in crisis to agree to go to a crisis center and avoid being booked by the police.
”
”
CITs assure that most folks being dropped off in a mental health emergency don’t end immediately up in jail or in court because of their medical condition. CITs aren’t a panacea. The people helped often came back later in another crisis because their living circumstances hadn’t changed and homelessness is a permanent crisis if you’re homeless.
”
”
CARE Courts force people into a treatment program and apply penalties for non-compliance “…, the consequences for being found “non-compliant” with a CARE plan or not attending court hearings are serious: a possible referral to Lanterman- Petris-Short Act (conservatorship) proceedings with a presumption that there is no suitable community-based alternative for the person.
This creates a direct route to conservatorship – a legal determination that deprives a person of the right to choose where to reside, to make medical decisions, to vote, to decide social and sexual contacts and relationships, and other fundamental rights.
This is a strategy for assuring people comply with mental health treatment programs, but in my opinion, it is needlessly punitive and not based on proven effective treatment strategies.
”
”
The CARE Courts will throw Californians already suffering from several life crises into an unfriendly and intimidating system, when what people in crisis need is compassion and help.
”
Joshua
But why is the therapist someone whom anyone should ever disclose their affairs to?
In a civilized society the approved way of redressing wrongs is the Civil Court. And to advance a case there you will probably want a lawyer. The therapist is not a lawyer. They do not even have a law degree. And therapist client privilege is much weaker than attorney client privilege. The attorney knows how to build a case, the therapist doesn’t.
Joshua
Corporal punishment can be outlawed, but the people who defend it are not that far from the people who support mental health.
Joshua
Our officials have got an every increasing number of people on drugs. More and more adults, and younger and younger children.
Thomas Insel, a major mental health ideologue, says it is 20% of adults.
We have to shut the mental health system off and get these drugs off the market.
Joshua
Then if I were the parent of a child being told they need CBT, besides going to a lawyer and the police myself, I would go to the School Board and demand in front of witnesses that that adult authority never be allowed to speak to my child again.
Sounds like the Democrats want to declare homelessness a Public Heath Crisis, which is a hold over from the COVID insanity and similar, and it is similar to Care Courts and turning homelessness into a “mental health issue”.
Conservatives are actually opposing the Public Health Crisis approach!
But what really is to happen is quite unknown.
No needs test public housing and Universal Basic Income will solve the entire problem, as very few people would refuse that. It is not “Housing First”, which is internment. And it contains private real estate gentrification. Similar to how in most industrialized countries and in the US, agricultural prices are controlled by the central government.
Joshua
Young people need to be schooled in where to draw lines with adult authorities, and in how they should do this.
They need to learn to shut off authorities who are saying they need therapy, or anything like CBT, or in any other way are trying to turn problems with adults back on to the child, or trying to mess with their heads.
If a child told me that some adult authority in their school was telling them that they need CBT, I would tell them to walk straight to the police station and log it as a report of criminality.
Then I would say that they need to find a lawyer without wasting any time.
Joshua
No one needs or benefits from psychiatric medications.
Joshua
Yes the mental health system is totalitarian, and this is why we must eradicate it and prosecute the practitioners.
Joshua
Removed for moderation.
Mindfulness in the schools, in everyone’s life, is good. I think it is necessary.
But when you introduce and idea like:
“identify their feelings and develop CBT-based emotional regulation skills”,
and say that Mental Health and Well Being might be compromised, you are making children subject to abuse and without redress, just as they would be if they were interned in a psychiatric hospital.
Joshua
This isn’t the first time in CA that there have been big uprisings over the homeless. It maybe comes about once a decade, since there has been homelessness, which is about 1980.
It will continue to get worse because of advancing industrial and information technology reducing the need for labor, and that then reducing the economic demand for industrial goods.
This Todd Gloria is taking a lot of criticism from the Right. But he is also one of those screaming the most loudly for Gavin’s Care Courts, and to have it first implemented in San Diego County.
Gloria, like most of the other backers of Care Courts such as Umberg, Eggman, and Steinberg, is one who had a family member whom they put into the mental health system. They fault the mental health system and the law for it not being coercive enough.
^ What the authorities are afraid to do is no needs test public housing, and then Universal Basic Income. This houses everyone without creating internment camps or advancing the Mental Health System. But most people who are not rich would want this. I contains private real estate gentrification, so the people who are the most against this are the real estate industry.
So the authorities are careful to make sure that whatever they offer is only available to the eyesore homeless, and to do this they invoke the idea of Mental Health.
One man had earned a living by being a stage hand.
”
Among the residents who have been relocated to housing is Ron McGowan. He was a stagehand almost his entire life, and it was paying the rent, until COVID.
“During the pandemic we were the first ones to get hit,” he told KPIX. “A lot of other industries could pivot. You could not pivot as a stagehand.”
He took the money he had and put his belongings in storage. With nowhere else to go, he ended up at Wood Street.
“On and off for two years,” he said of his time in the encampment. “It has definitely been traumatic over there.”
”
Well Gavin’s COVID Hysteria hit those who lived with the most itinerant employment the hardest. And so there was a huge surge in the homeless population. And this really hasn’t come back down, and it isn’t going to either. It is a permanent change.
And then Gavin’s AB-5 destroyed the Gig Economy, so a lot of people who had earned their living that way were out of luck.
Those are the types of people who found solace, pre-pandemic, at a South Main Street homeless service center in some cases every day of the week in Santa Ana.
And later wrote about it in sworn court declarations.
The center’s one of several homeless service providers throughout Orange County – like Micah’s Way, the Harm Reduction Institute and Mary’s Kitchen – getting pushed out by local city officials over public nuisance complaints.
They represent one side of the homelessness debate that views direct assistance and basic needs as crucial to helping people recover their lives – and with full autonomy.
That seemed to jive less and less with local officials over the years, seeing these sites draw visible homeless presence, in favor of what some consider a new rallying point: Court-ordered mental health treatment.
It’s called CARE Court, and it seeks to put people with critical mental health issues into court-ordered treatment plans for up to two years before they deteriorate or commit crimes.
”
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and others filed the lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individuals who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. Defendants include the city, several city departments and Mayor London Breed.
Joshua
Ron, the issue is not specifically what is considered abuse. It is what is considered normal and mandated. It is the nature of the middle-class family, people having children so that they can use them to give themselves an adult identity, and then finding the child to be defective.
Maybe the parents are driving the child to the doctor. With adults it is schizophrenia. With adolescents it is bipolar. With younger children it is autism. Maybe the parents are driving the child to the doctor. But may the child is not exposed to white coats until they are old enough to be driving themselves, but it still amounts to a secularization of Original Sin.
Joshua
You talk to the people who are your comrades, the ones whom you fight shoulder to shoulder with at the barricades.
And so you think there is value in talking to a psychotherapist, and a government licensed therapist no less. Well what are their qualifications? And what are your qualifications?
Were you there in 1954 with Võ Nguyên Giáp, as he cut the airstrip and then disregarded the Chinese advisors and turned Dien Bien Phu into a siege campaign?
Are you a member of the Irish Republican Army?
Do you have flattened knuckles and knife and bullet scars?
No, then what can you possible offer your clients except being someone who hears everything they say as evidence of defective thinking?
”
Fed up with tent cities, officials up and down California have ironed a new approach to the publicly-visible homelessness crisis on their hands:
Putting homeless people in front of judges and potentially into treatment programs.
The newly-approved and highly controversial system is known as CARE Court, and it isn’t exclusive to homeless people or intended for all of them.
Rather, the new law’s authors say it’s for those with mental health and substance abuse issues, who under the current system only get help after they deteriorate or commit crimes, or end up back on the street with no help at all.
The idea’s to court-order such people into a treatment plan for up to two years, with County of Orange officials joining six other counties in committing to an early rollout of the system over the next calendar year.
”
”
But around this new system are two directly opposing views of how voluntary it really is – and where it stands in California’s long and notorious history of institutionalization.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, state lawmakers and big city mayors have pushed CARE Court as non-coercive and individualized – and as the next step in the state’s move away from institutionalization.
”
”
Civil rights groups, on the other hand, say CARE Court is institutionalization’s next chapter, coercive by its very structure, while self-determination — voluntary but supportive treatment — is the best route through which people recover.
”
”
The CARE Court legislation invokes the ‘self-determination’ concept twice in its text and in accompanying public policy documents.
Yet the very concept’s loudest advocates have come out swinging against it.
While painted in voluntary terms, critics say CARE Court guarantees no housing in the unaffordable state.
In the long run, they say the plan empowers courts to warehouse people in shelters or place them in conservatorships, the case where a judge appoints someone (the ‘conservator’) to care for another adult deemed to have no self-decisionmaking ability.
”
”
“These big city public officials can make what they’ve been trying to do happen at the expense of poor people really easily,” said Lili Graham, a Disability Rights California attorney and one of CARE Court’s chief critics.
“And you can put someone anywhere, regardless of whether it’s the right place for them or not.”
”
”
But if you ask Brooke Weitzmann, a high-profile attorney for homeless and disabled people:
“Voluntary does not require the judicial branch.”
”
”
CARE Court Rings Alarms for Civil Rights Groups
”
”
Weitzmann, meanwhile, has this question: “Why would we want to redirect money that could be going toward the actual resources and toward the people’s needs, into the administration of a court system?”
“We already have a great voluntary system,” Weitzmann said. “It’s called the Health Care Agency. And if they had enough employees, to help people come up with voluntary plans and execute them, if they had enough internal staff, and enough contractors, we could be meeting the needs.”
In a written emailed statement responding to questions on Sept. 19, Umberg said “Housing is a vital component to the CARE Court process – but finding stability and staying up to date with treatment is virtually impossible for the unhoused. One of the upsides to this new process is that the court will be able to issue orders that are specific to the needs of each individual (i.e. bridge housing, a licensed adult care facility, supportive housing, etc.).”
”
1. Prosecute the government issued license holders of the mental health system in International Court for Crimes Against Humanity, drugging, using their license to tell someone that they are “mentally ill”, and everything else.
2. Prohibit our government from licensing psychotherapists. And where there are such sessions occurring with minors, enforce mandatory reporting as it was intended. Anytime a child shows up for therapy it has to be reported to Child Protective Services so that there can be court oversight, and follow up reports have to be made, and the therapist has to try to get to the care takers and report, or report that he cannot.
Joshua
Resistance:
Our jails are always full to capacity with all the Drug and Domestic Violence cases. What they can really do to people who defy the Care Court will be limited. We need to resist in mass, and we need to prepare people for this. And we need to shut down the Los Angeles County Street Drugging Team.
So we need to take the entire mental health system to pieces!
Joshua
If you were not tangled up with the mental health system already, would you still have been at risk of being jailed?
I think most of the time the mental health system is part of what lands people in jail.
Joshua
Ron, as soon as the party walks into the office of any kind of a therapist and opens their mouth to speak, they are selling themselves out, setting themselves up to be treated as suffering from an illness.
What they needed to have done instead is some self inventory and then begun the search for political comrades, people who want to change objective things about the world.
Thomas Insel, July 22, NY Times, with 1 hour 13 min audio.
There’s a paradox that sits at the center of our mental health conversation in America. On the one hand, our treatments for mental illness have gotten better and better in recent decades. Psychopharmaceuticals have improved considerably; new, more effective methods of psychotherapy have been developed; and we’ve reached a better understanding of what kinds of social support are most helpful for those experiencing mental health crises.
When are we going to shut off this entire industry?
Joshua
There have been books like this for a long time, they are the staple of the middle-class family. They are called pedagogy manuals. They show people how they can use children to increase their own social status. They give them the words to speak so that they will look good.
Lately the words are “empathy”, “attachment”, “bonding”, and “communications skills”. Adults go to psychotherapists so that they can be taught this language too.
At the Barnes and Nobel’s stores they have a whole section with large format glossy paper picture books. As far as I am concerned they are a type of K*dd*ie P*rn.
Joshua
We have to fight these commitments, not matter what it takes.
Joshua
Resistance needs to be organized, people need to know how to fight this on the ground, and in court.
I would say refuse to tell the cops anything which goes beyond the immediate situation. Say, “I’ve been instructed by a civil attorney to never talk about anything beyond the immediate situation, never to talk about anything which gets to constructing a biography on me, because I may be taking some actions in the civil court to redress historical wrongs.”
This might infuriate police as they are not used to people standing up to them. But let them arrest you whatever. And same for a judge and same for any of these Social, Mental, and Behavioral Health Workers. Try to not even be in the same room with them.
So tell them nothing, and just face them down, and you should be able to avoid drugging, which is the the most important. And if they talk about shelter or any other programs, “I have been ordered to give no response at all.”
They never really have anything on you unless you discuss your biography with them. And anyone who lives on the street has already had their biography nullified.
And when they try to put words into your mouth do not take the bait, just stick to your own line. If unhoused never affirm it, and resist any temptation to plead for pity. This is what talking to them really amounts to.
Anyway, this needs to be organized by lawyers. And we need to set up safe houses and an underground railroad.
Joshua
Josef Mengele liked to do surgical experiments on dwarves, people with mismatched eyes, and identical twins.
