I just note, in a comment above which is now under moderation, I point out how I think schizophrenics should try doing the outdoor exercise and mountain climbing that i am doing to help my ptsd and brain injuries. And I’m insightful about my brain and I just know or feel this would help schizophrenics. Of course, I’m not schizophrenic myself so I guess I can’t say I know for sure. But I’m probably right about it.
Though, of course, you know what? Maybe I’m not fully right about it, or I’m only right about it for some people but not others. But what if the social environment and culture of the mental health field were such, so that everyone who was passionate and enthusiastic about me and had creative ideas like I have, about “what could be” or “what might be true” were welcomed and others responded to them not by shunning them but by getting excited about it too and volunteering their own ideas?
Guess what? Even if I don’t have the answer. Or don’t have the full answer, if the culture were the type that would welcome my way of thinking and open minded enthusiasm and passion, enormous progress would be made, one way or another.
By the way, did you know, I have been investigating some of my photographs and trying to analyze what I’m doing mathematically with them, and they show I have both this amazingly precise memory but also out-of-this-world visual processing skills, making me something of a savant.
I discovered that I had this gift with schizophrenics — well, only three of them, — where I would touch them and they told me I’d made their voices go away.
I don’t like divulging it because it sounds kind of weird. But, that’s what they said I did, and I assume they were not lying. I think my visual skills as shown in certain mathematical precision I have in the way I frame the photographs I take may somehow exploit quantum mechanics in the brain somehow or may have something to do with how quantum mechanics manifests itself in the brain. And my visual processing skills would make me very anti-schizophrenic somehow.
Or, no, maybe it’s like a part of one’s brain evolved to harness quantum mechanics, but it needs certain sensory stimuli from nature in order to develop such skills. Deprive the brain of such sensory stimuli and it will try to learn anyway and learn wrong.
Actually, I also have a gift in music too, as you can see here.
Maybe it was something about the rhythm with which I moved when I touched them. On the head. That did something. A bit like the Mozart effect.
Anyway, I think schizophrenia has something to do with quantum mechanics in the brain. And maybe tied to a brain skill that is actually very useful to us, but only if its developed right.
I just wanted to point out something more. One of the problems with “in group” brainwashing or herd like behavior, such as with the field of psychiatry, is that it subtly impacts even those who argue with them. It’s like battered women’s syndrome.
You start arguing with them over the facts. However, you are still accepting one premise, which is: if all they say is true, that sicker patients are the ones staying on the anti-psychotics, they are still terrible drugs with terrible side effects, and “you know, I think you are capable of doing better and coming up with a better treatment than that ANYWAY.”
What nobody is arguing about is that, EVEN IF everything they are saying is true, they have the wrong defeatist attitude, and this reminds me of how Obama had his supporters chant “yes we can.” Are psychiatrists even trying to be like that?
But I know how group thinks are. If you immerse yourself in a group, even as a devil’s advocate, it’s still possible — unconsciously — to develop some of their more defeatest group thinks, without fully realizing it. Actually, my mother would often fight against that type of thinking in her dealings with other people, and I’d see her do that and turn out to be right in the end, so that makes me programmed to try to see outside the box too.
I just know that I’ve done a number of things in the countryside in the white mountains of New Hampshire to get over PTSD, brain injury, and all sorts of other stuff. And I’m insightful about my brain. Maybe people labeled as Schizophrenics could do what I’ve been doing. And perhaps in a social context as with the soteria project. They walked WITH THEM, didn’t they? I think the schizophrenia issue is tied somehow to malfunctioning of parts of the brain used in the fight-flight response, and walking through the woods outdoors in nature probably will “reset” it somehow. People hallucinate if left long enough in sensory deprivation chambers. Maybe modern society IS different enough from nature so it’s like a sensory deprivation chamber to schizophrenics. Maybe modern building materials are bad. In terms of what light rays or frequencies they systematically block, and for millions of years we evolved in environments where all frequencies of light were blocked pretty evenly, anytime we were inside or outdoors.
Anyway. Bottom line. I just think of Obama’s supporters who chanted “yes we can.” Anti-psychotics are terrible. But EVEN IF THEY HAD WORKED, psychiatry should have looked for others solutions anyway.
Psychiatry’s WORST OFFENSE is that they refused to look for alternatives EVEN BELIEVING anti-psychotics worked against symptoms. And then they try to force detractors to accept the premise that, if anti-psychotics genuinely work against symptoms, we should stick with them and not try anything better. And bogging down the conversation that way.
And what’s their excuse? “Oh no, we can’t. It’s impossible.” Well, guess what? Human beings invented the cell phone. Computers. All sorts of amazing technological stuff. All psychiatrists should have taken the position, on anti-psychotics, that “they may work, but even if they work, they are so bad that we need to find a better alternative and fast.”
We have mass incarceration of how many black men, and what did they do that was anywhere near as harmful as that negative defeatest attitude? We should not under-estimate the sheer amount of damage that can be done to society merely through a pessimistic negative defeatest attitude like that. And someone should say that to psychiatrists. “You have a defeatest attitude, and you know what? How about we call THAT a mental health condition in its own right, and how about we say this makes you a danger to yourself or others?”
And, I note, it’s important to argue with psychiatrists about the facts, definitely. But it’s also important to rise above those petty arguments and just tell them: “you know what, I don’t care about those details, you need to find something better than anti-psychotics anyway, or you’re worthless. And if you aren’t even. trying, then there’s something very wrong with you.”
I just note, also, I think of the sickest schizophrenia patients staying on anti-psychotics for decades, and I just feel so sorry for them, so sad for them. Because I know the damage being done them and I also know, they could be helped, and nobody is trying to help them. I really do feel sorry for them and, indeed, I feel hurt to think about it and I have to deliberately avoid thinking about it too intensely, in order to protect myself from feeling a certain sense of deep sad regret over “what might have been” for so many people, what their lives could have been.
Maybe the worst thing about psychiatry is how they have brainwashed themselves into being completely devoid of that type of compassion or empathy, and have gotten caught up with greed instead. And they don’t know how bad they are because they all got brainwashed, little by little, as a group.
Is that kind of compassion I feel a “salt of the earth” value and they think they are important people who have evolved above it?
You know what? Although I have tons of problems with Christianity which is terribly corrupt, we are completely missing, now, the part about morals. And that is a really bad problem. And, yes, Christianity became corrupt and there are many reasons to want to throw out much of it. Oh, and when I mean morals, I’m not talking about sexual puritanism but, instead, about the kind of thing regarding compassion for other human beings.
Actually, the sexual puritanism part of Christianity is part of its anti-compassion. As, after all, humans are sexual beings, and puritanism also tries to force us to repress that positive side of humans interacting with each other sexually. But, that same kind of repression is also, in some ways and sometimes — not all the time — a form of lack of empathy too. Which I am going to say is IMMORAL. And when I talk about morals, I’m talking about something other than the super ascetic and stringent “Christian morals” stereotype.
I think now of the principle of Karma, what goes around comes around and what you put out in the world eventually comes back to you, ten fold. I think that should happen to the psychiatric community, and many others who have gone down similar wrong paths. This is not forgiveness, notice. Actually, that’s another problem with Christianity as its developed. Where forgiveness has been substituted with the notion of being an enabler for evil — where you have an excuse for being a coward and can say, instead, that you are “nice” and want to go easy on people who are doing wrong, out of “compassion.”
Do we need to “forgive” psychiatrists who destroy others’ lives? Sure, you forgive them — in your own mind — all the while doing everything you can to remove their abilities to harm other people. And that may well involve sometimes not being nice and sometimes not saying only lovely and nice words.
Removed for moderation.
You know what? I was a math major at Harvard. And, I suppose it’s not considered polite for me to go and say that it was more than just being a math major at Harvard. I was something of a genius in a unique way compared to most math majors at Harvard, though that did not necessarily mean I always did well, because my brain needed the right social conditions to fully work right in math, and I usually was deprived of those conditions, but those few times I had them, it was amazing. I should probably just be accurate, right?
Anyway, this article reminds me of the debate over gender differences in the brain. Where, actually, fMRI’s have found only very tiny visible differences, and then feminist professors have decreed that we need to default to the politically correct viewpoint of “all gender differences are socially constructed and not biological” in the absence of evidence. Or, in the instance of evidence showing that, what gender differences can be SEEN that way appear tiny, then we argue gender brain differences are tiny.
The politically correct dogma viewed as a religious decree which is supposed to impose on science. When, in fact, a true scientific approach is merely to say that, in the absence of proof, “we don’t know one way or the other.” Rather than, if you are WITH political correctness, what you say gets to be regarded as automatically true and you don’t have to prove it. if you go against political correctness, you have to prove it first — and then, even proving it is often not enough, in practice.
Anyway, this all bothered me a lot because, actually, I think this whole question could be solved by mathematicians. My mathematical intuition — which was especially good with geometry — tells me that, even if there are major brain differences with both gender and depression, that our ability to visibly see them using these MRI techniques is always going to be very circumscribed.
Because, unlike the rest of our body, the brain is a very specific and complicated geometric shape, and is encased in a skeleton that is hard and also is a specific and complicated geometric shape. Now, in our bellies or muscles like biceps, we can gain weight and the fat makes them bulge out, or we can gain muscle and get stronger, and our muscles bulge out and we can see them more.
Well, I think that when we specialize in one particular skill rather than another, this changes the balance of our brains, making certain parts slightly larger and others less large, just like it is with muscles, and gender brain differences as well as differences between the depressed and non-depressed might manifest in a slight size difference. But that means the brain activity for a particular “skill” cannot be concentrated in any one area, as this will cause that part of the brain to enlarge like a tumor, destroying the geometrical precision of how and where it fits into the rest of the brain, or the skull. And this means that brain activity must be distributed across the brain, sort of like a super disorganized tangle of yarn.
Because, the brain doesn’t know what it is going to have to learn, when it grows up, or I should say it doesn’t know what it’s going to have to specialize in. It has to ensure that, as you intensively specialize in a particular skill, there is never so much activity concentrated in one geometrically small spherical area of the brain, so that this part of the brain grows like your bicep muscle might with weight lifting, only to crowd out adjacent portions the way a tumor might.
This means the neural activity, for the brain “specializing” in one thing rather than another, as in being different from the average or “blank slate” non-specialized brain structure that is genetically determined, will have to ensure such “specialization” or “difference from the norm” as it determined either by a differently learned skill or by the action of testosterone rather than estrogen on brain development, will have to ensure that such specialization differences in neural volume will have to be distributed over distant parts of the brain, parts of the brain quite distant from one another, in such a way so it’s all a small amount of brain expansion evenly distributed so as not to have a tumor effect or bulge in the wrong area.
And, by the way, computer scientists creating hard disks for information storage have to do the same thing — create algorithms to ensure the data is distributed in lots of little specks evenly over the whole entire disk, or they’ll run into the same problem.
Also remember, in the case of gendered brain differences, most of the DNA that makes up the female brain as compared to the male brain is exactly the same, meaning it encodes the same geometry in women as in men. And there is no choice on that. It’s already a super complicated math problem, for the limited amount of DNA we have, to successfully encode ONE brain of a successful geometric shape with no encroachment and everything fits together perfectly. To create two different male and female brains involving radically different geometries would require that we all have something like maybe twice the amount of DNA in humans, all of which can’t overlap between males and females. Because if it did, you’d end up with babies born where the DNA was trying to fit square pegs into round holes too much.
Thus, male brains are — mostly — just female brains which were allowed to grow bigger. And maybe the hormones created differences in the pruning of neural connections, within the same geometric brain shape. That already means, a gendered brain difference pretty much would have to be somewhat similar to a two mile high long lightning bolt, taking a slightly different two mile path and striking the ground only six feet away from where it otherwise would have.
Can we, looking at binoculars ten miles away, at a two mile long lightning bolt, notice a six foot difference in where it lands on the ground? And yet, let’s say there are two lightning rods on the ground at both locations, six feet apart. Understand that the lightning, as an electrical circuit, hitting one lightning rod rather than the other could result in an astronomical difference, depending on what those two different lightning rods are connected to. But it all looks the same to us.
The same thing could easily apply to the depressed brain, as compared to the non-depressed brain. Let me see, what would a mathematician say? IF the differences between a depressed brain and a non-depressed brain were big enough for us to be able to see in this way, then the non-depressed person’s increased brain activity would stimulate those parts of the brain we can SEE to grow enough neurons until non-depression starts creating too much pressure on adjacent parts of the brain like a tumor. BUT, because the brain has figured out how to rout all the brain activity just right so as to guarantee against this happening, that means we cannot see the difference between depression and non-depression, with such crude measuring techniques.
Now here is where my ADHD and brain injury start to take hold. I say this as mathematical “insight,” but in terms of thinking it through, I can’t do that right now and maybe I don’t have sufficient information to know how to think it through. But it is true that neurologists should network with pure mathematicians and/or physicists or both.
Because I am pretty sure a pure mathematician could, after a bit of work, explain/predict that brain differences with depression versus non-depression, as well as gendered brain differences, are going to be impossible to detect with these kinds of studies. And they are capable of predicting all that theoretically, in the exact same way as Einstein eventually predicted black holes, theoretically, and only after he predicted them were they able to take the science he developed, and then figure out how to INDIRECTLY measure and “prove” that black holes really existed.
I think a similar type of mathematician could do the same kind of work Einstein did, and eventually figure out theoretically how, IF gendered brain differences and brain differences with depression — and depression is gendered so it’s good to look at both of them at once — existed, then exactly HOW can they manifest in the brain, in such a way so as not to disturb the underlying brain geometry, as well as other constraints. And then, and only then, do you know what to look for.
A mathematician might even find that they theoretically could exist but current technology is incapable of producing measuring instruments capable of reliably measuring the differences. How long after Einstein did we discover the first black hole?
Do you know, this reminds me of when I was victim of the mafia. It started many years prior with Harvard University first engaging in wrong-doing and then, when I ask for an investigation, engaging in years of reprisals and intimidation, all of it targeting me for daring to implicate them in exactly what they did or were doing, which was criminal to start with, though less obviously criminal than things became later, when I drop out of Harvard and later on the gay community is “handed the reins” by Harvard and starts abusing me even more viciously than I had been abused at Harvard, and this gay community abuse started in this chatroom where a weirdly large number of “regulars” were gay Harvard employees, and they and others in the gay community made it clear in no uncertain terms that they were abusing me on behalf of Harvard.
Eventually, I am told that, if you are gay and want to be part of the “party scene,” e.g., be able to party with illegal drugs like crystal meth and get away with it and also be safe, you HAVE TO abuse and intimidate victims of the mafia like me in this way. As well as shun them except for those few instances where you might be allowed to “hook up” with them, but it’s some kind of assignment where you are given instructions as to how to treat them. And, if you don’t agree to go along with this criminality, you will not be able to do illegal drugs without having “problems.” And, apparently, the way it works, even gays who don’t do drugs can still have problems at work, and also be turned into incels by the rest of the gay community, if they fail to toe the line exactly on victims of the mafia like me. So pretty much everyone agrees to let a certain portion of the gay community be experimented on in vicious ways by corporations. And they all know it happens and they all keep quiet like docile subjects. The gay activist “movement” actually gets money from these corporations, and also it’s obvious they neglect so many issues that SHOULD be important to gays, like for instance I eventually found out that life for HIV positive gay men can be absolutely horrible, because they get forced on SSI and must live on only 800 a month income, and if they try to work and make more money than that, they will lose their health insurance, and they will have to stop taking their HIV medication because the medication alone costs $40,000 a year, so they’ll die. In my case, two or three of the perpetrators were HIV positive gay men in just that same position. Forced into it because of their dire financial straits.
Another perpetrator was this Jewish guy who clearly was from a compromised family and was a victim of some kind of unethical medical experiment himself, and lawyers were refusing to let him sue the doctors. He was in excruciating pain all the time because the bad medical care had left him with osteoporosis causing him to eventually break his back. Medical doctors forced him to work for the mafia by under treating his pain, forcing him to turn to the “gay drug scene” for heroine to help get the pain under control which doctors were refusing to help with. And, one of the requirements for continued heroine was the “job” he did with me, working for the mafia. So, I mean, a lot of other gays are victims too.
Later on, when several date rape druggings and rapes happened, and police started stalking me and framing me a few times, first of all there were a couple of incidents that were staged in order to make it clear that Harvard was involved in all of it. But, then, my own attorneys went and intimidated me themselves. They simply refused to do their jobs right. Two attorneys. However, it was in private and they were sneaky enough so, if I eventually died, they could probably blame me or make it look like some kind of invented guilt on my part was responsible for failure to aggressively prosecute the case.
At the same time the attorneys refused to help and also the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and associated police not only refused to help but outright joined in on the intimidation, I ended up being date rape drugged several more times, more rapes and other incidences, some merely violent and not “rape,” I end up getting intimidated so badly as to develop a kind of stockholm syndrome or patty hearst syndrome. Except it was more that the things done to me were so extreme as to cause the fear centers of my brain to just completely make me so terrified of implicating the mafia or Harvard in anything that all I could do was act like and say that I only wanted to make a deal with the mafia to cover things up, and not only say that but engage in a pattern of withholding of information and even altering of facts just right so as to do a very good job — and I’m smart and knew how to do it right — of actually making it genuinely look like nobody else had done anything wrong, and that maybe the only motives behind my desire to “cover things up” were guilt based on some implied wrong doing on my part, and surely not extreme abuse so extreme, there has never been a legal case anywhere in this world ever publicized which involved whole communities of people ganging up on a victim as badly as that, so as to traumatize them this badly.
It was after I’d been intimidated this badly that the second lawyer I got handled everything just right so I could be pressured and intimidated into putting myself in the situation that let them try to murder me with rat poison, which probably would have been faked as an accident or suicide. But I believe, had I not survived, that Harvard and members of the gay community and the police could have all DENIED the extreme abuse that had gone into forcing me to change my stance from one where I originally was demanding criminal prosecution of all perpetrators to one where I “only wanted to make a deal with the mafia and cover things up.” They could instead say some kind of hidden guilt resulted in blackmail pressure getting me to say all that. As if a genuine criminal investigation might have uncovered something about myself, and that’s why I didn’t want one.
And I think, based on how viciously I was treated and what they told me, that then the perpetrators themselves, including the very same gay people who’d abused me so badly, could have BRAZENLY and aggressively played the victim themselves, and gone and accused me of having been menacing and “difficult” with all of them, and — well, you know what happened with the Matthew Shepard murder. But it’s pretty much exactly how lynchings would happen in the south, where it wasn’t the black man lynched who was the victim, it was instead the white woman who instigated it who was the victim.
I am still angry that a group of people would have the gall to think they could be that vicious towards someone, arrange that person’s corruptedly rigged death, meant to be covered up with a false narrative and faked forensics, they immediately afterwards go and get on their high horses, playing the victim themselves, and probably act super aggressive and outraged and self righteous, not merely denying responsibility for all the things done to me — which they did for money and drugs — but take it even further and claim that THEY were victims of ME. Or some such lies meant to damage and discredit me.
However, at the same time, I was told by one of the perhaps not quite a perpetrator but someone “on the inside,” that what was happening to me was something this “group of people” within the crystal meth scene does to victims all the time. His name was Loi and he said he absolutely hated them, and that they were always ganging up on someone and starting trouble with someone, and they always cover it up using crooked police and, well, he didn’t say murder but I think that’s also what they do. If a victim doesn’t back down.
In other words, they enjoy this permanent impunity from accountability, all the while being used to going to extremes of viciousness. They are untouchable, and whenever they have a problem with someone, it’s the victim who is to be blamed, while they always get off scott free. That’s what the rules are in this world. And the police and the medical system and mental health system collude with this requirement.
The punishment for taking on this group can be to be framed by police, or falsely diagnosed schizophrenic or with a “drug problem” by psychiatrists, or murdered in some way that’s usually sneaky, usually “a drug overdose” or a rigged accident, where they again blame you for it.
When I was almost murdered via rat poison, someone broke in and trashed my hotel room and broke my laptop in half, all in a way so they could say I did it myself, like Charlie Sheen, in some drug induced psychotic rage — perfect so all other perpetrators of viciousness against me could have gone and acted like, I don’t know, that while spectre of the damsel in distress intimidated woman, terrified by the menacing man who is so big, strong, and scary. This was gay men, of course, but I know they were going to cop to that “explanation” for why a problem happened with me, because they were all reminding me non-stop about such intentions.
Oh, here is one example of such a “reminder” regarding how the gay community would collude with a cover up of their crimes against me — by blaming ME for being “difficult.” You can read it. It’s obvious, they all learned the same lesson as to “this is how we cover things up.” Only problem is, I documented this and all other instances of such “reminders” for years.
After I hire the second attorney — and was almost murdered with rat poison a few months after — I remember sending an email to someone explaining that I “now have about 8000 files saved over the course of a five years, documenting the non-stop harassment and bullying.”
If you look at these print screens, you can kind of get an idea. But, yes, gay community harassment and hate directed against me over the course of maybe five years eventually took up nearly 8000 files, as you can see here.
But, just note the sense of entitlement they have or had.
Let me quote:
“Since you are a lawyer you’d realize the significance of the attached document
Damian Schloming
to bbixby
show details Jun 24 (6 days ago)
Showing the massive amounts of documentation I have on ALL of the various games so many gay guys played on me, mostly online conversations, since I began talking to Stefano. I call it a massive outpouring of hate, because that’s what it is. And, again, when you start noticing large amounts of total strangers suddenly contacting you and you start to get all sorts of people saying weird things, doing weird things, just a ton of weirdness, what else would the prudent thing be to do other than to start to compulsively document everything? Now, remember, I did not document EVERYTHING that happened because I couldn’t. Just impossible to. I only only document or save a conversation like that when the person behaved too weirdly for me not to think something was fishy about it. So I decided to open the bulk of the folders that show the various files constituting the bulk of the papertrail, just so you can see the file names. Then I hit “print screen” and pasted to MS word. Just so you can see the file names. Now imagine if you opened each and every file, and read everything in it? But, just open this MS word document, and just browse over the file names alone. Look at what I have been having to deal with over a long stretch of several years. Look at some of the file names. Is this the life of an ordinary person that I am living? Furthermore, now when I email mafia people, I keep on telling them I will keep quiet, and be good, I just want to be able to live a normal life from now on — and all I get are taunts and hate and vicious and sadistic games played on me. At the same time they are so dismissive of my requests to be allowed to live a normal life, I cannot even mention the idea that maybe some of these people who perpetrated these wrong-doings should possibly be criminally prosecuted or, in anyway, be anything but rewarded for they did to me, or I am made to feel like I have committed a terrible social faux paux.
I think I will go through that word document, and just list a sampling of the file names. Most of them deal with criminal harassment, vicious behavior, mind games, death threats, rapes, poisonings, the mafia, the FBI, hits on life, “it will all be over soon,” and you also see how it impacted every single aspect of my life, like I was boxed in and could go nowhere without it being present and a factor. What you don’t see from this are the files showing massive amounts of the same sort of thing occurring at two different workplaces, three apartments I lived in, and then there seems to be no place in the world I can travel without it following me. Incidents have happened in Massachusetts, New York City, Connecticut, Provincetown, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine. This is a high tech stalking of me using the mafia. An attempt to stalk me, torment me, and eventually murder me. Think of what certain serial killers do — torment their victims for maybe hours or days before killing them. But look at what this is — years and years and years of abuse, torment, and being put in situations of the most wretched pitiful condition you could possibly imagine on a human being. In particular, what you sometimes see is a need for me to document that someone said something or whatever, just because when you have that many people doing things like that to you, you have to document it or otherwise you end up with a story that is so beyond the realm of human imagination that it is impossible to tell it and have people believe it could possibly be true. And then there are a few where it appears the people who have organized this campaign against me are starting to realize just what they have done, so you start to get file names showing massive amounts of placating, flattery, sweettalking, and guys contacting me from all over the world doing that. This is unreal, yet I am not making it up.”
—-
They really were like children who have a sense or entitlement and think they are entitled to get away with this kind of stuff.
Let me quote from other emails I sent to my attorney, which capture perfectly the sense of entitlement, these groups of people had who were all being bribed with money and drugs.
“to bbixby, bcc: [email protected], bcc: has
when, in particular, you read what I said to Cockwatch, and realize how true it is, I guess it should only take just a bit of thinking — thinking done in the absense of hearing peer pressure from all the perpetrators who want to avoid being held accountable for what they did — to realize, hold on, I’m being way too nice to people. People did things. They should get what they deserve. We live in a certain kind of world. Those are the rules, nobody is exempt from them, even if obviously all bad people who eventually get in trouble got into trouble because they did something they thought they would get away with. It just doesn’t matter. There is such a thing as right versus wrong, it is not political, it is not a democracy, right versus wrong. It doesn’t matter how psychopathic my parents were, or how good they were at getting a huge coalition of people to jump on the bandwagon with respect to their abuse of me. As horrific as it was, and as huge as the multitude was of people who were involved in the abuse, there is such a thing as right versus wrong and there is such a thing as the truth. There is no way around the truth. It doesn’t matter how vociferously the perpetrators can get multitudes of people to lobby for their cause. It’s a matter of right versus wrong, and how strongly I was able to prove it and me being able to escape through even the most cunning of traps. It simply doesn’t matter how rich someone is who does wrong, or how clever or manipulative my parents were. I am a lot more clever, and that counts for something. Those people who did sick and twisted things to me need to pay, and so do my parents. I suggested those people who engaged in the manipulation that started this problm should get in trouble wiht the law, get caught for doing drugs, I was treating to a bunch of sermonizing a felt like I was sitting in some pew listening to some evangelical minister preach to me about how bad I am. Well, you know what? Maybe I should stop caring about people trying to tell me I am bad. OK fine, I am bad — so that means they shouldn’t have picked on me, because of what sort of hell I am going to unleash because they did. Fine, let people denounce me, I don’t care. I am going to get what I want and live the kind of life I want to live, and everyone else can go to hell.”
Reply2h
Damian Schloming
Oh yes and this email. This really captures it. What else can I say when I read this but yuck!!! And what I am talking about — this is how EVERYONE treated me. But look at what it shows, regarding what kind of people they are.
Reply1mEdited
Damian Schloming
Damian Schloming
Feb 10, 2011, 12:43 AM
to MalenaSD, bcc: bbixby, bcc: bootjockstud
And, maybe now isn’t a bad time for me to point out, when I was suggesting those individuals be punished, that small handful of individuals who wove this web of lies which, combined with my parents’ lies, allowed Stefano to sic the mafia on me so he could abuse me in some of the sickest and most twisted ways imaginable, the answers I was receiving did not indicate any respect or recognition of what happened to me, or appreciation for what was done to me. “People just don’t want to be involved in that” and this whole idea that, apparently, not everyone on this earth has an equal right to be protected from crimes of this nature. E.g., if you are an important and powerful person, merely being annoyed is enough for these people to be punished real badly. But I, at least according to what some have implied, am some of different category of person where nobody cares that the sickest and most twisted crimes imaginable were committed against me, and so these people should just get away with it. “Sometimes people just get away with it,” I was told, in the most disrespectful and hurtful manner possible. The message is the same message my parents had for me all my life “you’re nothing, people can abuse you however they like and get away with it, because you are nothing.”
All you can do, when in some situation like that, is just take it and take it and take it, but plan very meticulously to ensure that a day will come when you won’t have to take it anymore. And, when that day comes, yeah that’s a huge number of guilty people who cannot avoid accountability for their actions anymore. Because, usually, when one crime is committed against someone, their family intervenes to put a stop to it. Not in this case — my family intervened and only sought to perpetuate it and incite others into going to extremes in the things they did to me combined with the numbers of individuals they involved. It is my business that the perpetrators be brought to justice. This is not a democracy. The perpetrators need to be brought to justice, and it does not matter who they are, how many of them they are, or how rich they are. What matters is what they did. This all started with a small handful of individuals inciting other people into abusing me. Everyone had a choice about it, and they made it. On top of it, it is wrong to treat someone in a manner that flippantly fails to acknowledge or validate the seriousness of the crimes that were committed against him. This is all about picking on someone because you think you can get away with it. Just because you can doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t mean you have to. If you pick on someone because you think you can get away with it, even if you don’t have to, well, you deserve to learn later you miscalculated.
Nobody showed me any mercy. I don’t need to show anyone else any mercy. I just need to show myself mercy, since I’m the only one doing that here. I don’t like being treated like I am nothing, like people who commit crimes of that seriousness just “get away with it.” I don’t like people lecturing me, trying to tell me these people should get away with it, and trying to tell me that it is wrong of me to want them punished. So now, I can prove everyone is guilty. Everyone else should start thinking, how important is it to them that these people get away with it? I am sick of feeling like I am sitting in a pew in some evangelical church, listening to some fire and brimstone sermon from someone in the mafia acting like a preacher disapproving of me because I am saying, no, these people are not going to get away with it, and if you think they should, you are sick. Is this something everybody really and truly believes in? How important is it to them that these people get away with it? Is this a deep rooted belief so strong they are willing to go to jail for it? If so, I can help give them an opportunity to prove this is something they really and truly mean — and not something they are merely saying to me simply because they think they can get away with it.”
—–
I think, though, that if you look at what happened in Iraq, I think there is a connection between these groups of people with that sense of entitlement, thinking only about their bribe money and their drug privileges, and these horrible atrocities you can read about here.
Actually, I KNOW there is a connection because this group of people who abused me like this were doing it as part of a program where I was used as a guinea pig for unethical nazi style medical experiments. And, I have been repeatedly told that the underlying motive for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were to enslave those populations for the purpose of such medical experiments.
And it’s these same constituencies in the United States as who abused me who are the ones whose jobs (or other privileges) they owe to the fact that so many of this medical research is done using the mafia, rather than done honestly and aboveboard. And money talks, and some of these drugs talk even louder. Hitler used crystal meth to control the Nazis and get them to do all that horrible stuff. You should try it sometime. You will see.
Removed for moderation.
Another thing we have to remember is, way back then, they did not have the mainstream media or widespread literacy like we have today, yet they still needed to manage society somehow.
Indeed, local lords and monarches and all that sort of WERE the “mainstream media” in a sense. They’d ride horses through different areas, right? Wear special clothes and have well trained knights and other acrobats do all sorts of impressive things. The super fancy clothes and super fancy jewelry all were stuff clearly created by very skilled and knowledgeable humans, e.g., were impressive. And then they’d tell people what to do.