Besides having his medical degree he had a PhD in Anthropology. He seemed to want to prove the Nazi racial theories, that everything depended on genetic hereditary. He got another doctor, from Hungary, to do the dissections. He had powerful wealthy backers and he was always sending them stuff in specimen jars.
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
pg 71:
The psychopath does not experience the anxiety one sees in the psychoneurotic; he does not suffer conflict in his internal milieu. In other words, he never undergoes a period of multilevel disintegration. Therefore, he neither is conscious of the complexity of his internal environment no sees himself objectively. He is incapable of either self-criticism or self-control.
Hughlings Jackson,
Mazurkiewics, died 1946, Polish psychiatrist, neo-Jacksonist.
Joshua
Being adolescent : conflict and growth in the teenage years / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson. BasicBooks 1984
The Psychiatric System is and abomination, and we must eradicate it and prosecute the practitioners. And often it is preying on children and enabling child abuse.
^Care Courts will solve nothing, except to create a new class of drug addicts, to make people see why they have to avoid the shelters, as they are internment camps, and to give the Democrats more of these Mental Health and Social Workers to vote for them.
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
Dąbrowski was a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist
pg 80:
Psychopaths as a rule do not create cultural works. The psychopath’s intelligence, even at a high level is not of a creative nature; it merely serves the egoistic purposes of the dominating impulse or group of impulses. Hence, even extensive use of intelligence leads not to creative ideas but to destructive action. As a result of these strong impulsive dynamics, it is difficult for the psychopath to make a long-range, controlling estimate of his own and other people’s acts; therefore, he has no capacity for sympathetic insight into the states of mind of others and is unable to grasp any social, moral, or cultural problems.
Pyschoneurotics, on the contrary, create works of culture because of their high moral sensitivity, their capacity for introspection, their ability to estimate their capacity for introspection, their ability to estimate their own and other people’s attitudes, and their ability to differentiate levels and to experience the “subject-object” process within themseleves, ie., because of their susceptibility to the process of disintegration, especially those of multilevel disintegration.
Joshua
This still does not explain where the idea of using medications to treat “mental illness” actually starts.
It makes no sense, unless you are interpreting “mental illness” as indicative of some physical ailment. And “mental illness” is already a very stretched interpretation in itself.
Joshua
School often is not very engaging or challenging. Making this into an “illness” is an outrage.
Joshua
We need some more smarts when it comes to dealing with harsh life experiences, past and present.
But as far as the Mental Health System, what we need is complete eradication and Crimes Against Humanity prosecution.
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
pg 77
The Feeling of Inferiority
”
Although the psychopath does not undergo any essential processes and experiences characteristic of multilevel disintegration, he may experience a feeling of inferiority. But it is a feeling of inferiority with regard to the external environment, not a self-dissatisfaction. A contrary phenomenon occurs in psychoneurotics. Such individuals demonstrate various types of increased excitability. Psychoneurotics are typical examples both of the process of development of internal environment and of the process of disintegration, especially the multilevel type. All the above-mentioned processes, which are lacking in psychopaths, are chacteristic of psychoneurotics.
Essential elements of psychoneurosis are the dynamization of the internal environment, the experiencing of hierarchy in oneself, and the strong manifestation of dynamics processing toward an ever higher hierarchy in oneself, and the strong manifestation of dynamics progressing toward toward an ever higher hierarchy of values up to the personality ideal. With a growing awareness and stabilization of his personal ideal, the individual becomes more conscious of the distance separating him from it; his sense of reality increases, and the dynamics of the ideal become the principle disposing and directing center in the individual’s development–the main source of developmental energy.
Joshua
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
page 78
What is the role of the third agent? The third agent, together with the first agent (inherited and inborn dynamics) and the second (environmental influences), becomes the major developmental agent in highly cultured individuals with a high degree of self-consciousness. They dynamics of the third agent arise and develop in certain number of individuals during periods of stress and during the developmental crises of life such as puberty, adolescence, and the climacteric. Rudiments of this agent may be seen in especially talented, sensitive, and sometimes nervous children. The third agent functions to deny some and affirm other specific peculiarities and dynamics within the individual’s internal environment, at the same time denying and affirming certain forms of influences of the external environment. The third agent selects, separates, and eliminates heterogeneous elements acting in both internal and external environments. The third agent becomes active during periods of strong tension of the developmental instinct and during positive multilevel disintegration. It operates in individuals endowed with strong tendencies toward positive development and, therefore, may be often seen in nervous, neurotic, and psychoneurotic persons. Such individuals often have inferiority feelings (typical of these disorders), connected as a rule with the process of disintegration.
In psychopath, there is neither a process of disintegration nor the development of a third agent because the disposing and directing center consists of an impulse or group of impulses integrated at a low level. Nor does the psychopath experience inferiority feelings with regard to himself because the development of this feeling presumes the process of disintegration.
Joshua
Everyone behind Care Courts, everyone except Gavin, has a family member whom they have tracked into the mental health system. That is all the Mental Health System is, containment for the family scapegoats. And now this is being formalized as a legal trap for the unhoused. There was no homelessness in America 1940 – 1980. It is now because of legal and economic changes ushered in by President Reagan’s Administration. Newsom, Steinberg, Umberg, and Eggman are shameless. Public housing is what contains private gentrification. Psychiatric drugging is about the worst thing you could do to someone. Legal resistance is being organized.
Joshua
No, its a Mental Hygiene Movement and the Eugenics Movement running amuck, and preying on children as we sit and refuse to do anything about it!
All the more important as CA Governor has gotten his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State Law passed.
Why housing advocates oppose a new California law designed to help the homeless
A new California law ostensibly aimed at helping unhoused people shreds their autonomy, advocates say
”
Already, unhoused people with severe mental health disorders can be involuntarily held in psychiatric care, but only for three days. They can leave only if they promise to take medications and make certain appointments. Using a court order, the CARE Act extends that period for up to a year, which can be extended to two years.
”
”
Family members, service providers and first responders — including paramedics or police officers — are among those legally able to file a petition with CARE court. If facing criminal charges, the individual could avoid punishment by enrolling in a mental health treatment plan. A judge could then order someone into treatment, including housing and medications.
”
“This law violates a person’s right to self-determination and violates people’s right to choose how they want to and need to address their problems,” Sam Tsemberis told Salon.
Newsom’s office is describing the program as a “paradigm shift” — but some advocates say that shift is in the wrong direction.
“This law violates a person’s right to self-determination and violates people’s right to choose how they want to and need to address their problems,” Sam Tsemberis told Salon in an email. Tsemberis is the founder and CEO of Pathways Housing First Institute, a non-profit founded in 1992 that originated the Housing First model for addressing housing access. He characterized the law as politically motivated, citing Newsom’s alleged bid for U.S. president, and designed to appeal to voters “tired of seeing homelessness.”
“Based on my clinical experience and research comparing voluntary and involuntary court-mandated treatment programs, it is very clear that better outcomes are achieved when treatment is voluntary, trauma-informed, and compassionate,” Tsemberis said, adding, “This law will not have any impact on reducing homelessness because it does not provide funding for housing.”
But the fact that police can intervene in these situations has alarmed some advocates. “Law enforcement and outreach workers would have a new tool to threaten unhoused people with referral to the court to pressure them to move from a given area,” Human Rights Watch said in April.
“Newsom’s ‘CARE’ Courts bill will not stop homelessness and it will not stop our mental health crisis,” James Burch, deputy director of the Anti Police-Terror Project, said in a statement, citing statistics that people with untreated mental health disabilities are 16 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that nearly 1,000 people have been killed by California police in six years.
California lawmakers approved CARE Court. What comes next?
Manuela Tobias & Jocelyn Wiener, CalMatters 9 hrs ago w/ audio
How the Autism – Apserger’s – Neurodiversity Hoax still rages on, and what those being targeted should do to protect themselves from it.
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
Dąbrowski was a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist
Because of poor communications between Poland and the west, he ideas are very different. Some of his views come from the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, but it is also very compatible with the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, Fanon, Szasz, Laing, and Cooper.
As it worked out, Dąbrowski spent the last decades of his life working in Canada, where he pick up quite a cadre of followers who make up the core of the Gifted Education Movement.
And I have a lot more respect for the Gifted Movement now that I understand this about it and know who these core members are. It is not just the upper middle-class trying to replicate itself. These kid really are way out there, and they will go thru continual cycles of reinvention at multiple levels.
And so Dąbrowski’s ideas are the antithesis of the Mental Health System, as though this is not said openly, this core of the Gifted Movement is the antithesis of the Autism – Asperger’s Hoax.
Joshua
Very true Yinyang!
Joshua
“efficacy of the treatment of common mental health problems”
Mental illness is a myth and we need to shut down the psychology journalists who keep promoting it.
Joshua
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski, 1964, Intro by Jason Aronson.
p. XVII
”
Like Thomas Szasz, author of Myths of Mental Illness, Dabrowski rejects the medical model of “illness” for psychiatric disorder. Szasz’s definition of psychiatric disorder as “disturbances in patterns of living” is congenial to Dabrowski’s point of view, but Dabrowski regards slight psychiatric disorders as necessary for personality development and would not consider them wrong patterns.
”
Szasz in Hungary and Dabrowski in Poland. We here in CA and the US are using the concept of Mental Illness in exactly the same way that had been the norm in the Communist East Block.
Dabrowsky talks about Erich Lindemann and Erik Erikson, neither,
“… has written specifically on the positive functions of acute psychoses. The anxiety, even psychoneurosis, may have a positive function in personality development is not inconsistent with current attitudes in Western psychiatry, but that psychoses – the persecutory delusions of paranoia, the hallucinations and the withdrawl of a schizophrenic, and the wild hyperactivity of a manic – may play a positive role in an individual’s maturation falls strangely on our ears. e tend to view psychosis as a failure of defense, the surrender of attempts at adaptation. Yet Thomas French and Jacob Kasonin some years ago and Bateson recently have suggested that psychosis may have a positive function.”
Percival’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis 1830 – 1832. G. Bateson (ed) Stanford Univ Press, 1961
Perceval’s narrative; a patient’s account of his psychosis, 1830-1832. Edited by Gregory Bateson. (1961)
*
Bateson, “suggests that schizophrenia is a “vast and painful initiation rite conducted by the self,” and that it has a definite course to run leading to the birth of a new identity. “… congruent with Dabrowski’s emphasis on te positive function of acute psychosis.
People need to know much more about Thomas Szasz, especially at this time when the Mental Health Movement if exploding. CA Governor Gavin Newsom has gotten his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State law passed and support for this in the legislature was near unanimous. Most people believe that everyone is on some Mental Health Spectrum and that they should be disclosing their affairs to psychotherapist and that we need more psychotherapists.
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski, 1964, Intro by Jason Aronson.
p. XVII
”
Like Thomas Szasz, author of Myths of Mental Illness, Dabrowski rejects the medical model of “illness” for psychiatric disorder. Szasz’s definition of psychiatric disorder as “disturbances in patterns of living” is congenial to Dabrowski’s point of view, but Dabrowski regards slight psychiatric disorders as necessary for personality development and would not consider them wrong patterns.
”
Szasz in Hungary and Dabrowski in Poland. We here in CA and the US are using the concept of Mental Illness in exactly the same way that had been the norm in the Communist East Block.
People must wise up and start fighting back!
Great Article Keith!
Joshua
This is the full Newsom Care Courts signing event, with all the speakers. It is amazing to me how all the people crying out for this, except perhaps Newsom, have had a family member they deemed as “mentally ill”, and whom they think would have benefited from living under a Psychiatric Police State. I think the Mental Health State in this country now probably works a lot like it was in the Soviet Union.
This is an atrocity unfolding before our very eyes. And yes part of the population slated for drugging, internment and conservatorship, and another part designated as their keepers. And this second segment votes.
Joshua
Removed for moderation
“Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is outside the current modes of personality theory; it stems from sources at the present neglected in the United States, it views “pathological” symptoms as generally positive factors in personality growth, and it was developed in Poland, a country that has been largely isolated from the West in recent decades.”
Joshua
Democrats have come to the position that when Governor Ronald Reagan closed down most of CA’s mental hospitals, that something wrong was being done. They needed to be replaced by Out Patient Treatment, or Assisted Out Patient Treatment. That means the asylum is created in your own head by using drugs.
And as CA Governor Gavin Newsom has signed his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State Law, his people talk about using drugs to “stabilize” people. And most of those behind this really seem to believe that member of their own family would have benefited from this:
”
The Oakland-based Anti Police-Terror Project is voicing strong opposition to the bill. APTP asserted that court-ordered hospitalization and medicalization are ineffective, as well as violate an individual’s human right to voluntarily seek mental health treatment.
”
Joshua
Where do people get this idea that mood altering chemicals are good for you? How far back does it go, and what did it start with.
To me it seems no different from the vast numbers of people who think ethanol and nicotine are good ways to make it through the day. And then as their numbers seem to be dropping, there are many more now who depend on marijuana, or even on crystal meth.
And as CA Governor Gavin Newsom has signed his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State Law, his people talk about using drugs to “stabilize” people. And most of those behind this really seem to believe that member of their own family would have benefited from this:
So how far back does it go, and with what did it start?