Yes, they were “Key Opinion Leaders.” But how do you convince illiterate peasants to listen to a “Key Opinion Leader?” Well, also they did have church and religion. However, since you can’t educate everyone into all the details you know, you have to figure out what works and do it. Religion worked for a lot of things. But, then, absent the printing press, what else did they have beside foot binding for women?
Think about some of the torture done on mostly men? Now here’s the thing. Stalin’s man made famines, I think, really do prove that, when you are running and managing an intricate economy, which is like a machine that is getting all the right necessities to all the right people at all the right rates — it HAS to be steady — everyone really does have to coordinate.
But, what you will have is many local people in various areas will be serving as cogs in the wheel of this vast system which, if it is allowed to be disrupted too much, it really will partially collapse and people will go hungry. The problem is, someone who is serving as a cog in the wheel of a larger system does not know economics and does not know or understand how the system works. They may not know that taking a certain forbidden action might have a ripple effect on the system that could cause damage to a lot of people — especially if everyone starts doing it — and they won’t understand how important it is not to do it, unless someone literally gets disemboweled for having broken such rules, or whatever other of the punishments were, some very gruesome.
But this is because, in a decentralized society, there really is a language barrier. It really is not easy to manage.
Today, we have literacy and communications industries. This allows for all sorts of new technology to “explain” to the public how to act right to fit into the system right. Except, it’s still not so simple. Society kind of figures out how to manipulate people into playing their appointed role in the system, usually in indirect ways. The people being manipulated doesn’t know they are being manipulated by elites, understand. To some degree they can’t know because jealousy over certain arbitrary inequality would occur. People would be unhappy. Or insulted if you told them the truth about where you have judged their “place” in the economy is. You know how it is, “we’re having you work here because you are stupid” or “we’re having you work here because you come across as unattractive and pathetic.”
Think of the stereotype of promoting the incompetent worker to a high position, solely to ensure they don’t screw anything up, e.g., they are nothing more than a glorified welfare recipient. But their family connections require that they not be insulted. So they get promoted instead.
Except this is starting to get very long. Key thing is, what’s going on in psychiatry now — and other parts of the economy — represents, well, actually economist Paul Krugman for the New York Times really did recently write that even in the beginning of the 20th century, we had a society where technological progress had WAY outstripped the ability of elites to manage society with such technology present. And that it has only gotten worse. And we are in an era where it’s as if too much technological progress happened too fast, too fast for society to even know how to figure out how to manage things right. And that’s part of the problem.
That would be part of the problem with psychiatry too. Namely, that it’s not just about the bad behavior or ill intentions of Big Pharma. If we fixed psychiatry and other parts of medicine, let us suppose we do a REALLY REALLY good job of it. That’s 33 percent of the economy by now, isn’t it? Let’s do such a good job that we shrink the healthcare system to 10 percent of the economy. What kind of catastrophe would that be?
Krugman also did write long ago that he predicts, in the future, we may well have a society that is sort of run by a few very colorful Key Opinion Leaders. Or that the internet will result in something like that happening. Colorful thought leaders who are very influential in part because they are very colorful and not drab. Simply because it is not good enough to just explain to people, in a drab way, what they need to understand to cooperate with societal “progress” or maybe I should call it “stability.” You need to know how to grab their attention right, so they really listen and understand.
Interesting take on the mind numbing bureaucratize:
——
“Moore: It was surprising to read how difficult it was for you to access data behind Study 329 and the Forest Laboratories citalopram study.
Jureidini: We’ve had a more recent episode where we’re just finishing off a reanalysis of a study called TADs, the Treatment of Adolescent Depression, which is probably the most influential trial of antidepressants in adolescents.
By the time we got on to Duke University, we were too late to get hold of the individual patient records and they had already been destroyed. But in existence, and very important, were the serious adverse event reports. There were 60 or so serious adverse events, and Duke still had the original reports that were filled out at the study sites by the people who were carrying out the study.
At high cost, they agreed to make them available to our team and we did some negotiation and got the cost down a little bit. We wrote a contract between our university and Duke University that would enable us to have access. Then, at the last minute, they said, “Actually, we’ve gone to our ethics committee and we can’t give you those documents because they can’t be sufficiently redacted to protect the identity of the patients.” This was clearly untrue because I had already provided the same documents to Columbia University in an earlier analysis of suicide and antidepressant trials.
What was equally interesting was that we went to our university and said, “Please support us in enforcing this contract that Duke has already entered into.” But our university wouldn’t do that. We got an American law firm to support us but again, our university wouldn’t let us pursue a legal means. Then when we wrote the whole thing up, our university wouldn’t let us publish any of the correspondence that we’d had with them about it.
One of the things that we do go on about in our book and in the opinion paper is the way in which academic institutions have sold out to industry more generally, and how concerning that is.”
——-
This strikes me as indicative of a kind of “out of touch” group think. Except I think the people doing this are and should be described as out right bullies.
However, as a former member of a very successful grass roots organization and also someone who really had this knack for political STRATEGY, I can only say that, when large entrenched institutions like this develop these types of tactics, changing it is going to take more than merely complaining about it or listing the behaviors, for people to passively gasp in horror about it.
Actually, our media is full of people whining about comparatively trivial injustices compared to this kind of thing, non-stop all the time in such a way that is exactly like crying wolf. By the time you read about institutions engaging in these kinds of skullduggery tactics re: Big Pharma, you’ve heard so much else, it’s like you’ve been lulled into complacency and into accepting this notion that things never change, never can be changed.
But that’s not true. Things CAN change. You just have to know how to go about it right. Tocqueville mentioned many many times that, when a people is deprived of political freedom for too long, they lose even the ability to know how to exercise political freedom if they ever had it given back to them.
Anyway, when I hear about such tactics, it strikes me that those interested in combatting this kind of stuff should read two books I and others read when involved in this successful grassroots political organization. One an old Chinese book titled “The Art of War” and the other book, “Rules for Radicals.”
I would say reading such books helps provide inspiration for the approach one should take, or even the attitude one should have, when seeking to change these kinds of things. Even while I’ll say this is something that is an art where you just have to do what you feel is right sometimes.
I personally feel that humiliation and shaming is what is necessary for officials in academic institutions who engage in that kind of behavior. And I mean it. The kind of humiliation that is ugly, like ugly name calling, as if they have gone so far that it really would take something as severe as that to give them a dash of cold water they need to wake themselves up.
Sometimes you can’t be nice. Sometimes the world is about dominance and submission, and when some people are way too uppity or outrageously asserting too much privilege over others, you just need to out dominance them and do whatever it takes to do that.
I should note, I have sometimes been “bad,” you might say or had “adventures.” I’ve dealt with academic bureaucrats who are just like that, and I have also dealt with the kinds of dregs of society drug dealer types who hang out in Dorchester, MA, fields corner, or outside the Pine Street Inn Homeless Shelter in Boston.
But that’s how it goes. Those who have too much of a reputation for being “nice” and “respectable” can end up devolving to levels of criminality and sleaziness that far outweigh those with reputations for criminality and low-classness and sleaze. It’s really true and I’ve dealt with a diverse array of people, unlike most people, so I know.
It’s bad when you are told you are “nice” or are part of the “upper classes,” and then told there are so many people out there who are beneath you, and you never deal with them so you don’t know any better. It’s like being spoiled. And how do children who are spoiled behave? Badly, right?
Bottom line is, we are a society where people need to be put in their place sometimes. And this sometimes means classes of people as well. In this case, I’d describe psychiatry as a big part of the “White Establishment.”
Actually, I think no one has ever pointed this out, but although I have never been to such meetings of all the psychiatric movers and shakers, I am right if I guess that all the movers and shakers in this industry who are “part of the problem” are 100% white, and that’s not even rounding up.
See, when I had my own issues with corruption at Harvard, and it is somewhat tangentially tied to this issue, I was a musician who played the pipe organ and I had my own problems with the organ world as a result. The organ world then, which was very well ensconced in all sorts of academic institutions all over America, also happened to be 100 percent white. And I mean that. 100 percent. Well, ok Asians were allowed. But zero blacks.
I can be even more precise about it. I played the organ starting in the late 80’s. And I was very talented and all that. So, from the late 80’s until maybe 2016 or 2017, I never met, heard, or saw — or even heard OF a black organist. With one exception. I once mentioned to Murray Somerville of Harvard something about how I noticed, some black people seem to have an amazing musical skill that really would lend itself so well to the organ, so why aren’t there black organists. And I think I even said that part of what makes my skill so special is that I’m similar to blacks in that way. He told me that he agreed with me, and even told me he knows of one black organist, and “his playing is very special like that” or something like that.
I should note, eventually when I had my problems with Harvard, they tarnished me with all the same Jim Crow stereotypes directed against black men. And, later on, I’d get stalked and harassed by people, who always would insult me using terms of poor mental health. E.g., it’s as if the mental health system, they viewed, was put in place to marginalize people they didn’t like or who they felt jealous of in some sense. So, if I had a problem with Harvard, that meant I was “crazy.”
It’s kind of like a “I bet those grapes are sour” wanting to stigmatize someone they feel jealous of as “mentally ill” in this arbitrary and capricious way which reflects more the kind of ostracism you might see on the school yard. And, true to form, blacks really are diagnosed schizophrenic at a rate four times that of whites, meaning the degree of bias that must permeate the mental health system, just based on that fact alone, is horrifying.
And, here’s the thing. I’ve always noticed that I seem to have much more affinity for black people than most other whites, especially those types of whites I have had such above mentioned problems with. And I do feel it’s my expressive style and all that — those same traits that inspired all those problems in the first place — that is why I get along with black people as well as I do.
But, here’s the thing, what do you do with bullies? How do you handle bullies? You cannot try to reason with them in a wishy washy way and get anywhere. They will not listen to reason, and if you try to reason with them, they will laugh at you and have no respect for you, because you are naive enough to actually think they are capable of listening to anything but outright force and dominance, as opposed to a polite request to voluntarily abide by rules of right versus wrong. They know only dominance and submission. You either out dominance them, or you don’t. That DOES mean you have to be tough — or, another way of putting it is: mean.
That, by the way, is exactly how you have to deal with drug dealing riff raff hanging out in bad areas of town too.
As an afterthought, I should even mention that, when I was victimized by the mafia in connection to Harvard, I was living in Dorchester then, in an alleged “bad neighborhood.” Well, I was not menaced even once by a single black “hoodlum.” However, after being date rape drugged by a bar in Boston, and involuntarily drugged other times, many incidents occurred involving gay men DRIVING DOWN from hoity toity neighborhoods like Boston’s South End, Cambridge, Melrose, etc., to do all sorts of bad and criminal things to me.
The only reason perpetrators wanted me to live in that neighborhood was not because residents were especially criminal compared to anyone else, but because residents were poor enough and easily intimidated enough so the perpetrators could get people from “nicer” areas like Cambridge to come down and do bad things to me, and they trusted the neighboring residents would be too INTIMIDATED to talk or come forward as witnesses admitting they’d seen things untoward happening.
I realize, I should point that out, because it flies so far in the face of typical societal stereotypes regarding who is behind most crime, The kinds Republicans use to justify their “tough on crime” stance. I realize I need to actually explain this or else people just won’t on their own guess that this was true. In my case, all perpetrators were either white or Asian.
And it just couldn’t be any other way.
One reason for the race disparities in Mass Incarceration, I believe, is to help it so whites only can monopolize these areas of crime, as they are quite lucrative and also come with valuable “party privileges.”
I guess I can only respond to this by noting just how common this type of corruption is. It is not only limited to psychiatry but is also a problem in all sorts of other sectors of the economy. And, mainstream economics in academia basically refuses to even acknowledge or recognize this problem, insofar as I understand, and to that degree, they should be debunked as a corrupt discipline most likely taking money and bribes perhaps not from Big Pharma so much as from plenty of other similarly corrupt business sectors.
I am particularly struck by this:
“Jureidini: I think we are. I don’t want to denigrate the concept of evidence-based medicine, because evidence-based decision-making is a good thing. Our concern is that true evidence-based medicine isn’t what’s practiced, largely because of the influence of industry but there are other reasons too.
One of the most striking shortcomings in the current approach to evidence in medicine is the absence of rigorously trying to set out to disprove a favorite hypothesis. What happens mostly in medicine is that people get an idea that they like and then try and massage the data to support that point of view rather than having a good idea and thinking “I’d really like that idea to be meaningful but before I go out there and tell people that I’ve got this great idea, I want to do whatever I can to challenge the idea.””
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Where else have we seen this kind of problem? I do know that, in Ancient Rome, for instance, lead poisoning was a favored medical practice. ESPECIALLY among the upper classes. Or at least the middle classes. (I bet there were a bunch who saw the writing on the wall and swore off it. If so, Rome was not a society that very thoroughly documented all opinions, as they did not have printing presses, let alone the internet. So, such dissent would have left no trace 2000 years later.)
However, I believe that there was, long ago, such a thing as the “guild system” which was said to get in the way of “progress.” A guild system involving the trades. And what were they called? Luddites?
Here’s the thing. A very basic understanding of the economy can be envisioned, simply by noting all the things we need, and then thinking about what systems of exchange have to happen, in order for everything to work out right. Meanwhile, technological progress in the production of food and other necessities allows for the transfer of labor from such sectors as food to other sectors.
Furthermore, if jobs are eliminated in work producing “essentials,” other sectors of the economy HAVE to expand in order to keep people employed and busy and with the money necessary to buy the necessities now produced efficiently by fewer people. Once efficiency is improved re: production of necessities, we must create inefficiency in other parts of the economy, or I should say superfluousness in other parts of the economy, in order to make the economic system work and keep people employed.
Absent that, only government welfare can suffice. However, you might as well say that many superfluous jobs created in response to excess efficiency in necessities are little more than glorified welfare masquerading as work. In a class system, we say the lower classes are “on welfare” or “on the dole.” But the upper classes? Oh they are deservedly being paid much more, to do “a whole lot of good.”
I am reminded of the door to door insurance salesman. We must always interrogate and question which parts of our economy really TRULY are “doing a whole lot of good.” Just because there is a lot of hype doesn’t mean you should believe it.
Do you know what is especially ….. I don’t even know what to say or how to say it ….. especially mind numbing about this?
This is sooooooooo bad, what they are doing here, it is so bad, it is shocking to the point of being unbelievable.
At the same time it is this bad, drug companies have managed to rope all sorts of institutions of higher learning into schemes this bad, all of whom work so hard to develop this aura of properness and respectability, complete with all sorts of authoritative jargon and very dignified sounding speech.
Even to the point where Harvard itself is complicit in this too.
Indeed, I remember when I was being victimized by the mafia in connection with Harvard, for awhile I spoke with this Malena person, who was Russian Jewish and told me she knew many holocaust survivors. She told me that my situation reminded me of a story she heard regarding a concentration camp inmate who scaled the barbed wire fence and tried to escape. And, normally, the guards would have shot him, but in this case, they spared his life, and also proceeded to explain to him: “why are you even trying to escape here? Don’t you understand, the things that go on here are so unbelievable and so far beyond the realm of human comprehension that, if you escape and try to tell anyone what goes on here, they simply will not believe you but will think that you are crazy.”
I think drug companies have the same thing going on with their bribery of doctors and institutions of higher learning. It’s outright criminal, what is going on, and they should be criminally prosecuted for this. Even worse, ALL OF THEM are doing it, so many that, in order to crack down on this, you’d literally have to expand the prison system in order to house all the co-conspirators.
But then, they are doing it all in plain sight, not even trying to cover it up, and trying to rely instead on bluff, an arrogant kind of bluff. If anyone questions them, they will act outraged and be like “I’m a [insert title and qualifications] how dare you question me?” Which is nothing but outright intimidation.
People just want to be enablers and just want to believe. It is sort of like wanting to believe in the good and wanting to think positively. You don’t want to believe that many people could be this bad and lie through their teeth this badly, so you choose instead to believe they are probably mostly doing the right thing.
That’s a mistake. It is necessary to be that cynical. Sort of like how you have to fight fire with fire.
Oh, even worse, it is necessary to be so cynical and such a “conspiracy theorist” that the very definition of schizophrenia begins to loom as a potential source of fear. You have to harbor a kind of distrust of the psychiatric profession that would give them the perfect opportunity to diagnose you schizophrenic or at least “paranoid.”
Except, actually, it’s HEALTHY to be that skeptical and not healthy to blindly trust OTHERS about your own health. Part of recovering from various health issues is listening to your own body, trusting yourself, and — it is almost as if you are the one in charge of your own health and you are the one who knows the best regarding your own health. Including or especially mental health. And the ability to “mind over matter” heal oneself has been underestimated by the medical profession.
Remember, health outcomes are way better in Europe than the United States, and they have government provided healthcare, and you know what the government is like. I once was hospitalized in Quebec so I kind of know. Everyone says the private market does way better than the government at catering to the consumer, and that is true. Health is an area where you do better when you are catered to much less. And what those government health agencies are telling European populations, with their rationing and long waits is: “you are on your own.”
That, in and of itself, might be responsible for much of improved European health outcomes. I am reminded of how victims of PTSD induced “dissociative disorder” need to “pull their brains together” in response to the trauma, and I note it’s been said that anti-psychotics hinder rather than help that.
Well, even if you don’t have PTSD, I think somehow the same principle might hold true with respect to your health. Europeans know they are on their own, and that makes them more attentive to their health in ways Americans are not, because Americans are coddled too much by consumer culture.
I think our whole entire culture might somehow impact that kind of thing too. And we in the USA are not even aware of it because we are too used to it.
The truth is, we are an empire similar to how Ancient Rome was an empire. And lead poisoning was a favorite for them.
Also, in contrast to America, Europe is a much older country and Europeans still cling to traditions more — which can have its downside, but also has its upside. And Europeans resisted jumping on the psychiatric bandwagon far longer than America did.
See, in America, you can have someone be the “big man” and do a bunch of smoke and mirrors “authoritarianism” sounding tricks, and it works. People here get brainwashed. Not so much in countries that are older and held onto tradition more.
I suddenly am reminded of Obama saying those who vote against him are ones who’d “cling to guns and religion.” Which is rather insulting. Actually, even with religion and guns, it’s as if America does traditionalism in the same wrong-headed way too. The problems of American culture EVEN INFECT those who would want to “cling to tradition more” in a healthy way, so it just becomes like another version of all the same wrong-headed stuff in psychiatry.
Removed for moderation.
Do you know that infrared light, shone on the skin, will increase serotonin?
“Several biochemical changes occur in the body as a result of exposure to near, mid, and far-infrared light. The triad effect of increased release of dopamine (a neurotransmitter), beta-endorphins (a neuropeptide hormone), and serotonin (the precursor to melatonin) during and after an infrared sauna therapy sessions may raise as well as stabilize mood (4).
This cascade of pleasure hormones released in response to the infrared light wavelengths makes this particular healing modality an excellent choice for individuals suffering from depression.”
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Now here is the thing. I have a cold laser and have tried using it to treat my head trauma symptoms. And I’ve used infrared heating pads in the past. I feel like I don’t like the infrared heating pad because, while it definitely will cause a temporary high, my brain adjusts to it. Plus, I don’t want to be dependent on it.
However, I DO like outdoor exercise. Which is known to cause permanent improvement, including building more brain tissue. Stimulating the growth of more brain tissue.
I believe that, when you exercise outdoors, you get the infrared light rays from the sun shining on in and into your head, which you don’t get indoors. And newer buildings are worse than older buildings in terms of what light rays they block in order to be energy efficient. At the same time, you get various olfactory stimulation outdoors you don’t get indoors — again, newer buildings really bad in this regard.
But, somehow, I think the outdoor exercise does more than mere symptom treatment but actually reprograms the brain somehow. E.g., you are getting the light rays and olfactory stimulation at the same time as your muscles are working and producing various chemicals on their own — which, I think, somehow tell the brain to get better.
And I think it’s a mechanism where you need all three conditions — outdoor olfactory plus infrared plus exercise — in order for it to work. Can’t have a missing piece of the puzzle, you know.
Anyway, I would suspect the people who benefit from SSRI’s probably would also benefit from infrared light therapy as well. Except that’s artificial. They’d probably benefit from the right type of outdoor exercise.
Oh, you know, it never occurred to me before but I’m realizing it now. Little kids with ADHD might also be having issues with modern buildings that block certain light rays their brains need in order to grow right. Something like that.
Oh, look at this. Skull thickness really makes a difference as to light rays penetrating your head and stimulating your brain.
Also, I should explain, infrared light hitting the SKIN causes a reaction that produces serotonin and a few other chemicals, I think. However, infrared light also penetrates the skull and directly stimulates the brain as well. Meaning, there are two mechanisms for stimulation of red light.
Hmmmm, you know one could speculate that lower levels of depression in black people could even be because black skin absorbs light that much better than white skin, isn’t that interesting?
See, here’s the thing. SSRI’s seeming to help some people but not others should have been regarded as a clue to what might be going on with depression, that should have called for more research identifying a mechanism that might result in better treatment.
You know what? There is a question I want to ask. And that is, why are double blind studies like this regarded as “the best” or regarded as “the gold standard?” Or, regarded as “the only way” to figure out whether something is good or not?
I just think the world is not that simple, and sometimes alternative methods should be tried.
I think anecdotal examples should be taken seriously, and investigated. We have enormous genetic diversity and many different sub populations. Depression may not even be all one disease but the symptoms of several different diseases or problems. Which could explain why some respond to SSRI’s and others don’t.
Wouldn’t it be nice to try to investigate what the underlying cause is, if not a chemical imbalance? See the declaration of a “chemical imbalance” was almost done in order to forestall additional research like that, which would make the blockbuster prozac look bad. Or reduce the number of people prescribed it, reduce the customer base.
In particular, EVEN WHEN SSRI’s help symptoms, they may be a bandaid. For instance, like prescribing morphine for a muscle imbalance causing pain without fixing the muscle imbalance.
What I hate is this conservative philosophy involving everyone jumping on the bandwagon of a fake “explanation,” but the purpose is to cut off scientific debate, which also amounts to cutting off or preventing areas of research which people who are inspired, creative, idealistic, etc., would love to do because they love science and exploration for its own sake, and not even for money’s sake.
Indeed, it strikes me that there is this cultural problem whereby those who care about money will always exclude or ostracize from academia those who are too idealistic and who will chaff at such reigns being put on them solely for the sake of money.
I ought to note, this is very important because I once spoke to a gay man I hooked up with who was in biotech about the whole issue of corruption in medicine. He said medicine is very corrupt.
And, right off the bat, he told me that perhaps the biggest area of corruption there was with pharmaceuticals was tied to the failure to recognize genetic diversity and the failure to identify and study different sub populations, and design drugs that are tailored specifically towards them.
Pharmaceutical companies insist on the “blockbuster” drug model, where they can find one drug they are able to market to the whole entire population, and they would never make as much money if they studied genetic diversity and assumed that a drug that worked for one person won’t work for another, so they have to tailor each drug for each sub population.
The R&D costs as a ratio of the final profits simply would be too high if they did that.
And this problem is endemic to ALL of medicine. Not just psychiatry. Though this man also said that, while all of medicine is corrupt, psychiatry is the most corrupt. “If you have enough money, you can buy ANY research result you want in psychiatry.”
Another interesting side point is, Identity Politics has made it politically incorrect to even study either gendered brain differences or race/ethnicity brain differences. Currently, the cultural conversation would say that further studies shouldn’t be done because the results would be insulting to minorities, but I am not so sure that would be true.
I personally know that, when I was at Harvard, they had this teaching style in math that was just terrible for me but good for other students, and they hinted to me that they knew I was different in a way that didn’t make me less smart at math (maybe I was more smart at math than the average Harvard math student), but that I was still at a disadvantage anyway because of their style which was “how we HAVE to do it, because this is America.” And they even explained, I should have gone to college in Europe because, if I went to a place like Oxford, they have the more sociable learning style with the kind of mentorship I need for my mind to fully engage.
They didn’t make any smoking gun statements but their beating around the bush suggested guilt of some sort. Many years later, my inevitable conclusion is that Harvard and other colleges in America have deliberately figured out a learning style or teaching style or tradition that is best suited towards upper middle class anglo saxon protestant WASP types, as well as those whose families gave them the best preparation, and is deliberately meant to disadvantage blacks, Italians, some Jews, and other types of more “ethnic” people who tend to have stronger family traditions and are in need of more “sociable” learning styles and are less cold. And who are more likely to be athletic and who are also stronger at the geometrical side of math, even while the Harvard Math Department tends to have a bias towards algebraic types of mathematicians.
And I believe places like Harvard have done research which they never divulged that helped them figure out how to engage in teaching styles meant to advantage America’s elite whites above both black and other ethnic immigrants.
I strongly believe the few studies that were done on race brain differences were artificially rigged so as to make certain minorities look inferior, all the while I suspect lots of “underground” studies have been done designed to develop teaching styles that artificially privilege Establishment American Whites, all so as to make the rigged studies suggesting inferiority of other groups become self-fulfilling prophecies.
America IS White Supremacist, and it is not a few blue collar troll like men in the deep south or other red state areas of the country who are the primary white supremacists. It’s the establishment that is, including the liberal establishment.
I also note health outcomes in America are VERY poor for blacks — and these disparities are VERY profitable for pharmaceutical companies. Knowing what I know about Harvard now, I believe Harvard and similar institutions may well have done underground studies which they covered up using the mafia that may focused on race secretly, and they may have figured out why health outcomes are poorer for minorities, only to cover up the research, deny such groups the knowledge they need to have to achieve better outcomes, and even gone further and tried to promote all the wrong things they knew would guarantee the bad outcomes so profitable to their corporate donors.
I just wonder, though. Do you think Identity Politics in and of itself — which was a creation of academia and of our cultural elite — do you think that might be a forces which is helping to give academia an excuse to avoid study of sub populations and genetic diversity, so as to prop up the blockbuster “one size fits all” drug model most convenient to Big Pharma?
I think it might be. And I say this in large part due to having lived for awhile in Dorchester in a black area myself, and learned of some of the appalling things that go on, which are none other than systemic racism practiced by the most ardent adherents to Identity Politics. And which include doing unethical involuntary medical experiments on poor blacks from the inner city, which are no different from how Hitler experimented on the Jews in Auschwitz. So, I mean, come on. Those trumpeting Identity Politics aren’t doing it for the minorities themselves. So who else might they pushing Identity Politics for? Maybe the corporations with the money?
Take, for instance, the black-white schizophrenia diagnosis gap. Victims of unethical medical experiments perpetrated by the mafia usually do end up getting diagnosed fraudulently with schizophrenia to cover up the crimes. So that, in and of itself, might be a good explanation for the wildly divergent rates of schizophrenia diagnoses. E.g., certain black neighborhoods are laboratories for unethical medical experiments, but absent being honest about it and putting them in concentration camps, complex criminal racketeering schemes involving a fraudulently imposed diagnosis of schizophrenia suffice instead.
You know what would be a really good idea to do?
Have a study done which lists the causes of death of those prescribed certain psych meds. Take, for instance, diabetes, but also take the added obesity rates and project deaths by heart disease or cancer or whatever.
As opposed to old age.
You might want to do this for some of the blockbuster atypical anti-psychotics like Zyprexa, known to cause lots of obesity and diabetes.
But here is where you want to get some really good mathematicians to calculate the increased revenues derived by the cancer industry, heart disease industry, and diabetes industry, all due to the prescriptions of anti-psychotics.
Let me ask, how much did zyprexa cost per year, when it first came out? Was it something like $10 a pill or $10 a day? So perhaps that comes out to $3650 a year? Profits realized only for 20 years per patient, and then price goes way down as a generic. That would be $73,000 for the original drug company, over the lifetime of that one patient.
“The total mean direct medical care costs for patients with established cardiovascular disease (CVD) were $18,953 per patient per year. Cost estimates varied widely, however, depending on the presence or absence of other health conditions.”
Oh wow. That’s six times higher per year than the direct cost of prescribing a patient zyprexa for 20 years. But I suspect zyprexa would raise heart disease rates far more than even the corresponding rise in obesity, by itself would.
Let’s say 20 percent of zyprexa patients get heart disease — coronary artery disease, I mean — and they wouldn’t have gotten it but for taking zyprexa, then the Heart Disease Industry should be counted as having realized even more increased revenues than Eli Lilly did.
My mother outright told me that elite Wall Street investors will network with institutions like Harvard, studying the effects of newly released blockbuster drugs like zyprexa, specifically for the purpose of getting an “inside edge” to the market. E.g., if zyprexa is going to cause a huge increase in heart attacks, they figure it out long before anyone else does, working with institutions engaging in unethical involuntary human experimentation — often using identical twins for that purpose — and here is where they add insult to injury. If they learn that a drug like zyprexa is bad, will cause very serious long term health problems, and should be taken off the market, they usually will cover up that knowledge, so they can experiment with various insider trading schemes designed to exploit, for profit, this secret knowledge they have about a product, which they expect nobody else will become aware of for decades.
But think of the carnage. These crooks are knowingly condemning large sectors of the population to health problems they know will happen, so they can profit from it. I find that part terrible.
I would say multiple RICO cases is the way to go. The only problem I will point out is that when college tuition is something like $200,000 per person, and then the correspondingly high salary increases you get for getting your degree are that much more rewarding compared to if you didn’t, and when the college educated population starts swelling bigger and bigger and bigger, you end up with a problem that people cannot back out of the system or choose a different occupation, the moment they find out their jobs involve criminal racketeering.
Once you invested in your medical school education, you are married to the mafia for life, basically. When people can’t back out, which people used to be able to do with respect to jobs that only required a high school education, the system is now capable of increasing the amount of criminality it requires of its participant employees, and how can they say no?
The legal system can police criminality so long as criminality is not the norm. When it IS the norm, I don’t know what they can do. They don’t have the time. The criminal racketeering that goes on today that academic institutions and corporations are involved with deliberately goes out of its way to introduce the kind of complexity and convolutedness to their schemes, so that it may not be impossible to bring RICO cases in certain circumstances perhaps. The biggest problem is the sheer number of man hours that would have to be involved, in just bringing one single case. And there are thousands of such cases, too many to count. The FBI cannot even begin to wade through it.