Joshua
And we need someone like Dabrowski to fight the mental health system, tortured by both the Nazis and the Communists.
Our state mental health apparatus continues to expand without bounds, until now it is a lot like what it must have been like behind the Iron Curtain.
Joshua
Kazimierz Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration (1964)
a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist, most revered in the Gifted Movement, anathema of the mental health and autism industries
ed and intro by Jason Aronson, Dept of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
from back of book:
”
The theory recognizes and emphasizes positive aspects of what are usually described in Western psychiatric literature as negative or “pathological” symptoms of mental illness.
”
See, I figured out for myself that the Gifted Movement is the anathema of the Autism / Asperger’s Hoax. It’s just that their people do not say that. They can’t. They are involved in Teacher Training, School Counseling, and even Psychotherapy. To challenge the Autism / Asperger’s Hoax would be to declare nuclear war on the parents.
Well a kind of inner circle of the Gifted Movement holds Dabrowski as scripture. And that is interesting as his work was not originally pitched as Gifted Movement. He is coming from another kind of a society.
But as I see more of this I see that his theory is also the anathema of the Mental Health System!
Joshua
Open Letter to Gavin Newsom
Gavin,
So now that you’ve got Care Courts passed, have you decided on a Care Courts Internment Badge? These were from Dachau.
Be sure to let us know so that we can order cloth in the correct color. And let us know when we should order rolls of barbed wire and canisters of Zyklon B crystals, and then when we should assemble in lines at the train stations.
”
Assemblymember Ash Kalra, who opposed the bill and represents District 27 that covers a large swath of San Jose and a portion of Santa Clara, said CARE Court could have a disproportionate impact on homeless individuals who are already stigmatized.
”
And yes, Gavin will sign it, he is endorsing it. But Santa Clara County is not supposed to be in the first counties to go, Oct 2023, it is supposed to be in the rest to be done a year later.
The Mayor of San Diego is there and he says his aunt has schizophrenia.
Earlier I had heard Darrell Steinberg speaking of how Governor Reagan had closed the mental hospitals, most of them. Steinberg says that that was right because On Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was not fiction.
But Steinberg says that Reagan was supposed to make up for that with out patient treatment. So now this is happening.
As I know this is Assisted Out Patient Treatment, meaning coerced. And mostly how it works is with instead of asylum walls, with pills ingested which give on their own walls.
And this is only one of the reasons why I am strongly opposed to psychotherapy. We should not continue to allow our government to license it.
And people should always have other options.
Joshua
This is interesting, but it still seems to support the mental health system, and that is completely wrong.
The only think to know about the mental health system is how people have been able to break free of it and sue for legal redress.
Joshua
With the way schizophrenia has been conceived, it is hard to imagine it in adolescents. So they have given us bipolar. And most of the diagnoses are for bipolar 2. And this seems to be a reworking of what they used to call dementia praecox.
And then since it is hard to imagine bipolar in younger children, they have also given us autism.
So because they want to establish that there is an objective basis for all of these afflictions, the whole thing has to hang together.
And so now when the CA a legislature has passed Newsom’s Care Courts, it was supposed to be pitched at the unhoused, but as it is worded it applies to anyone who could become unhoused because of severe mental illness. And so it applies to everyone.
And severe mental illness is supposed to be those on the Schizophrenia Spectrum, but the main diagnosis is bipolar and this is the core of this spectrum.
And then Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has been a central pillar of CA’s mental health phenomenon. He says that everyone is on some “Mental Health Spectrum”, and would do well with Mental Health Wellbeing checks. And he has set up an institute and put Thomas Insel in charge of it. Insel has a company, MindStrong which will give everyone these Wellbeing Checks via cell phone texting.
Darrell Steinberg had put his daughter into an out of state psychiatric hospital at the age of 13 years. And now in her 20’s, she still believes that she has “mental illness”.
Anyone who lives kind of on the edge and without a lot of social and emotional support could be labeled as having bipolar 2.
Particularly because this is all being done by government licensed medical practitioners, it all clearly falls within Nuremburg precedent. No one’s position or licensing puts them above International Law. No one can say that they are Just Following Orders or that they are Just Following the Law. And it is right that the Statue of Limitations has been lifted, and that the penalties have been extreme.
“Unlike in cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest, which rely on a robust network of shelters to spare homeless people from the dangers of extreme cold, cities in the West have long let people languish outdoors in our generally good weather.”
again pushing the mental illness fallacy
“Researchers this year found that unsheltered people — especially those with a mental illness — were significantly more likely to end up in the hospital during extreme heat than housed people, based on a study of emergency room admissions.
”
California Heat Wave Crisis Exposes ‘Broken’ Homeless System: Mayor
“These days are extreme examples of what is wrong and broken in the first place,” Steinberg said. “If extreme weather can help drive the change that is necessary, then let’s take advantage of the crisis.”
“12 days
The Governor has 12 days to sign, approve without signing, or veto a bill. A letter or phone call to the Governor’s Office is appropriate to state your position on the bill. If the bill is signed or approved without a signature, it goes to the Secretary of State to be chaptered.”
R. D. Laing wrote a number of books which deal with this, and his views are not completely consistent. As I would explain it, he is not saying that childhood experience causes mental illness. That would only mean that you have to submit to treatment to get cured before you can have a voice.
No, childhood experience could not cause mental illness because there is no such thing as mental illness.
But childhood experience often does track people into situations where they are ripe for getting sucked into the mental health system, drugs, electroshock, lobotomy, and disclosing their affairs to a psychotherapist who is not licensed to practice law.
I have heard other stores like that and it is very understandable. Again, not to pry or be disrespectful, if you don’t mind my asking, was a lack of familial emotional support a factor in this all ending up in the mental health system? Like say, it could be this sense that there is a mysterious anomalous wrong which has long been in play, and then these various crises are seen as manifestations of this (Original Sin) and the mental health system is seen to offer the solution, either in drugs or in talk therapy.
Thanks,
Joshua
ADHD/Autism/Asperger’s/Neurodivergence is a hoax. Mental Illness/Brain Chemical Imbalance is a myth. They are closely related and depend on each other. We need to eradicate both movements and prosecute the practitioners.
Yes, people need to erect defenses to toxic environments, as you will often find in families in the industrial age middle-class.
We need to dismantle the entire Mental Health and Autism / Aspergers system.
And we need to put an end to this Los Angeles County Street Psychiatry Operation.
Joshua
A culturally mandated initiation would change things. But I would say that no one could ever have authority to do this. And there will always be disparity about what this would entail, who is eligible for initiation to adulthood, as there is disparity about what the rules for adult life are.
We are a pluralistic and economically stratified society.
Joshua
Removed for moderation.
I understand. That does seem to be the most common situation, a pack of lies and deceptions, and the fear that you are deteriorating and will suffer huge consequence and that drugging is best for you.
Again, not intending to pry and not wanting to be disrespectful, how old were you when you first had contact with the mental health system? Were there any ways in which family seemed to fuel it, making you into a problem to be solved, or that there was something somehow off about you?
It is an incredible credit to you that you did get out of it. You might not still have been alive otherwise.
Joshua
Yes, this is a very important matter, all the more so since California’s Governor just got his Care Courts SB-1338 passed.
As I see it the whole thing revolves around intergenerational trauma. The idea that someone is “mentally ill” seems to start in the family, and mostly it is about not measuring up to social expectations for the middle-class.
Psychiatric drugging is very common now. A large portion of the population is kept medicated.
It is very common and even more so in CA. We have prop 63 2004, Mental Health Services Act, gotten passed by now Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. They did polling and found that the electorate would go for a 1% Millionaires Tax. And then they ran 1 week of statewide TV ads and it passed by 53%. It has since raised $30 billion, and is now up to $8.3 billion per year. And all that this money is used for is putting people on drugs.
The Democrats have the 2/3rds in both houses, so they could overturn ballot box propositions, and they could even amend the state constitution. But instead they and Republicans are doing more stuff like this to make it worse.
Darrell Steinberg had put his daughter in an out of state mental hospital at the age of 13 years. As far as I am concerned, there is not anything else one needs to know about him.
The girl now in her 20’s goes along with it, “I have mental illness”, and her father continues to build his entire political career around mental health.
Joshua
Yes, we have to get these drugs off of the market.
You used to be able see this on youtube, and his other one about Autism. Now you have to be in the UK and register for a free account to see them in full.
In the first it is beyond anything one could fabricate. In Pittsburg, he talks with several families, but this one he lived with. The mother has a PhD and she used to be making regular trips to Paris. But now she says, “There is too much going on here.” So she has to stay home and they keep the 10yo drugged. They even keep their dog drugged. The boy seems like the very nicest when Lou talks with him. The boy does maybe seem kind of beaten down though. The father talks about the boy as though he is a terror, and he cites a suicide attempt.
The boy does kind of try to slip in an out of situations. Reading Françoise Dolto, she described such a boy as moving like a cat. And it is totally a product of the family environment he is living in.
But the doctor points out that the boy does not say hello or goodbye when he enters or leaves his office. And so his “illness” is effecting the course of his life and how people respond to him, so he needs to be on drugs.
As I see it, in these cases there are always two bodies of persons behaving completely unethically, the parents or guardians, and the doctors. And often it does go beyond unethically and into criminality. And that fact that we have mandatory reporting laws makes it even more likely that it is criminal.
But what makes it hard to prosecute is the doctor’s license certificate, framed and up on the wall.
The whole idea of mandatory reporting is that in most all cases of familial child abuse, doctors had long seen things that could not be proper, but they did not report, or they tried to solve the problem by talking to the parents themselves. Mandatory Reporting is supposed to solve this. But then when you have doctors becoming complicit in the fictional ailments, or advertising a position of parental exoneration, then the problem continues.
I had talked about this issue with someone I knew in County Social Services and she teaches their class on mandatory reporting, and she insists, “You report everything.”
It seems very different for the doctors in private practice, though the law and the issue are the same. They are just choosing to interpret the situations differently.
And then some minors will come of age and side with their parents and the drugging. “I have a mental illness.” Or “I have autism.”
And so likely so that they can side with the parents they will have children of their own and do the same or similar to them. That way they identify with those who have the power and never have to re-experience what it was like to have that kind of stuff done to them.
But these drug doctors hold government issued medical licenses, so this is a systemic and organized form of oppression, and clearly within Nuremburg Precedent.
Well, total non-cooperation is the first way. So you don’t show up in court or in the psychiatrist’s office unless they have you in handcuffs. And even then, you refuse to talk.
And in the field, police officer or no, you refuse to talk to them.
Okay, but I am not qualified to give legal advice. This is why we need to have the resistance organized by attorneys.
Care Courts, Recent News:
Opinion Behind Newsom’s move on California’s chronic problem with the mentally ill
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/03/newsom-california-mental-health-care/
“The 1967 legislation had been years in the making, a bipartisan undertaking that proponents hailed as the Magna Carta for people in state hospitals. It provided patients with basic rights, accelerated the emptying of those antiquated institutions and became a template for states across the country.
”
Mayor Darrell Steinberg responds in wake of deadly 24 hours in Sacramento w/ video
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/crime/deadly-24-hours-sacramento/103-e1c0e4c1-4ab3-4f06-8aed-5978a4cab2d4
Joshua
Rachel, you got a web address or an email address for “Anti-Psychiatry Rising”?
Joshua
Not being an attorney, a psychotherapist is not required to follow case law.
But if they could still get away with it they would still be telling people that they are fantasizing when they talk about childhood sexual molestation.
Today that could violate mandatory reporting.
And if they pooh pooh legal redress, they could be interpreted as giving legal advice, bad legal advice.
A lot of what psychotherapists used to do is no longer legally tenable. So they are effected by case law. Probably they are kept abreast of it by their insurance carriers.
But are they conning clients? Well when the client ends up in the office, what are they believing they will find? I would say that it is that the therapist somehow knows a great deal that they do not, and that the client’s own thinking can be corrected.
But the premise of this expectation is unfounded. Usually it will have been the client who has lived life further out on the margins. They know more how to live when your legitimacy is under attack. The therapist, on the other hand, is a licensed member of a respected profession, so I would say that it is unlikely that they could know anything of benefit to the client.
Now sometimes in the administration of the affairs of juveniles, therapists will get called in to be the decision makers. And I am not challenging this. I do not see it the same as just advertising for psychotherapy clients.
For the same reason that I am objecting to psychotherapy, I also raise objections to Philosophical Counseling. This later diverges from the ideas of Freud, as it did when both Sigmund Freud and Edmond Husserl were both students of Franz Brentano.
What I question in it is that these fee charging counselors are not actually comrades, but they want you to disclose your affairs to them.
Okay, but I have never suggested that talk therapy be outlawed, merely that we no longer allow or government to license it. Adults should be able to talk to and give money to whom every they wish.
Guys pay prostitutes do listen to them. This is known as “emotional work”. I am sure that many find it beneficial and I am not pooh poohing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNNVCpQNiT4
But I still think it best if you can build or join a group of comrades who are fighting for the same objectives as you are. And it is from these comrades that you learn the most, and it us with these comrades that you would likely most want to talk about yourself and your own affairs.