Let me see, how can I illustrate this. In 2010, I believe, or perhaps it was 2011, I had just started working with my second attorney on the racketeering scheme I had been a victim of since Harvard, which I had by then spent 15 years collecting evidence on, and trust me, this was a very good case and what I did was very clever. It’s an amazing legal case I mustered up. Exquisite. Something I am very proud of.
Well, around that time I have an email I wrote to one gay man I was emailing online about the matter, explaining that the number of computer files I have which are relevant now amounts to 8000 files just for the five year period from 2005-2010 alone. It would be 15000 files if I include everything from Harvard starting in 1994. However, some of these files are block files, which means each of them include hundreds of documents all saved in one file. So that’s an under-estimate. And this was all from simply doing a quick computer count on all the relevant files I had which I’d saved in various folders and marked as relevant. A quick computer count which does not separate out tons of block files which contained hundreds of different documents each.
In addition to all of that, however, I should note that the moment I started emailing the second attorney I had, I suddenly started being deluged online by huge numbers of gay men on a certain hook up site, all placating placating placating me. This was because my computer and gmail account were being hacked, so I could do nothing without the perpetrators finding out everything I did and staying one step ahead of me.
This placating of me — only after I go to that second attorney — was in such contrast to the non-stop campaign of death threats, hate mail, and harassment which same online community had been heaping on me for two years straight that I knew, this sudden contrast was very very relevant to “proving” that the (gay mafia) existed, or even if that’s not the best way to characterize it (it’s really more of a Harvard and corporate mafia run by straight male CEO’s than a gay mafia), at least it proves the gang-like pattern of behavior this community was engaging in nearly without exception. Let’s just say I had a legalistic background from before, so I knew how legally relevant these placating emails were.
So I started copying every single one of them, hitting print screen and saving to microsoft word, over and over and over again. Since, by now, the same website which maybe netted me on average two or three or at most five or ten emails a day from other guys probably was netting me hundreds of emails a day from guys, all placating me in the same way. And I saved every single one of them in a graphics file, except these were pasted to MS Word documents which quickly got hundreds of pages long and then had to be saved and then I’d start up another document which I’d say after it was well over 100 pages.
In less than a month, I wracked up maybe — I can’t remember if it was 5 gb or maybe more like 12 to 14 gb of memory. The files started taking up some ungodly amount of space, and then I simply had to stop further documentation. Because I knew if I continued it, I’d need to buy a bigger computer and I knew I couldn’t afford that.
So, by the time it would be a RICO case which the FBI might be in a position to investigate, there were probably thousands of emails from gay men online, just from a very short time period, which were suspicious enough so they all would need to be tracked down and very thoroughly investigated.
Except, I am sure, you know how the mafia works. Where one perpetrator may do something, only if it’s criminal racketeering and you investigate it, you might learn of dozens of people involved behind the scenes, for every one person who did something “overt” and in need of investigation.
Now I did all the right things which would make it easy for a government agency to investigate matters. You could say what I did was brilliant. And yet, it still would be a really really tough investigation involving extraordinary amounts of man power. Even while I carefully manipulated the perpetrators into at times making all the right explicit confessions that are easy to follow up on. Meaning, I was smart enough not only to make my situation become a legal case, but I was also smart enough to figure out how to make it so it can be efficiently investigated so as to reduce the number of man hours put into it.
Most victims don’t do the right things so they can be helped. And even if some of them do enough of the right things so they theoretically could be helped, they still can’t be helped because, well, the way investigations work, if something is too ambiguous, if law enforcement REALLY tries very very hard, as in devotes an enormous amount of time, yes they can still crack the case anyway. They are only able to reserve that kind of effort for a small number of cases like murders. Otherwise, they just don’t have the time.
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Removed for moderation.
I have very little respect for the bipolar diagnosis these days.
Do you know that Harvard University tried to get me fraudulently diagnosed bipolar? All so they could invent a pretext for refusing to investigate my claims of misconduct against the then organist at Harvard and some of his students?
See, I had this talent at the pipe organ that made it so many teachers said I was probably one of the best in my generation at it. Meaning I was better than all the other organists at Harvard, even though I was a student. And not just a little bit better. A lot better. There was no comparison.
Guess what other organists did? It was just one problem after the other after the other. I was forced to quit a job playing the organ at Harvard due to intolerable working conditions. But then, other students started doing things like rope me into agreeing to give performances, and then not tell me the right pieces I’m supposed to practice or play until the very last minute. One told me “I only want you to accompany these four pieces” at first, only to then tell me, less than a week before the performance, “actually, I need you to accompany ALL 21 pieces of this work.”
It was just one thing after the other after the other like that. I had low self esteem due to not having the most supportive family, so actually what happened was that the things I tolerated for very long without formally complaining were actually quite outrageous. Most other people would have complained long ago and I didn’t because I had such low self esteem. However, eventually the antics of the organ world at Harvard got so outrageous and over the top that I finally do officially complain.
Harvard literally corruptly arranged for their doctors, who had previously insisted I was not bipolar, to suddenly insist I was bipolar. And my official complaint against the organ world at Harvard was the proof of my insanity, they said. And that meant they were not obliged to even investigate my claims in the first place.
Of course, they knew that such an investigation would show up very serious wrong doing detrimental to Harvard’s reputation. Not only that, but I’m gay and Harvard arranged for a large portion of the gay community to harass me and ostracize me on behalf of Harvard, so that years later, I’d still have gays come up to me who shouldn’t have known me from Atom and accuse me of being “crazy” in a manner that was obviously linked to my experiences at Harvard.
Or, in some cases, they would harass me in subtle ways which were sneaky but just a repeated pattern of sneaky nasty behavior engaged in over and over and over again. Until I’d eventually get fed up and confront them on it. And they’d suddenly accuse me of having a mental health problem the moment I did. It was as if Harvard was a kind of mafia.
I started documenting much of the behavior, and have an enormous amount of computer files on it. However, in one instance, a somewhat indiscreet gay man ended up kind of summarizing, very accurately, the systematic abusive behavior from the gay community, which can be traced back to my problems with Harvard. But, already, you can see here the abuse and corruption of the mental health system in all of this.
It also became true that, when it eventually came to rape, cops refused to help me, and they made reference to this same “mental health excuse” that everyone else started making in conjunction with abuse of me, ever since Harvard got their docs to suddenly impose a bipolar diagnosis on me for asking for an investigation into the misconduct of other organists.
Also, if you see this series of emails I post, from one “JPBoy” — notice how he says “hundreds of guys know about you” and I correct him and say that I think it is 1000’s. I was right.
I eventually hire a lawyer to deal with these matters, and was almost murdered with rat poison, which was an incident staged by NYC cops, and if I’d died of it, they were planning to do faked forensics in a manner similar to what happened in the Matthew Shepard “hate crimes” case where a fake narrative was imposed to cover up the antics of the gay crystal meth scene, and everyone pretended the perpetrators were straight. In my case, after the rat poison gets into my system, someone comes into my hotel room, breaks my laptop in half and trashes it. But police were going to pretend I’d done all that myself in some kind of psychotic rage.
And they probably were going to arrange for me to maybe fall off a balcony and hit my head or something – this as a way to cover up what was a whole series of brutal crimes carried out by gay men with the blessing of the police and mental health system. Or, rather, which police and the mental health system had COLLUDED with.
The perpetrators wanted to be able to somehow portray me as a difficult person who flies off the handle and goes into all sorts of psychotic rages, all so that the hordes of gay perpetrators could all go lie and say they had a difficult time with me, I was so difficult, etc.. People at Harvard could have then gone and explained that, all the problems I had had there was because I was that difficult too.
Well, it all didn’t work because, as a result of some kind of fluke, I got only a tiny portion of the rat poison/warfarin dose that was intended. So after the person who trashes my hotel room leaves, I escape in my jacket and underwear … The hotel clerk at the front desk refuses to call the police on my behalf so I have to run to another business to call the police. They instantly take me to the hospital and they all knew it was warfarin and they treated me for warfarin overdose without having to ask me a single question about any kind of symptoms.
Basically the same “system” that had colluded to try to murder me had to then go and save my life after I was seen escaping the hotel room in the middle of January in my underwear. Because if they had let me die of warfarin poisoning, there is no way they could have faked it so as to make it look like anything but a murder. Too many witnesses saw me running outside. And they could not cajol me back into my hotel room, only to have me fall off a balcony or something. It would be like, if I’m running out of the hotel in my underwear, if it isn’t a crime, at the very least I need medical attention. Well, they can’t have me dying in the hospital, you know. That’s not according to plan. So they had to save my life instead.
What you have here, though, is the police and mental health system acting as a kind of criminal gang. However, no one can accuse the police and mental health system of doing that. The very accusation would be used as “proof” the person making the accusation suffers from schizophrenia. It’s a really bad problem. But, see, after experiencing THAT from the system, I really do not have much respect at all for current diagnostic categories like bipolar.
Well, the way it works, while the right is beholden to large corporate interests like Big Pharma, bad psychiatry which disables and marginalizes and creates permanent dependency on drugs as well as permanent dependency on welfare services such as public housing or group homes, all of that creates steady professional jobs not just for psychiatrists but for those professionals who run all of the “affordable housing projects” those disabled people live in.
These are all political patronage jobs handed out by the Democratic Party. And, the way the machine all works, it’s absolutely important that the number of political patronage jobs stays steady and doesn’t shrink. Their system is completely incompatible with any kind of mental health system that actually has people get better.
Let me just say, I know something about the paranoia the system has regarding the potential shrinking of political patronage jobs in such areas as affordable housing. They are obsessed.
Similarly, nobody talks about this but, while Republicans might have the tough on crime rhetoric, Mass Incarceration creates HUGE numbers of political patronage jobs for the Democratic Party.
Although I do believe prisons also creates political patronage jobs for the Republican Party as well. Whereas the mental health system is far more imbalanced in terms of creating political patronage jobs for the Democrats only.
However, our system of mass incarceration along with the mental health system for the poor, both kind of go together and ally with one another. How many prisoners get put on those debilitating psychiatric drugs?
Left wing opponents of Mass Incarceration go on and on and on about how “so many prisoners are mentally ill, we are incarcerating the mentally ill, that’s terrible.” However, I think prisons are pushing drugs on prisoners solely on behalf of the drug companies and not always appropriately.
However, prisons are cheap and house prisoners efficiently. Left wing liberals want those prisoners to be taken out of prison, be declared mentally ill, and then housed in affordable housing projects with mental health services, all of which is probably two to three times more expensive PER PERSON, but that would create how many more political patronage jobs for the left, for them to do that?
Thus, even the opposition to Mass Incarceration is a little bit too wedded to the greed of the whole — well, there is this whole academic corporate complex and the “college degree leads to a high paying job” guild.
Colleges, in order to justify their tuition, need to ensure they can place all of their graduates in decent paying jobs.
Bloating the mental health system is a way to do that. And prisons, by the way, are not such decent jobs. Thus, the political patronage jobs of the prison system do not go to the same crowd of people as political patronage jobs in the mental health system.
Blue collar and lower class people probably without college degrees work in prisons. White collar and more upper middle class people work in the mental health system.
It may be the case that “the system” prefers to house people who are difficult in prisons, and people who are easier to manage in the “mental health system.”
One thing I am aware of, from living in Cambridge, MA and knowing about the politics of the affordable housing lobby is that “affordable housing” in liberal cities is designed primarily to create political patronage jobs for liberal professionals. And these liberal professionals are not the nicest landlords either. They do not treat the tenants very well at all. And they have a sense of entitlement and do not want to deal with anyone who is “difficult.”
Thus, the most needy people are excluded from affordable housing, because they would be regarded as “too difficult.” I remember hearing two decades ago that, in Cambridge, MA, the ideal “affordable housing” inmate was often something like a white woman from a wealthy family who has perfect credit (perfect credit absolutely essential and non-negotiable for tenants of these affordable housing projects) who has decided to quit her job and pursue her calling as an artist.
But, the thing is, affordable housing projects are part of the “nice jobs” program former students are promised after their parents paid an arm and a leg on college tuition. With that kind of money being paid in tuition, it is a requirement that these professionals be coddled afterwards. Part of that is ensuring they never have to deal with mentally ill or other “needy people” who might be regarded as “difficult.”
So I do think you might have some sort of “cross-over” where the prisons often are used to house the mentally ill who are “difficult” and who the spoiled rich kids employed in the “mental health system” don’t want to have to bother with. And since their parents paid that much in college tuition, they are entitled to get their money’s worth for what they paid for in their college degrees.
Do you know what psychiatrists are taught to do regarding patient records? They are taught to write the records in a manner not to maximize accuracy but instead to minimize the chances of a successful lawsuit. Don’t expect medical records to be accurate or even reflect what the doctor personally believes about the patient.
I believe you could do a class action lawsuit. But remember that such a class action lawsuit would be not just a lawsuit but a P.R. debacle for psychiatry and Big Pharma and certain parts of mainstream academia as well. Except, that’s just what’s needed to spur on the maximum amount of change for the better possible.
With that in mind, I strongly recommend such a class action suit to name Harvard University prominently if it can. Harvard is one of the biggest names in the world so such a class action suit would get so much more press if it targets Harvard University as well.
Many attorneys might refuse to take the case in the first place, simply saying that they know it’s better for their careers to stay on the good side of Harvard. I don’t know — how about starting up an association of psychiatric patients who were victimized who can be one of the plaintiffs in such a lawsuit? Where there are regular monthly meetings members can go to, where they attend in person, and the sociability drives the whole dynamic forward.
Lawyers are more willing to take cases if they know there is an active association that regularly makes the news who will endorse their good name even in the face of attacks due to them going up against the establishment. Hard to explain but, the way the media works, they are partial to organized groups who they can regularly rely upon for sources in a practical way which makes their jobs easier to get done.
What about including, for instance, the bought-and-paid-for invention of “child bipolar disorder” by Harvard professor Biederman? If you think Prozac is bad, wait until you hear about the anti-psychotics. Far worse mental straitjacket. And putting children on them? I’m horrified.
Honestly, he’s destroyed their lives, of so many children who were put on those drugs. It’s criminal. Except the parents can’t sue because they needed the welfare money in the first place and can be accused of being bad parents to have let it happen.
And, as for the kids put on anti-psychotics who are now adults, there is not enough evidence out there showing just how much the anti-psychotics permanently disabled them, made them so they will never be normal and never live normal lives, so as to help them sue. That is a problem. I strongly suspect that one of the things academic institutions do for the drug companies is simply to agree to avoid studying an issue in the first place, especially when they strongly believe that conducting such studies might expose major corporate donors to legal liability.
However, let me ask. Is there any group out there which could DO the class action lawsuit? It’s not good enough simply to write an article about it. You have to find a group willing to take it on.
Because, in a money making industry like this, failure is defined as success and success as failure.
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Not sure they will get reparations. Best thing to do for someone is try the best to help them out from now on. Money not the solution to everything. Think of the focus on reparations, even while our whole society and economy has degraded so much that the things money can buy aren’t worth it. So you can’t throw more money at the problem.
I do wonder, though, whether it might help if those charlatans in academic institutions really got the shaming and humiliation they deserve. Sometime punishment helps, and they are a class of people who don’t get enough of that.
I’m not surprised the serotonin hypothesis would have come from Harvard in 1965. My mother worked for the Harvard School of Public Health then, for Jean Mayer in nutrition research. I understand the culture.
What she was aware of was links to the food industry — especially that part which produced grains — donating to Harvard, and the “recommendations” that warned us away from saturated fats, cholesterol, butter, red meat, eggs, etc., not really being supported by any kind of rigorous data.
They just wanted to believe.
Those nutrition recommendations were debunked starting in the 90’s. However, my mother told me as a kid in the 80’s all about how questionable they were. She wasn’t talking publicly about it, though, and neither were other researchers. Or former researchers. She was not on speaking terms with Jean Mayer by then.
This may seem like a side note. However, when I went to Harvard much later, I learned about the strategic significance of the Crimea — which is now one of the reasons for the current war in Ukraine — as being tied to trade between the grains industry of Southern Russia and Ukraine, and the Middle East.
The Middle East depends on grains from southern Russia and Ukraine, as they are a desert. Or they used to depend on that. Most such grains must be shipped through the Crimea, a tiny bottleneck, making it so whoever controls the Crimea controls all the trade between Southern Russia and the Arab world.
This means that leveraging the Middle East (and other countries) for oil production would be made easier by getting the populations of those countries, like the Middle East, addicted to easily transportable grains. Thus, exaggerating the health benefits of grains as compared to meats, milk, butter, etc., would not have only benefitted the grains industry but would have benefitted all industries dependent on cheap oil. As the best way to encourage oil rich countries to produce high volumes of oil for cheap prices is to make them as dependent on possible on food imports from oil consuming countries.
The Soviet Union’s mismanagement of agriculture resulted in all food exports from Russia/Ukraine to the Middle East ceasing, and the Middle East had to get its food elsewhere, and even the Soviet Union had to get much of its food from imports as well. Both the Soviet Union and the Middle East started ramping up oil production exactly as such food import dependency started happening.
Long digression, but it suggests we have a systematic problem with how huge sectors of the economy are capable of warping scientific “opinion” and skewing in all sorts of ways, with psychiatry perhaps just the tip of the iceberg, a small part of a much larger problem worldwide.
On top of it, actually, in an economy with lots of technology assisted mass production, it becomes necessary either to have huge welfare systems for all those not employed, as machinery makes things so efficient only a small number of people need to be employed feeding everyone. Or, alternative to welfare systems, whole areas of the economy that simply provide non-essential goods and services need to kind of sprout up, to create excuses to employ people, and to spread the wealth around.
Something HAS to happen to put money in the hands of all those not employed producing the bare necessities of life, which is a lot of people now with technology. It either has to be welfare, or “non-essential” products and services.
I believe there is a connection, for instance, between Europe’s super generous welfare system, compared to the USA, and the fact that they have lower rates of ADHD diagnosis and ritalin prescription, and lower rates of psychiatric drug use and cheaper healthcare systems. Indeed, welfare reform in the Clinton Era piggy backed on Harvard professor, Joseph Biederman’s bought and paid for diagnosis of “childhood bipolar disorder.”
I think this can become a problem, as whole business sectors lobby to try to get government to “decree” THEIR goods/services to be more “essential” than the rest, and it all gets decided politically. When we were much poorer and 70 percent of the population worked only to provide us the food we need, there wasn’t much choice, what the other 30% of the economy was.
Now, we actually DO have choice, theoretically. Oddly enough, I think technology has created a situation that enhances the power of the government so much compared to what it used to be that, although we theoretically have more choices regarding what we can do with our economy than we used to, in practice, we are less free. Wealth has created tons and tons of straitjackets.
Because businesses and special interests lobby lobby lobby to try to make it all “not a choice.” And they are all extraordinarily wealthy compared to before. And our economy is, in some ways, more fragile because it is so complex. And so centralized. If a war in Ukraine can potentially cause mass starvation in so many other parts of the world, that portends to an enormous amount of economic centralization. Some of the countries threatened with the worst starvation due to the Ukraine war are actually parts of Africa that have very very fertile soil — but, political conditions have resulted in governments being bribed by foreign interests interested in exploiting such countries for raw materials mining, and these governments have undermined local farmers so badly as to make those countries dependent on food imports — which are only granted in return for raw materials exports. The undermining of local farmers the only tactic that can work to create threatened starvation level conditions, unless men agree to go work in dirty hazardous mines.
However, the extreme exploitation of the third world countries, for cheap labor, creates a completely different problem for us at home. We are like the fat and sedentary middle classes of Ancient Rome, who were granted political patronage off the surplus the Roman Empire extracted from the provinces, only they lead poisoned them into passivity and complacency.
Also, it’s almost like the machinery of the centralized economy wants the bribed middle classes who get all the “goodies” to kind of be steady recipients of largess. Except, the market for luxuries and non-essential goods is anything but steady. In order for the economy not to be at the whim or mercy of transient fads too much, authorities can only make the economy work by making certain non-essential goods “essential” in this steady way.
Computers and internet service is a good way to create economic stability and predictability. And the healthcare system is a good way. Long long ago, I believe foot binding of women in China may have had a motive of limiting the kind of disruptive fluctuations to the economy that would happen when women had babies who took all their time, and then became more mobile and able to do various work as the babies got older. Foot binding limited their activities to stuff like textiles — and textiles can tolerate more fluctuation in the labor force than necessities like food production.
Think about it this way. Women help produce food too, then there is a baby boom, so many women are taken out of food production even while more food needs to be produced. It’s better if such women never STARTED helping out with food production in the first place. Since the economy is somewhat flexible. If there are, initially, lots of young women helping out with food production, you need fewer men working at food production. So several young men become blacksmiths, carpenters, etc, who would have stayed in food production.
Then there is a baby boom and tons of women drop out of producing food to have babies, who eat more. Then, and only then, does society figure out “we have too many young men working as blacksmiths and carpenters, more than we need — and how do we get them back to producing food, that is not so easy. It’s better if women had never started helping out producing food in the first place. What if we do foot binding for women, that will keep everything steady and predictable for us.”
I feel like some sort of economic “pressure” like that was responsible for foot binding of women in China. And somehow the same economic “issue” may also favor psychiatric drugs that create permanent dependency. The need for stability. And I think maybe the exact same economic “issue” might have caused mandatory lead poisoning in Ancient Rome.
In each case, you have products or policies that cause systematic disability and predictable dependency, all of which helps to provide a predictable “stabilizing” force to the economy. And, somehow, wealthy economies worry about such predictability more than less wealthy economies.
I should note, I believe the economics departments of college campuses may suffer from corruption similar to that of psychiatry. Let us suppose that is so. Maybe what I am talking about, the common thread you can weave through foot binding, lead paint in Rome, and psychiatry and bad nutrition recommendations — maybe that is some sort of economic phenomenon we could figure out and publicly identify, and we can’t expect college economics departments to do it. More than the mere fact that business sectors are self interested and lobby. Because everyone lobbies — but it seems the business sectors who enjoy the best success may be those that, in some STRUCTURAL WAY, are able to provide some sort of economic predictability and stability.
Well, universities do think long term, and they want not a big one time donation, but several small ones that go on in perpetuity. It is also true that, because most of the economy is non-essential, it is a fact that academia monopolizes part of the non-essential economy, but other parts of the non-essential economy don’t require workers with college degrees.
Bloat or expand psychiatry, and you raise the value of a psychiatric education in academia. If less money were spent — in the whole economy — in psychiatry, where else might it be spent? How about Disney world. Well, you don’t need an advanced education in order to work at Disney World. Colleges want to maximize the need for EDUCATED WORKERS.
The problem with that is, sometimes you end up with academia acting as charlatans. They want to find fault with EVERYONE who is not under their tutelage, or who hasn’t purchased an expensive education. You even have that in the diversity industry.
More and more and more, it’s all about “education education education.” Always for a price. The solution to everything. And if you don’t have an education, what are you? Backwards, archaic, inferior. Even one of the latest Nobel Prize Winners, Malala, was all about “sending girls to school.” I hate sitting still for long periods of time. I hate being cooped up indoors under a schedule imposed by others. My mother hated school too.
I think someone needs to voice the opposing view.
“Another area of research has focused on serotonin receptors, which are proteins on the ends of the nerves that serotonin links up with and which can transmit or inhibit serotonin’s effects. Research on the most commonly investigated serotonin receptor suggested either no difference between people with depression and people without depression, or that serotonin activity was actually increased in people with depression – the opposite of the serotonin theory’s prediction.”
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I sort of feel as if depression is likely a ‘brain activity imbalance’ sort of like a muscle imbalance. Just as muscles atrophy with lack of use, parts of the brain go into disuse, which is like atrophy though the cells are still there, though it’s also true that such parts of the brain eventually do start to shrink as well.
If depressed people have higher serotonin, maybe that’s like the body trying to re-activate certain areas, or like the brain doing the equivalent of compensating for weak muscles by simply flexing them harder. And SSRI’s is like boosting the part of the muscle that causes electrical activity and flexing, rather than lifting weights so that your muscle fibers get bigger or you develop more muscle fibers. E.g., try to force weak muscle fibers to work harder rather than make them bigger.
But it’s possible SSRI’s tricks the brain into thinking it doesn’t need to start the processes that fix itself. Or, if depressed people have higher serotonin, is that temporary? A temporary response to depression and how the brain tries to recover? Or were they always that way?
Depending on the answer to that, SSRI’s might go and, when they boost serotonin themselves, they force the body to refrain from starting up the process that assists depression recovery, in order to avoid Serotonin overload.
I don’t know.
I think they have not thought to do such studies, have they?
See, I majored in math and also studied some physics and I was wondering whether it might help for psychiatry to see whether their departments could benefit from networking with mathematicians.
There is a whole field called “neural networking” that the mathematically inclined really love. And my mathematical intuition as well as study of physics is exactly what makes me inclined to think of the brain in this manner. Indeed, the brain works kind of like how waves work in the study of physics.
There may well be studies you could even do of brain activity of depressed people, where you can actually figure out quite a lot, if you got the right mathematicians to theorize right about the causes of mental illness, and to test out different theories and see whether they could possibly spot different patterns here or there.
Of course, one wonders how psychiatrists might react to not fully understanding the math behind their own subject. You either have a mathematical brain, or you don’t.
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“As to the nature vs. nurture debate, it seems the truth is likely some combination of nature and nurture – not one or the other. I do believe there may be a genetic component to IQ, given my father and son both graduated from university Phi Beta Kappa (within the top 10%, within the top 10% of universities).”
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Actually, I majored in math at Harvard and do have a very good memory and very good intuition in math as well. And physics too.
The whole nature versus nurture debate could be a VERY interesting math problem. Because, well, think about it. Imagine the brain growing and developing like how a tree or shrub grows, and then nurture is like outside influences exerting influence at times, but the brain is still genetically programmed to grow in only certain ways in response to those outside influences, so you get a combination of nature versus nurture.
Maybe certain parts of the brain are stubborn, though, and will not bend to nurture too much. Like the heart, for instance, has to be within a certain range regarding geometric shape and other stuff, and cannot stray too far from the norm.
Other things like survival instinct and how you respond to danger – like when you get PTSD and it’s stubborn and irrational. You can try to reason yourself out of PTSD but, no, you can’t.
You know you are safe. It doesn’t matter. Another part of your brain over rules that and can only be treated the way it can be treated.
It’s stupid to have a debate where some academics say it’s all 100 percent nurture, some say it’s all nature, when in fact you could try to develop a whole science that starts out with the assumption that it is a combination of both, one where it’s going to be very hard to sort things out, but at least you can try.
I just know what the culture was among researchers in the 1990’s. America has been a crass country that is one of the only countries that refuses to enact family leave laws, arguing that the “free market” should decide everything.
This has been politically rigged by the “community” of large corporations who donate excessively to academia. And part of that rigging, I believe, may involve using the power of “strings attached” donations to academia to promote the exact same corruption of economic research and behavioral science relating to parenting and development that we all acknowledge Big Pharma does to academia with respect to psychiatry.
And it is also true that these corporations try to corrupt or influence the media and other parts of our culture as well. And we might also want to acknowledge or look back through history to understand it better. For instance, some researchers have argued that the debilitating foot binding of women in China which only stopped during the 20th century was tied to economics as well. Helping to create a “captive” pool of female workers in textiles, where the disability caused by foot binding made them less able to bargain effectively for better wages since they couldn’t do anything else, and they were also more reliable and steady workers since they couldn’t do anything else as well. If it hurts to walk, you will prefer to just sit down and sew.
However, elites in China never actually openly proclaimed “we want you to do foot binding because it will make you better workers.” Instead, elites got women to do that by promoting it as a fad and glamorizing it. Pretending that men wanted it. (As a man, I can say I don’t think most men care about feet, and when they do, they prefer them natural.)
The question I’d ask is, might researchers for this twin study have WANTED to say parenting doesn’t matter? So as to minimize family leave and maximize female labor hours?
I should also explain, people should try to bone up on the economics laws of supply and demand. A policy like family leave will take (female) workers out of the job market, and this increases competition among companies for workers, forcing them to pay the remaining workers higher wages in order to retain them. The more guilt mothers have regarding whether parenting matters or not, the more of them will drop out of the work force to spend more time with their kids (or at least cut back their hours) and a trend like this really can force companies to try extra hard to keep workers in the workforce, inevitably leading to higher wages and lower profits.
So, per economics, the laws of supply and demand mean that rigging a study to say that “parenting doesn’t matter and it’s all genetic” is going to keep more women voluntarily in the workforce, and help companies keep women’s wages lower. And if you publish a study that says parenting DOES matter, and it triggers feelings of guilt in working mothers who work long hours nationwide — you really could cause a trend among women cutting back work hours, dropping out of the workforce entirely, this lowers the pool of female workers, forcing those wages up, and that will lead to lower profits and higher wages.
Look at the corruption Big Pharma has been able to achieve with psychiatry, simply by donating to academia? I believe the rest of the business world, all the other corporations who donate to academia, are doing a lot more distorting of the output of academic researchers than MadInAmerica focuses on.
And this distorting of academic research may be part of why wages for Americans have systematically dropped in the last few decades. Academic fraud is what helps manipulate the public or mislead the public just right so politicians getting money from the same corporations can “pretend to help” or “pretend to be trying to do the right thing” and it all just doesn’t work out for anyone but the corporations.
We have a democracy, but if corporations can infiltrate academia and distort academic science and economics and everything else just right, they can run the show like dictators.
What if it wasn’t actually the money that helped but merely the mother having people in her life who demonstrated that they cared via giving of money, in such a way so as to make her feel more secure, and that sense of security helped her child’s development?
“…debates over income transfer policies for low-income families have “centered on maternal labor supply rather than child well-being,” often with moralizing or paternalistic policies that blame low-income mothers for their own marginalization….”
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People need to make a really big fuss. And change the culture so that academic institutions who take money from corporations stop going so far in pushing crass materialistic self interests and feel obligated by culture to have some semblance of morality.
It needs to be a situation where academics would be too embarrassed to push certain stuff in the first place. Rather than aggressively pushing for all the wrong things on behalf of corporations, and then trying to badmouth, attack and shame those who oppose them as “backwards” and “ignorant.”
There is far more than just industry payments that are at issue.
There is such a phenomena as the whole psychiatric profession almost policed in a way by a mafia of sorts, where if someone strays out of line, they will be blacklisted or just not have favorable career prospects. And you can even have problems such as men finding it difficult to get dates if they dare cross the party line. Or women having their characters assassinated or reputations ruined in the whole world of female relational bullying, which results in men shunning them.
As a gay man, I will say, among gay men, the way it works, conformity is policed via the drug scene most of all. And by economic blacklisting as well. All of which creates a situation where industry does not have to directly finance certain stuff to exert influence.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt even said this was what got Adolph Eichmann to participate in The Final Solution. Namely, that he wasn’t a bad person. He merely was someone who “wished to belong.”
She was pointing the finger to some kind of social ostracism and cancel culture among the Nazis.
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Do you know something? I’m a classical musician, I play the pipe organ and am very talented.
There has been a similar type of dogmatic pseudo-religious “movement” among academic types starting in the 80’s, regarding the “authentic interpretation of classical music.”
Where I feel it’s like they try to emulate a super stiff and stultified version of what they think courtiers for snooty nobility used to be in the past. Except it’s kind of childish in a way that would almost make one laugh.
There are “rules of authenticity” and they get outraged if you violate such rules. I recall my mother mentioning one such musician she spoke to, a conversation, where this woman said something along the lines of “when it comes to the historical interpretation of classical music, I am a purist.”
What’s interesting about this culture, though, is that they want to get you bogged down in the rules, to the detriment of actually playing as fully expressively as those musicians really did play in the past. Musicians like Bach.
It’s as if the same stultifying political correctness now infecting college campuses with super strict speech codes also has infected music. And it’s actually not REALLY authentic, it’s really a product of the 1980’s, but they don’t see that.
The 80’s were the start of mass incarceration, though. And, actually, I even decided to look up what happened with the prison system in the Victorian era, where women suddenly got encouraged to “lay down the law” vis-a-vis strictness and stringency, and always object or faint when a man violated “the rules” in his speech somehow, by saying something vulgar. Sure enough, the Victorian Era was a time of massive expansion of the prison system too.
With “historical authenticity,” I should note — especially in the pipe organ world — what you have is arrogant male professorial types leading the way with the frigidness and aggressive dogmatic approach. Expressing all sorts of dismay at those whose adherence to “proper standards of historical authenticity” fall short.
And they happen not to be personally attractive or charismatic in the least. But women, however, somehow feel obliged to put on this show of fake sounding impressed at their prestige, perhaps not based on their personal charisma but based on them having managed to gain establishment stamp of approval instead.
I say fake sounding because it’s as if, on the inside, women aren’t REALLY impressed, these are men they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, but they are being good sports about it and faking it.
And if you look up certain Jim Crow stereotypes, just look up the brute stereotype. Interestingly enough, it’s actually very attractive and those are just the characteristics you want to see show through in your playing of music, if you are a musician.
And there is this weird thing going on whereby, in truth, women — or gay men, which I am one — actually find that “brute stereotype” to be very admirable and sexy, and a lot of men yearn to live up to it and try to live up to it, at least in superficial appearances of toughness and masculinity, so long as one is not genuinely assaultive.
So it’s not ACTUALLY an insult to those tarnished by it. It’s more shameful or insulting to be those men who don’t live up to it and are jealous and get angry because of their jealousy. But we pretend it’s an insult, just to assuage their feelings and their hyper sensitivity.
As if, well, it’s as if Jim Crow America had a component to it that shamed and insulted those white men who did not live up to the “animalistic” norms of masculinity black men were tarred with sometimes, as if to arouse their jealousy just enough to help discourage them from helping black men out who were being oppressed.
Now why would I be inspired to say this regarding psychiatry? Well, interestingly enough, my music skills were always on the charismatic side and I eventually did get – only temporarily – corruptly “diagnosed” by Harvard, as a ploy by them to avoid investigating my complaints of wrong doing — hazing and various bullying — on the part of other male musicians, who happened to be nowhere near as good as me, nowhere near as popular. And I also was very handsome, muscular, and well built — so they couldn’t say I “made up for it” in terms of looks either. It was just plain unfair.
Harvard refused to investigate my complaint but instead corruptly arranged for their own doctors to try to “diagnose” it away. Although, the wrong doing had left a paper trail so, in a way, you couldn’t diagnose it away. It was more that such “diagnosis,” however absurd, was part of a campaign by Harvard to threaten me via, see they also started saying “people feel threatened by your complaints” blah blah blah.
Now, the truth was, they felt threatened by how my complaints could tarnish Harvard’s reputation, but they threatened to tarnish me with that very same Jim Crow “Brute Caricature” as what they told me their defense would be, should I try to hire a lawyer and sue. What all these jealous inferior male musicians who had engaged in lots of vicious back stabbing would say about me.
And they even told me they had ties to the media, the New York Times at their beck and call. They will get journalists to pillory me, have lots of people come out of the woodwork to accuse me of having been “menacing” to them, should I sue Harvard.
They even had psychiatrists at their beck and call — and threatened various retroactive falsification of records, and they even threatened to hack my emails and retroactively rewrite all of them, so as to fabricate fake paper trails portraying me in a bad light. (And I did indeed have typos introduced into a few of my Harvard emails by some IT worker at Harvard — just to demonstrate how much they meant it.)
And, at another time, I do have a series of medical records, which actually portrayed me in a very good light, stolen from my apartment. I later try to retrieve them again — they were falsified. Another set of medical records got falsified, portraying me in a horrible light — although these records were too obviously falsified for them to want me to keep them in my apartment, I could have claimed they were obviously falsified and it would have made a good case, so they were stolen too from inside my apartment. (Probably by my landlord.)
I ought to disclose, my story is not so unusual within psychiatry. But is common. Common enough, I’d say, so that I think the whole profession is tarnished by it, and the diagnostic categories deliberately made vague or ill defined, precisely so institutions like Harvard and wealthy corporations can leverage psychiatry for their own corrupt ends like this.
The end result is that psychiatry does not help the people it serves, and the very thinking of the whole entire psychiatric profession is tarnished by it. Ordinary people ill served by it are viewed as collateral damage, in a system that is primarily there to cater to monied interests.
If you are an ordinary person, how much money do you have compared to well heeled establishment players?
I am reminded of what they say about public housing. The managers of public housing treat the residents terribly, because they view their true “clients” as members of the government that is funding them, and not the actual tenants living in the apartments.
This is what the world is like. This is what the world has always been like. I think, in the past, that people were far less naive about society working like this than they are today. Today, we are asked to be gullible and naive. Well, actually, we are all overworked to exhaustion and do not even have the time to research stuff and figure out the truth on our own.
I do have to say it is interesting just how closely Harvard adhered to innuendo that plays into those Jim Crow stereotypes, in their dealing with me. Because it’s as if it amounts to hinting to a well known societal phenomenon that people don’t openly talk about, but instantly know exactly what it means.
Everyone has had issues with “the jocks.” The football players who would pick on the little wusses and give them wedgies. Well, I was home schooled and not exposed to those “high school” dynamics. So perhaps I don’t know. But I do think everyone else does.
I wonder, does psychiatry play off of somewhat absurd stereotypes perhaps? Which are jealousy based and immature? And, recall, psychiatrists were not themselves “the jocks” but were, instead, men who felt jealous of them. And now do they seek, in their diagnostic categories, to “get even?”
Actually, there was one psychiatrist involved in that whole saga who was just awful. He had an unattractive geeky nasal tone of voice but talked in this super authoritative way, like he was the “big man” who as an “expert,” a “guru.”
He apparently told my mother I was a narcissist. Or that whatever psychological issues I had were narcissistic related. I remember thinking, that’s not true. My “issues” were not tied to me craving attention or adulation, as I kind of got swamped with that when young because of my musical talent and got used to it and so it didn’t have an effect on me. My “issues” revolved being excluded by my peers and ostracized, not treated a an “equal” and not allowed to just be “one of them.”
He said that because of what HIS issues were. And he wouldn’t even know what my issues were. But he would have grown up in school, jealous of the “cool kids.” Wanting the same attention.
See there is a “the grass is greener on the other side” phenomenon going on here.
Still, how much of the psychiatric profession, and psychology as well, how much is it made up of a small clique of people — men — who hail from a certain subset of society, or of masculinity. And they have their own issues which they project onto the world?
I am tempted to post this link from Tocqueville on how Democracy has modified the English language.
And we can understand that, all throughout history, societies have never really been one entire language without dialects but, actually, there have always been dialects that are usually associated with a person’s occupation. And, in non-democratic societies, those occupations were more fixed and stable and the different languages/dialects end up very precise.
In Democracies, you end up with all sorts of confusion and ambiguity. Language gets less precise and that imprecision can be abused and even result in peoples’ thinking being affected.
Tocqueville did not live in a society where there was a race religion that turned into something that policed language about race the most virulently of anything else. But that’s what goes on today.
It’s interesting how I think we can say we have an image in our minds of the typical “racist” or “white supremacist,” and we imagine a working class or super macho muscular type of man with bald head and tattoos. Colorful. And that’s what a white supremacist is, in our minds.
And psychiatrists? No, they have protection. Which is a kind of class protection that makes it so they get away with racism because of who they are. All the while the white man with the coarse language, tattoos, and rough around the edges look gets pilloried in the media and culture as the quintessential racist, because it’s convenient.
The racist is not someone we know. The racist lives on the other side of the train tracks. We stick our heads in the sand.
Now this finding is interesting. As I have read about there being a debate between gender differences in the brain. And studies done by MRI’s show — well, there is such large variation between two different brains of the same gender that it’s not very easy to find significant gendered brain differences.
And here we have the same finding with respect to the brains of depressed people and those who aren’t. “No significant differences” if you ask those who do brain MRI’s.
I feel, though, as someone who studied math that the workings of the brain probably involves stuff that — well, it’s like a chaotic system like the weather. Where, as they say, a butterfly flapping its wings in Arizona could have so much of an impact so as to cause a whole storm to happen thousands of miles away.
Maybe depression — and gender differences — are things that theoretically could be seen but they manifest themselves in ways that otherwise look so subtle if you are trying to see it in the electrical circuitry of the brain that it’s kind of like how, only after a lot of theoretical work was Einstein able to postulate the existence of black holes. And then figuring out how they exist theoretically, they were able to figure out complicated ways to prove they really existed. To infer they really existed.
Now, in academia, they need to lobby donors for funds. And they need to go tell them “the expensive machine you buy us IS DEFINITELY going to yield clear cut scientific findings that you will be able to see right away. And when you publish your company’s annual report and want to boast to everyone of all the good you did with your funding, we will be able to tell you of definitive findings.”
How can scientists go and tell a donor who helped them buy an MRI something like “honestly, we didn’t find anything meaningful or significant yet — just be patient. Who knows, you might be dead before we finally figure out the current problem we are working on.”
In America, they are all too impatient.
The Japanese are wise in comparison, and maybe we need to learn something from them. They will start projects at present that they do not expect to fully come to fruition until several generations down the road. For instance, in gardening, they will go put a boulder underneath a waterfall today, and it will slowly over the course of 100 years or so produce beautiful holes and ripples in the boulder, and then they will take it out and put it in some garden. They have beautiful gardens today with special waterfall sculpted boulders that were originally put in a waterfall by their ancestors over 100 years ago.
Because I think the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression is not only a lie but the truth is depression is kind of like an “activity imbalance” — very similar to how one muscle atrophies and then other muscles take over for it, causing it to atrophy more and more.
SSRI’s create a different “activity imbalance” that treats symptoms — but, in certain ways, things are still a little bit off and it’s just not the same as fixing the underlying problem. Nerve cells with reduced activation.
Strokes create different types of activity imbalances than would occur on their own, and these lead to depression. However, the SSRI then goes and creates another activity imbalance on top of it — which aggravates others leading to low coordination and stuff.
What if you have an atrophied muscle and instead of making the person exercise it, you give them a machine? And then, maybe, if they try exercising it, it’s weak and discouraging so they stop.
By the way, there is evidence that depressed people suffer from brain shrinkage. That’s just like muscle atrophy.
Well, I didn’t read it yet — other than super quick skimming — because I’m an impatient person.
But, the headline jumped out at me right away.
“Euphemism for policing social deviance.”
I have a bit of a problem with failure to fully expound on the notion of “social deviance” all the while just throwing that word out there, and letting the audience guess at what they might call “deviant.”
For instance, some forms of social deviance amount to failure to respect proper boundaries in one’s interactions with others, or failures to conform to social norms in a way that’s polite and considerate of others.
Of course, that is behavioral and drugs cannot handle that. And, that is also NOT what this headline obviously means.
As someone who has had issues with extreme amounts of corruption and mafia like stuff at “respectable” mainstream institutions like Harvard, with ties to the U.S. government and the ability to get the govt to cover up their crimes, and then what you have happen here is an institution where people get excluded unless they conform, and over the years, basically the whole “inside” community goes increasingly further and further and further off the deep end when it comes to how far from mainstream notions of “normal” they are and how deviant they are.
Except, they are not deviant as individuals. They are all deviant as a whole brainwashed group that is like an extremist cult. This could have been enabled by the fact that the FBI failed to ever police them. After initially deciding to go after the mafia, the FBI chose to regard academic institutions and the ivy league schools as “beyond their purview” and “un-investigatable” from the perspective of the mafia.
Which creates a situation — and you can go study economics and economics will say this WOULD happen — which creates a situation where corporations can pour monies into these institutions and turn them into vast profit centers for organized crime. And what do they say about money and how it corrupts?
Anyway, you can end up with a whole entire deviant community, so vastly brainwashed away from mainstream norms that it would be utterly shocking to the ordinary community to discover the truth, yet these individuals on the inside are so used to it, they fail to fully appreciate how bad they are and even develop a sense of entitlement about the wrongs they do — they all agree with each other and all reinforce each other and also arrogantly and aggressively exclude all those who might even say a word that could help them see reality better.
Except, here’s the clincher: I went to Harvard and witnessed that. Guess what? The same corporations paying them off also pay off politicians and mental hospitals and medical institutions and a whole network of charities that are connected and whose sole purpose for their existence, in many cases, is as recipients of corporate bribery which in some ways is a form of money laundering.
So I had crooked cops and crooked doctors, as well as a few local crooked businesses, and actually a large corporation as well (subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway owned by Warren Buffett) all jump on the same Harvard bandwagon and reinforce their brainwashed deviant reality.
On top of it, when I was a victim of the mafia — after dropping out of Harvard due to their horrible behavior — and I note, my subsequent victimhood was a direct result of what Harvard had done and Harvard was clearly involved and had their fingerprints all over it, one of the weird things they did was arrange for me to be stalked by criminals, in the gay scene, mind you, who went out of their way to proclaim their ties to all sorts of horribly deviant groups. Pedophile rings, but worse than just child molesters who do it in a nice way. Brutal rapists who cause permanent damage in some cases and seek to infect the victim — deliberately — with HIV. Or who commit the kinds of rapes with bottles and knives and other sharp objects we hear about in Bosnia. And who also do work for Big Pharma in terms of intentionally trying to raise HIV rates in gay men by deliberately infecting many against their will. Sometimes using date rape drugs for the purpose. Often date rape drugging them in a particular bar, gang raping them to infect them, and dumping them in a public park afterwards to recover.
I got stalked by one person who was acting weird. And then a whole group of other people tell me about these activities or underground groups involved in such activities this stalker was involved with. And they told me online in writing and I went to the police, twice — with logs of the conversation.
Police react totally un-admirably regarding the matter. And then I am retaliated against pretty viciously by a local church I played the pipe organ at, as if they’d informed the mafia I’d been a “rat” or a “snitch.” Indeed, it was a daycare center owner who occasionally used parking spaces in the church who engaged in a weird pattern of behavior and then successfully arranged for me to be banned from parking there, and the minister took his side, unfairly.
And the daycare center owner even went out of his way to make several double entendre remarks, like saying that parents needed “access to their kids” and my car was interfering with access to their kids. And when I said there was enough room, then he said it was about “visibility,” my car interfered with “visibility.”
This was after I went to police a second time, due to someone telling me that the “group” in question also would pimp out the under age children of meth addicts.
Wow. Now isn’t that pretty “in your face?” Shoving their own deviance down the rest of society’s throats, if you ask me. I am reminded of Saul Alinsky’s rules for radicals, where radicals get polite moderate people to cave by breaching all the various boundaries of politeness that more conservative people won’t breach and wouldn’t think of breaching. And they get away with stuff because they are that shockingly aggressive and bellicose about it.
Anyway, later on, I got date rape drugged and criminally abused in all sorts of ways, and it was very obvious I was a victim. When a problem happened, police covered it up and took me to a hospital to have psych docs try to discredit me. Psych docs who knew the truth, said they knew the truth, but told me in no uncertain terms — often really nasty and intimidating — that I am to back off my allegations against this group or they will declare me to be schizophrenic.
I even told them I had a massive paper trail backing my allegations up. They wouldn’t budge.
In other words, again THEY were deviant and they were EMBRACING their own deviance and trying to shove it down my throat.
They were not policing deviance in my case. THEY were deviant and they were policing my normality and trying to bully me into BECOMING deviant, or at least agreeing to it in theory.
Turns out I was a victim of an unethical medical experiment during that time I didn’t figure out until much later on. Ended up being cured of genital herpes mysteriously — permanently. Never had an outbreak again yet, prior to this series of incidences, my immune system was so bad at controlling it that I was always in an outbreak unless I took enough of this particular herb, lemon balm.
The drug companies who profit off management but not cure of herpes were giving money to Mass General Hospital and other Boston area hospitals and institutions. All “respectable” institutions who would never be involved with any of this crazy stuff, right? Well, that’s a clever organized crime ploy. Their aura of respectability combined with the utter crazy lunacy of my story. That means they can get away with it and no one is supposed to believe me. It sounds too far fetched.
Note the story was totally crazy and loony because the perpetrators very cleverly made sure it would be. Because I knew they’d be wanting to cover things up by saying I was crazy, I documented everything on my computer and can establish that the “lunacy” of my story is 100 percent the fault of the perpetrators.
Which illustrates a clever side to the system. You have super respectable institutions involved with the mafia. The media goes out of its way to cover up their dirty laundry and speak of them in super venerable tones. But they are deeply involved in criminal racketeering and, in line with their reputation for respectability, when they go about their organized crime schemes, they make sure to get people to do it all in a super crazy, off-the-wall melodramatic way, with tons of people doing tons of extra stuff to the victim that doesn’t even make sense, so that if you are the victim, you can’t tell the truth without your story sounding crazy.
And, all along, they have people going bullying the victim around that very issue and trying to put them on the defensive. “Oh you sound crazy.” “Everyone has a problem with you, you know, haven’t you ever noticed, the one common denominator here is you. Maybe you need to take a good hard look at your own actions. It looks to me like you are the one provoking all this.” Stuff like that.
The policing of deviance here is really tied to the covering up of organized crime. Which, in and of itself, IS deviant.
On top of it, vast economic class and race differences in toleration of “deviance” hold. Where society engages in most policing of deviance among poor black men and poor white men next most, perhaps, even while whatever deviant behavior they allegedly engaged in to merit such punishment was a tiny fraction of the deviance so many rich white people routinely get away with. Or, alternatively, a small group of black people are allowed to engage in pretty severe deviance — only so long as they participate in the organized crime schemes of white society and, in many case, do terrible things to other members of the black community.
Modern day Identity Politics would completely mitigate against the recognition of such phenomena. Defining racism in this pseudo-religious way and also as totally symbolic. Some person on the other side of the country can SAY a “racist thing” — or perhaps write it in a newspaper article — and all black people are now “victims” of that “racist thing.” As if society is pretending to have ceased oppressing blacks in all the same practical ways as before, and now the anti-racism fight has no other battles to fight, but for the exclusively and purely symbolic ones.
Again, policing deviance isn’t about policing behavior. It’s about policing a person’s social class. With deviance defined according to who they are, not what they do. And what you are allowed to do depends solely on who you are and your social class. The policing of deviance, then, is really about putting someone of a certain social class in their place. It’s about saying “when YOU do it, it’s deviant, when HE does it, it’s illustrious.”
Actually, notice how many high fallutin academics are very incoherent? Not only in their words. But their ideas are incoherent enough so, theoretically, if a poor black person in the inner city tried to say anything that incoherent, they’d be locked up and put in neureleptics for “schizophrenia.”
But when a Harvard academic says something about as bad, we all agree we don’t understand it and it sounds incoherent to us because we are stupid in comparison to them.
Removed for moderation.
Actually, you know what’s interesting? My mother was involved in the nutrition research of the 60’s at the Harvard School of Public Health. And she told me, the nutrition research of the 60’s was bogus and bought and paid for by the food industry.
Actually, here is one of her articles — you can download the PDF.
This was about obese adolescent girls.
This was a paper where two men had tried to write an article, it didn’t get published. Or wait, they tried to write two articles. She combined the two articles into one and this was published. And then Harvard fired the two men and tripled her salary.
However, she later on had criminal things done to her, by the mafia. And, actually, she was herself a guinea pig as a child, where her mother was forced to feed her on a super strict rigid schedule — every six hours as an infant — and this messed up her appetite regulation mechanism of her brain, so she had trouble keeping her weight down unless she took amphetamines. And had an artificial weight problem as a result, which wasn’t what she naturally would have been. Which was a bit sad because she was otherwise a very attractive woman and was able to look quite glamorous when her weight was down.
Anyway, my mother told me about being bullied by groups of women acting as a gang and engaging in social ostracism, or otherwise having lots of problems with women engaging in vicious intimidation of her. Some of which I witnessed as a kid. And which went above and beyond normal melodrama. E.g., it was probably incentivized by the mafia. And in part something food companies paid bribes for. In other words, my mother was just bullied and bullied and bullied for years, mostly by women, and this was an important tactic which very effectively worked to silence anyone who would be whistleblowers over the nutrition corruption.
Anyway, one of the bits of “inside information” my mother told me about this article I post was that Harvard researchers withheld information. The obese girls were all catholic and the non-obese girls were all protestant.
I think this suggests that something went on with the mafia which resulted in systems of extortion and blackmail which effectively worked to help enslave Irish and Italians so they could be used as guinea pigs for unethical medical experiments. And a lot of Jews too, actually. Pretty much anybody was at risk, but newly arrived immigrants the easiest prey for these schemes.
I can say this because I know it was true for my own family — on my mother’s side at least. Italian – Jewish. I won’t go into details but several family members did have medical care that was just plain abnormal and had to have been some sort of unethical experiment. On both the Jewish and Italian side.
And it’s possible same thing might have happened on my father’s side, which was German and English. Well, yeah, I heard a few things there that didn’t sound right. But I was not as close to them.
“De Nadai, Hu, and Thompson focus on data pollution, which they define as “inadvertent errors” in the data. This is distinct from “data poisoning,” which involves “intentional attempts to feed inaccurate data into models.” The current article focuses on well-intentioned researchers whose results are misleading by accident.”
—–
Where I read this is where I get mad. Or perhaps not quite as mad as in frustrated.
Especially when I hear the words “well-intentioned.” Because I feel like saying “no, there IS ill intent.”
Somewhere, at least. But I feel as if passivity and not caring IS ill intent or should be regarded so. Or people should be afraid enough of being accused of doing something intentionally so that they will be more than well meaning dopes but will think hard enough to avoid the “well intentioned error.”
There is also such a thing as ill intent in education. Perhaps no one person having malicious intent, but everyone showing lack of responsibility and passing the buck. “So long as I get my money, I don’t care.”
But, you know what? Sometimes you have an affirmative obligation to take responsibility. If your work is having an impact on people’s lives. And isn’t just about you climbing the ladder and having your career.
Actually, quite often, researchers will just do anything to get published, because they need to get published in order to have their careers. And they become slaves to “what the media will publish.” And that comes first rather than the whole notion of doing good.
And then they go have families and want to support them financially and all that. Well, ok, their children come first. They need to get published and make a splash so they can get promoted.
And they were well-intentioned and thought the research data was sound, and as for selection bias or other problems, well they just hadn’t thought of that.
Actually, how do you know someone is well intentioned? A lot of people are very good at coming across as well-intentioned, even while they are systematically doing all that is in their self interest. How do we know that they didn’t privately think of it in their own heads, some problem regarding selection bias that only could have been fixed by them getting a second grant to help them investigate or clarify certain issues? So they know FOR SURE?
Well, it’s not going to make as much of a splash if researchers say “we did a study that suggests one thing — however, we realized, if you look at it this way and if you look at it that way, it’s possible the data might be ambiguous, and we can only find out for sure if we get more funds to do a more careful analysis.”
I have a feeling their departments tell them “NO, don’t go there.” In other words, don’t ask those tough questions in the first place. Because there is a system and it’s like a machine and you have to work it in order to get ahead.
I’m reminded of the Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky saga, where democrats were all saying “it’s only about sex, he lied about sex, everyone does it, everyone lies about sex, so he should get away with it.” It made me disgusted, even though I was otherwise a libertarian, and perhaps that’s because I’d already, by then, dealt with the culture of academia. Where indeed, well, you can maybe call them ill-intentioned. But, at the same time, you can almost excuse them by saying “well, everyone does it.”
Everyone, in isolation, could convince themselves “everyone does it, so it’s ok if I do it too.”
OK, fine, but we have a nation of fat people now and it’s partly because nutrition research was corrupted by food industry donations in the 60’s, and researchers were intimidated by an academic HERD.
How can we get to a place where we, as a nation, are NOT a nation of fat people due to such corruption but, instead, are healthy?
At some point I think the solution is that we need to make those people who are “only well intentioned” but goofed in one way or another pay the price AS IF they had evil intent. Start doing that, and watch how quickly people start cleaning up their act so fast.
Maybe we need to say, as a society: “you need to have accurate research findings, and if you put something out there that’s problematic, and people listen to it and follow it and it hurts them, you need to go to jail. EVEN IF it’s not your fault and you didn’t mean it but you were just too stupid to have thought of something.”
How much value do we place on the health of the American people as a society?
I will say another thing. Which is, the definition of mental illness and psychological maladies are skewed to favor and privilege those cultures which dwell in mainstream academia and the professional world.
Which is like — well, ok, when I was young I used to read about King Arthur and his knights. I also read about Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves too.
Let us just say academia has overcome “toxic masculinity” in that regard.
Only to replace it with a completely different kind of bullying. A whole different culture of bullying and back stabbing which is, in many ways, perhaps colder and more brutal even if subtle and understated.
Actually, academics tend to be sneaky and leave the dirty work up to the mafia — I kid you not. I was personally a victim of that sort of thing.
They tend, also, not to be motivated by pride but by greed. They will not leave something up to the mafia because you humiliated them or violated their “honor” or “pride.” They will leave something up to the mafia because you were raped on their campus and that could interfere with their reputation. Or because they got money from some company and agreed to do some scientific fraud on their behalf, and you threatened to whistleblow.
In that sense, there is a Uriah Heep type of “‘umble” obsession with greed that is a bit shameful and self abasing, yet is also very violent at the same time.
And then there is a culture of back stabbing, spreading of false rumors, social ostracism, all of which is quite pernicious but nobody guilty of that is ever really turned into the psychiatric system for that kind of bullying. Because it’s sneaky enough to leave no legalistic “smoking gun” that would allow for law enforcement to easily declare someone “a danger to themselves or others” because of some simply and easy CLEARLY DOCUMENTABLE thing they said.
In that sense, it’s interesting how, in an ultra legalistic society dominated by lawyers, the American Psychological Association bashes “toxic masculinity” which is always something that can be described in a way so it’s EASY to describe it in a newspaper article or even in a short sound bite.
But what does that mean? That means the structural practical realities of the jobs of lawyers and law enforcement and journalists is dominating our discourse of what should be regarded as “bad behavior.” And I question whether this also does not influence the whole field of mental health?
Where you have a society of professionals each trying to make their own jobs easy, and choosing to cut corners here and there.
Except it’s a problem where our whole definition of health ends up being dictated by the occupational structural needs of the “helping” professions.
Removed for moderation
Now I wanted to mention something. I have an incredible sense of balance, love music and dancing, and love athletic and gymnastic type of stuff that uses my incredible sense of balance. And I’m somewhat of a natural performer.
At the gym, I do one set of exercises that are challenging in terms of balance. Then I get used to them and they are no longer challenging so I like to do another that’s challenging, so I am always challenging myself.
Now here is something I want to note. Any kind of balance exercise is like learning to ride a bike. Once your brain has set down those pathways, they are permanent. But that does mean, your brain has to “grow” each time and develop a new set of connections each time.
What if I am someone who simply has to always be active and doing a lot of athletic stuff? (I note, I have had other relatives who were the same and felt obliged to remain very active into their late 90’s, never stopped being active until they died.)
Would I perhaps be more prone to depression, had I not been allowed to develop my athletic and musical side? Because there would be all this brain that “wants” to be exercised and develop doing that stuff — and, if it can’t do that, it won’t do anything. Or it won’t do much. But it would be prone to depression, I think.
Because it’s meant to have that constant stimulus.
Would academics have thought of that? I do think they are a sedentary bunch. Those who are more like me would not have gotten very far there. So they aren’t going to even think of that in the first place.
I was also thinking about psychotherapy — there is a headline I see that says psychotherapy has an enduring effect on depression unlike pills.
I sort of always felt that psychotherapy isn’t really that good for me. Because, sitting down in an office like that, it’s as if I’m not exercising most of my brain while talking to a psychotherapist. I sort of wonder if, having a psychotherapy session walking around outdoors or doing some activity at the same time besides talking, might that impact me better? It might even making me think of things I wouldn’t think of sitting still indoors.
I wonder about that, because I do think there is human variety. And what’s good for some isn’t good for everyone.
By the way, I happen to be a gay man who is — well, were I a woman and like that, the best way to describe me would not be a compliment and not permitted on here. OK, so I get around lots.
And, at the same time, I am a very curious and intellectual person. And, also, if you are talking to someone who is a member of some profession, after you sleep with them, they will trust you more and are willing to tell you all sorts of inside information they would never tell.
OK, so first of all, I met one gay guy in this cruisy video store — very sleazy place, I might add. With little booths big enough so two or three guys can share them. He was a nurse and from a family of nurses. Guess what he told me?