Then your issues are not seen as pathology, but rather as collective injustice which people are working to redress.
Political action often draws diverse comrades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Leading_the_People#/media/File:Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_Le_28_Juillet._La_Libert%C3%A9_guidant_le_peuple.jpg
Joshua
I think our society could do much better in dealing with grief and shame, and in recongnizing that we have these and that they should not be pathologized.
Joshua
We need to be rehearsing people in role plays on how to stand up to these Mental and Behavioral Health and Social Workers, and on how to face down the judges in the court room.
They need to know how to maintain the autonomy in their lives, and to keep the needle out of their arms.
Joshua
Ron, we are a society governed by a body of laws, and these include civil court precedents. But far too often these laws only help parents and the powerful to abuse those who do not have power.
What does the psychotherapist do to ameliorate this?
Here through legal and legislative activism Jeff Anderson stands up for victims:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om3dXMY7KRw
His efforts have recovered billions of dollars on behalf of survivors, and he has bankrupted Catholic dioceses.
A lot of this comes down to lifting statues of limitations. These are tracked here:
http://sol-reform.com/
CHILD USA CEO Marci Hamilton on SOL Reform
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fsbfN5av-M
And now one case where family conflict was brought into the court room was Rachel Channing, Morristown New Jersey
New Jersey student who sued parents returns home
https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/12/us/student-sues-parents-new-jersey/index.html
The parents did not like Rachel’s boyfriend, and so they said they were not going to pay for her college or high school.
So she ended up living with the family of a friend. And the father, an attorney, was the one who encouraged a lawsuit. The attorney who handled this Tanya Helfand was a family lawyer. And there are things in New Jersey law which made it more likely that this lawsuit would succeed, like a requirement for paying the child’s college costs after divorce and beyond the age of 18. But these parents were not divorced.
https://www.tanyahelfand.com/
https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/12/us/student-sues-parents-new-jersey/index.html
The Family Law section of the ABA watched this suit extremely closely as it could have changed a lot of things. But the suit failed badly, the judge was so ridiculous, and of course the jury never saw any evidence, and Rachel ended up having to do a Mea Culpa in the court room.
The father, a former police chief was accustomed to getting drunk and extremely inappropriate with Rachel. And the money the parents spent on their legal defense was vastly more than what Rachel wanted, just high school and a college she had already won a scholarship for.
Okay, this case is over, but the issue is far from over.
But I ask you Ron, what help does the psychotherapist offer, and do they even try to follow case law? And so isn’t the psychotherapist just conning the client by even getting them into the office and disclosing their personal affairs, so that it can be turned into a self-improvement project?
Joshua
page 181,
”
Apparently solitude, despite all its drawbacks, is an ecological niche that has some advantages of its own. The the main advantage is simply the other side of the coin of witchcraft; the great personal power that accrues to the sorcerer. It is as if people drew the conclusion that anyone who was able to pull away from the gravitation of the group must possess superhuman powers, and this belief, in itself, is he sorcerer’s power. Society attributes power to those who defy it even out our days, as exemplified by so-called charismatic leaders. Charismatic authority, as Weber suggested, derives from a person’s ability to disregard the rules of the system: “Pure charisma does not know any ‘legitimacy’ other than that flowing from personal strength” Weber 1924, p. 22). The point Weber did not make is that people pay attention to a charismatic leader, not in spite of his rebelliousness, but because of it. Anyone who presumes to hold authority independently of the social order will be thought of either as a madman or as someone with superhuman strength, because only such would dare to defy public opinion, the concentrated psychic energy of the collectivity. The act of defiant individuality attracts attention; it might eventually attract a following, and therefore gain actual power. Students who are loners in high school partake of the same ambivalent image. THey are often ridiculed and ignored, but sometimes they are secretly respected and envied.
.
.
.
In many preliterate societies, only persons who already differ psychologically from the rest of the tribe become involved with magic; they might be epileptics, albinos, or bearers of some other mark that sets them apart. Transition to the life of the hermit — feared and respected, but isolated — is easier for those who fail to fit the system in the first place.
”
Joshua
I think that this Experience Sampling Method that Csikszentmihalyi is influenced by Dabrowski. He wants to know that the teenagers are thinking when randomly polled. There will likely be big mood swings recorded in that.
Csikszentmihalyi sites lots of ongoing conflict with parents and siblings.
pg 153,
“But it is questionable whether the principle of postponing gratification really works as well as the so-called Protestant Ethic suggests. Quite apart from the fact that children who grow up in entropic families are likely to replicate the conflict in their own lives and spread it through their adult relationships, the question is whether one is justified in producing disorder in another person’s experience, no matter how lofty the goal for the sake of which the action is taken.
Joshua
Csikszentmihalyi talks about negentropy:
pg 24,
”
The elements of this state are opposite from those identified with psychic entropy. First, psychic negentropy includes positive feelings toward self and others: happiness, friendliness, and good cheer. This is a common part of adolescent experience, set off by a wink from a girlfriend, a good shot on the basketball court, or just the taste of spring in the air.
”
To me, this author is extrapolating on what Dabrowski made he Theory of Positive Disintegration.
Negentropy includes psychological activation, action follows without the need for thought or hesitation, a sense of energy and competence, intrinsic motivation, effective concentration.
page 25,
”
… it might make sense to conclude that negentropic experiences are incompatible with community order and the goals of development because they drain attention away from more essentially productive tasks. The is the reason for the puritanical aversion to enjoyment that is expressed by the Protestant Ethic.
”
Joshua
Being adolescent : conflict and growth in the teenage years / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson. Basic Books Inc 1984
This book is only so so. As in another Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book I read they are using this Experience Sampling Method, which means they have got a class of 75 adolescents running around with these pager like things that go off sometimes. They have this stack of response forms which they are supposed to fill out.
He wants to know how they spend their time, and with who, and doing what.
This is not really a Gifted Movement Book, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is not really a Gifted Movement writer, but in some ways this makes it more interesting. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a student of Dabrowski, and though he does not mention him in this volume he is clearly influenced by him.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about Entropy: Disorder in Consciousness, as something faced by adolescents, and I think everyone.
pg 19, “The tension between adolescents and the rest of society usually takes the form of a conflict between goals structured by instincts and buy values. On the one hand, a young person develops goals based on sexual desires, the need for dominance, for a social territory, for acceptance by peers. These urges are experienced as coming from the body, and therefore many adolescents accept them as their own, even though, as we have seen, this belief is based on an illusion, because instincts are geared to help the survival of the genes and not necessarily the welfare of the person carrying them.
”
Csikszentmihalyi talks about Entropy: Disorder in Consciousness, at length, and in this he distinguishes himself as a follower of Dabrowski and the anathema of the Mental Health System.
And it applies to adults just as much as it does to adolescents.
Csikszentmihalyi also talks about Negentropy: Order in Consciousness. What he really means is self-oganization, inner direction.
The 2nd law tells us that entropy is always increasing, never decreasing. But living things are self-organizing, so it looks like entropy is decreasing. It can be like this because living things can never be closed systems. They have to be be open systems, and it only looks like entropy is decreasing. Living things are more properly categorized as dissipative strutures. They are self-oganizing and they can be like this because they are not in thermal equilibrium with the environment.
And then Negative Entropy or Negative Temperature, these are things that come up in some unusual non-equilibrium structure. What is important here is that our author is talking about some situations when adolescents in particular are clearly very highly self directed. And though he does not come out and say this, we have to keep the mental health system away from them.
pg 23,
“Regard of the specific activities, people mentioned a set of consistent elements that related to the optimal experience. They described profound involvement with their activity, which combined a loss of self-consciousness with deep concentration. The experiences was subjetively pleasing — compelling enough to inspire rock climbers to risk their lives — and at the same time required highly complex use of mental or physical skills. Many respondents used the word “flow” to describe the effortless buoyancy of the experiences.
This state of consciousness we will call psychic negentropy, literally “negative psychic entropy.” It is a condition in which one feels whole and acts with clarity, commitment, and enthusiasm.
”
(It is interesting, I and a friend used to talk about flow in exactly the same way that this author does. And to find the things you really should be doing, your life’s calling, you look for that flow. But I fear, I know that in adolescent or an adult, the mental health people would call this manic. And in a pre-adolescent child they would call it autism.)
Joshua
Megan wrote: “I used to think therapy could be beneficial if only you went through the trials of finding a good therapist—and by “good,” I mean one that is not only well-trained/well-educated, but one that is a “good fit” for you in particular.”
Megan, I think this is what gets a lot of us hooked into it and keeps us hooked. With a therapist one is investing so much time and money, but you still don’t know what the therapist’s actual views are.
But then, why should you care, why should you be telling them any of your personal stuff? They aren’t going to the one representing you in court, and they aren’t going to be out on the barricades either.
And if you want to live in this world you need public honor, not just to have found a therapist who sees things your way.
Joshua
Very glad Rachel to have met you online and I am so glad that you are off of drugs.
Joshua
Anti-Psychiatry Rising?
I’m already interested, and I agree with everything you have posted.
But I also think we need to do something about psychotherapy, not to outlaw it but just to cut off the government support for it. Prohibit our government from licensing it, and clarify mandatory reporting so that anytime a child shows up in their office they have to report it to Child Protective Services. This will shut off the Fix-My-Kid doctors.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin/article/rise-and-fall-of-antipsychiatry/C7BA890894B48BE211FFA12F8527A4C9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry
https://web.archive.org/web/20131112063753/http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/anti-psychiatry-and-its-legacies
https://web.archive.org/web/20131112065704/http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/anti-psychiatry-part-1
Foucault, Michel (1997). “Psychiatric Power”. In Rabinow, Paul (ed.). Ethics, subjectivity and truth. Translated by Robert Hurley and others. New York: The New Press
The Anti-Psychiatry Movement
https://livingwithschizophreniauk.org/information-sheets/the-anti-psychiatry-movement/
The Movement Against Psychiatry
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj4mmb/the-movement-against-psychiatry
The Antipsychiatry Movement: Dead, Diminishing, or Developing?
https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201100484
Anti-Psychiatry, 21pg pdf
https://drbpacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Anti-psychiatry.pdf
Yes Rachel, thank you. But I can’t find it. Gotta link or an email address?
Joshua
Ron,
A now classic text, and it explains this better than I’ve seen anywhere else.
https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Social-Family-Radical-Thinkers/dp/1781687595/ref=sr_1_2?crid=7EP2DDCB9SM3&keywords=anti-social+family&qid=1664645943&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIxLjQ1IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=anti-social+family%2Caps%2C494&sr=8-2
They explain that psychiatry and psychotherapy convert your experience of injustice into a medial problem and a self-improvement project.
And isn’t this already obvious?
And their ability to do this is based on what power they have over you.
Joshua
California’s Housing Crisis Hasn’t Spared the State’s College Students
https://reason.com/2022/09/30/californias-housing-crisis-hasnt-spared-the-states-college-students/
”
For many California college students, navigating homelessness or overcrowding has become part of getting the degree.
Five percent of University of California (U.C.) students and 10 percent of California State University (CSU) students are homeless during the academic year, according to one state estimate. The two public university systems have a combined 16,000-person waiting list for on-campus student housing.
Meanwhile, those in search of private, off-campus housing describe a punishing months-long grind of Craigslist searches and competing with 40 other applicants for the chance to rent a single room in a 50-year-old home.
“You’d regularly see the street lined with students sleeping in cars,” says Nolan Gray, research director at California YIMBY and a PhD student at UCLA. “I had students in classes that I helped teach who were sleeping in cars, sleeping two to three people to a bedroom while still paying $1,000 a rent. ”
”
California city giving homeless people $18,000 to move somewhere else, reports say
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/california-city-sausalito-giving-homeless-people-18000-to-move-somewhere-else-reports-say-united-states-waste-of-the-week-taxpayer-dollars-open-the-books-adam-andrzejewski
Will the California Homelessness Crisis Curtail Gavin Newsom’s Ambitions? The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/homelessness-gavin-newsom/
Joshua
We have to get the entire mental health system and its concepts our of our lives.
Joshua
But why would any rational person want a government licensed psychotherapist to be in the middle of this?
A shaman maybe, but not a therapist, and not one holding a government issued license.
Joshua
It is not an aberration. They have decided that everyone needs to be drugged.
Joshua
Care Courts Recent News:
Crisis Intervention Teams have advantages over CARE courts
https://capitolweekly.net/crisis-intervention-teams-have-advantages-over-care-courts/
”
Debates about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Courts program have raged across the state in recent months. A major point of contention is whether Californians with mental health challenges will be helped or hurt by being pushed into the legal system.
In Portland, Oregon, there is a different approach that has proven successful for many years.
Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs) (Mobile Crisis Services) work with local crisis centers to “provide people in mental health crisis the care they need instead of incarceration” …. “Community Mental Health Programs in collaboration with local law enforcement agencies have established CIT programs across the state to de-escalate crisis situations involving individuals with serious mental illness.”
CITs Mobile Services respond to a mental health crisis in the community, with police normally already at the scene. The Mobile Services deescalates the situation–without using force–to get the person in crisis to agree to go to a crisis center and avoid being booked by the police.
”
”
CITs assure that most folks being dropped off in a mental health emergency don’t end immediately up in jail or in court because of their medical condition. CITs aren’t a panacea. The people helped often came back later in another crisis because their living circumstances hadn’t changed and homelessness is a permanent crisis if you’re homeless.
”
”
CARE Courts force people into a treatment program and apply penalties for non-compliance “…, the consequences for being found “non-compliant” with a CARE plan or not attending court hearings are serious: a possible referral to Lanterman- Petris-Short Act (conservatorship) proceedings with a presumption that there is no suitable community-based alternative for the person.
This creates a direct route to conservatorship – a legal determination that deprives a person of the right to choose where to reside, to make medical decisions, to vote, to decide social and sexual contacts and relationships, and other fundamental rights.
This is a strategy for assuring people comply with mental health treatment programs, but in my opinion, it is needlessly punitive and not based on proven effective treatment strategies.
”
”
The CARE Courts will throw Californians already suffering from several life crises into an unfriendly and intimidating system, when what people in crisis need is compassion and help.
”
Joshua
But why is the therapist someone whom anyone should ever disclose their affairs to?
In a civilized society the approved way of redressing wrongs is the Civil Court. And to advance a case there you will probably want a lawyer. The therapist is not a lawyer. They do not even have a law degree. And therapist client privilege is much weaker than attorney client privilege. The attorney knows how to build a case, the therapist doesn’t.
Joshua
Corporal punishment can be outlawed, but the people who defend it are not that far from the people who support mental health.
Joshua
Our officials have got an every increasing number of people on drugs. More and more adults, and younger and younger children.
Thomas Insel, a major mental health ideologue, says it is 20% of adults.
We have to shut the mental health system off and get these drugs off the market.
Joshua
Then if I were the parent of a child being told they need CBT, besides going to a lawyer and the police myself, I would go to the School Board and demand in front of witnesses that that adult authority never be allowed to speak to my child again.
Joshua
Care Courts Recent News:
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria in Netherlands studying bike lanes as homeless crisis grows
https://www.kusi.com/san-diego-mayor-todd-gloria-in-netherlands-studying-bike-lanes-as-homeless-crisis-grows/
San Francisco sued by homeless demanding affordable housing
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/san-francisco-sued-by-homeless-demanding-affordable-housing-2022-09-28/
Cities can’t prohibit the homeless from using blankets or pillows on public property, court rules
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Cities-can-t-prohibit-the-homeless-from-using-17473913.php
Homeless San Franciscans Sue, Charge City of San Francisco and Mayor Harass Unhoused, Violate Their Civil Rights in Cover Up for Affordable Housing Failures
https://www.davisvanguard.org/2022/09/homeless-san-franciscans-sue-charge-city-of-san-francisco-and-mayor-harass-unhoused-violate-their-civil-rights-in-cover-up-for-affordable-housing-failures/
Homeless Advocates Sue San Francisco To End Homeless Encampment Sweeps
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/homeless-advocates-sue-san-francisco-to-end-homeless-encampment-sweeps/
Joshua
This video was from yesterday
Mayor Bill Wells and Amy Reichert call out San Diego County’s failure to fix homeless crisis
https://www.kusi.com/mayor-bill-wells-and-amy-reichert-call-out-san-diego-countys-failure-to-fix-homeless-crisis/
Sounds like the Democrats want to declare homelessness a Public Heath Crisis, which is a hold over from the COVID insanity and similar, and it is similar to Care Courts and turning homelessness into a “mental health issue”.
Conservatives are actually opposing the Public Health Crisis approach!
But what really is to happen is quite unknown.
No needs test public housing and Universal Basic Income will solve the entire problem, as very few people would refuse that. It is not “Housing First”, which is internment. And it contains private real estate gentrification. Similar to how in most industrialized countries and in the US, agricultural prices are controlled by the central government.
Joshua
Young people need to be schooled in where to draw lines with adult authorities, and in how they should do this.
They need to learn to shut off authorities who are saying they need therapy, or anything like CBT, or in any other way are trying to turn problems with adults back on to the child, or trying to mess with their heads.
If a child told me that some adult authority in their school was telling them that they need CBT, I would tell them to walk straight to the police station and log it as a report of criminality.
Then I would say that they need to find a lawyer without wasting any time.
Joshua
No one needs or benefits from psychiatric medications.
Joshua
Yes the mental health system is totalitarian, and this is why we must eradicate it and prosecute the practitioners.
Joshua
Removed for moderation.
Mindfulness in the schools, in everyone’s life, is good. I think it is necessary.
But when you introduce and idea like:
“identify their feelings and develop CBT-based emotional regulation skills”,
and say that Mental Health and Well Being might be compromised, you are making children subject to abuse and without redress, just as they would be if they were interned in a psychiatric hospital.
Joshua
This isn’t the first time in CA that there have been big uprisings over the homeless. It maybe comes about once a decade, since there has been homelessness, which is about 1980.
It will continue to get worse because of advancing industrial and information technology reducing the need for labor, and that then reducing the economic demand for industrial goods.
This Todd Gloria is taking a lot of criticism from the Right. But he is also one of those screaming the most loudly for Gavin’s Care Courts, and to have it first implemented in San Diego County.
Gloria, like most of the other backers of Care Courts such as Umberg, Eggman, and Steinberg, is one who had a family member whom they put into the mental health system. They fault the mental health system and the law for it not being coercive enough.
Bill Walton, basketball legend and San Diego resident, rails on how city has handled homelessness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-U2-dc8S6A
^ What the authorities are afraid to do is no needs test public housing, and then Universal Basic Income. This houses everyone without creating internment camps or advancing the Mental Health System. But most people who are not rich would want this. I contains private real estate gentrification, so the people who are the most against this are the real estate industry.
So the authorities are careful to make sure that whatever they offer is only available to the eyesore homeless, and to do this they invoke the idea of Mental Health.
****************************
Abandoned vehicles burn at troubled California homeless encampment
https://kesq.com/news/2022/09/27/abandoned-vehicles-burn-at-troubled-california-homeless-encampment/
One man had earned a living by being a stage hand.
”
Among the residents who have been relocated to housing is Ron McGowan. He was a stagehand almost his entire life, and it was paying the rent, until COVID.
“During the pandemic we were the first ones to get hit,” he told KPIX. “A lot of other industries could pivot. You could not pivot as a stagehand.”
He took the money he had and put his belongings in storage. With nowhere else to go, he ended up at Wood Street.
“On and off for two years,” he said of his time in the encampment. “It has definitely been traumatic over there.”
”
Well Gavin’s COVID Hysteria hit those who lived with the most itinerant employment the hardest. And so there was a huge surge in the homeless population. And this really hasn’t come back down, and it isn’t going to either. It is a permanent change.
And then Gavin’s AB-5 destroyed the Gig Economy, so a lot of people who had earned their living that way were out of luck.
Joshua
Abandoned vehicles burn at troubled California homeless encampment
https://kesq.com/news/2022/09/27/abandoned-vehicles-burn-at-troubled-california-homeless-encampment/
Sports betting to solve homelessness? Dodgy claims made by Prop. 26 and 27 campaigns, fact checked w/ audio
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article266083936.html
Mayor Bill Wells and Amy Reichert call out San Diego County’s failure to fix homeless crisis
w/ video
https://www.kusi.com/mayor-bill-wells-and-amy-reichert-call-out-san-diego-countys-failure-to-fix-homeless-crisis/
Joshua
Is Orange County Gutting Local Homeless Resources Needed by CARE Court? VOICE OF OC
https://voiceofoc.org/2022/09/is-orange-county-gutting-local-homeless-resources-needed-by-care-court/
”
A jobseeker looking to clean up.
A woman whose husband tried to kill her.
Those are the types of people who found solace, pre-pandemic, at a South Main Street homeless service center in some cases every day of the week in Santa Ana.
And later wrote about it in sworn court declarations.
The center’s one of several homeless service providers throughout Orange County – like Micah’s Way, the Harm Reduction Institute and Mary’s Kitchen – getting pushed out by local city officials over public nuisance complaints.
They represent one side of the homelessness debate that views direct assistance and basic needs as crucial to helping people recover their lives – and with full autonomy.
That seemed to jive less and less with local officials over the years, seeing these sites draw visible homeless presence, in favor of what some consider a new rallying point: Court-ordered mental health treatment.
It’s called CARE Court, and it seeks to put people with critical mental health issues into court-ordered treatment plans for up to two years before they deteriorate or commit crimes.
”
California Crane Strikes Amtrak Train While Clearing Out Homeless Encampment
https://www.newstrail.com/california-crane-strikes-amtrak-train-while-clearing-out-homeless-encampment/
Newsom Signs Bill to Allow Homeless to Keep Emotional Support Dogs in Shelters
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/bill-to-allow-homeless-to-keep-emotional-support-dogs-in-shelters-signed-by-newsom/
Senate Bill 774, authored by Senator Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys)
(When Care Courts SB-1338 first went through the State Senate, Hertzberg was the only one who refused to vote for it.)
Lawsuit demands San Francisco stop homeless camp sweeps
https://www.turnto23.com/news/state/lawsuit-demands-san-francisco-stop-homeless-camp-sweeps
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and others filed the lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individuals who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. Defendants include the city, several city departments and Mayor London Breed.
Joshua
Ron, the issue is not specifically what is considered abuse. It is what is considered normal and mandated. It is the nature of the middle-class family, people having children so that they can use them to give themselves an adult identity, and then finding the child to be defective.
Maybe the parents are driving the child to the doctor. With adults it is schizophrenia. With adolescents it is bipolar. With younger children it is autism. Maybe the parents are driving the child to the doctor. But may the child is not exposed to white coats until they are old enough to be driving themselves, but it still amounts to a secularization of Original Sin.
Joshua
You talk to the people who are your comrades, the ones whom you fight shoulder to shoulder with at the barricades.
Paris, 1871
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-paris-commune-barricade-in-the-rue-de-la-paix-1871-france-113149961.html
And so you think there is value in talking to a psychotherapist, and a government licensed therapist no less. Well what are their qualifications? And what are your qualifications?
Were you there in 1954 with Võ Nguyên Giáp, as he cut the airstrip and then disregarded the Chinese advisors and turned Dien Bien Phu into a siege campaign?
Are you a member of the Irish Republican Army?
Do you have flattened knuckles and knife and bullet scars?
No, then what can you possible offer your clients except being someone who hears everything they say as evidence of defective thinking?
Joshua
California’s CARE Court: A Step in the Right Direction or ‘Terrifying’ Step Backwards?
https://voiceofoc.org/2022/09/californias-care-court-a-step-in-the-right-direction-or-terrifying-step-backwards-%EF%BF%BC/
”
Fed up with tent cities, officials up and down California have ironed a new approach to the publicly-visible homelessness crisis on their hands:
Putting homeless people in front of judges and potentially into treatment programs.
The newly-approved and highly controversial system is known as CARE Court, and it isn’t exclusive to homeless people or intended for all of them.
Rather, the new law’s authors say it’s for those with mental health and substance abuse issues, who under the current system only get help after they deteriorate or commit crimes, or end up back on the street with no help at all.
The idea’s to court-order such people into a treatment plan for up to two years, with County of Orange officials joining six other counties in committing to an early rollout of the system over the next calendar year.
”
”
But around this new system are two directly opposing views of how voluntary it really is – and where it stands in California’s long and notorious history of institutionalization.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, state lawmakers and big city mayors have pushed CARE Court as non-coercive and individualized – and as the next step in the state’s move away from institutionalization.
”
”
Civil rights groups, on the other hand, say CARE Court is institutionalization’s next chapter, coercive by its very structure, while self-determination — voluntary but supportive treatment — is the best route through which people recover.
”
”
The CARE Court legislation invokes the ‘self-determination’ concept twice in its text and in accompanying public policy documents.
Yet the very concept’s loudest advocates have come out swinging against it.
While painted in voluntary terms, critics say CARE Court guarantees no housing in the unaffordable state.
In the long run, they say the plan empowers courts to warehouse people in shelters or place them in conservatorships, the case where a judge appoints someone (the ‘conservator’) to care for another adult deemed to have no self-decisionmaking ability.
”
”
“These big city public officials can make what they’ve been trying to do happen at the expense of poor people really easily,” said Lili Graham, a Disability Rights California attorney and one of CARE Court’s chief critics.
“And you can put someone anywhere, regardless of whether it’s the right place for them or not.”
”
”
But if you ask Brooke Weitzmann, a high-profile attorney for homeless and disabled people:
“Voluntary does not require the judicial branch.”
”
”
CARE Court Rings Alarms for Civil Rights Groups
”
”
Weitzmann, meanwhile, has this question: “Why would we want to redirect money that could be going toward the actual resources and toward the people’s needs, into the administration of a court system?”
“We already have a great voluntary system,” Weitzmann said. “It’s called the Health Care Agency. And if they had enough employees, to help people come up with voluntary plans and execute them, if they had enough internal staff, and enough contractors, we could be meeting the needs.”