“Zyprexa and similar drugs MAKE YOU INCOMPETENT. I know that because I am from a family of nurses. It’s a scam. Everyone knows it’s a scam.” He also told me all about how abruptly withdrawing causes temporary symptoms of psychosis, even if you didn’t have psychosis in the first place and it was inappropriately prescribed, and “in order to get off of zyprexa or the other neureleptics, you need to be on valium for a whole entire year, and then taper off the valium too, but most doctors aren’t taught about this.”
In other words, all the key opinion leaders out there? They are liars. They all know it’s a scam and they all are lying through their teeth and, at the same time, privately to themselves, or amongst each other and those they trust, they all openly agree it’s a scam, “but the money.”
Someone really should do some kind of undercover investigation involving gay men who are attractive and charming simply trying to sleep with as many medical doctors as possible, relevant in the area of psychiatry, and see if they can get them to admit the truth. That would be interesting.
However, I also once hooked up with a guy in biotech as well. Another interesting bit of inside information he told me was all about how, the whole business model of the one blockbuster drug that gets sold to the whole population and makes billions is profitable but also not the right way to do medicine.
There is human variety, what works for one sub population doesn’t work for another. They should really be working to categorize people into various sub populations, and target specific remedies or treatments to each small sub population, one at a time. If they really want to make medicine more advanced, that’s what they need to do. But they won’t do it because of money interests.
What’s even more disturbing is, maybe you can take a drug that works for one sub population, and if you pick your study subjects right, it looks to be a wonderful success — and then you can turn it into a blockbuster drug prescribed for everyone. And nobody knows, it’s only good for that one sub population and you should not take it if you are not part of that.
At the time I was very interested in the subject of corruption in biotech and medicine, so I was asking such questions, is there systemic fraud? That’s one thing I was told.
However, at another time, I also remember being told, when asking were they looking as hard as they should for an HIV cure, I remember being told that they are not really trying very hard to find a cure for HIV. (It’s so profitable not to cure that they don’t want to.) And he said, they are looking in the wrong direction, and then told me some esoteric stuff I didn’t quite understand.
Something along the lines of how, those seeking a cure are looking to cure it via targeting one particular biological mechanism, “but that is never going to work,” he said. And that they should be looking for a cure via targeting a completely different biological mechanism, because that IS promising and that’s the only way a cure might be found, “but they all won’t do that.”
And he said it looks like they don’t want to, and it’s probably because of Big Pharma funding. Or, I think, he didn’t quite want to say that, he forced me to speculate, isn’t that probably because of Big Pharma Funding, so he could cautiously and hesitantly admit “yeah, it sure looks like it.”
Because there is a whole culture of intimidation in those circles where it’s politically incorrect to be “conspiracy theorists.” Except it has gotten so extreme, you have to tiptoe around their blatant and brazen corruption, all the while they feel no qualms about shoving such brazen unapologetic corruption down everyone else’s throats, with zero remorse as to the millions of people harmed by their research failures. Instead, you must feel like you are walking on eggshells, all ready to apologize to them for pointing out their failures or their lack of stamina and ambition. Not exactly an environment conducive to greatness in medicine — where I note this is people’s lives that are at stake.
Isn’t it disgusting, the culture of the people who make it in those research circles, then? It looks to me like they do not allow anyone to succeed there unless they are scum. Or have been slowly programmed to become scum. I do know the way “ivory tower” thinking occurs. People slowly get brainwashed further and further away from the mainstream, so slowly that they do not even realize just how outrageous they have become.
I say it that way because I really do think this whole notion of deliberately playing dumb and going on a deliberate wild goose chase in the wrong direction you know will never succeed, because you are not going to stand up to Big Pharma, is this kind of sneaky kind of submissive sort of “playing dumb” that is very annoying.
They act like they have no backbones, except they could have backbones, they just don’t care and are greedy.
Now, did you know, there is nothing the psychiatric profession would like more than to be able to diagnose away such annoying and unbearable dissent for them.
And, as you know, the neuroleptics that make you fat are the best tools for which to accomplish that.
Now, this is interesting but, did you know, when I was a victim of this criminal racketeering scheme, it was psych docs who were assisting with the covering up a whole series of unethical medical experiments on me — which happened to involve testing of a successful cure for herpes researchers hoped to cover up so they could be bribed by drug manufacturers of herpes management drugs like valtrex.
Well, when that whole saga was going on, I was being bullied right and left for “daring to talk about the mafia” even while I was being victimized so badly in so many ways. Criminally victimized.
Doctors were acting like the Soviet Union and trying to forcibly medicate me — I did get a few involuntary injections in the emergency room at times — for daring to “talk about the mafia” or daring to tell them I was a victim of the mafia.
However, at the same time, I note I had proof. I had saved copies of several death threats from gay men they did as part of this whole saga, including a promise from this one guy named Pete who wrote me something about how “it will all be over soon” and “the mob will shut you up.” Also, police had framed me and these were obvious frame ups too.
Here is where, see, I had a right to tell other doctors that I’d been told I was being targetted by the mafia, without them instantly yelling at me to shut up and trying to go inject me with haldol. I even told them I had documentation proving it, to no avail because they were so corrupt.
Eventually, I remember suggesting to someone that, if you really need to cover up that this is the mafia that’s involved here, it’s inappropriate for you to be saying that I am crazy or psychotic. You need to then say that PETE is the one who is crazy. (And some of the others).
And I said I hoped the mafia would decide to cover it up by declaring all of these lowlifes to be the crazy ones, rather than me. As it would serve them right.
But, with regard to this Pete guy, I mentioned that he already had love handles when I met him and was ever so slightly out of shape. And something along the lines that I hope they make him take his medicine. Take his medicine. Take his medicine til he is as fat as a house.
Of course, doctors and police all simply never did that. Despite a mountain of evidence I had — I saved every single online conversation I had with ANYONE who purported to be in the mafia and started giving me a hard time — not a single one of these guys ever got declared “crazy” for talking about the mafia and medicated. However, doctors tried their best to arrange for that to happen to me, if I dared talk about it. And they were so corrupt, I was able to get it to be only temporary as they got me to change my story in a way so as to–
Well, ok, here’s the thing. Some of these incidences involved drugs. Crystal meth. Which is known to cause paranoid delusions. So, in one case, I was able to get out of the hospital by changing my story and reversing all of my accusations, pretending that it was all because I had gotten high on crystal meth, but I am all better now.
That’s how bad the doctors were.
I even remember, in one case, talking to this woman doctor or nurse who was being bad like this and corrupt. At some point, she decided to stop arguing with me regarding the fact that all the mafia stuff I was talking about was second hand information I had gotten from others. Regardless of whether it was true, I am merely quoting others and you can’t call a quotation by me of other people a “psychotic delusion.” So then she kind of decides not to argue about that and then merely tells me: “OK, but if these people are all doing that to you, that shows you have some kind of illness and you need to take this medication.”
Can you imagine saying something like that to a rape victim? “He raped you because you are mentally ill.”
One more thing I forgot to mention about the Connecticut incident which eventually resulted in them rescuing me from the water. The way it was, I was terrified — well, they didn’t announce themselves for an hour but just waited silently for an hour before abruptly coming to the water to rescue me and lighting up five strobe lights all at once too. Which they had set up super quietly in the dark.
Btw, I thought about it and did wonder, maybe they were trying a “justifiable homicide” murder and then when I started yelling “help help” and started thrashing around in the water, perhaps they thought it was a shark or something. Somehow felt if they didn’t rescue me right then, or if they let me drown, that would just not look good for some reason.
Not sure. But, anyway, afterwards, well first of all when they got to me the injected something right away that put me straight to sleep. I wake up in the hospital and the doctor says, first, that “they watched you for an hour before coming to rescue you” and then she said that “they said you said you were to swim away from the shore to escape the mafia” or something like that. This was Milford, CT so apparently they were accusing me of having said to them that I had planned to swim from Milford, CT to Long Island.
I, of course, told her that was nonsense.
This doctor was good in the sense of kind of indicating she didn’t believe any of the others, she believed me. It was as if she was kind of warning me, she found all of their stories inconsistent and knew I was calm and in my right mind. But in a very cool and subtle way.
However, I do note, all the information is consistent with cops, after having watched me for a whole hour, having to pretend I’d swum away from shore only to swim back, I guess, so as to perhaps explain why they had taken so long.
All I can say is, the facts are consistent with an attempted pre-meditated “justifiable homicide.” But, I mean, if this is the mafia and Harvard’s involved and etc. etc. etc., one could still speculate: was this to manipulate me into getting the second attorney?
Anyway, the circumstantial evidence all adds up and fits a “justifiable homicide” interpretation. Including why they felt they had to say something to cover up why they were waiting that long.
Oh now I remember what else I wanted to say before, but it slipped my mind because the very process of recollecting what happened with those cops on that seashore in Connecticut aggravated my memory repression issues.
Notice how these intended deaths were to be drug overdoses or justifiable homicide shootings, wherein it’s all covered up by portraying me I guess as a menacing person or something like that. E.g., a dangerous perpetrator type.
Well, the interesting thing about the mafia is they are super practical about stuff. Many years previously, what was the “threat” that some people levied against me? Around 1998 when certain problems I was having at Harvard were “coming to a head” so to speak, I became a subject of repeated warnings that I need to watch out not to become a victim of a Matthew Shepard style hate crime. And I am a very big strong and muscular person too. I was always wondering “why me?” This was when I first started cruising at this cruisy park in Boston.
And I once did indeed have a problem with several drunk college kids parking their car surrounding mine and then acting threateningly for awhile — but I was able to stave them off.
This was all around the time of the Matthew Shepard “hate crime” murder, and then once that murder happened, it all stopped and never happened again. Even some Harvard students went and did things to hint at knowing that I’d been at the fens (that’s the name of the cruisy park), which is where I was repeatedly warned.
I even have a threatening email from the President of the Harvard Organ Society, which he timed literally to coincide EXACTLY with Matthew Shepard actually dying. (He was in a hospital for awhile before he died).
Here he writes, and I copy and paste:
“Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 21:50:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: Seth Moulton
To: Damian Schloming
Subject: organ society
Dear Damian,
I just wanted to take a moment to get in touch with you regarding your
place in HROS. Although we’ve barely talked at all this year, I have
heard of your problems with The Memorial Church. I certainly don’t
intend to take sides in any disputes you may have, but I hope that you can
put them aside and still be a member of the Organ Society. With your
diligent work and wonderful playing, your contribution is not something I
would like to miss.
That said, I do think, however, that you should actively try to
straighten-out your relationship with The Memorial Church or at least with
Murray. Perhaps there have been more recent developments, but last I heard
you missed an appointment for lunch to do just that. Unfortunately, it
seems that it’s a situation you must deal with; everyone can’t just forget
about it.
Please be in touch if I can be of any help, and I’m hoping to see you at
our meeting next Monday. Hopefully you’ll be able to play at Halloween as
well!?
-Seth”
——–
It so happens to be the case that there was no appointment ever scheduled for lunch in the first place. However, I happened to go to the fens when Matthew Shepard was murdered — I was initially TOLD about that murder AT the fens, by a man whose tone I still remember because he said it in this very weird way, almost as if to tantalize or intimidate.
So I stayed up late, and this caused me to oversleep and not see that email. Either that or the Harvard computer center went and slipped that email in later on, back dating it to coincide, and that’s why I didn’t notice that email until months later, when I go over my correspondence from the past. (They WERE that corrupt at Harvard regarding fudging of the records).
The Matthew Shepard murder is also something where it’s been publicly exposed that the official narrative is bogus, and I know that the vast majority of gay men do not believe the official narrative and wouldn’t. If you really ARE gay, and this involves the politicized murder of a gay man, survival instinct is not compatible with believing in a bogus narrative. Some people might pretend to believe for the sake of others. Privately, you do what you know works best to protect yourself.
Anyway, I had wanted to include this point about Matthew Shepard in my above comment on the CT incident involving the potential shooting. And it slipped my mind and I was not able to remember, because that’s how my memory repression issues work and the CT incident was a very scary incident to remember. I finally just remembered it now.
I also suffer from repressed memory syndrome, or maybe it’s that I suppress full memory recall of troubling facts, even though they are relevant to the point I am making, because it’s so triggering and so scary and I’ve worked so hard to get over PTSD and part of that was deliberately “trying to forget” some of the stuff that happened to me.
The rat poison incident was not the only attempted murder. Here is a description of another incident, which I miraculously survived too. And in part I was very clever, which was interesting. Well, I am just someone who survives. Survival instinct can be very powerful.
However, this attempted murder was something police were trying to do and stage as a “justifiable homicide” — or so that’s what it looked like.
One interesting part I should note is how I talk of my parent’s trying to discredit me by calling me “bipolar.” Well, that’s the thing. I think they did that because they knew, if police can’t cover something up by portraying it as a “mental health issue,” they will instead cover it up by arranging for some kind of covered-up murder.
So first it was going to be a police shooting. Allegedly “justifiable,” so they would have claimed. Then there was the rat poison incident. Which didn’t work. And then, after the rat poison incident was over with, there were zero other incidences. I decided “I have enough proof now to nail the perpetrators on everything.”
OK, so here is the description of the Connecticut incident that happened right before I hired the second lawyer. The rat poison incident happened after I hired that lawyer.
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This was ten years ago and, since then, Black Lives Matters has been going on and on and on about police shootings. In this instance, the man in CT was trying to set things up so as to make me look like a drug dealer who had just sold him drugs he already had at his place when I got there, and appeared to be trying to “set up” a scene whereby police could potentially shoot me and pretend they didn’t know better, e.g., “justifiable homicide.”
Let me explain what this man did. I won’t go into all details but I knew something was wrong and I knew I had to leave and get out of there. He was not being nice about it. When I get outside, he suddenly says very loudly so everyone can hear “I will get you the money later” or something like that. As if I had delivered him drugs and expected money. But that was not all. I look at my cell phone and saw that I’d gotten three texts from strangers I did not know, all asking me about drugs in a manner so as to make it look like I was a drug dealer. It was scary. Then I go to the back yard and the neighbor next door is there, just waiting, and says “hi” in this almost friendly tone but it wasn’t friendly – it was passive aggressive “we are going to get you” nice.
I suddenly knew this was a dangerous situation. It was dark and police could easily have pretended not to see well, thought I had a gun or weapon, and shot me. I thought to myself, what can I do that might be unpredictable in just the right way so, if they are going to kill me, they decide to abandon the attempt? I stripped naked, went to the ocean to swim, so that it would be clear I did not have a gun on me so they could not shoot.
Police waited there for an hour while I was in the water – that’s exactly what the nurse in the hospital told me “they watched you for an hour before going into the water” – without saying a word and waiting for me to come out. Had I come out of the water, there was nothing stopping them from pretending to think I had a weapon on me, and shooting. I eventually started getting tired and then I pretended to start thrashing around in the water as if I was perhaps drowning. Immediately, they yell “Damian,” turn on five very bright strobe lights, and come rushing into the water so quickly with a rubber raft to “save” me – I wasn’t really drowning, I was just sick of waiting.
The way it worked, so long as I was in the water, they could not shoot me IN the water and pretend they thought I had a gun. However, waiting for an hour for me to come out was not compatible with them having innocent intentions. But it could have worked maybe. Except, if they had LET me drown, then everyone would want to know, why did they see me in the water and wait silently without making a noise and just let me drown? When they obviously could see me the whole time? The only answer to that question was: they were trying to stage a “justifiable homicide” shooting scene, with witnesses there ready to lie and testify to whatever was necessary justify it.
I could tell, though, by the panicked tone in their voices, that they were really scared at the thought of me drowning and them not having an explanation that could fit with a non-murderous narrative. Also, they got to me so fast, it was like they were panicking. I have never seen anyone in a rescue operation go and take a rubber raft and put it in the water faster and paddle out to me faster. In most rescue operations I ever see, they are not that frenzied. And, also, it was true that I dealt with them afterwards and they were VERY sheepish. Like they had a guilty conscience.
It is also the case that I had been active enough in the water so that my legs were covered with scratches all over them from the rocks. Actually, the reason I was constantly diving down and picking up or looking for heavy rocks was in hopes of shielding myself in case they tried to shoot me while in the water. The CT man also had a neighbor who was an accomplice and was waiting out there.
I wake up in a hospital in Connecticut. The doctor – a female – goes and tells me that police somehow got my father’s number (even though I was unconscious) and called up my father and he said “he is bipolar.” I remember asking how did they get my father’s number, I did not have it on me, they said they got it from my license. Which does not make sense. The doctor, though, who was the same one who told me that “police watched you for an hour on the water” told me my father said I was bipolar, and she said “but I can tell, you don’t seem bipolar, you are calm.” I wonder if she was warning me or something.
However, I note, let’s play devil’s advocate and pretend that cops were not up to something really dirty. All the things I had done to elude what looked like an intentional covered-up murder were some of the craziest things anyone can do. And there I was, and you could see my legs covered with scratches from being in the water. The doctor didn’t even ask me why I ended up in the water or how I got those scratches or what the hell had happened. It was as if she kind of already knew, so it didn’t matter. No need to ask me.
And, guess what? They didn’t pink slip me to a mental ward. They let me go nearly right away. That was another thing very ironic to how this whole mafia situation was handled. I was hospitalized so many times, and in all cases doctors covered up the crimes. However, SOMETIMES they go and act like “you have a serious mental health problem if this happened to you” and force me into a mental ward for one or even two weeks. In other cases, I get let go right away. And there was no rhyme or reason to it. In some of the instances where I was discharged right away, IF you were to say “this wasn’t the mafia, this was him having a mental health episode,” then the things I had just done were some of the craziest things a person could do. In other cases, where I get hospitalized for two weeks, I hadn’t done ANYTHING but they hospitalize me anyway. Oh yes and even the doctors hospitalizing me admitted to knowing about some of the crazy things the police HAD just done. “Oh yes, we know, they are like that sometimes.” Because the whole thing was rigged and this was just part of a pre-planned program I was being put through.
Anyway, I wanted to post this because I thought I should include this. This is relevant. Relevant because, especially, Black Lives Matters has been making a big fuss about police shootings that are murders. What happened to me really helps prove just how pre-meditated these police shootings can be.
I am not even all too anti-police, I should note, because I did not think the cops were bad men. It’s a big problem the corruption that hospitals engage in. You can’t trust a hospital to save the life of a cop who defied the mafia, and police sent him on some sort of emergency “call” to some crime scene, where he suddenly gets shot and shooter miraculously escapes and it remains forever an unsolved murder, and the hospital (playing dumb here) “just tried and tried and tried but couldn’t save him.” Hospitals commit murder too. Police who don’t obey can get killed too.
Also, hospitals have access to the types of drugs that incentivize the street thugs who would be one of those who’d “take on” a cop who disobeyed the mafia. Also, another common problem is just how many illegal drug “overdoses” are really pre-meditated murders, and they wouldn’t have succeeded but for what the hospital did. There are so many illegal drug users and they are a huge army that outnumber the police substantially.
If corruption among the rich, the super-rich, large corporations, universities and other charities and government agencies is not taken on, how can you expect police to not also be trapped in the same web of corruption? They are just one tiny little cog in a very big wheel. The biggest factor, I believe, is the massive outpouring of wealth from the top, in the form of systematic bribes.
(Duplicate comment)
Now what can I say about forensic psychiatry? First of all, my twin brother and I were both victims of a criminal racketeering scheme involving using us as guinea pigs for unethical medical experiments on the brain. And the perpetrators did this in a complicated way using the legal system and the mafia.
This now starts to get — well, I’ll be accused of name dropping but it is real.
Harvard University was involved as was McLeans Hospital. And they used their connections to rope in some pretty high profile people in it as well.
Actually, one truly horrible “twist” I might add is how much they warned me that, not only do they have connections to the government and can rely upon the government to cover things up for them, but they ensured me they also have connections to the New York Times and pretty much have the New York Times wrapped around their little finger. Meaning, if the govt does a cover up that smells really bad, e.g., disregards major evidence, well the New York Times will not only cover up the malfeasance of the government but will also work very hard to discredit me as well.
Harvard insiders not only warned me of that but then, as if on cue, the New York Times and NYT owned Boston Globe then proceeded to do some slavish editorials showing extreme favoritism towards Harvard and shameless suck up toady behavior towards Harvard, as well as snarky attacks on a writer who criticized Harvard, so as to ensure that I’d know the threats by Harvard insiders weren’t empty threats.
And then on two well timed occasions, the NYT published articles detailing how they had been “soft on Hitler” during the holocaust and buried news of it on their back pages in order to minimize the holocaust. Everyone knew, at the time I read the New York Times very thoroughly and would not have missed that.
All stuff that might seem like coincidences, when viewed in isolation, but when viewed as a pattern, it just strikes me as too much like lighting striking at the same place over and over again too many times to be “just a coincidence.”
But one can’t say there were any smoking guns because it was all very “Clintonesque.” As in “slick willy.”
Anyway, one such time the NYT has to publish a “we were soft on Hitler” mea culpa was right after my identical twin brother was literally accused of stalking Lauren Bush, George W. Bush’s niece. And I knew something about that and knew that she and one other person were encouraging him or trying to set him up, lure him into doing something stupid so they could accuse him — and he WAS stupid, unlike me. And I will admit/agree he was REALLY stupid there, because I know what he was like.
However, the case was never adjudicated because forensic psychiatrists went and dragged their feet and dragged their feet, delaying things until a judge ruled that the charges were so weak, even if they took him to trial, he would get off on “time served.” And then my parents got a guardianship over him where they had him forced medication, under the pretense that he was schizophrenic.
However, privately I was told that what they really wanted to study was, they wanted to use healthy non-schizophrenic identical twins for a study on the brain to determine that, when studies show that schizophrenics have brain shrinkage, it’s the anti-psychotics causing the brain shrinkage and not the disease, schizophrenia causing it. And they wanted to do this research criminally, and then threaten to repeat same research in a non-criminal setting where it can’t be covered up, and agree not to do so if drug manufacturers give them massive bribes. This was Harvard and McLeans Hospital.
I was the twin who was being used as a “control.” Anyway, I had a ton of documentary evidence showing that all mental illness diagnoses of my twin brother were blatantly fraudulent and indefensible, and that my parents were lying and not to be trusted and that I had caught them lying numerous times.
All forensic psychiatrists refused to talk to me or answer phone calls but talked extensively with my parents. It was like a “white wall of silence.” Not only that, but my twin brother had a language disorder which was entirely the fault of my parents, who isolated him as a kid and deprived him of the opportunity to fully learn how to speak as a kid, so he did not fully learn how to talk until a teenager, and these late-acquired language skills were skills that could go dormant if isolated for too long — like a foreigner whose English language gets rusty if they go back to their own country for awhile.
So what the forensic psychiatrists did was to put my brother in solitary confinement, at all times when he was refusing to take medication, until his language skills got worse and worse and worse, and then he would agree to take medication to get out of solitary confinement, and then the moment he was out of solitary confinement, his language skills came back. And then they misdiagnosed his language disorder as “schizophrenia.” Except this was all super super corrupt. And in order to get away with this, they not only had to stonewall me and refuse to even talk to me, but then I then had a group of people stalk and threaten me and threaten to kill me, in order to prevent me from intervening in the guardianship proceedings that were done via a faked “schizophrenic” diagnosis. And I even got fired as well from my job, where people who were complicit with what happened to my brother worked.
And then afterwards I got date rape drugged and raped numerous times, framed by cops on false drug charges over and over again, and then almost murdered with rat poison but I survived, albeit with slight brain damage that causes occasional language issues just bad enough so nobody can deny I got brain damage from something. I was also involuntarily drugged with all sorts of unknown substances which I still to this day don’t know what they were. By criminals in my apartment, except I could not go to the police about them as they would not cooperate.
By the way, one other issue. Though I refer to me being used as a guinea pig for unethical nazi like “twin” experiments, like how Hitler experimented on identical twins in Auschwitz, there seems to be another problem with the Bush family, having to do with what the motives were for the Iraq war and war in Afghanistan.
Based on what I was told by a graduate student in the Harvard Math Department, apparently the motives for the war were to help the computer industry do a “medical revolution” quickly whereby they could cut ethical corners and do all sorts of human experimentation “quickly” and “cheaply” — which would lead to all sorts of advances in products involving robotics and medicine that could make HUGE amounts of money and assist with all sorts of interesting things, like robotic performed microsurgery, and other similar stuff.
So apparently Iraqi and Afghanistan citizens were experimented on, en masse for all this, as were soldiers blackmailed over — well, these are war crimes, you know. Some soldiers were forced to do it to Iraqis, then blackmailed because they had done it to Iraqis, and experimented on themselves.
Now let me also explain something. I was told all this secretive stuff even while Harvard did its to use its connections to the mental health system to have me tarnished as “mentally ill.” But in a way that wouldn’t really fly, so long as I was still alive. Too many contradictions, with portrayals of me drastically way off from what everyone knows my personality is.
Well, just prior to the rat poison incident, police who framed me on false charges also made false accusations of “disorderly conduct” wherein — you should have seen the way they portrayed me. These were the most embarrassing and humiliating charges anyone can be brought up on, but I wasn’t embarrassed or humiliated because everyone knows it’s not how I would act. At least so long as I was alive.
In some cases, the police made me seem like Marlon Brando in “on the waterfront” – which is not what I am like. In other cases, well, just very undignified.
How did they try to rig the rat poison incident? Well, as luck would have it, I got only a fraction of the dose they thought I had gotten, and it wasn’t lethal. Well, someone goes and when I am in the bathroom, trashes my hotel room and breaks my laptop in half so I can no longer communicate with the outside world.
Since I’d only gotten a tiny dose of rat poison, I was well enough to just run down and try to call the police after the intruder left, only to see that the front desk clerk was shocked, surprised, horrified, terrified. Because he wasn’t expecting to see me alive and well and they were in the middle of a murder that was intended to be covered up by faked forensics, and me coming down and complaining in front of everyone about an intruder is disastrous to would-be murderers in a mafia controlled hotel. He, of course, wouldn’t call the police and tried to urge me to go back to my room, so I ran and went to another business and made THEM call the police. Who took me to the hospital to save my life.
I didn’t even know I had rat poison in me. But the police knew that’s what it was and the hospital knew that’s what it was and they didn’t even need to talk to me, they knew how to treat it without asking a single question. Because they had been working in cahoots with the criminals. But I guess they had to abort it once I was seen by too many witnesses running outdoors for help in my underwear in January.
Anyway, it would appear to be the case that, if the rat poison incident had succeeded, I am guessing they would have said that I flew into a rage and trashed my hotel room and broke my laptop in half in a Donald Trump style temper tantrum.
This whole organized crime scheme was perpetrated by a bunch of progressives, I should note. So, as can be expected, they would falsify things to have me portrayed in the same way as Donald Trump, all the while if my own family dared to suggest the death was suspicious, they’d have a bunch of little twits come out of the woodwork and explain they’d had a bad encounter with me “and it was terrifying.” Or something like that.
In other words a whole bunch of little twits would have badmouthed me in very dishonest ways and I would not have been able to answer back due to being dead. For some reason, I almost think that’s funny and it also reminds me of the classical Jim Crow stereotype of the damsel in distress “terrified” about a black man who “menaced” her, therefore he needs to be lynched.
Oh yes. One other disturbing fact. The Harvard Math graduate student who told me of a “medical revolution” motive for the wars told it to me even before September 11th. Which, of course, would imply that maybe the tech industry was involved in September 11th in some way, even if in a super indirect “laundered” way.
By the way, I hate having to be the one to have to “come forward” about this type of stuff. It’s as if Harvard repeatedly set me up to be some kind of “point man” to “come forward” about lots of corruption. Or tell people about lots of corruption. As if they went out of their way to try to train me to be a conspiracy theorist.
Oh yes and, by the way, regarding Harvard corruption, in the 60’s, my mother worked as a researcher for Jean Mayer in the area of nutrition.
Oh here, this proves it, here is my mother “Lenore” on the lower left, Jean Mayer and other Harvard researchers pictured too. Weirdly enough, in part of the scrap book I didn’t include, my mother had even references a researcher who studied the affects of cold on human bodies in Germany of all places, I do believe. Isn’t that one of the experiments Hitler did on the Jews?
“Suisse woman who studied physiological adaptation to cold.”
I don’t feel 100 percent sure if that might not have been an attempt on my mother’s part to hint about Nazi Germany or to hint as to having been privvy to info at Harvard pertaining to corruption as bad, but I suspect it because of things my mother privately told me, going all the way back to when I was a kid.
According to her, what she told me when I was a kid in the 80’s, all the nutrition research from the 60’s was bogus, and was falsified as a result of donations to Harvard (and other places) by General Mills and grains’ manufacturers. At the time, when I was told that, my mother would have come across as a nut, because the findings from the 60’s still held sway. Only starting in the 90’s, all of those studies from the 60’s were debunked and what I witnessed growing up was to see everything my mother told me as a kid being proven to have been right over and over again.
What my mother also told me, however, was of Liz Blount. Who my mother references here:
Liz Blount drowned in her bathroom from an overdose of sleeping pills, and my mother was “officially” the last person to see her alive, so all witnesses said. It all worked out so police ruled it a suicide all the while — well, according to my mother, that’s why she was forced to raise my twin brother and me as guinea pigs in the first place. “They won’t put us in jail, so long as we move to Maine and raise you the way we are raising you.”
But it is also true that all of the other nutrition researchers from the 60’s knew what had happened to my mother. The truth is, the research from the 60’s was inconclusive, it’s not that studies even showed we should stop eating saturated fats and instead eat lots of grains, high carbohydrate foods, and margarine. A bunch of high status Harvard educated professional men just bullshitted their way through it and “decreed” stuff that wasn’t supported by the data. But no one whistle blowed or called them on it.
Though my mother did tell me something about knowing the woman who used the mechanical calculator to calculate the data, a woman who was “always so tired,” and for some reason that was part of how/why my mother knew the nutrition recommendations from the 60’s were bogus and a scam.
Well, they are, aren’t they? Everyone knows about that too.
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Duplicate comment.
“They are a bunch of thugs” is a nice way of putting it.
Anyway, I personally read that apology and got annoyed.
See I have been around the block a few times, you might say. I’ve strayed away from those portions of society where only “nice” upper middle class people live, and associated with some of those who would be regarded as part of the underclass. As well as, to be honest, a very wide diversity of people.
Because of that, I have seen a much larger portion of our world than most upper middle class “nice” and “respectable” college educated yuppies have seen.
The definition of racism currently being bandied about today is that very definition which is most accessible to being understood by such yuppies. And is most likely to resonate with them or at least garner their support without provoking any of their ire.
What should I say? I tend to get so disgusted, I often can’t help but be sarcastic about it. Let us just say, all “nice people” can agree that the blue collar Irish police officer who is a bit rough around the edges shouldn’t have taken his gun out and shot the “Noble Savage” black man with impeccable credentials for virtuousness — e.g., no occasional partying with illegal drugs and no melodramatic former relationships with women who will badmouth him.
Well, guess what? Those are the easy cases to be anti-racist over. However, the vast majority of cases where police shoot black men are ones where — well, ok, shootings are not the most common problem, the really bad problems are false accusations and wrongful arrests and convictions and all that. And, guess what? The vast majority of men harmed by that unfortunately happen to suffer from “toxic masculinity” which the APA goes apeshit denouncing in hysterical tones.
Which I am going to say IS systemic racism. And it’s sneaky systemic racism too.
And, you know what? Maybe I should go and say, if they can dish it out, they can take it. The APA are made up of men who are not, I would presume, “toxically masculine,” are they?
What are they instead but a bunch of slimey slippery sneaky worms who are like pond scum and like slithering sniveling Uriah Heep of David Copperfield?
America is, above all, an overly litigious society where lawyers rule. And what do lawyers say? Lawyers say, well if nobody can prove it in a black and white way, you are entitled to get away with it. Which is, of course, a legal concept. Guess what? Racism is not a legal concept and people have a right to call things racist which are other than black and white violations of political correctness and which also includes sneaky insidious stuff.
Except, of course, academic institutions and large corporations with in-house legal counsel wouldn’t like that. Because they are masters of all the sneaky insidious stuff — unlike their business competitors, the small mom and pop business owners without extensive legal educations.
Now in the professions we DO have what we might call a “guild system.” E.g., professionals are members of a “special interest group” and they have their financial interests. Big Pharma makes it so medical doctors will subscribe to whatever belief fits with the medical profession’s financial interests. However, the psychology profession will also wish to skew things as well to fit their agenda.
What’s wrong with the psychology profession today, I wonder? My experience of it is that practitioners tend to be from a segment of society that is very non-athletic, unlikely to suffer from ADHD and people who are very verbal and like to talk and who are sedentary as well.
The profession attracts certain types of people who are part of a certain culture. Oh yes, and they also have this non-scientific sort of attitude and tendency towards vagueness. I also was a scientist and math major and I would describe the whole style of the psychology profession as “non-rigorous.” Which I think is a bit of a cop out.
A whole section denounces “toxic masculinity” yet, at the same time, they define it vaguely enough so it appears to be the case that they expect the reader to “fill in the blanks” with their own personal biases, including racist ones. They won’t SAY that black Italian Latino or blue collar white men suffer from toxic masculinity, including the macho guy with the tattoos who walks with the swagger. But maybe they expect you to think that, especially if you were not one of those types and perhaps still have bad memories of being called a wuss in the school yard and having the bullies steal your lunch money. Or, at least they are not taking responsibility for how they expect other people to interpret what they say.
They can argue, as members of a profession that’s a specialty, that they — internally — are not racist and if you get that impression from the things they say about “toxic masculinity,” well that’s just your ignorance and lack of expertise showing. What did YOU major in, in college? Did you even go to college at all? That’s inherently disrespectful, though, if you would claim that your lack of clear communication accessible to the layperson is a result of your superior education and credentials. Conveying an aura of exclusivity.
When I suffered from really bad PTSD, I found dynamic exercise outdoors mountain climbing to work the best for it, not sitting down and talking to someone in an office. I do think it might have helped even more if I could have done all that outdoor exercise WITH someone else walking with me, mountain climbing with me and talking to me along the way. I’d have recovered way faster.
Is it not true that, in the soteria project, they did not merely talk to schizophrenics sitting down in offices but went for walks outdoors with them and talked with them as they were going on those walks with them?
If only they could do further studies and try to contrast the difference. In some cases talk to people sitting down in an office. In other cases, go for walks with them outdoors in nature and see.
Notice in this study, people who walked OUTDOORS grew brain cells.
I believe it also matters WHAT sort of outdoor setting you exercise in. I am very intuitive about my own body and I just feel that it has something to do with what you are breathing in outdoors. The olfactory. And that the outdoor environment also makes a difference. Being around a lot of trees, for instance, rather than in the city.
I also think being around high mountains matters, as well as fast running streams with cold water crashing on lots of rocks.
The current psychology profession tends to be part of the humanities majors in college which attracts people who are more sedentary and who have trouble getting themselves to exercise even when they want to. I do wonder, though, if indoor gyms might play a role in that. I was personally never able to make exercise a true habit until I combined indoor weight lifting with outdoor exercise as well. I think whatever makes outdoor exercise best for depression also makes it more habit forming as well. And it can make you develop a habit for indoor exercise at the gym.
In any case, I notice the contrast between “biogenetic beliefs” versus “psychosocial beliefs” strikes me as very limited. “Biogenetic beliefs” implies limited reliance on drugs. “Psychosocial beliefs” implies limited reliance on sedentary sit down “talk sessions” with psychologists in indoor offices.
There is a much larger world out there than those two. You CAN be a rigorous thinker who views certain things as biological and not be one of those psychiatric quack types.
Meanwhile, as for the whole psychology sphere, I note most relationships involve people DOING activities together, rather than just sitting down and talking. I used to be a member of a grass roots organization where we all worked as a team on a shared goal. Which was outside ourselves.
Maybe we can call such relationships dynamic relationships? Or dynamic interactions? As opposed to non-dynamic sitting in an office talking purely about cerebral stuff? Where the conversation is supposed to involve only your head and nothing else? As if the head and the brain is just like a separate organ in the body, to be treated separately from everything else?Kind of like how, if you have a heart problem, we just specialize on the heart and leave everything else alone.
Maybe whatever you might talk about in a “psychotherapy” setting might gell far better if you talked about it with someone in a dynamic setting rather than sedentary sit down setting. Of course, maybe I should also clarify that, probably for me that would really be very important. It might not be as important to others as for me, because everyone is different.
Even so, it’s important to recognize that diversity. Different people have different needs. Our whole mental health profession, does it truly recognize such diversity or are treatment options geared more towards the structural “needs” of different facets of the mental health profession as a business and an industry?
Where it is almost as if the profession is saying: “We do what we do, we refuse to stray beyond certain limited boundaries. We will not adjust to you as a patient. You are required to adjust to us. You have to be someone who can be fixed by what we do. And if you need something that is beyond our limited offerings, we will dig our heels into the ground and refuse to budge.”
I don’t know that you will ever be able to expect more than that from a “profession” like that, of course. Because the economic system is what the economic system is. People need to make money and people need to have lives. There is a certain structure which is compatible only with certain things.
Long ago, in the past, they used to have witch doctors. Who were somewhat sworn to poverty and lived off the donations of others. And who also, I believe, didn’t have children. There is something of a wisdom to that. You do it for its own sake, which means you believe in it and you care. Rather than, you suddenly have babies and THEY are what motivate you. Whatever is best for them.
And then, as a psychiatrist, Big Pharma is very willing to come in and help you do whatever is best for your own kids. E.g., make lots of money. The job of the patient is to have it be that whatever fixes their issues is also whatever is best for your own kids. And, if it isn’t, not to complain about it. “Too bad.”
See in Africa I think they treat schizophrenia by surrounding the person with people and social stimulation, and it works. At least in “primitive” Africa they have had this tradition.
Maybe the person’s “lack of insight” is a behavior pattern that is crying out for him to be surrounded by people, surrounded by sociability, wherein people work very hard to convince him out of his lack of insight.
Which happens to be the best treatment for schizophrenia anyway, is it not?
It’s not lack of insight. Absent chemical restraints or interventions, it’s a behavior that works best to cajol other people into providing the environment that works best for treatment.
The fact that trauma and stress seems to cause it also interesting. The person NEEDS more social support then.
I think the current psychiatric system is based on efficiency and is tied to an atomized society, that seeks to limit human sociability and which has driven human beings apart so we are more isolated from each other today than we have ever been in our entire history.
Psychiatry seeks to reinforce that isolation and “treat” those who can’t cope with it as well, all the while they do not have time to dedicate themselves properly to patients and spend the time necessary. Note how, as I mentioned, in Africa it would have been the people who know a schizophrenic very well who would have bombarded them with non-stop sociability and human connection, as a “treatment.”
Now, in the West, Mental Illness is regarded as a thing to be handled by professionals and not the community. Professionals who do not have the time. Who cannot get intimate with patients. To the contrary, arm’s length “professional” — e.g., cold — relationships are the only thing that’s allowed.
When, in fact, our brains need intimacy and social connection, and the mental health system should be regarded as something of a scam so long as it fails to recognize this.
You should see what Harvard arranged for me, when they were using me as a guinea pig for unethical medical experiments. Something similar.
On the bright side, they were testing a product that cures herpes, genital herpes, the annoying variety, and so I’m free of that, at least. However, the way it works, they will agree to withhold the cure from public knowledge in return for massive donations from pharmaceutical companies who profit off of perpetually managing herpes rather than curing it. So they needed to cover it up in some criminal way.
This criminal cover up involved having goons do stuff to me that was “tied to the mafia” and then police take me to psych wards or meth wards where psych docs can corruptly write my medical records just right so as to discredit me so I can’t say anything. And in the process, when I was asleep, I am guessing they would check to see, was I getting a sore again or was the herpes really gone?
I can allege all this, of course, but I did more than that. Prior to going to Harvard I learned about the importance of keeping records and maintaining proper paper trails. I did all that, and sent everything to a lawyer in the end. We will see what results from that.
Do you think it makes me like a modern day James Bond? Some of my experiences were kind of similar. A James Bond who had herpes for awhile. That part is not what they would put in a movie.
Well, if you are a hunter, someone will be lucky enough to kill an animal, which will be big enough and will spoil soon enough (no refrigeration) so that it is necessary to share and stupid not to.
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Yes and, guess what? I don’t know how much these rules are published but it’s an unspoken rule, at least, that if you want to get on — I think it’s SSI disability benefits. If you want to get on SSI disability benefits, their rules are somewhat rigid. A doctor can write something diagnosing you with any sort of condition and he can assure the government that you are really disabled. They won’t listen unless you are prescribed a neureleptic. The moment you are prescribed a neureleptic, that’s “proof” you are disabled enough to go on SSI.
In other words, the bureaucracy itself is corruptly mandating these prescriptions as a pre-condition for SSI benefits. Which is corporate welfare. You don’t get on SSI unless the drug company is allowed its “take.”
The same thing was also done with mostly gay men and HIV. I visited Provincetown a few times and talked to a few gay men with HIV who were on SSI. They told me it was a terrible life. SSI was only giving them $10,000 a year or less to live on. They could not make money elsewhere or work, or they’d lose not only the SSI but their health insurance (medicaid/medicare). Meanwhile, the cost of HIV drugs was, in their case, something like $50,000 a year. That’s literally how much the pharmaceutical companies were making off of HIV.
$10,000 a year for the HIV infected man to live on. $50,000 a year for the pharmaceutical companies per HIV infected man. This was a big money making scam. And, at the time, I heard rumors of several organized groups seeking to maximize the rate of HIV infections, deliberately trying to infect HIV negative men unawares. I’d ask the guys who told me about this “is this something the drug companies are sponsoring” and they’d say “probably.”
I do know one thing. This was something I could not go to the police about. They knew about it and would not do anything.
Well, even if shamanism is a fantasy and all that, perhaps it evolved because, for some reason, it’s a healthy way of thinking. Or a healthy mental exercise, to believe in it.
Well, I am not surprised to see all this research went nowhere.
And, because I think a picture is often worth 1000 words, I’m going to post a google image search of the X Files Fox Mulder’s picture of a flying saucer with the words “I want to believe” at the end of this post.
Because it’s actually true that they want to believe and are obsessed with any kind of quick fix that would involve drugs or something that can be monopolized through the patent system. And I will admit that human ingenuity in the past several decades has been remarkable and I am now typing all this on a miraculous invention called The Laptop and I fully understand why, after seeing the human race build such marvelous machines, a whole culture in academia would sprout up that would involve the love of trying to fix human beings the way you could fix a machine.
The mindset and the whole approach to the thinking of it is wrong.
Living creatures did not get put together like a machine. We evolved over a very long period of time, our brains grew, you might say. Evolved certain structures and patterns. This evolution resulted in some structures that maybe somewhat simple, yet actually there was nothing preventing such things as the structure of the brain from evolving in a manner that is so complicated or subtle that we just don’t have the tools to measure the brain this way.
Oh yes, neuroscientists are obsessed with their own tools they use to measure the brain. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I do remember hearing, in a biology course, that in many ways, life very often COULD HAVE — if it had been intelligently designed by a person — been far more simple than it was. Yet, because it evolved rather than was deliberately created, there are structures or systems in us that simply chose to go about certain tasks in the most complicated manner imaginable — stupidly complicated. At least so an engineer would say. “Why do you have to make it so complicated,” anyone would ask the engineer who designed it.
Yet, with life, it doesn’t matter. We evolved that way. All that needs to matter is that it works.
I remember having this same response to scientists who are in a debate over gender and the brain, who are not able to really see all too much in the way of systemic brain differences by gender, at least not with the current measuring tools. (Or, the differences the see are on the small side.) Maybe that all doesn’t matter, that we currently can’t see it with our measuring tools.
Actually, I majored in pure math where, if one does so, it’s possible to understand how certain brain differences that might result in schizophrenia for one person but not another, or that might cause systematic gendered behavior differences or strengths, might still in both cases result in electrical activity which, when measured, looks so similar, we will never be able to figure out the difference unless perhaps some mathematician who was a genius was able to “crack” the code and figure out the pattern difference.
I just wonder, how about if scientists tried to think of Darwin and natural selection, and then ask themselves, what could mental illness be in the brain? Why would it have evolved?
I have written one post about how maybe depression might be something intended to encourage people to live near tall mountains which have guaranteed rainfall even in drought yet are uncomfortable otherwise. The mere fact that women get it more often and men tend to feel compelled, socially, to do what women want and cater to their feelings, even if they seem “irrational” also possibly connected to all that. Women would have forced everyone to move back to the colder mountains after everyone — during a temporary period of lots of brain — moved to a nice warm dry valley. Some women just couldn’t tolerate it. They just didn’t feel right. They wanted to go back to the mountainous areas. The men were annoyed about it but reluctantly agreed. Then the climate got dryer for awhile. People without depression tendencies starved.
As for schizophrenia — that strikes me as tied to paranoia and anxiety and fear. Now I have a tendency towards anxiety but not schizophrenia or psychosis. I also was a victim of the mafia and went through a period where I feared for my life. Oddly enough, after surviving all that, I still have some amount of ptsd and anxiety that I didn’t have before. But, in so many ways, gone are all sorts of inhibitions I used to have. In a way, it was freeing.
It’s interesting, though, how I think maybe my mind just feels a “need” to find something to be a little scared over yet overcome. After the PTSD from the criminal stuff subsided enough, the “fear” needed to go somewhere — so it “transferred” into a fear of heights. I am sometimes afraid of driving over bridges, for instance.
I feel like schizophrenia is related to anxiety somehow. I just wonder, though, maybe the part of our brains originally geared towards hunting in the jungle where, if one steps on something wrong one can fall and really get hurt, or if one is not alert, one can get hurt by an animal, maybe that part of our brains needs exercise and modern day society doesn’t give us enough of that type of mental exercise.
Studies say if you put people in “sensory deprivation” chambers for long enough, e.g., total dark where they are floating on water and seeing and hearing and feeling nothing — they will eventually start to hallucinate. Maybe the boringness of modern day society and excessive amount of security and safety fails to exercise the brains of some who were evolved to be living in a dangerous jungle like environment.
Oh yes, now didn’t the soteria project involve going for walks with schizophrenics and just talking to them? That’s the thing. Schizophrenia or paranoia would tend to force people to not go out in the jungle alone but bring someone with them. I think it’s interesting how they didn’t merely talk to them but they went for walks with them. I bet the walks were very important and sitting down across a table in a sedentary office from someone just isn’t going to be the same.
Here’s the thing. Why can’t academics go and be interdisciplinary about it? Combine all the sciences. Think about human evolution and ask what are the evolutionary origins of mental illness? Speculate the way I am speculating. And then follow through by designing actual studies that would explore such theories, and then see if they have any validity. And then try to use one’s imagination to figure out what sorts of things might help.
Except, this way of thinking is theoretical in the exact same way as Einstein was theoretical about black holes. Had we just limited ourselves to telescopes and never been theoretical in the way Einstein was, we would never have figured out that black holes exist. Because, like how i said maybe parts of the brain are complex beyond our ability to ever be able to “see,” black holes also are incapable of being directly observed.
Oh yes. Another thing. Intuition and what we call “psychic” ability. Some of it may well be something tied to quantum mechanics in the brain — and quantum mechanics IS weird in the sense of sometimes having “retrocausality” with future events in tiny circuitry capable of influencing the past or present somehow. And tiny circuitry is exactly what our brain is full of. And then, go and be Darwinistic about it. If it was theoretically possible for the brain to evolve certain types of intuitive skills that harness quantum mechanics and help one sometimes see into the future in some ways, often with respect to sensing danger, well natural selection does say, if it could have evolved, it would have evolved as it would have given us MAJOR survival advantages.
If that’s what it is, it would be SUPER complex. Then again, nature does not favor or mandate simplicity. Some of those academics who argue that psychic ability is “absurd” have not thought that maybe parts of the brain are mind bogglingly complex. Because there was nothing stopping us from evolving that degree of complexity. It is actually superstitious and un-scientific to argue “it couldn’t possibly be true.”
The scientific thing to do would be to be open minded enough to try to theoretically explore the topic. “How might it be true?” Which most academics won’t do — because they are being paranoid and fear looking “superstitious.” Because academia is a pretty intolerant place full of back stabbing and intimidation, is it not? Culture of intellectual intimidation. Everyone afraid of saying something out of place.
“These days, we in psychiatry are beholden to this idea that neuroscience will produce magic bullet solutions on the molecular level and that we can identify everything in the brain. This ideology ends up reinforcing the same class and race hierarchies that we were discussing. It presents itself as neutral because you’re talking about a brain. It doesn’t matter where somebody lives. It doesn’t matter the color of their skin, what their job is. It’s just the brain. It shouldn’t matter where they live, what they do, who they are.”
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Maybe these psychiatrists should talk to the right kind of mathematicians. Abstract mathematicians.
Calling some things a brain disease does NOT mean there will be magic bullet solutions.
Like, ok, take cancer. There is a tumor located in one spot and you can see it.
In contrast, psychiatric illness, in the brain, is like a complex weather pattern, and how well can we predict or control the weather? This takes chaos theory.
There will be no magic bullet solution as psychiatrists hope. If anything, the best science may well dash their hopes for one, all the while perhaps the math behind it might be complex enough so very few people can really understand it and xenophobia within various professions will prevent it from being accepted or recognized.
I will note, however, that some research suggests outdoor exercise is capable of stimulating brain growth — growth of a nature that is capable of rectifying just the imbalances that would lead to depression anxiety and paranoia.
Here’s the thing. Parts of the brain grow and shrink, depending on what sensory experiences we have and what we are trying to learn. Even pregnant women experience brain shrinkage during pregnancy, all so that their brains have room to remodel themselves in compatibility with the nuances of what their infant best needs re: social stimulation.
Now I just wonder, is the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness still being taught today? I know, long ago, Rob Whitaker said it was a bogus theory that was utterly lacking in evidence. Just something medical schools decided to declare in an evidence free way because it helped Big Pharma market drugs better.
Well, the whole issue of brain growth and shrinkage utterly discredits the whole “chemical imbalance” theory. On top of it, Rob Whitaker had problems with anti-depressants and other psych drugs because they acted as ENABLERS. Once put on those drugs, the brain would never fix the problem that caused these issues, and instead become more and more dependent on the drugs, as well as experience cognitive decline.
It made me think, depression is likely an activity imbalance in the brain. But the brain needs to make more connections or make some connections stronger in order to fix it. That’s where outdoor exercise might work. Medications prevent all that from happening entirely, though. The underlying problem caused by the drugs only get worse.
Here’s the thing. There are many things about our modern society that create conditions for poor mental health. I don’t know that academia is too interested in studying them or exposing them. The whole economic system depends on them not doing so.
It’s not just the influence of Big Pharma which is the problem. All sorts of other swaths of the business community might find their interests threatened if we couldn’t just say “don’t worry about changing your lifestyle — we can provide you a quick fix with drugs.”
What about long work hours? What about excessive time indoors? What about homes that are energy efficient but keeping out the outdoor air worsens our mental health? What about the influence of nutrition as well as poor physical shape? Excess work hours and sleep deprivation?
I would think, actually, that sleep deprivation might be the worse of it. Interestingly enough, I do feel as if sleep deprivation is way worse due to our sedentary lifestyles. People who are working hard physically exerting themselves hard all day will end up sleeping extra soundly those hours they do sleep, so they end up ok. If you are sedentary all day, you won’t sleep as soundly, and the side effects of sleep deprivation are so much worse.
Nice questions to ask, right? All of them will carve deeply into corporate america’s current privileged existence it enjoys with respect to the matter of long work hours and cheap labor. A privilege you will notice it is obsessively interested in preserving, all you need do is read some of the articles in the feminist sections of mainstream publications like the New York Times, The Atlantic, etc., which obsess about female labor in ways which — well, ok they SAY this is all for “the good of women” but, please. Read enough of it, and you can tell it is about corporations and money. Even if you don’t have any education or insight about economics, I think you can tell. But you can definitely tell if you are economically literate.
If the labor supply went down, wages would have to go up, and would cut into their profit margins. But women do try to pull out from work to spend more time with the kids, so it’s a constant tug of war. A constant battle to keep the labor supply of women up, hence the non-stop propagandizing. Mercenary is the word I like to use to describe all this. In a somewhat crass way too.
Oh yes, take the economics of free childcare versus mandatory paid family leave.
Free childcare will increase the labor pool of women — supply v. demand means free childcare will make wages of women go down. Mandatory family leave will decrease the labor pool of women, making women’s wages go up. Democrats now want two years of free child care and only 12 weeks of paid leave — lopsided ratio means the child care is going to reduce wages far more than paid leave will increase wages. On top of it, as wages go down, women will need ot work longer hours and NEED the free childcare more and spend less time with their own children. Not a SINGLE media publication out there has pointed that economic reality out.
This shows you just how much our whole establishment is enslaved to the interests of corporation over and above the interests of people.
I note, our brains are developing faster during our infancy than at any time in our development. We were meant to have our mother there to help nurture and stimulate our developing mind. Daycare is absolutely an unhealthy environment for that.
However, the needs of corporations and the running of the economy happen to be coming first here.
By the way, I can’t help but be Darwinistic about this whole topic. We were evolved so as to have a mental need to engage in regular exercise, even if we were being fed enough, so we’d be in good physical shape to do the hunting and/or gathering necessary to get food when times were tough.
It also is the case that the best climates for mental health are in mountainous areas with lots of running fresh water, lots of cold streams and brooks and rivers. Well, let’s say the climate in a particular valley area was suitable for human life during a warm spell but then dried up when the sun got colder. If some of us have mental health problems in a valley area, and those with mental health problems force everyone else to live near the mountains, when a dry spell hits for a long time, they will all survive and those humans without such mental health problems won’t.
Even though the valley is more comfortable than the mountainous area is.
Um, wow. I think, in some ways, depression and ptsd are neurological — but just in such a super complicated way, science won’t figure out directly how they should be treated. Humans evolved with instincts that help them instinctively “know” or be able to “figure out” how they should be treated.
Just as, I think religion evolved, organized religion evolved, because it has always been some form of societal construct that results in positive mental health rather than negative mental health.
That is a scientific way one can think of it. Dry and scientific. And no fun.
But I believe in the spiritual too and feel there is no sharp dividing line between the “dry scientific” and “spiritual.” I do suspect some intuition and foresight maybe could be seen as quantum mechanics in the brain.
Meaning, it’s “scientific.” Even so, I would still not dismiss the spiritual.
I DO think a big problem with modern day society is that science does not respect or even positively DIS-respects the spiritual.
Which is strange and awful — and also anti-scientific too. It fully makes sense to argue that the spiritual amounts to collective wisdom we evolved over eons, because it gave us a competitive advantage.
Just like how maybe WE as babies are not born knowing how to walk, yet deer are born knowing to walk, because they evolved that ability HARD WIRED in the brain, we evolved the tendency towards spirituality HARD WIRED IN THE BRAIN.
Scientists and academics need to RESPECT THE SPIRITUAL much more. Respect it AND respect it AS something that is scientific. Respect it in a scientific way.
Rather than, we have a form of ghettoization today where those who would embrace the spiritual try to define themselves overly in contrast to science, and in such ways so that they don’t really have the best language for describing the various spiritual or psychic phenomenon they both believe in and experience and know others who experience.
I have been both very scientifically trained and also with lots of spiritual ability and someone who hung out around psychics, lots of psychics, and maybe was “trained” in that too, in some kind of informal way. But all in such a way so that I can speak both languages. As well as see the scientific consistency in much of my intuition.
Much of which I have actually written down, over the course of many years, and ended up stored in my computer files. It’s very interesting, actually.
Anyway, what’s the difference between “psyche” and neurology? Maybe “psyche” is neurological in such an extraordinarily complicated way that we will never be able to have advanced mathematics complex enough or sophisticated enough to be able to study it using tools of neurology. But the psyche evolved along with innate wisdom about the psyche, enabling us to rely on that innate wisdom, when scientific tools would fail, and we call that reliance on innate wisdom “psychology.”
But here’s the thing. Psychology can be distorted and corrupted, in a societal way where the whole society ends up somewhat unhealthy. And when that takes place, the only way it can be fixed is by people who believe in themselves strongly and believe in their intuition very strongly, and who resist the lemming-like mindset of the herd. And who resist it strongly enough so the herd eventually rights itself. Here is an interesting fact about human society. All of society can start going in the wrong direction, in a lemming like manner, where the majority all “agree” with one thing that is wrong. All “agree” — but not really too fervently.
It only takes a VERY few group of people in society, who are REALLY grounded and who REALLY believe in themselves. To speak up, speak the truth, hold their ground, and not back down. And get the majority to wake up, think about things, and change their minds.
Feminist legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, wrote a book called The Butterfly Effect recently. The title of her book recognizes that same point.
“Why not leave the brain work to neurologists and return psychology (and psychiatry, if you could ever drag them away from their love affair with drugs and other toxic interventions) to the actual study of their subject, the psyche?”
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Because mental health issues, all of them, ARE of the brain. What is the “psyche” anyway? It’s ill defined.
Everything is neurological. I am a victim of brain injuries so I know. Also, sitting down and talking to a therapist? Honestly, the truth is, we are brainwashed into doing that — rather than a whole bunch of other things — because therapists need jobs and steady careers.
I believe the soteria project involved people talking to schizophrenics and curing them of it — not sitting down in an office but WALKING WITH THEM. The walking with them part VERY important.
Academia just has this psychology profession, which makes a lot of money. And it all works out so the (fake) notion is that you solve “psychological problems” by going to some psychologist, sitting down with them in their office, and paying them money.
I have seen therapists in the past and, frankly, found it all to be really stupid. The social stimulation is good. But you can get that anywhere. The idea that you need to see a “professional” is — well, maybe it’s not 100 percent a scam, but to some degree it is. We used to have religion that involved teaching universal moral values, and I am not big on Christianity, but I have to say, the advantage of going to church is that enough people in the community get innoculated as to the right values of living in a social society, so it’s almost like you don’t need professional psychologists as much, if everyone went to church once a week — or something that was LIKE church. After all, I agree Christianity is obsolete, but something more modern should be put in its place to fill the gap it left. There is a NEED for that in human society.
By the way, are you aware that Adolph Hitler did a ton of experiments in psychology? Well, not him personally. Nazi doctors. And some of what they figured out was imported to America, tricks to be used by the mafia.
And then George W. Bush also goes and pays psychologists on some project regarding psychological torture and terrorism. Which everyone agrees was not a terror prevention program.
Who knows what their interests were or what their agenda was. But the truth is, people usually have a pretty good understanding of their own self interests and are not stupid about it.
For some reason, the conventional wisdom is that the government war on terror apparatus was “just being real stupid” with regard to their obsession with psychological torture and terrorism. The truth is that, as regards how to get confessions, no new research ever needed to be done. It’s common knowledge what works and what doesn’t work.
I really feel, though, that psychological torture as a tool in the hand of would be terrorists, who wish to use it to incite OTHERS into committing terrorism, strikes me as much more of a research area where interesting things could be explored.
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The truth is, we are living in the dark ages when it comes to psychiatry and mental health and understanding the brain.
Also, another interesting thing is, the brain is a mathematical system. Where I do think brain activity — and imbalances in brain ACTIVITY — can be seen similarly to what physicists call “standing waves.” You know how, in the brain, when one part of the brain gets extra active, it will selectively activate certain other parts of the brain while selectively dampening other parts. Similar to how, in a container of water, you will have several waves with peaks and troughs.
When I was recovering from criminally induced PTSD via mountain climbing and other stuff like that, first of all I noticed that the same exercise indoors didn’t help, it had to be outdoors, and then I intuited, the biggest difference is the olfactory stimulation you get outdoors. Sure enough, olfactory sense networks with a bigger part of the brain than any other sense, meaning the capacity for olfactory sense to stimulate the brain or affect stimulation is bigger than anything else.
The olfactory sense stimulates the brain — even while muscles produce chemicals in response to exercise, which get into your blood stream and go right to your brain. I will say, I think various parts of the brain will ignore those chemicals, if not being stimulated via olfactory sense the most (and the other senses too) at the same time. But, somehow, these chemicals plus the sensory stimulation causes the part of the brain that over reacts in response to ‘fight or flight’ adrenaline and causes PTSD — and which probably is implicated in schizophrenia which is something like a malfunction that is still tied to the brain’s “sensing of danger” — to re-evaluate, re-program, and change course. Permanently, though.