In a written emailed statement responding to questions on Sept. 19, Umberg said “Housing is a vital component to the CARE Court process – but finding stability and staying up to date with treatment is virtually impossible for the unhoused. One of the upsides to this new process is that the court will be able to issue orders that are specific to the needs of each individual (i.e. bridge housing, a licensed adult care facility, supportive housing, etc.).”
”
Photos: State clears Wood Street homeless camp, Oakland’s largest
Caltrans planned in July to shut the camp by the first week of August
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/26/photos-state-clears-wood-street-homeless-camp-oaklands-largest/
Joshua
2 Concrete Steps to Achieving System Change:
1. Prosecute the government issued license holders of the mental health system in International Court for Crimes Against Humanity, drugging, using their license to tell someone that they are “mentally ill”, and everything else.
2. Prohibit our government from licensing psychotherapists. And where there are such sessions occurring with minors, enforce mandatory reporting as it was intended. Anytime a child shows up for therapy it has to be reported to Child Protective Services so that there can be court oversight, and follow up reports have to be made, and the therapist has to try to get to the care takers and report, or report that he cannot.
Joshua
Resistance:
Our jails are always full to capacity with all the Drug and Domestic Violence cases. What they can really do to people who defy the Care Court will be limited. We need to resist in mass, and we need to prepare people for this. And we need to shut down the Los Angeles County Street Drugging Team.
Recent News:
LA agencies failed to spend nearly $150 million in federal homeless grants, report says
https://abc7.com/homelessness-los-angeles-county-homeless-in-southern-california-federal-grants/12266305/
Joshua
So we need to take the entire mental health system to pieces!
Joshua
If you were not tangled up with the mental health system already, would you still have been at risk of being jailed?
I think most of the time the mental health system is part of what lands people in jail.
Joshua
Ron, as soon as the party walks into the office of any kind of a therapist and opens their mouth to speak, they are selling themselves out, setting themselves up to be treated as suffering from an illness.
What they needed to have done instead is some self inventory and then begun the search for political comrades, people who want to change objective things about the world.
Joshua
Looks like we get one free LA Times read per day:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-24/doubts-raised-over-the-los-angeles-homeless-count-is-it-time-for-a-new-way
Newsom Promised in 2008 to Fix Homelessness: Instead, He Made it Worse w/2x videos
https://elamerican.com/gavin-newsom-promised-in-2008-to-solve-homelessness/
Senator Brian Jones announces new bill banning homeless encampments near schools and parks
The bill requires enforcement officers to provide information about sleeping alternatives, homeless and mental health services, and homeless shelters.
https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/senator-brian-jones-new-bill-banning-homeless-encampments-near-schools-parks/509-89684d42-1d82-4c7b-aca6-499d5149c102
California’s homelessness crisis hits new flash point: Private residents suing cities over encampments
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Could-this-California-city-s-next-step-to-17462802.php
Thomas Insel, July 22, NY Times, with 1 hour 13 min audio.
There’s a paradox that sits at the center of our mental health conversation in America. On the one hand, our treatments for mental illness have gotten better and better in recent decades. Psychopharmaceuticals have improved considerably; new, more effective methods of psychotherapy have been developed; and we’ve reached a better understanding of what kinds of social support are most helpful for those experiencing mental health crises.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-thomas-insel.html
20% of adults are on prescription psych meds.
Joshua
When are we going to shut off this entire industry?
Joshua
There have been books like this for a long time, they are the staple of the middle-class family. They are called pedagogy manuals. They show people how they can use children to increase their own social status. They give them the words to speak so that they will look good.
Lately the words are “empathy”, “attachment”, “bonding”, and “communications skills”. Adults go to psychotherapists so that they can be taught this language too.
At the Barnes and Nobel’s stores they have a whole section with large format glossy paper picture books. As far as I am concerned they are a type of K*dd*ie P*rn.
Joshua
We have to fight these commitments, not matter what it takes.
Joshua
Resistance needs to be organized, people need to know how to fight this on the ground, and in court.
I would say refuse to tell the cops anything which goes beyond the immediate situation. Say, “I’ve been instructed by a civil attorney to never talk about anything beyond the immediate situation, never to talk about anything which gets to constructing a biography on me, because I may be taking some actions in the civil court to redress historical wrongs.”
This might infuriate police as they are not used to people standing up to them. But let them arrest you whatever. And same for a judge and same for any of these Social, Mental, and Behavioral Health Workers. Try to not even be in the same room with them.
So tell them nothing, and just face them down, and you should be able to avoid drugging, which is the the most important. And if they talk about shelter or any other programs, “I have been ordered to give no response at all.”
They never really have anything on you unless you discuss your biography with them. And anyone who lives on the street has already had their biography nullified.
And when they try to put words into your mouth do not take the bait, just stick to your own line. If unhoused never affirm it, and resist any temptation to plead for pity. This is what talking to them really amounts to.
Anyway, this needs to be organized by lawyers. And we need to set up safe houses and an underground railroad.
Joshua
Josef Mengele liked to do surgical experiments on dwarves, people with mismatched eyes, and identical twins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele#/media/File:Child_survivors_of_Auschwitz.jpeg
Besides having his medical degree he had a PhD in Anthropology. He seemed to want to prove the Nazi racial theories, that everything depended on genetic hereditary. He got another doctor, from Hungary, to do the dissections. He had powerful wealthy backers and he was always sending them stuff in specimen jars.
So the hunt for Mengele went on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele#/media/File:Mengele_US_Navy_Medicine_(page_10_crop).jpg
until we had positive genetic identification of his remains.
Joshua
Removed for moderation.
What was this system supposed to do, except to screw up the lives of millions of people just to prove their theory of biophysical psychiatry.
There is no failure. We just need to eradicate the entire thing.
And all the more so as CA Governor Gavin Newsom has got his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State law passed.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/04/saving-lives-cementing-stigma-review-just-like-you/#comment-201511
Joshua
Care Courts Recent Related News:
San Diego County officials talk about the implementation of ‘Care Court’
https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/san-diego-county-implementation-care-court/509-e14a2003-a5e8-47c2-ba53-fa82a6b02c24
Commentary: Governor Gives Us the CARE Act When What We Need is Housing For the Homeless
https://www.davisvanguard.org/2022/09/commentary-governor-gives-us-the-care-act-when-what-we-need-is-housing-for-the-homeless/
Opinion: 9 Bills Newsom Can Sign Today to Alleviate Homelessness in California
https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2022/09/22/opinion-9-bills-newsom-can-sign-today-to-alleviate-homelessness-in-california/
Disability Rights California Disappointed with Governor Newsom’s Signing of SB 1338
https://www.davisvanguard.org/2022/09/guest-commentary-disability-rights-california-disappointed-with-governor-newsoms-signing-of-sb-1338-umberg-care-court-into-law/
Joshua
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
pg 71:
The psychopath does not experience the anxiety one sees in the psychoneurotic; he does not suffer conflict in his internal milieu. In other words, he never undergoes a period of multilevel disintegration. Therefore, he neither is conscious of the complexity of his internal environment no sees himself objectively. He is incapable of either self-criticism or self-control.
Hughlings Jackson,
Mazurkiewics, died 1946, Polish psychiatrist, neo-Jacksonist.
Joshua
Being adolescent : conflict and growth in the teenage years / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson. BasicBooks 1984
The Psychiatric System is and abomination, and we must eradicate it and prosecute the practitioners. And often it is preying on children and enabling child abuse.
We need to stop debating and to start acting.
Joshua
Care Courts Recent Related News:
San Jose Homeless Sweep Creates New Dangers
The sprawling land once home to hundreds of San Jose homeless residents sits mostly empty this week.
https://patch.com/california/campbell/san-jose-homeless-sweep-creates-new-dangers
^Care Courts will solve nothing, except to create a new class of drug addicts, to make people see why they have to avoid the shelters, as they are internment camps, and to give the Democrats more of these Mental Health and Social Workers to vote for them.
Homelessness in California’s Cities
https://www.ppic.org/event/homelessness-in-californias-cities/
Rising homelessness is tearing California cities apart
Democrats are under pressure to fix the state’s most pervasive problem — or at least move it out of sight.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/21/california-authorities-uproot-homeless-people-00057868
^ a good article!
“San Diego has penalized people refusing shelter”
Mayor Gloria’s push for homeless ‘progressive enforcement’ leads to eightfold spike in arrests
https://inewsource.org/2022/06/10/san-diego-homeless-arrests/
‘It’s Just Horrendous’: Thousands Of San Jose Seniors Face Homelessness
https://patch.com/california/campbell/its-just-horrendous-thousands-san-jose-seniors-face-homelessness
S.F. had bold plan to cut chronic homelessness in half in 5 years. The numbers only got worse
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/homelessness-plan-numbers-17453102.php
Joshua
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
Dąbrowski was a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist
pg 80:
Psychopaths as a rule do not create cultural works. The psychopath’s intelligence, even at a high level is not of a creative nature; it merely serves the egoistic purposes of the dominating impulse or group of impulses. Hence, even extensive use of intelligence leads not to creative ideas but to destructive action. As a result of these strong impulsive dynamics, it is difficult for the psychopath to make a long-range, controlling estimate of his own and other people’s acts; therefore, he has no capacity for sympathetic insight into the states of mind of others and is unable to grasp any social, moral, or cultural problems.
Pyschoneurotics, on the contrary, create works of culture because of their high moral sensitivity, their capacity for introspection, their ability to estimate their capacity for introspection, their ability to estimate their own and other people’s attitudes, and their ability to differentiate levels and to experience the “subject-object” process within themseleves, ie., because of their susceptibility to the process of disintegration, especially those of multilevel disintegration.
Joshua
This still does not explain where the idea of using medications to treat “mental illness” actually starts.
It makes no sense, unless you are interpreting “mental illness” as indicative of some physical ailment. And “mental illness” is already a very stretched interpretation in itself.
Joshua
School often is not very engaging or challenging. Making this into an “illness” is an outrage.
Joshua
We need some more smarts when it comes to dealing with harsh life experiences, past and present.
But as far as the Mental Health System, what we need is complete eradication and Crimes Against Humanity prosecution.
Your website looks promising
https://existentia.com.hr/en/
Joshua
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
pg 77
The Feeling of Inferiority
”
Although the psychopath does not undergo any essential processes and experiences characteristic of multilevel disintegration, he may experience a feeling of inferiority. But it is a feeling of inferiority with regard to the external environment, not a self-dissatisfaction. A contrary phenomenon occurs in psychoneurotics. Such individuals demonstrate various types of increased excitability. Psychoneurotics are typical examples both of the process of development of internal environment and of the process of disintegration, especially the multilevel type. All the above-mentioned processes, which are lacking in psychopaths, are chacteristic of psychoneurotics.
Essential elements of psychoneurosis are the dynamization of the internal environment, the experiencing of hierarchy in oneself, and the strong manifestation of dynamics processing toward an ever higher hierarchy in oneself, and the strong manifestation of dynamics progressing toward toward an ever higher hierarchy of values up to the personality ideal. With a growing awareness and stabilization of his personal ideal, the individual becomes more conscious of the distance separating him from it; his sense of reality increases, and the dynamics of the ideal become the principle disposing and directing center in the individual’s development–the main source of developmental energy.
Joshua
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
page 78
What is the role of the third agent? The third agent, together with the first agent (inherited and inborn dynamics) and the second (environmental influences), becomes the major developmental agent in highly cultured individuals with a high degree of self-consciousness. They dynamics of the third agent arise and develop in certain number of individuals during periods of stress and during the developmental crises of life such as puberty, adolescence, and the climacteric. Rudiments of this agent may be seen in especially talented, sensitive, and sometimes nervous children. The third agent functions to deny some and affirm other specific peculiarities and dynamics within the individual’s internal environment, at the same time denying and affirming certain forms of influences of the external environment. The third agent selects, separates, and eliminates heterogeneous elements acting in both internal and external environments. The third agent becomes active during periods of strong tension of the developmental instinct and during positive multilevel disintegration. It operates in individuals endowed with strong tendencies toward positive development and, therefore, may be often seen in nervous, neurotic, and psychoneurotic persons. Such individuals often have inferiority feelings (typical of these disorders), connected as a rule with the process of disintegration.
In psychopath, there is neither a process of disintegration nor the development of a third agent because the disposing and directing center consists of an impulse or group of impulses integrated at a low level. Nor does the psychopath experience inferiority feelings with regard to himself because the development of this feeling presumes the process of disintegration.
Joshua
Everyone behind Care Courts, everyone except Gavin, has a family member whom they have tracked into the mental health system. That is all the Mental Health System is, containment for the family scapegoats. And now this is being formalized as a legal trap for the unhoused. There was no homelessness in America 1940 – 1980. It is now because of legal and economic changes ushered in by President Reagan’s Administration. Newsom, Steinberg, Umberg, and Eggman are shameless. Public housing is what contains private gentrification. Psychiatric drugging is about the worst thing you could do to someone. Legal resistance is being organized.
Joshua
No, its a Mental Hygiene Movement and the Eugenics Movement running amuck, and preying on children as we sit and refuse to do anything about it!