As someone who took courses in math and physics, though, as I see myself slowly overcoming PTSD via mountain climbing, I visualized the process via thinking of physics and standing waves. The anxiety/fear/PTSD part was like a whole part of my brain had gotten way over stimulated or too liable to stimulate too intensely. Too active. And so strong, it stifled and totally clamped down on and completely shut down other parts of the brain more willing to re-evaluate “danger” and agree I was no longer in danger then (which I no longer was — but knowing that in an “intellectual” sense wasn’t the same as REALLY knowing that in ALL of my brain).
The mountain climbing, I just know, helped to calm down the anxiety part some, helped to stimulate the strengthen the other parts capable of keeping that anxiety part in check. Not just temporarily but, over time, permanently. But, actually, part of it is I distracted myself by becoming involved with intellectual stuff — which meant kind of “growing” a different part of my brain, which then got strong enough so as to shut down the over active “anxiety/fear” part.
I ought to note, when studying math, I did a bit of set theory and then on my own started to think of how you could use that material to mathematically model the brain — which I later found out was a topic that had already been invented before I thought of it. “Neural networking,” it is called.
I think they ought to get mathematicians, and good ones too, to start to think about the field of mental health, and see what they can imagine. Because I bet you could make some breakthroughs. Most psychiatrists, I note, are not mathematicians. And do not have mathematical literacy, which is something where it’s all hard wired into the brain. You either have it or you don’t. If you don’t have it, you will be incapable of being educated into it.
So I imagine most psychiatrists would not like my suggestions at all. Especially the male ones who guard their academic “territory” very ferociously. I’ve been through this before. As a teenager I was involved in grassroots politics and wrote letters to the editor of local papers, including an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal at age 19. This was in Cambridge, MA. Well, I remember one Robert Winters who loved being an expert and talking in an authoritative way, like how some psychiatrists are. Well I was shy and didn’t talk, usually. But there was one time I’m standing with people in a conversation with Robert Winter about something, they are talking about something I know about. So I bravely muster up the courage to pipe in and say something. The moment I start talking, he instantly and very aggressively interrupts, cuts me off, and says something authoritative just to prevent me from joining in. It was clear he felt “threatened” by me, as a lot of people say.
“They’re just threatened by you,” I have heard over and over again. Referring to my intellect, not my muscles, I note.
Anyway, they should have mathematicians join the field of mental health, and see if they can use their math skills to somehow gain insights that might help. However, they will have to watch out for the attack dogs presently in the field. When I was at Harvard, I was told by administrators all about how each field is like it’s own fiefdom, where they ward off outsiders, and this results in intellectual segregation that is very bad. It is possible for people of another discipline to contribute insights to a discipline different from their’s. All sorts of amazing work could be done. It all isn’t done because of the territoriality of people in each discipline.
Academia ends up being pretty stupid because of that. I would say the social studies, in particular, are especially dumbed down due to lack of contributions from people with anything even approaching rudimentary math skills. Actually, my mother had math skills and tried to go into sociology. Let’s just say, it was quite a disaster. Ostracism, backstabbing, etc.
And I am not surprised. Every time I read an article that discusses sociology or anthropology or even theories regarding evolution, as someone with rigorous math skills, the stupidity and mathematical ineptness I can obviously see from the people presently in the field is very annoying. I get inspired to write facebook posts or blogs contributing my own insights, based on my mathematical mind, and I think they are good ones too. But no one, currently in the field, ever thought of them.
Can you imagine trying to socialize with existing academics in a field like that? And, of course, I am a socially sensitive person who would know better than to explain to people that they are being stupid about something.
Actually, one of my ideas I had re: evolution was, I noticed that the best way to deal with anxiety and depression is not merely to do outdoor exercise. Location and climate matters too. The white mountains of New Hampshire which are somewhat high altitude, and have lots of streams with cold water crashing over rocks makes the biggest positive impact of all.
Why would we have evolved that way? Because routine climate change occurs. Absent those mental health issues, during wet periods, human beings might have chosen to move to much easier-to-navigate valleys that would, in time of drought, dry up causing everyone to die. But not if depression and anxiety – especially among women – forced everyone to live closer to mountainous areas. Which will be the places that stay wet in times of drought, unlike the valleys and plains.
The moment people move — in wet periods — to the seemingly more welcome valley, some women, more prone to depression, will start saying “I just don’t feel right, I feel scared, I want to go back to the mountains, I felt better there.”
Oh yes, here is the facebook post I wrote about it.
Isn’t it a theory that ought to be considered potentially valid?
Now in my case, well I really do suffer from ADHD and a tendency towards anxiety, but that is all. And so does my twin brother. We were given fake diagnoses and lied to by doctors at Harvard who wanted to conduct unethical medical experiments on us — and it’s a long complex story.
However, eventually — well, the sickening part of it was to conduct a series of horrific crimes perpetrated by the mafia, cover these crimes up, and then fraudulently portray the very severe PTSD and trauma as spontaneously appearing symptoms of schizophrenia — and they hoped they would be able to claim no one had done anything to us.
I was legally savvy. My twin brother wasn’t and I couldn’t get him to listen to me about the importance of keeping paper trails. Anyway, I kept paper trails and took them to a lawyer and they proved the abuse badly enough so people were willing to admit that I’d been abused and my then fragile mental state (not what I started out with, what the perpetrators caused in me by what they did) was the result of abuse and very serious crimes. Actually, I even had physical damage from some pretty undeniable rapes, it was that bad. As well as clear cut brain damage.
However, had I not gotten a lawyer at the right time, they would have declared it all schizophrenic — and then if you put someone suffering from that kind of PTSD on anti-psychotics, it inhibits the part of the brain that might have the capacity to recover on its own.
They know that too, and the sickening part of psychiatry is how often they will misdiagnose trauma, and how much they know if such a misdiagnosis leads to an anti-psychotic, they can use the anti-psychotic to permanently incapacitate an abused and exploited victim. And, yes, they do this fully knowing what they are doing, it’s that evil.
Actually, in my case, it wasn’t just trauma trauma. I had head trauma inflicted which, again, makes it even harder for the brain to re-develop the connections it must develop to overcome PTSD. And would have made an anti-psychotic even more debilitating and detrimental to my recovery.
But that is all theoretical. And that is all the danger I knew about, hence my rigorous keeping of paper trails and legal savvy I used to protect myself from that.
However, even after getting the attorney, I was still in a very debilitated state of mind. Terrible PTSD which could easily look like schizophrenia if you didn’t know what had happened to me.
The one thing that worked the best for my recovery was outdoor exercise and mountain climbing. For some reason, exercise combined with exposure to nature — which stimulates the olfactory sense, biggest interface between one’s environment and the brain — helped my brain overcome those ingrained “ruts” I was stuck in with PTSD. And stimulated it to grow new and more positive connections.
Actually, there was a study done on elderly people which shows OUTDOOR walking — but not indoor exercises — stimulates the brain to grow more brain cells and make more connections.
I am certain that overcoming PTSD — but also probably overcoming other issues like schizophrenia — is best done by stimulating the brain to grow more brain cells like this. And I speak of this as a victim of trauma and ptsd and brain damage leading to certain cognitive impairments. Mountain climbing outdoors IS like a drug that impacts one’s brain. Also, the environment one does it in counts too. Higher altitude mountains with lots of cold running water crashing over rocky streams has a better or at least different impact compared to hotter, lower altitude and more “stagnant” air environments.
Hiking the white mountains of New Hampshire will have a different impact from hiking short rolling hills in areas of New England near sea level, even though both are good.
Anti-psychotics does the exact opposite of grow brain cells. It causes brain shrinkage. It’s the exact opposite of the right thing to do. They act as enablers. This is as bad as ancient rome prescribing lead poisoning to the upper middle class.
Actually, part of the unethical experiments I was forced to endure involved many years of excruciating physical pain due to an untreated muscle spasm, which even when treated caused me a neurological pain syndrome that is hard to recover from and hard to shake off.
I now, occasionally, have fake pain in certain spots, that my brain neurologically “creates” — or gets fooled into thinking is real — that is a result of me having spent 25 years in untreated excruciating pain. Fibromyalgia is what it’s sometimes called. However, most people with fibromyalgia were born with it whereas I had it programmed in me due to a horrendous experience that’s almost unheard of.
Anyway, what I suffer from now are what could be described as pain hallucinations. E.g., the same pain that used to be in my upper back left shoulder blade area will remap itself to different parts of my body, which then will sometimes “feel” like they are in the same pain I used to have before.
The moment I was informed it was a pain syndrome and not real injuries in those spots, I instantly started to “mind over matter” start to will the pain away and mentally take control over the pain and start training myself into mentally reducing it. That went on for awhile during a two year haitus from mountain climbing. And I improved the pain somewhat. Then I start regularly mountain climbing in New Hampshire again — and the mountain climbing itself DRASTICALLY reduced the pain.
I can say, the mountain climbing stimulates your brain into “re-evaluating” what IS reality and what ISN’T reality. Re-evaluating the “pain” it was wrongly feeling into “not-pain.” But I think PTSD is the same way, and likely schizophrenia probably is too. As well as depression. Your brain can do re-processing of stuff. Re-programming of stuff. Somehow, it is stimulated to automatically do it much more in an environment involving outdoor exercise in nature. And I think, if it were researched better, we would learn why.
My gut feeling tells me, your brain is sensitive to what you are breathing in, the olfactory sense, as well as the exercise and the exertion. But olfactory stimulation in the absence of exercise and exertion won’t work. I just know it’s the combination that does it. Also, mountain climbing involves exercise on un-even terrain — not the monotonous “same movement all the time” repetition of a gym treadmill, which also means your whole entire nervous system is being stimulated and exercised as you mountain climb. Forcing your brain to be “there.” Monotonous treadmill — your brain can fall asleep while you do that. It’s not the same.
Thinking of evolution, our brains developed in environments where, when we trekked long distance through unfamiliar territories, our brains had to be on the look out for dangerous predators or other dangers. Schizophrenia and ptsd are diseases related to paranoia and the sensing of danger. Maybe our brains were developed so we “need” some amount of the conditions associated with real danger in our lives, or it’s like — I once heard about how people, if put in sensory deprivation chambers for too long, will start to hallucinate. Maybe modern day civilized life is, to some people, too much like a sensory deprivation chamber.
Well, I have a rather complex paper trail of evidence on my computer, from when I lived in this lower income black neighborhood of Dorchester, that backs up the contention that large corporations, wishing to make money off of illegally involuntary “Nazi style” medical experiments on marginalized people (e.g., the poor, or black people, etc.), will resort to using both the psychiatric system, crooked cops and mafia connected gangs to accomplish their aims.
The idea is that, in a neighborhood that is poor enough, the mafia can get away with things and residents there can be intimidated into denying any knowledge or pretending to have witnessed nothing. You will have gangs engage in rather bizarre elaborate “conspiracies” or antics, outside in the neighborhood, playing minds games on and otherwise targetting and hazing a particular victim — often after they have been plied with drugs. Then same individuals will engineer some “incident” that results in police being called, police then go and take the person to a hospital, which may conduct any number of unethical experiments on them (for which they are getting bribed with corporate money, or else maybe some research institution like Harvard got the bribe), and then they will falsify records just right and accuse the victim of suffering “psychosis” (usually drug induced).
The key thing is, if the victim later on tries to make any accusations, part of their story is going to include the rather fanciful antics of the “mafia” like gangs in their neighborhood, just prior to them being taken to the hospital where bizarre things were done to them. All neighbors will deny responsibility or knowledge, the victim is genuinely going to look like they really did hallucinate the whole thing into existence.
It’s a very clever cover up.
I was personally a would-be victim of such a scheme. However, I did a number of things that ensured some of the abuse wouldn’t get covered up. For instance, some of the “Hazing” involved death threats and other bizarre threatening stuff communicated to me online on my computer — which computer hackers from the online server (not in my apt) the communications were going through systematically kept deleting, leaving no evidence I’d been threatened and harassed. I started hitting print screen and saving to microsoft word, systematically capturing those threatening antics, e.g., the threats which would appear in my inbox, and then magically disappear via computer hacker, in a manner intended to make it look like they’d never been sent and I’d just imagined them. In one instance, I had a print screen of a particular folder obviously full of threatening emails — and a minute or two later, a print screen of the same folder, with all the threatening emails gone. And this was a folder where no one, not even me, can delete old messages, they automatically disappear after 30 days and not before. That — and a whole bunch of other things I documented as well — was enough to prove it.
In my case, I was experimented on with pharmaceuticals that were not approved of by the FDA. Including — well, I believe the perpetrators have a successful cure for genital herpes they are covering up, in return for bribe money from Big Pharma. Just one example of the kind of corruption that is out there.
But I do need to note. The threat to fraudulently diagnose victims of crimes “crazy” or with some fabricated mental health diagnosis in order to cover up crimes perpetrated by the mafia is very common. And endemic to psychiatry. Which, by now, is a discipline that networks with other medical industries.
Actually, in my case, I believe some of the faked diagnoses of me, even while not very credible, were strategically clever enough so as to render my potential testimony against any numbers of criminals “not quite credible enough to indict them.” These criminals — who were mostly drug users doing what they had to do in order to party with cocaine and crystal meth safely — were later blackmailed and forced to submit to unethical nazi style medical experiments done on them, in the arena of computers, robotics and medicine. Testing out such devices on them as robotic rectums intended eventually for elderly incontinent.
Again, use of the psychiatric system proved to be very advantageous for this kind of plot. The key thing was for medical doctors to tarnish me with bogus psych diagnoses making my testimony just questionable enough so that, if no one else came forward so as to back me up regarding my contentions that I was a victim of certain crimes, no one could be indicted on my testimony alone. And then third parties helped blackmail the perpetrators by waiting in the wings, threatening to come forward in a manner that might bolster my testimony, but agreeing not to do so, if the criminals submitted themselves for medical experiments.
This is the kind of subtle and sophisticated criminal racketeering that goes on, using psychiatry. But, I mean, with psychiatry being leveraged for the purposes of organized crime in ways as elaborate as THIS, please, how can it possibly be a credible discipline with respect to actually trying to help people with their mental health?
You simply cannot do good mental healthcare, when a huge portion of psychiatry has been distorted so as to make it useful for criminal racketeering.
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Removed for moderation.
Let me copy and paste a comment I made on Actress Ashley Judd’s facebook page. One of many comments explaining the benefits of outdoor exercise but I’ve done it lots and have to say, figuring out what exercise works best IS a science in and of itself. It is a cop out for the medical system to say “just exercise” without saying how.
What exercise you do should be a whole entire field of study.
But, it is also true that not everyone is the same. And I was thinking, why is it that I find — I am fair skinned white but partly Italian — that the mountain air really helps but lots of running water is important and high altitude mountains are important? And then I thought, if my ancestors tended to be prone to depression and anxiety UNLESS they lived in just the right environment, well that’s why they stayed in those colder harsher mountainous areas during 30-50-100 year periods where the weather on earth was very wet, and didn’t migrate to lower lying areas, which then get too dry during droughts so everyone who migrated to the wrong areas ended up dying.
Just a thought. But it’s the type of thinking that would be useful to do in situations involving mental health. Another thing. I’ve also commented on the debate over whether there are ingrained gender differences. Corporations also want to pretend there are none, we are all the same, women who want to be “women” and not be “just like men” were brainwashed and need to be brainwashed back — an argument eerily similar to those who say homosexuals should just get over it via “conversion therapy.” But, when I thought about whether there really ARE ingrained gender differences or not, and I remembered how math works and all, my mathematical intuition tells me that a single population that lives in the same environment for a long enough time without mixing it up will develop increasingly ingrained gender differences IN THAT ENVIRONMENT (probability theory says that will be so given a small number of non-overlapping distinct sex genes free to ‘go their own way’ re: evolution and natural selection). But, there is no guarantee that the gender differences that develop in a population IN ONE PARTICULAR ENVIRONMENT will at all be the same as those that developed among humans living in a different environment. The way humans have migrated and interbred with people from completely different environments means, everyone is mixed up. We are less “standardized” now than at any other time in human history. Medicine ought to reflect that. Diversity does not mean we need to force everyone into the same standardized box. The opposite is true. Yet, the “magic of the free market” idea with economic centralization means, the more “diverse” our society becomes in terms of being homogenized, the more corporations just want to pretend everyone is standardized so as to facilitate their mass marketing to everyone.
From my facebook post.
“I have to ask, why would I just feel it that the mountain air — from high altitude mountains but not lower mountains, and they have to be wet and have a lot of running water that splashes lots — have positive mental health effects, especially depression and anxiety which COMPELS you to seek help to fix it? And women are more prone to it than men? And, go away from that environment, and you are more prone to depression and anxiety? I just remembered my meteorology class from high school. What happened to those of our ancestors eons ago? And their neighbors who did not survive? There were droughts, and there were wet periods, and the wet periods sometimes lasted longer than one or two or three generations. Long enough for people’s memories passed down from their ancestors to be weak. Tall mountains with certain altitudes will STILL have rain in the droughts. Those humans who moved to flatter areas with low hills during wet periods all DIED when there were droughts. Those who couldn’t live there because they got depressed — or at least the women got depressed and the older men did — they stayed in the mountain areas that were always going to stay wet. And survived. So, when I say, hiking in NH helped me so much with PTSD and even helped my (former) bronchitis, permanently, and that it was the air there, and the air in small hills down in Rhode Island is NOT the same and won’t work as well, isn’t it interesting that science could explain that? Also, if you are a man and in a bad area, you will want to avoid that depression and anxiety by getting lots of exercise and staying in good physical shape. So, in the drought, you can still get the hell out of there to better environments anyway despite not enough food. If you are a woman — better not stray too far from a hospitable environment. Consider it a very ingrained “memory” of the history of weather conditions. ** Outdoor exercise new hampshire mountains **”
I sort of think that the whole model corporations follow where it is all about making money and marketability is inherently anti-science.
So long as they can figure out some way to rope people in to using their products and spending money on their products, they don’t care. Even if it’s a sledgehammer and this is the brain and neurosurgery we are talking about.
It’s terrible to go study a drug on a general population when, in fact, there is a huge amount of biological diversity in the human race. With origins in hot areas of Africa for some, while others migrated north to very cold areas.
If they really were serious about solving health problems, they would try to figure out ways to isolate and segregate and study sub populations of human beings, where they segregate out those who have the exact same brain characteristic — scientifically determined. And psychiatry, in its current state, is pathetically not a science, I would suspect.
I have long been a fan of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, where they talk of the magic of the free market, and in some cases that works. But, with health care, well … see I kind of know what the problem is.
There are people out there who are creative and who are scientific, and who have pride in their work. When it comes to health, if they ever REALLY tried to figure out how to work on the mind and on conditions like depression or anxiety and get it right, they will probably end up concluding that it is complicated. Each sub population they can isolate and figure out the problems of will need a different solution. It might not be what the company donating money for research is going to be able to make much money off of. But such scientists will continue such studies because they like being creative and smart and they have a sense of pride in their work that is OTHER THAN the “profit motive.”
Especially when, actually, the “profit motive” is that of a corporation — which is economically centralized inasmuch as one corporation will produce one product that is meant to be distributed over a large area and serve a lot of people, with the more people buying it ensuring the bigger profits. That principle works excellently when the problem — as it’s been for most of human history — is making sure human beings and civilization has enough food to keep everyone alive and no famines.
Food is food. We can all pretty much eat the same thing and stay alive. The “magic of the free market” works wonderfully when the goal is to get people a lot of food.
With healthcare, science and nuance are what matters. Corporate Donations to academia stifles creativity and researchers who are there because they are scientists and have egos and care about creativity more than money hate it.
Oh and that’s a bit of a problem with a certain brand of “feminism” promoted by corporate/academic interests, with rigid and self serving definitions of “gender equality” that involve “advancing women” who would rather be mothers and who are grudgingly doing it for the money solely in order to pay back exorbitant student loans for skyrocketing tuition rates. They don’t have the sense of pride in their work and desire for their work to be MORE than just the making of money. So Big Pharma loves them. They’ll live with the stultifying rules.
Not politically correct, what I’m saying. It’s TRUE and I am not going to live in a society where damage is done by lying and pretending it isn’t true.
Third paragraph error: meant to say “yes they are corrupt BUT there is huge variation from one state to another….”
Sorry in second paragraph I meant to say you had a prison system which profits off of dysfunction. Cellphone autocorrect error.
So there was an interest in “mothering the mother” amid the great society and then interest waned? What I heard about the great society was that this “welfare establishment” developed that became very interested in monopolizing federal funds for themselves, and I’m talking about employees and various corrupt profiteers attached to the welfare system sometimes more or less loosely.
You ended up with mass incarceration which is feeds a hugely profitable prison industry which profits off of distinction. And, some of the housing projects out there are not much better than prisons. The problem with federal money is that it is so easy for corruption to develop. Before the great society welfare systems were administered by the states — and there was all sorts of corruption and abuse. It was very obvious too given how one state might vary from another depending on the political conditions in each. So the Feds step in but corruption is something that is not limited to the states, but it takes time to develop. It seems that it is only a matter of time before it will develop.
Government has always been this way throughout history. Thing is, when individual states are more powerful, yes they are corrupt because there is huge variation from one state to another, and people exchange information. Good example is lead paint and childhood lead poisoning. In states with older housing stock and tight housing markets — eg real estate interests have potential to make lots of money off new construction, those states have distorted the science somewhat in order to falsely blame lead poisoning on lead paint, and mandated very expensive deleading procedures dangerous to children but which helps to prop up the price of new construction painted with non lead based paint. Other states without the same market and corresponding political conditions actually ban some of those procedures because studies have found time and time again they not only do not protect against lead poisoning but often cause it.
So if you look at the variation from one state to the other between lead paint laws, and what the state “experts” claim the truth is, it is readily obvious there is serious amount of corruption. The temptation is towards the federal government applying a uniform code. When it does so, the uniformity of the policy makes it much harder to see how it might be influenced by corruption. You’d have to compare the USA to Mexico, Canada, or Europe to see it. And I think corruption gets worse always when it is the least noticeable. With regard to lead paint laws, I do know the truth is slowly prevailing and various states feel compelled to recognize reality. Partly because various parties can point out the differences between each state and in some cases force entrenched interests to cave.
I believe the European healthcare system is less corrupt than the USA because, though they are all government run in Europe, each different country has its own system, and each country is right next to one another, information is shared from one country to another, and reality or the truth has an easier way of influencing policy. The USA is isolated from the rest of the world with power centralized in Washington.
But who, in the psychiatric profession, are ever going to have the guts to get their hands dirty by labeling — and possibly provoking — individuals who might be obvious to people as sociopathic or sick people? One thing you can’t expect of upper middle class people who spent tons of money on advanced degrees is for them to get their hands dirty in any way. The default human tendency, when confronted with evil, is always to not want to get involved. That speaks to an inherent limitation psychiatry has, and always will have.
To drive home my point: for him to label his father as a sick person IS labeling — but it is not “wrong” because it is TRUE his father is a sick and sociopathic bad person who abuses and hurts other people. The labeling that is being criticized here is a mislabeling of victims of abuse as not having been abused but instead having something wrong with them — which is wrong because it is inherently inaccurate and also can trap the victims in continued abusive situations. Labeling is bad when it is inherently dishonest and enables abuse — but, when someone is a sick sociopathic person, nothing works more effectively to protect others from their abuse than to have the guts to label them as such.
If his father is a bad person who engages in psychological abuse, who lacks a consciense and lacks normal emotions of empathy towards others, popular culture generally labels such people as sociopaths, or criminally insane, and it is a valid label.
A label such as that, I want to note, is applied to people who have a pattern of abuse towards others, a pattern of hurting other people, and that’s when they are labeled criminally insane or sociopathic.
Isn’t it interesting how the medical community wants to wipe away all “stigma” from mental illness — and make very clear that mental illness is not a label that is to be applied to people who are bad people? The words “sick” or “criminally insane” are words the medical profession shies away from.
Instead, they want to label symptoms a person experiences as mental illness, symptoms which are often induced in people when they are the recipients (but not perpetrators) of abusive behavior, and then first they want to erase all stigma: no this doesn’t mean the subject is bad. But, at the same time, they will jump through hoops going out of their way to avoid ANY kind of judgement regarding the CAUSE of such symptoms that could implicate a member of the subject’s family or immediate social group as having engaging in any kind of abusive behavior, in favor of asserting that such symptoms spontaneously arose in the individual because something is medically wrong with them, and therefore they are required to use the paid, expensive, professional services of a doctor, and all those pricey drugs, for the rest of their life.
This is nothing other than an inherent built-in bias of a medical profession that needs to make money. Go get training for any kind of sales job, and you will have it drilled into your head countless times just how drastically making any kind of value judgments perceived offensive to some people can cut into your bottom line and reduce your market share.
While therapists are most likely individuals voluntarily choose to seek out, psychiatrists are professionals most likely to receive patients who have been turned into them by family members. How quickly and drastically would the psychiatric profession be financially decimated if psychiatrists admitted that abusive environments can cause symptoms of mental illness, or that mental illnesses can be cured by the right sort of socially based therapeutic environment?
Doing so gets into the tricky area of possibly making some sort of judgment (direct or implied) regarding the family members of the mentally ill, who are the ones who pressure mentally ill people into seeking treatment.
The best way for psychiatry to increase it’s market share is to systematically diagnose indiviuals with having something wrong with them — e.g., chemical imbalances — while also scoffing at any claims by them that they were abused or mistreated by family members, and chaulking up such claims to their “imaginations” which are “tarnished” by the “illness.”
Doing so not only prevents the problem of psychiatrists offending the very family members whose cooperation they need to keep patients, but also gives family members an incentive to use the psychiatric system, to help them absolve them of any kind of abusive implications.
Furthermore, nothing works better to keep a patient trapped in the mental health system for life, than to systematically enable abusers whose behavior may well be causing symptoms — and there is a lot of money to be made from a model of psychiatry that causes poor long term outcomes. And allying with bad or abusive people against victims of such behavior is hugely in the financial interests of the psychiatric profession.
So, in my opinion, it is actually important to label an abusive person an abusive person — and labeling someone abusive when it is obvious they are is the sort of common sense thing which the medical profession seems notoriously willing to cop out on, in favor of labeling victims as only imagining abuse and having something “inherently wrong” with them — e.g., something medicalizeable.
I just note, in a comment above which is now under moderation, I point out how I think schizophrenics should try doing the outdoor exercise and mountain climbing that i am doing to help my ptsd and brain injuries. And I’m insightful about my brain and I just know or feel this would help schizophrenics. Of course, I’m not schizophrenic myself so I guess I can’t say I know for sure. But I’m probably right about it.
Though, of course, you know what? Maybe I’m not fully right about it, or I’m only right about it for some people but not others. But what if the social environment and culture of the mental health field were such, so that everyone who was passionate and enthusiastic about me and had creative ideas like I have, about “what could be” or “what might be true” were welcomed and others responded to them not by shunning them but by getting excited about it too and volunteering their own ideas?
Guess what? Even if I don’t have the answer. Or don’t have the full answer, if the culture were the type that would welcome my way of thinking and open minded enthusiasm and passion, enormous progress would be made, one way or another.
By the way, did you know, I have been investigating some of my photographs and trying to analyze what I’m doing mathematically with them, and they show I have both this amazingly precise memory but also out-of-this-world visual processing skills, making me something of a savant.
I discovered that I had this gift with schizophrenics — well, only three of them, — where I would touch them and they told me I’d made their voices go away.
I don’t like divulging it because it sounds kind of weird. But, that’s what they said I did, and I assume they were not lying. I think my visual skills as shown in certain mathematical precision I have in the way I frame the photographs I take may somehow exploit quantum mechanics in the brain somehow or may have something to do with how quantum mechanics manifests itself in the brain. And my visual processing skills would make me very anti-schizophrenic somehow.
Or, no, maybe it’s like a part of one’s brain evolved to harness quantum mechanics, but it needs certain sensory stimuli from nature in order to develop such skills. Deprive the brain of such sensory stimuli and it will try to learn anyway and learn wrong.
Actually, I also have a gift in music too, as you can see here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS2QU2yIm2Y
Study me enough, and it’s not so far fetched.
Maybe it was something about the rhythm with which I moved when I touched them. On the head. That did something. A bit like the Mozart effect.
Anyway, I think schizophrenia has something to do with quantum mechanics in the brain. And maybe tied to a brain skill that is actually very useful to us, but only if its developed right.
I just wanted to point out something more. One of the problems with “in group” brainwashing or herd like behavior, such as with the field of psychiatry, is that it subtly impacts even those who argue with them. It’s like battered women’s syndrome.
You start arguing with them over the facts. However, you are still accepting one premise, which is: if all they say is true, that sicker patients are the ones staying on the anti-psychotics, they are still terrible drugs with terrible side effects, and “you know, I think you are capable of doing better and coming up with a better treatment than that ANYWAY.”
What nobody is arguing about is that, EVEN IF everything they are saying is true, they have the wrong defeatist attitude, and this reminds me of how Obama had his supporters chant “yes we can.” Are psychiatrists even trying to be like that?
But I know how group thinks are. If you immerse yourself in a group, even as a devil’s advocate, it’s still possible — unconsciously — to develop some of their more defeatest group thinks, without fully realizing it. Actually, my mother would often fight against that type of thinking in her dealings with other people, and I’d see her do that and turn out to be right in the end, so that makes me programmed to try to see outside the box too.
I just know that I’ve done a number of things in the countryside in the white mountains of New Hampshire to get over PTSD, brain injury, and all sorts of other stuff. And I’m insightful about my brain. Maybe people labeled as Schizophrenics could do what I’ve been doing. And perhaps in a social context as with the soteria project. They walked WITH THEM, didn’t they? I think the schizophrenia issue is tied somehow to malfunctioning of parts of the brain used in the fight-flight response, and walking through the woods outdoors in nature probably will “reset” it somehow. People hallucinate if left long enough in sensory deprivation chambers. Maybe modern society IS different enough from nature so it’s like a sensory deprivation chamber to schizophrenics. Maybe modern building materials are bad. In terms of what light rays or frequencies they systematically block, and for millions of years we evolved in environments where all frequencies of light were blocked pretty evenly, anytime we were inside or outdoors.
Anyway. Bottom line. I just think of Obama’s supporters who chanted “yes we can.” Anti-psychotics are terrible. But EVEN IF THEY HAD WORKED, psychiatry should have looked for others solutions anyway.