All the more important as CA Governor has gotten his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State Law passed.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/04/saving-lives-cementing-stigma-review-just-like-you/#comment-201440
Joshua
Care Courts Recent News:
Why housing advocates oppose a new California law designed to help the homeless
A new California law ostensibly aimed at helping unhoused people shreds their autonomy, advocates say
https://www.salon.com/2022/09/18/why-housing-advocates-oppose-a-new-california-law-designed-to-help-the-homeless/
”
Already, unhoused people with severe mental health disorders can be involuntarily held in psychiatric care, but only for three days. They can leave only if they promise to take medications and make certain appointments. Using a court order, the CARE Act extends that period for up to a year, which can be extended to two years.
”
”
Family members, service providers and first responders — including paramedics or police officers — are among those legally able to file a petition with CARE court. If facing criminal charges, the individual could avoid punishment by enrolling in a mental health treatment plan. A judge could then order someone into treatment, including housing and medications.
”
“This law violates a person’s right to self-determination and violates people’s right to choose how they want to and need to address their problems,” Sam Tsemberis told Salon.
Newsom’s office is describing the program as a “paradigm shift” — but some advocates say that shift is in the wrong direction.
“This law violates a person’s right to self-determination and violates people’s right to choose how they want to and need to address their problems,” Sam Tsemberis told Salon in an email. Tsemberis is the founder and CEO of Pathways Housing First Institute, a non-profit founded in 1992 that originated the Housing First model for addressing housing access. He characterized the law as politically motivated, citing Newsom’s alleged bid for U.S. president, and designed to appeal to voters “tired of seeing homelessness.”
“Based on my clinical experience and research comparing voluntary and involuntary court-mandated treatment programs, it is very clear that better outcomes are achieved when treatment is voluntary, trauma-informed, and compassionate,” Tsemberis said, adding, “This law will not have any impact on reducing homelessness because it does not provide funding for housing.”
But the fact that police can intervene in these situations has alarmed some advocates. “Law enforcement and outreach workers would have a new tool to threaten unhoused people with referral to the court to pressure them to move from a given area,” Human Rights Watch said in April.
“Newsom’s ‘CARE’ Courts bill will not stop homelessness and it will not stop our mental health crisis,” James Burch, deputy director of the Anti Police-Terror Project, said in a statement, citing statistics that people with untreated mental health disabilities are 16 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that nearly 1,000 people have been killed by California police in six years.
California lawmakers approved CARE Court. What comes next?
Manuela Tobias & Jocelyn Wiener, CalMatters 9 hrs ago w/ audio
https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/state-and-regional/california-lawmakers-approved-care-court-what-comes-next/article_c2887221-ce25-565d-9b91-07786ac08346.html
California Politics: Newsom signs Care Court legislation, agrees to gubernatorial debate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxULYnWgM5E
video
https://www.abc10.com/video/news/politics/california-politics-newsom-signs-care-court-legislation-agrees-to-debate/103-f17267f0-bda4-4dda-87a5-ef418f5a0d4a
Joshua
How the Autism – Apserger’s – Neurodiversity Hoax still rages on, and what those being targeted should do to protect themselves from it.
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964
Dąbrowski was a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist
Because of poor communications between Poland and the west, he ideas are very different. Some of his views come from the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, but it is also very compatible with the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, Fanon, Szasz, Laing, and Cooper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_D%C4%85browski
As it worked out, Dąbrowski spent the last decades of his life working in Canada, where he pick up quite a cadre of followers who make up the core of the Gifted Education Movement.
And I have a lot more respect for the Gifted Movement now that I understand this about it and know who these core members are. It is not just the upper middle-class trying to replicate itself. These kid really are way out there, and they will go thru continual cycles of reinvention at multiple levels.
And so Dąbrowski’s ideas are the antithesis of the Mental Health System, as though this is not said openly, this core of the Gifted Movement is the antithesis of the Autism – Asperger’s Hoax.
Joshua
Very true Yinyang!
Joshua
“efficacy of the treatment of common mental health problems”
Mental illness is a myth and we need to shut down the psychology journalists who keep promoting it.
Joshua
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski, 1964, Intro by Jason Aronson.
p. XVII
”
Like Thomas Szasz, author of Myths of Mental Illness, Dabrowski rejects the medical model of “illness” for psychiatric disorder. Szasz’s definition of psychiatric disorder as “disturbances in patterns of living” is congenial to Dabrowski’s point of view, but Dabrowski regards slight psychiatric disorders as necessary for personality development and would not consider them wrong patterns.
”
Szasz in Hungary and Dabrowski in Poland. We here in CA and the US are using the concept of Mental Illness in exactly the same way that had been the norm in the Communist East Block.
Dabrowsky talks about Erich Lindemann and Erik Erikson, neither,
“… has written specifically on the positive functions of acute psychoses. The anxiety, even psychoneurosis, may have a positive function in personality development is not inconsistent with current attitudes in Western psychiatry, but that psychoses – the persecutory delusions of paranoia, the hallucinations and the withdrawl of a schizophrenic, and the wild hyperactivity of a manic – may play a positive role in an individual’s maturation falls strangely on our ears. e tend to view psychosis as a failure of defense, the surrender of attempts at adaptation. Yet Thomas French and Jacob Kasonin some years ago and Bateson recently have suggested that psychosis may have a positive function.”
Percival’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis 1830 – 1832. G. Bateson (ed) Stanford Univ Press, 1961
https://www.amazon.com/Percevals-narrative-patients-psychosis-1830-1832/dp/0688078834
Perceval’s narrative; a patient’s account of his psychosis, 1830-1832. Edited by Gregory Bateson. (1961)
*
Bateson, “suggests that schizophrenia is a “vast and painful initiation rite conducted by the self,” and that it has a definite course to run leading to the birth of a new identity. “… congruent with Dabrowski’s emphasis on te positive function of acute psychosis.
Joshua
Care Courts Recent News:
Advocates Criticize Newsom Over Measure Aimed at Substance Use Disorder
https://www.nugmag.com/advocates-criticize-newsom-over-measure-aimed-at-substance-use-disorder/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=advocates-criticize-newsom-over-measure-aimed-at-substance-use-disorder
There’s not much care in Newsom’s CARE court
https://48hills.org/2022/09/theres-not-much-care-in-newsoms-care-court/
CARE Court could start in San Diego County by next summer
https://www.kpbs.org/news/local/2022/09/16/care-court-could-start-san-diego-county-next-summer
SF Must Have a Mental Health Court in 12 Months, But No One Can Say How it Will Work
https://thefrisc.com/sf-must-have-a-mental-health-court-in-12-months-but-no-one-can-say-how-it-will-work-98638bc7d77f
News
Newsom signs bill creating CARE Court system into law
https://almanacnews.com/news/2022/09/16/newsom-signs-bill-creating-care-court-system-into-law
https://www.theepochtimes.com/gov-newsom-oks-care-act-to-force-severely-mentally-ill-people-into-treatment_4734703.html
Interesting to hear what their ideas are:
How CARE court act will be implemented in Kern
https://news.yahoo.com/care-court-act-implemented-kern-012632196.html
Newsom Signs Far-Reaching, Controversial Mental Health Bill Into Law
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/newsom-signs-far-reaching-controversial-mental-health-bill-into-law/
We Do Not Need CARE Court Aug 11, extensive list of signatories, 20 pages
https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2022/08/Open%20Letter%20to%20Governor%20Newsom%20August%2011%202022.pdf
Joshua
People need to know much more about Thomas Szasz, especially at this time when the Mental Health Movement if exploding. CA Governor Gavin Newsom has gotten his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State law passed and support for this in the legislature was near unanimous. Most people believe that everyone is on some Mental Health Spectrum and that they should be disclosing their affairs to psychotherapist and that we need more psychotherapists.
Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski, 1964, Intro by Jason Aronson.
p. XVII
”
Like Thomas Szasz, author of Myths of Mental Illness, Dabrowski rejects the medical model of “illness” for psychiatric disorder. Szasz’s definition of psychiatric disorder as “disturbances in patterns of living” is congenial to Dabrowski’s point of view, but Dabrowski regards slight psychiatric disorders as necessary for personality development and would not consider them wrong patterns.
”
Szasz in Hungary and Dabrowski in Poland. We here in CA and the US are using the concept of Mental Illness in exactly the same way that had been the norm in the Communist East Block.
People must wise up and start fighting back!
Great Article Keith!
Joshua
This is the full Newsom Care Courts signing event, with all the speakers. It is amazing to me how all the people crying out for this, except perhaps Newsom, have had a family member they deemed as “mentally ill”, and whom they think would have benefited from living under a Psychiatric Police State. I think the Mental Health State in this country now probably works a lot like it was in the Soviet Union.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey8rHoeWgfY
Joshua
Homeless advocates decry Newsom’s mental institution law
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/homeless-advocates-decry-newsoms-mental-institution-law/
This is an atrocity unfolding before our very eyes. And yes part of the population slated for drugging, internment and conservatorship, and another part designated as their keepers. And this second segment votes.
Joshua
Removed for moderation
“Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is outside the current modes of personality theory; it stems from sources at the present neglected in the United States, it views “pathological” symptoms as generally positive factors in personality growth, and it was developed in Poland, a country that has been largely isolated from the West in recent decades.”
Joshua
Democrats have come to the position that when Governor Ronald Reagan closed down most of CA’s mental hospitals, that something wrong was being done. They needed to be replaced by Out Patient Treatment, or Assisted Out Patient Treatment. That means the asylum is created in your own head by using drugs.
And as CA Governor Gavin Newsom has signed his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State Law, his people talk about using drugs to “stabilize” people. And most of those behind this really seem to believe that member of their own family would have benefited from this:
Homeless advocates decry Newsom’s mental institution law
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/homeless-advocates-decry-newsoms-mental-institution-law/
”
The Oakland-based Anti Police-Terror Project is voicing strong opposition to the bill. APTP asserted that court-ordered hospitalization and medicalization are ineffective, as well as violate an individual’s human right to voluntarily seek mental health treatment.
”
Joshua
Where do people get this idea that mood altering chemicals are good for you? How far back does it go, and what did it start with.
To me it seems no different from the vast numbers of people who think ethanol and nicotine are good ways to make it through the day. And then as their numbers seem to be dropping, there are many more now who depend on marijuana, or even on crystal meth.
And as CA Governor Gavin Newsom has signed his Care Courts Psychiatric Police State Law, his people talk about using drugs to “stabilize” people. And most of those behind this really seem to believe that member of their own family would have benefited from this:
Sickening:
12 min video
https://www.kcra.com/article/gavin-newsom-to-sign-care-court-program-bill/41203085#
So how far back does it go, and with what did it start?
Joshua
And we need someone like Dabrowski to fight the mental health system, tortured by both the Nazis and the Communists.
Our state mental health apparatus continues to expand without bounds, until now it is a lot like what it must have been like behind the Iron Curtain.
Joshua
Kazimierz Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration (1964)
a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist, most revered in the Gifted Movement, anathema of the mental health and autism industries
ed and intro by Jason Aronson, Dept of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
from back of book:
”
The theory recognizes and emphasizes positive aspects of what are usually described in Western psychiatric literature as negative or “pathological” symptoms of mental illness.
”
See, I figured out for myself that the Gifted Movement is the anathema of the Autism / Asperger’s Hoax. It’s just that their people do not say that. They can’t. They are involved in Teacher Training, School Counseling, and even Psychotherapy. To challenge the Autism / Asperger’s Hoax would be to declare nuclear war on the parents.
Well a kind of inner circle of the Gifted Movement holds Dabrowski as scripture. And that is interesting as his work was not originally pitched as Gifted Movement. He is coming from another kind of a society.
But as I see more of this I see that his theory is also the anathema of the Mental Health System!
Joshua
Open Letter to Gavin Newsom
Gavin,
So now that you’ve got Care Courts passed, have you decided on a Care Courts Internment Badge? These were from Dachau.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/images/Holocaust/triangles.gif
Be sure to let us know so that we can order cloth in the correct color. And let us know when we should order rolls of barbed wire and canisters of Zyklon B crystals, and then when we should assemble in lines at the train stations.
Recent Care Courts News:
WATCH LIVE: Gov. Newsom to Sign Legislation Establishing CARE Court in Santa Clara County video, Eggman, Umberg, someone from NAMI Harold Turner.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/newsom-care-court-santa-clara-county/3002996/
Silicon Valley officials question Newsom’s mental health plan
https://sanjosespotlight.com/silicon-valley-santa-clara-county-officials-question-governor-gavin-newsoms-state-california-mental-health-plan-care-court-illness-treatment/
”
Assemblymember Ash Kalra, who opposed the bill and represents District 27 that covers a large swath of San Jose and a portion of Santa Clara, said CARE Court could have a disproportionate impact on homeless individuals who are already stigmatized.
”
Fast Food Fight and CARE Court Plan Near Finish Line
KQED w/audio
https://www.kqed.org/news/11922990/fast-food-fight-and-care-court-plan-near-finish-line
And yes, Gavin will sign it, he is endorsing it. But Santa Clara County is not supposed to be in the first counties to go, Oct 2023, it is supposed to be in the rest to be done a year later.
Here is a full video of the event, with the speakers, IT IS SICKENING!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey8rHoeWgfY
The Mayor of San Diego is there and he says his aunt has schizophrenia.
Earlier I had heard Darrell Steinberg speaking of how Governor Reagan had closed the mental hospitals, most of them. Steinberg says that that was right because On Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was not fiction.
But Steinberg says that Reagan was supposed to make up for that with out patient treatment. So now this is happening.
As I know this is Assisted Out Patient Treatment, meaning coerced. And mostly how it works is with instead of asylum walls, with pills ingested which give on their own walls.
Joshua
[Duplicate Comment]
Milwaukee police briefing after police shooting near 33rd and Galena | FOX6 News Milwaukee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQVlfkOlm2k
Milwaukee police shooting; suspect dead | FOX6 News Milwaukee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuoYD9Osivs
Food delivery driver shot on West Side, Chicago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjn0ol8ny9Q
Deputies responding to reported active shooter at Houston ISD’s Heights High School (22 hours ago, so it must have diffused)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGbl_kiEvGI
One man dead, another seriously injured after shooting inside Newport News apartment, VA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auWpIo4upwA
Joshua
And this is only one of the reasons why I am strongly opposed to psychotherapy. We should not continue to allow our government to license it.
And people should always have other options.
Joshua
This is interesting, but it still seems to support the mental health system, and that is completely wrong.
The only think to know about the mental health system is how people have been able to break free of it and sue for legal redress.
Joshua
With the way schizophrenia has been conceived, it is hard to imagine it in adolescents. So they have given us bipolar. And most of the diagnoses are for bipolar 2. And this seems to be a reworking of what they used to call dementia praecox.
And then since it is hard to imagine bipolar in younger children, they have also given us autism.
So because they want to establish that there is an objective basis for all of these afflictions, the whole thing has to hang together.
And so now when the CA a legislature has passed Newsom’s Care Courts, it was supposed to be pitched at the unhoused, but as it is worded it applies to anyone who could become unhoused because of severe mental illness. And so it applies to everyone.
And severe mental illness is supposed to be those on the Schizophrenia Spectrum, but the main diagnosis is bipolar and this is the core of this spectrum.
And then Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has been a central pillar of CA’s mental health phenomenon. He says that everyone is on some “Mental Health Spectrum”, and would do well with Mental Health Wellbeing checks. And he has set up an institute and put Thomas Insel in charge of it. Insel has a company, MindStrong which will give everyone these Wellbeing Checks via cell phone texting.
Darrell Steinberg had put his daughter into an out of state psychiatric hospital at the age of 13 years. And now in her 20’s, she still believes that she has “mental illness”.
Anyone who lives kind of on the edge and without a lot of social and emotional support could be labeled as having bipolar 2.
Particularly because this is all being done by government licensed medical practitioners, it all clearly falls within Nuremburg precedent. No one’s position or licensing puts them above International Law. No one can say that they are Just Following Orders or that they are Just Following the Law. And it is right that the Statue of Limitations has been lifted, and that the penalties have been extreme.
Joshua
Recent Care Courts News:
NewsMax propagates absurd right wing views
Sacramento Mayor Urges Solution for California’s Homeless
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/california-homeless-sacramento/2022/09/13/id/1087288/
Column: Could extreme heat be just what California needs to finally solve homelessness?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-13/extreme-heat-climate-change-california-homeless-shelter-housing-policy
“Unlike in cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest, which rely on a robust network of shelters to spare homeless people from the dangers of extreme cold, cities in the West have long let people languish outdoors in our generally good weather.”
again pushing the mental illness fallacy
“Researchers this year found that unsheltered people — especially those with a mental illness — were significantly more likely to end up in the hospital during extreme heat than housed people, based on a study of emergency room admissions.
”
California Heat Wave Crisis Exposes ‘Broken’ Homeless System: Mayor
“These days are extreme examples of what is wrong and broken in the first place,” Steinberg said. “If extreme weather can help drive the change that is necessary, then let’s take advantage of the crisis.”
Sacramento Business Owners Protest Dangers of Homeless Drug-Addicted, Mentally-Ill Transients
A neighbor’s vigilance resulted in the arrest of a transient guy with a $250,000 warrant Sunday
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/sacramento-business-owners-protest-dangers-of-homeless-drug-addicted-mentally-ill-transients/
“12 days
The Governor has 12 days to sign, approve without signing, or veto a bill. A letter or phone call to the Governor’s Office is appropriate to state your position on the bill. If the bill is signed or approved without a signature, it goes to the Secretary of State to be chaptered.”
https://www.senate.ca.gov/legislativeprocess#:~:text=The%20Governor%20has%2012%20days,of%20State%20to%20be%20chaptered.
“approve without signing”?
https://www.statescape.com/resources/legislative/bill-signing-deadlines/
Joshua
R. D. Laing wrote a number of books which deal with this, and his views are not completely consistent. As I would explain it, he is not saying that childhood experience causes mental illness. That would only mean that you have to submit to treatment to get cured before you can have a voice.
No, childhood experience could not cause mental illness because there is no such thing as mental illness.
But childhood experience often does track people into situations where they are ripe for getting sucked into the mental health system, drugs, electroshock, lobotomy, and disclosing their affairs to a psychotherapist who is not licensed to practice law.
Joshua
Cheers Shooting: 1 dead in shooting at Natomas sports bar, Sacramento County
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHwuTbLsKmU
Deadly shooting investigation underway in Natomas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC6zxsQszaI
Suspect killed after GTA shootings leave 2 dead, including police officer, Toronto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saQrnH1xfJs
TIMELINE: Here is what we know about the fatal shooting of a Toronto police officer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHh_mPiWDnc
Apparent shooting on Dillingham leaves man hospitalized, Honolulu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSxsD2n7nkI
Couple injured in Highway 4 shooting and crash, Contra Costa County CA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcP6nB0KOV8
Two Teen Boys Killed in Shooting at Lincoln Heights Street Carnival | NBCLA, Los Angeles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNwnG7EapX8
Joshua
I have heard other stores like that and it is very understandable. Again, not to pry or be disrespectful, if you don’t mind my asking, was a lack of familial emotional support a factor in this all ending up in the mental health system? Like say, it could be this sense that there is a mysterious anomalous wrong which has long been in play, and then these various crises are seen as manifestations of this (Original Sin) and the mental health system is seen to offer the solution, either in drugs or in talk therapy.
Thanks,
Joshua
ADHD/Autism/Asperger’s/Neurodivergence is a hoax. Mental Illness/Brain Chemical Imbalance is a myth. They are closely related and depend on each other. We need to eradicate both movements and prosecute the practitioners.
Joshua
Care Courts Recent News:
Homeless Resident Sues San Jose Over Sweep
https://patch.com/california/campbell/homeless-resident-sues-san-jose-over-sweep
Joshua
Suspects receive bonds of $1M and $2M in fatal shooting of Pct. 3 Deputy Omar Ursin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kiL7-YNjxg
Three Dead In Overnight Shooting In West Park, Miami
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuDQlfi82h0
Michigan Man Killed By Police After Shooting Wife And Daughter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2HNxPgWnmw
Neuropsychologist testifies at Parkland school shooter’s sentencing trial | September 12 , Florida
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9VR6-HL_CE
Family remembers victim of Memphis shooting rampage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8uffTrPj9g
1 dead, 1 wounded in Lincoln Heights shooting, Los Angeles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwM-cXGfpN0
65th and Villard shooting; 16-year-old boy dead | FOX6 News Milwaukee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJD0a2uYctA
Joshua
Middle Finger is simply a way of telling the doctors what you think of them in no uncertain terms. It can be a very life affirming gesture.
Sarah Connor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evJ-XVrI4Js
Joshua
Yes, people need to erect defenses to toxic environments, as you will often find in families in the industrial age middle-class.
We need to dismantle the entire Mental Health and Autism / Aspergers system.
And we need to put an end to this Los Angeles County Street Psychiatry Operation.
Joshua
A culturally mandated initiation would change things. But I would say that no one could ever have authority to do this. And there will always be disparity about what this would entail, who is eligible for initiation to adulthood, as there is disparity about what the rules for adult life are.
We are a pluralistic and economically stratified society.
Joshua
Removed for moderation.
I understand. That does seem to be the most common situation, a pack of lies and deceptions, and the fear that you are deteriorating and will suffer huge consequence and that drugging is best for you.
Again, not intending to pry and not wanting to be disrespectful, how old were you when you first had contact with the mental health system? Were there any ways in which family seemed to fuel it, making you into a problem to be solved, or that there was something somehow off about you?
It is an incredible credit to you that you did get out of it. You might not still have been alive otherwise.
Joshua
Yes, this is a very important matter, all the more so since California’s Governor just got his Care Courts SB-1338 passed.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/04/saving-lives-cementing-stigma-review-just-like-you/#comment-201133
Joshua
Very well put Birdsong.
As I see it the whole thing revolves around intergenerational trauma. The idea that someone is “mentally ill” seems to start in the family, and mostly it is about not measuring up to social expectations for the middle-class.
Joshua
Care Courts Recent News:
There are better ways to help a panhandler than handing over cash, experts say
https://wcti12.com/news/nation-world/show-compassion-to-panhandlers-by-helping-local-shelters-instead-experts-say-california-homelessness-affordable-housing-panhandling-handouts-how-to-help
^ this isn’t talking about mental health, but it is a moral reform, tough love approach. Compassion cards directing people to services.
Joshua
Fatal shooting near 21st and Cherry in Milwaukee | FOX6 News Milwaukee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj7MK4DoPGw
3 injured after triple shooting near vacant Northridge Mall, Milwaukee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4LQPi_zoz0
Security footage, 911 calls detail deadly shooting rampage that killed 2 people in Phoenix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zz193YVbvI
Watch: Video Shows Shooter In Phoenix Fire Multiple Rounds In Rampage That Killed 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txQgdoP4jyM
Barricaded church gunman arrested after shooting at Westland cops (Michigan)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d49vJyflKgI
Joshua
Psychiatric drugging is very common now. A large portion of the population is kept medicated.
It is very common and even more so in CA. We have prop 63 2004, Mental Health Services Act, gotten passed by now Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. They did polling and found that the electorate would go for a 1% Millionaires Tax. And then they ran 1 week of statewide TV ads and it passed by 53%. It has since raised $30 billion, and is now up to $8.3 billion per year. And all that this money is used for is putting people on drugs.
The Democrats have the 2/3rds in both houses, so they could overturn ballot box propositions, and they could even amend the state constitution. But instead they and Republicans are doing more stuff like this to make it worse.
Darrell Steinberg had put his daughter in an out of state mental hospital at the age of 13 years. As far as I am concerned, there is not anything else one needs to know about him.
The girl now in her 20’s goes along with it, “I have mental illness”, and her father continues to build his entire political career around mental health.
Joshua
Yes, we have to get these drugs off of the market.
You used to be able see this on youtube, and his other one about Autism. Now you have to be in the UK and register for a free account to see them in full.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQsmynA18OU
In the first it is beyond anything one could fabricate. In Pittsburg, he talks with several families, but this one he lived with. The mother has a PhD and she used to be making regular trips to Paris. But now she says, “There is too much going on here.” So she has to stay home and they keep the 10yo drugged. They even keep their dog drugged. The boy seems like the very nicest when Lou talks with him. The boy does maybe seem kind of beaten down though. The father talks about the boy as though he is a terror, and he cites a suicide attempt.
The boy does kind of try to slip in an out of situations. Reading Françoise Dolto, she described such a boy as moving like a cat. And it is totally a product of the family environment he is living in.
But the doctor points out that the boy does not say hello or goodbye when he enters or leaves his office. And so his “illness” is effecting the course of his life and how people respond to him, so he needs to be on drugs.
As I see it, in these cases there are always two bodies of persons behaving completely unethically, the parents or guardians, and the doctors. And often it does go beyond unethically and into criminality. And that fact that we have mandatory reporting laws makes it even more likely that it is criminal.
But what makes it hard to prosecute is the doctor’s license certificate, framed and up on the wall.
The whole idea of mandatory reporting is that in most all cases of familial child abuse, doctors had long seen things that could not be proper, but they did not report, or they tried to solve the problem by talking to the parents themselves. Mandatory Reporting is supposed to solve this. But then when you have doctors becoming complicit in the fictional ailments, or advertising a position of parental exoneration, then the problem continues.
I had talked about this issue with someone I knew in County Social Services and she teaches their class on mandatory reporting, and she insists, “You report everything.”
It seems very different for the doctors in private practice, though the law and the issue are the same. They are just choosing to interpret the situations differently.
And then some minors will come of age and side with their parents and the drugging. “I have a mental illness.” Or “I have autism.”
And so likely so that they can side with the parents they will have children of their own and do the same or similar to them. That way they identify with those who have the power and never have to re-experience what it was like to have that kind of stuff done to them.
But these drug doctors hold government issued medical licenses, so this is a systemic and organized form of oppression, and clearly within Nuremburg Precedent.
Joshua