Psychiatry’s WORST OFFENSE is that they refused to look for alternatives EVEN BELIEVING anti-psychotics worked against symptoms. And then they try to force detractors to accept the premise that, if anti-psychotics genuinely work against symptoms, we should stick with them and not try anything better. And bogging down the conversation that way.
And what’s their excuse? “Oh no, we can’t. It’s impossible.” Well, guess what? Human beings invented the cell phone. Computers. All sorts of amazing technological stuff. All psychiatrists should have taken the position, on anti-psychotics, that “they may work, but even if they work, they are so bad that we need to find a better alternative and fast.”
We have mass incarceration of how many black men, and what did they do that was anywhere near as harmful as that negative defeatest attitude? We should not under-estimate the sheer amount of damage that can be done to society merely through a pessimistic negative defeatest attitude like that. And someone should say that to psychiatrists. “You have a defeatest attitude, and you know what? How about we call THAT a mental health condition in its own right, and how about we say this makes you a danger to yourself or others?”
And, I note, it’s important to argue with psychiatrists about the facts, definitely. But it’s also important to rise above those petty arguments and just tell them: “you know what, I don’t care about those details, you need to find something better than anti-psychotics anyway, or you’re worthless. And if you aren’t even. trying, then there’s something very wrong with you.”
I just note, also, I think of the sickest schizophrenia patients staying on anti-psychotics for decades, and I just feel so sorry for them, so sad for them. Because I know the damage being done them and I also know, they could be helped, and nobody is trying to help them. I really do feel sorry for them and, indeed, I feel hurt to think about it and I have to deliberately avoid thinking about it too intensely, in order to protect myself from feeling a certain sense of deep sad regret over “what might have been” for so many people, what their lives could have been.
Maybe the worst thing about psychiatry is how they have brainwashed themselves into being completely devoid of that type of compassion or empathy, and have gotten caught up with greed instead. And they don’t know how bad they are because they all got brainwashed, little by little, as a group.
Is that kind of compassion I feel a “salt of the earth” value and they think they are important people who have evolved above it?
You know what? Although I have tons of problems with Christianity which is terribly corrupt, we are completely missing, now, the part about morals. And that is a really bad problem. And, yes, Christianity became corrupt and there are many reasons to want to throw out much of it. Oh, and when I mean morals, I’m not talking about sexual puritanism but, instead, about the kind of thing regarding compassion for other human beings.
Actually, the sexual puritanism part of Christianity is part of its anti-compassion. As, after all, humans are sexual beings, and puritanism also tries to force us to repress that positive side of humans interacting with each other sexually. But, that same kind of repression is also, in some ways and sometimes — not all the time — a form of lack of empathy too. Which I am going to say is IMMORAL. And when I talk about morals, I’m talking about something other than the super ascetic and stringent “Christian morals” stereotype.
I think now of the principle of Karma, what goes around comes around and what you put out in the world eventually comes back to you, ten fold. I think that should happen to the psychiatric community, and many others who have gone down similar wrong paths. This is not forgiveness, notice. Actually, that’s another problem with Christianity as its developed. Where forgiveness has been substituted with the notion of being an enabler for evil — where you have an excuse for being a coward and can say, instead, that you are “nice” and want to go easy on people who are doing wrong, out of “compassion.”
Do we need to “forgive” psychiatrists who destroy others’ lives? Sure, you forgive them — in your own mind — all the while doing everything you can to remove their abilities to harm other people. And that may well involve sometimes not being nice and sometimes not saying only lovely and nice words.
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You know what? I was a math major at Harvard. And, I suppose it’s not considered polite for me to go and say that it was more than just being a math major at Harvard. I was something of a genius in a unique way compared to most math majors at Harvard, though that did not necessarily mean I always did well, because my brain needed the right social conditions to fully work right in math, and I usually was deprived of those conditions, but those few times I had them, it was amazing. I should probably just be accurate, right?
Anyway, this article reminds me of the debate over gender differences in the brain. Where, actually, fMRI’s have found only very tiny visible differences, and then feminist professors have decreed that we need to default to the politically correct viewpoint of “all gender differences are socially constructed and not biological” in the absence of evidence. Or, in the instance of evidence showing that, what gender differences can be SEEN that way appear tiny, then we argue gender brain differences are tiny.
The politically correct dogma viewed as a religious decree which is supposed to impose on science. When, in fact, a true scientific approach is merely to say that, in the absence of proof, “we don’t know one way or the other.” Rather than, if you are WITH political correctness, what you say gets to be regarded as automatically true and you don’t have to prove it. if you go against political correctness, you have to prove it first — and then, even proving it is often not enough, in practice.
Anyway, this all bothered me a lot because, actually, I think this whole question could be solved by mathematicians. My mathematical intuition — which was especially good with geometry — tells me that, even if there are major brain differences with both gender and depression, that our ability to visibly see them using these MRI techniques is always going to be very circumscribed.
Because, unlike the rest of our body, the brain is a very specific and complicated geometric shape, and is encased in a skeleton that is hard and also is a specific and complicated geometric shape. Now, in our bellies or muscles like biceps, we can gain weight and the fat makes them bulge out, or we can gain muscle and get stronger, and our muscles bulge out and we can see them more.
Well, I think that when we specialize in one particular skill rather than another, this changes the balance of our brains, making certain parts slightly larger and others less large, just like it is with muscles, and gender brain differences as well as differences between the depressed and non-depressed might manifest in a slight size difference. But that means the brain activity for a particular “skill” cannot be concentrated in any one area, as this will cause that part of the brain to enlarge like a tumor, destroying the geometrical precision of how and where it fits into the rest of the brain, or the skull. And this means that brain activity must be distributed across the brain, sort of like a super disorganized tangle of yarn.
Because, the brain doesn’t know what it is going to have to learn, when it grows up, or I should say it doesn’t know what it’s going to have to specialize in. It has to ensure that, as you intensively specialize in a particular skill, there is never so much activity concentrated in one geometrically small spherical area of the brain, so that this part of the brain grows like your bicep muscle might with weight lifting, only to crowd out adjacent portions the way a tumor might.
This means the neural activity, for the brain “specializing” in one thing rather than another, as in being different from the average or “blank slate” non-specialized brain structure that is genetically determined, will have to ensure such “specialization” or “difference from the norm” as it determined either by a differently learned skill or by the action of testosterone rather than estrogen on brain development, will have to ensure that such specialization differences in neural volume will have to be distributed over distant parts of the brain, parts of the brain quite distant from one another, in such a way so it’s all a small amount of brain expansion evenly distributed so as not to have a tumor effect or bulge in the wrong area.
And, by the way, computer scientists creating hard disks for information storage have to do the same thing — create algorithms to ensure the data is distributed in lots of little specks evenly over the whole entire disk, or they’ll run into the same problem.
Also remember, in the case of gendered brain differences, most of the DNA that makes up the female brain as compared to the male brain is exactly the same, meaning it encodes the same geometry in women as in men. And there is no choice on that. It’s already a super complicated math problem, for the limited amount of DNA we have, to successfully encode ONE brain of a successful geometric shape with no encroachment and everything fits together perfectly. To create two different male and female brains involving radically different geometries would require that we all have something like maybe twice the amount of DNA in humans, all of which can’t overlap between males and females. Because if it did, you’d end up with babies born where the DNA was trying to fit square pegs into round holes too much.
Thus, male brains are — mostly — just female brains which were allowed to grow bigger. And maybe the hormones created differences in the pruning of neural connections, within the same geometric brain shape. That already means, a gendered brain difference pretty much would have to be somewhat similar to a two mile high long lightning bolt, taking a slightly different two mile path and striking the ground only six feet away from where it otherwise would have.
Can we, looking at binoculars ten miles away, at a two mile long lightning bolt, notice a six foot difference in where it lands on the ground? And yet, let’s say there are two lightning rods on the ground at both locations, six feet apart. Understand that the lightning, as an electrical circuit, hitting one lightning rod rather than the other could result in an astronomical difference, depending on what those two different lightning rods are connected to. But it all looks the same to us.
The same thing could easily apply to the depressed brain, as compared to the non-depressed brain. Let me see, what would a mathematician say? IF the differences between a depressed brain and a non-depressed brain were big enough for us to be able to see in this way, then the non-depressed person’s increased brain activity would stimulate those parts of the brain we can SEE to grow enough neurons until non-depression starts creating too much pressure on adjacent parts of the brain like a tumor. BUT, because the brain has figured out how to rout all the brain activity just right so as to guarantee against this happening, that means we cannot see the difference between depression and non-depression, with such crude measuring techniques.
Now here is where my ADHD and brain injury start to take hold. I say this as mathematical “insight,” but in terms of thinking it through, I can’t do that right now and maybe I don’t have sufficient information to know how to think it through. But it is true that neurologists should network with pure mathematicians and/or physicists or both.
Because I am pretty sure a pure mathematician could, after a bit of work, explain/predict that brain differences with depression versus non-depression, as well as gendered brain differences, are going to be impossible to detect with these kinds of studies. And they are capable of predicting all that theoretically, in the exact same way as Einstein eventually predicted black holes, theoretically, and only after he predicted them were they able to take the science he developed, and then figure out how to INDIRECTLY measure and “prove” that black holes really existed.
I think a similar type of mathematician could do the same kind of work Einstein did, and eventually figure out theoretically how, IF gendered brain differences and brain differences with depression — and depression is gendered so it’s good to look at both of them at once — existed, then exactly HOW can they manifest in the brain, in such a way so as not to disturb the underlying brain geometry, as well as other constraints. And then, and only then, do you know what to look for.
A mathematician might even find that they theoretically could exist but current technology is incapable of producing measuring instruments capable of reliably measuring the differences. How long after Einstein did we discover the first black hole?
Do you know, this reminds me of when I was victim of the mafia. It started many years prior with Harvard University first engaging in wrong-doing and then, when I ask for an investigation, engaging in years of reprisals and intimidation, all of it targeting me for daring to implicate them in exactly what they did or were doing, which was criminal to start with, though less obviously criminal than things became later, when I drop out of Harvard and later on the gay community is “handed the reins” by Harvard and starts abusing me even more viciously than I had been abused at Harvard, and this gay community abuse started in this chatroom where a weirdly large number of “regulars” were gay Harvard employees, and they and others in the gay community made it clear in no uncertain terms that they were abusing me on behalf of Harvard.
Eventually, I am told that, if you are gay and want to be part of the “party scene,” e.g., be able to party with illegal drugs like crystal meth and get away with it and also be safe, you HAVE TO abuse and intimidate victims of the mafia like me in this way. As well as shun them except for those few instances where you might be allowed to “hook up” with them, but it’s some kind of assignment where you are given instructions as to how to treat them. And, if you don’t agree to go along with this criminality, you will not be able to do illegal drugs without having “problems.” And, apparently, the way it works, even gays who don’t do drugs can still have problems at work, and also be turned into incels by the rest of the gay community, if they fail to toe the line exactly on victims of the mafia like me. So pretty much everyone agrees to let a certain portion of the gay community be experimented on in vicious ways by corporations. And they all know it happens and they all keep quiet like docile subjects. The gay activist “movement” actually gets money from these corporations, and also it’s obvious they neglect so many issues that SHOULD be important to gays, like for instance I eventually found out that life for HIV positive gay men can be absolutely horrible, because they get forced on SSI and must live on only 800 a month income, and if they try to work and make more money than that, they will lose their health insurance, and they will have to stop taking their HIV medication because the medication alone costs $40,000 a year, so they’ll die. In my case, two or three of the perpetrators were HIV positive gay men in just that same position. Forced into it because of their dire financial straits.
Another perpetrator was this Jewish guy who clearly was from a compromised family and was a victim of some kind of unethical medical experiment himself, and lawyers were refusing to let him sue the doctors. He was in excruciating pain all the time because the bad medical care had left him with osteoporosis causing him to eventually break his back. Medical doctors forced him to work for the mafia by under treating his pain, forcing him to turn to the “gay drug scene” for heroine to help get the pain under control which doctors were refusing to help with. And, one of the requirements for continued heroine was the “job” he did with me, working for the mafia. So, I mean, a lot of other gays are victims too.
Later on, when several date rape druggings and rapes happened, and police started stalking me and framing me a few times, first of all there were a couple of incidents that were staged in order to make it clear that Harvard was involved in all of it. But, then, my own attorneys went and intimidated me themselves. They simply refused to do their jobs right. Two attorneys. However, it was in private and they were sneaky enough so, if I eventually died, they could probably blame me or make it look like some kind of invented guilt on my part was responsible for failure to aggressively prosecute the case.
At the same time the attorneys refused to help and also the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and associated police not only refused to help but outright joined in on the intimidation, I ended up being date rape drugged several more times, more rapes and other incidences, some merely violent and not “rape,” I end up getting intimidated so badly as to develop a kind of stockholm syndrome or patty hearst syndrome. Except it was more that the things done to me were so extreme as to cause the fear centers of my brain to just completely make me so terrified of implicating the mafia or Harvard in anything that all I could do was act like and say that I only wanted to make a deal with the mafia to cover things up, and not only say that but engage in a pattern of withholding of information and even altering of facts just right so as to do a very good job — and I’m smart and knew how to do it right — of actually making it genuinely look like nobody else had done anything wrong, and that maybe the only motives behind my desire to “cover things up” were guilt based on some implied wrong doing on my part, and surely not extreme abuse so extreme, there has never been a legal case anywhere in this world ever publicized which involved whole communities of people ganging up on a victim as badly as that, so as to traumatize them this badly.
It was after I’d been intimidated this badly that the second lawyer I got handled everything just right so I could be pressured and intimidated into putting myself in the situation that let them try to murder me with rat poison, which probably would have been faked as an accident or suicide. But I believe, had I not survived, that Harvard and members of the gay community and the police could have all DENIED the extreme abuse that had gone into forcing me to change my stance from one where I originally was demanding criminal prosecution of all perpetrators to one where I “only wanted to make a deal with the mafia and cover things up.” They could instead say some kind of hidden guilt resulted in blackmail pressure getting me to say all that. As if a genuine criminal investigation might have uncovered something about myself, and that’s why I didn’t want one.
And I think, based on how viciously I was treated and what they told me, that then the perpetrators themselves, including the very same gay people who’d abused me so badly, could have BRAZENLY and aggressively played the victim themselves, and gone and accused me of having been menacing and “difficult” with all of them, and — well, you know what happened with the Matthew Shepard murder. But it’s pretty much exactly how lynchings would happen in the south, where it wasn’t the black man lynched who was the victim, it was instead the white woman who instigated it who was the victim.
I am still angry that a group of people would have the gall to think they could be that vicious towards someone, arrange that person’s corruptedly rigged death, meant to be covered up with a false narrative and faked forensics, they immediately afterwards go and get on their high horses, playing the victim themselves, and probably act super aggressive and outraged and self righteous, not merely denying responsibility for all the things done to me — which they did for money and drugs — but take it even further and claim that THEY were victims of ME. Or some such lies meant to damage and discredit me.
However, at the same time, I was told by one of the perhaps not quite a perpetrator but someone “on the inside,” that what was happening to me was something this “group of people” within the crystal meth scene does to victims all the time. His name was Loi and he said he absolutely hated them, and that they were always ganging up on someone and starting trouble with someone, and they always cover it up using crooked police and, well, he didn’t say murder but I think that’s also what they do. If a victim doesn’t back down.
In other words, they enjoy this permanent impunity from accountability, all the while being used to going to extremes of viciousness. They are untouchable, and whenever they have a problem with someone, it’s the victim who is to be blamed, while they always get off scott free. That’s what the rules are in this world. And the police and the medical system and mental health system collude with this requirement.
The punishment for taking on this group can be to be framed by police, or falsely diagnosed schizophrenic or with a “drug problem” by psychiatrists, or murdered in some way that’s usually sneaky, usually “a drug overdose” or a rigged accident, where they again blame you for it.
When I was almost murdered via rat poison, someone broke in and trashed my hotel room and broke my laptop in half, all in a way so they could say I did it myself, like Charlie Sheen, in some drug induced psychotic rage — perfect so all other perpetrators of viciousness against me could have gone and acted like, I don’t know, that while spectre of the damsel in distress intimidated woman, terrified by the menacing man who is so big, strong, and scary. This was gay men, of course, but I know they were going to cop to that “explanation” for why a problem happened with me, because they were all reminding me non-stop about such intentions.
Oh, here is one example of such a “reminder” regarding how the gay community would collude with a cover up of their crimes against me — by blaming ME for being “difficult.” You can read it. It’s obvious, they all learned the same lesson as to “this is how we cover things up.” Only problem is, I documented this and all other instances of such “reminders” for years.
https://pbase.com/damian1974/jpboy_about_justin_who_was_then_age_23_but
After I hire the second attorney — and was almost murdered with rat poison a few months after — I remember sending an email to someone explaining that I “now have about 8000 files saved over the course of a five years, documenting the non-stop harassment and bullying.”
If you look at these print screens, you can kind of get an idea. But, yes, gay community harassment and hate directed against me over the course of maybe five years eventually took up nearly 8000 files, as you can see here.
https://pbase.com/damian1974/gay_community_hate
But, just note the sense of entitlement they have or had.
Let me quote:
“Since you are a lawyer you’d realize the significance of the attached document
Damian Schloming
to bbixby
show details Jun 24 (6 days ago)
Showing the massive amounts of documentation I have on ALL of the various games so many gay guys played on me, mostly online conversations, since I began talking to Stefano. I call it a massive outpouring of hate, because that’s what it is. And, again, when you start noticing large amounts of total strangers suddenly contacting you and you start to get all sorts of people saying weird things, doing weird things, just a ton of weirdness, what else would the prudent thing be to do other than to start to compulsively document everything? Now, remember, I did not document EVERYTHING that happened because I couldn’t. Just impossible to. I only only document or save a conversation like that when the person behaved too weirdly for me not to think something was fishy about it. So I decided to open the bulk of the folders that show the various files constituting the bulk of the papertrail, just so you can see the file names. Then I hit “print screen” and pasted to MS word. Just so you can see the file names. Now imagine if you opened each and every file, and read everything in it? But, just open this MS word document, and just browse over the file names alone. Look at what I have been having to deal with over a long stretch of several years. Look at some of the file names. Is this the life of an ordinary person that I am living? Furthermore, now when I email mafia people, I keep on telling them I will keep quiet, and be good, I just want to be able to live a normal life from now on — and all I get are taunts and hate and vicious and sadistic games played on me. At the same time they are so dismissive of my requests to be allowed to live a normal life, I cannot even mention the idea that maybe some of these people who perpetrated these wrong-doings should possibly be criminally prosecuted or, in anyway, be anything but rewarded for they did to me, or I am made to feel like I have committed a terrible social faux paux.
I think I will go through that word document, and just list a sampling of the file names. Most of them deal with criminal harassment, vicious behavior, mind games, death threats, rapes, poisonings, the mafia, the FBI, hits on life, “it will all be over soon,” and you also see how it impacted every single aspect of my life, like I was boxed in and could go nowhere without it being present and a factor. What you don’t see from this are the files showing massive amounts of the same sort of thing occurring at two different workplaces, three apartments I lived in, and then there seems to be no place in the world I can travel without it following me. Incidents have happened in Massachusetts, New York City, Connecticut, Provincetown, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine. This is a high tech stalking of me using the mafia. An attempt to stalk me, torment me, and eventually murder me. Think of what certain serial killers do — torment their victims for maybe hours or days before killing them. But look at what this is — years and years and years of abuse, torment, and being put in situations of the most wretched pitiful condition you could possibly imagine on a human being. In particular, what you sometimes see is a need for me to document that someone said something or whatever, just because when you have that many people doing things like that to you, you have to document it or otherwise you end up with a story that is so beyond the realm of human imagination that it is impossible to tell it and have people believe it could possibly be true. And then there are a few where it appears the people who have organized this campaign against me are starting to realize just what they have done, so you start to get file names showing massive amounts of placating, flattery, sweettalking, and guys contacting me from all over the world doing that. This is unreal, yet I am not making it up.”
—-
They really were like children who have a sense or entitlement and think they are entitled to get away with this kind of stuff.
Let me quote from other emails I sent to my attorney, which capture perfectly the sense of entitlement, these groups of people had who were all being bribed with money and drugs.
“to bbixby, bcc: [email protected], bcc: has
when, in particular, you read what I said to Cockwatch, and realize how true it is, I guess it should only take just a bit of thinking — thinking done in the absense of hearing peer pressure from all the perpetrators who want to avoid being held accountable for what they did — to realize, hold on, I’m being way too nice to people. People did things. They should get what they deserve. We live in a certain kind of world. Those are the rules, nobody is exempt from them, even if obviously all bad people who eventually get in trouble got into trouble because they did something they thought they would get away with. It just doesn’t matter. There is such a thing as right versus wrong, it is not political, it is not a democracy, right versus wrong. It doesn’t matter how psychopathic my parents were, or how good they were at getting a huge coalition of people to jump on the bandwagon with respect to their abuse of me. As horrific as it was, and as huge as the multitude was of people who were involved in the abuse, there is such a thing as right versus wrong and there is such a thing as the truth. There is no way around the truth. It doesn’t matter how vociferously the perpetrators can get multitudes of people to lobby for their cause. It’s a matter of right versus wrong, and how strongly I was able to prove it and me being able to escape through even the most cunning of traps. It simply doesn’t matter how rich someone is who does wrong, or how clever or manipulative my parents were. I am a lot more clever, and that counts for something. Those people who did sick and twisted things to me need to pay, and so do my parents. I suggested those people who engaged in the manipulation that started this problm should get in trouble wiht the law, get caught for doing drugs, I was treating to a bunch of sermonizing a felt like I was sitting in some pew listening to some evangelical minister preach to me about how bad I am. Well, you know what? Maybe I should stop caring about people trying to tell me I am bad. OK fine, I am bad — so that means they shouldn’t have picked on me, because of what sort of hell I am going to unleash because they did. Fine, let people denounce me, I don’t care. I am going to get what I want and live the kind of life I want to live, and everyone else can go to hell.”
Reply2h
Damian Schloming
Oh yes and this email. This really captures it. What else can I say when I read this but yuck!!! And what I am talking about — this is how EVERYONE treated me. But look at what it shows, regarding what kind of people they are.
Reply1mEdited
Damian Schloming
Damian Schloming
Feb 10, 2011, 12:43 AM
to MalenaSD, bcc: bbixby, bcc: bootjockstud
And, maybe now isn’t a bad time for me to point out, when I was suggesting those individuals be punished, that small handful of individuals who wove this web of lies which, combined with my parents’ lies, allowed Stefano to sic the mafia on me so he could abuse me in some of the sickest and most twisted ways imaginable, the answers I was receiving did not indicate any respect or recognition of what happened to me, or appreciation for what was done to me. “People just don’t want to be involved in that” and this whole idea that, apparently, not everyone on this earth has an equal right to be protected from crimes of this nature. E.g., if you are an important and powerful person, merely being annoyed is enough for these people to be punished real badly. But I, at least according to what some have implied, am some of different category of person where nobody cares that the sickest and most twisted crimes imaginable were committed against me, and so these people should just get away with it. “Sometimes people just get away with it,” I was told, in the most disrespectful and hurtful manner possible. The message is the same message my parents had for me all my life “you’re nothing, people can abuse you however they like and get away with it, because you are nothing.”
All you can do, when in some situation like that, is just take it and take it and take it, but plan very meticulously to ensure that a day will come when you won’t have to take it anymore. And, when that day comes, yeah that’s a huge number of guilty people who cannot avoid accountability for their actions anymore. Because, usually, when one crime is committed against someone, their family intervenes to put a stop to it. Not in this case — my family intervened and only sought to perpetuate it and incite others into going to extremes in the things they did to me combined with the numbers of individuals they involved. It is my business that the perpetrators be brought to justice. This is not a democracy. The perpetrators need to be brought to justice, and it does not matter who they are, how many of them they are, or how rich they are. What matters is what they did. This all started with a small handful of individuals inciting other people into abusing me. Everyone had a choice about it, and they made it. On top of it, it is wrong to treat someone in a manner that flippantly fails to acknowledge or validate the seriousness of the crimes that were committed against him. This is all about picking on someone because you think you can get away with it. Just because you can doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t mean you have to. If you pick on someone because you think you can get away with it, even if you don’t have to, well, you deserve to learn later you miscalculated.
Nobody showed me any mercy. I don’t need to show anyone else any mercy. I just need to show myself mercy, since I’m the only one doing that here. I don’t like being treated like I am nothing, like people who commit crimes of that seriousness just “get away with it.” I don’t like people lecturing me, trying to tell me these people should get away with it, and trying to tell me that it is wrong of me to want them punished. So now, I can prove everyone is guilty. Everyone else should start thinking, how important is it to them that these people get away with it? I am sick of feeling like I am sitting in a pew in some evangelical church, listening to some fire and brimstone sermon from someone in the mafia acting like a preacher disapproving of me because I am saying, no, these people are not going to get away with it, and if you think they should, you are sick. Is this something everybody really and truly believes in? How important is it to them that these people get away with it? Is this a deep rooted belief so strong they are willing to go to jail for it? If so, I can help give them an opportunity to prove this is something they really and truly mean — and not something they are merely saying to me simply because they think they can get away with it.”
—–
I think, though, that if you look at what happened in Iraq, I think there is a connection between these groups of people with that sense of entitlement, thinking only about their bribe money and their drug privileges, and these horrible atrocities you can read about here.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2013/3/15/iraq-wars-legacy-of-cancer?fbclid=IwAR2PZVWwKQd0Kh7BuHPQAi0-QK8I_YGeTpKgCo2zR7NkgsXk5emsBGrZdQg
Actually, I KNOW there is a connection because this group of people who abused me like this were doing it as part of a program where I was used as a guinea pig for unethical nazi style medical experiments. And, I have been repeatedly told that the underlying motive for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were to enslave those populations for the purpose of such medical experiments.
And it’s these same constituencies in the United States as who abused me who are the ones whose jobs (or other privileges) they owe to the fact that so many of this medical research is done using the mafia, rather than done honestly and aboveboard. And money talks, and some of these drugs talk even louder. Hitler used crystal meth to control the Nazis and get them to do all that horrible stuff. You should try it sometime. You will see.
Removed for moderation.
Another thing we have to remember is, way back then, they did not have the mainstream media or widespread literacy like we have today, yet they still needed to manage society somehow.
Indeed, local lords and monarches and all that sort of WERE the “mainstream media” in a sense. They’d ride horses through different areas, right? Wear special clothes and have well trained knights and other acrobats do all sorts of impressive things. The super fancy clothes and super fancy jewelry all were stuff clearly created by very skilled and knowledgeable humans, e.g., were impressive. And then they’d tell people what to do.
Yes, they were “Key Opinion Leaders.” But how do you convince illiterate peasants to listen to a “Key Opinion Leader?” Well, also they did have church and religion. However, since you can’t educate everyone into all the details you know, you have to figure out what works and do it. Religion worked for a lot of things. But, then, absent the printing press, what else did they have beside foot binding for women?
Think about some of the torture done on mostly men? Now here’s the thing. Stalin’s man made famines, I think, really do prove that, when you are running and managing an intricate economy, which is like a machine that is getting all the right necessities to all the right people at all the right rates — it HAS to be steady — everyone really does have to coordinate.
But, what you will have is many local people in various areas will be serving as cogs in the wheel of this vast system which, if it is allowed to be disrupted too much, it really will partially collapse and people will go hungry. The problem is, someone who is serving as a cog in the wheel of a larger system does not know economics and does not know or understand how the system works. They may not know that taking a certain forbidden action might have a ripple effect on the system that could cause damage to a lot of people — especially if everyone starts doing it — and they won’t understand how important it is not to do it, unless someone literally gets disemboweled for having broken such rules, or whatever other of the punishments were, some very gruesome.
But this is because, in a decentralized society, there really is a language barrier. It really is not easy to manage.
Today, we have literacy and communications industries. This allows for all sorts of new technology to “explain” to the public how to act right to fit into the system right. Except, it’s still not so simple. Society kind of figures out how to manipulate people into playing their appointed role in the system, usually in indirect ways. The people being manipulated doesn’t know they are being manipulated by elites, understand. To some degree they can’t know because jealousy over certain arbitrary inequality would occur. People would be unhappy. Or insulted if you told them the truth about where you have judged their “place” in the economy is. You know how it is, “we’re having you work here because you are stupid” or “we’re having you work here because you come across as unattractive and pathetic.”
Think of the stereotype of promoting the incompetent worker to a high position, solely to ensure they don’t screw anything up, e.g., they are nothing more than a glorified welfare recipient. But their family connections require that they not be insulted. So they get promoted instead.
Except this is starting to get very long. Key thing is, what’s going on in psychiatry now — and other parts of the economy — represents, well, actually economist Paul Krugman for the New York Times really did recently write that even in the beginning of the 20th century, we had a society where technological progress had WAY outstripped the ability of elites to manage society with such technology present. And that it has only gotten worse. And we are in an era where it’s as if too much technological progress happened too fast, too fast for society to even know how to figure out how to manage things right. And that’s part of the problem.
That would be part of the problem with psychiatry too. Namely, that it’s not just about the bad behavior or ill intentions of Big Pharma. If we fixed psychiatry and other parts of medicine, let us suppose we do a REALLY REALLY good job of it. That’s 33 percent of the economy by now, isn’t it? Let’s do such a good job that we shrink the healthcare system to 10 percent of the economy. What kind of catastrophe would that be?
Krugman also did write long ago that he predicts, in the future, we may well have a society that is sort of run by a few very colorful Key Opinion Leaders. Or that the internet will result in something like that happening. Colorful thought leaders who are very influential in part because they are very colorful and not drab. Simply because it is not good enough to just explain to people, in a drab way, what they need to understand to cooperate with societal “progress” or maybe I should call it “stability.” You need to know how to grab their attention right, so they really listen and understand.
Interesting take on the mind numbing bureaucratize:
——
“Moore: It was surprising to read how difficult it was for you to access data behind Study 329 and the Forest Laboratories citalopram study.
Jureidini: We’ve had a more recent episode where we’re just finishing off a reanalysis of a study called TADs, the Treatment of Adolescent Depression, which is probably the most influential trial of antidepressants in adolescents.
By the time we got on to Duke University, we were too late to get hold of the individual patient records and they had already been destroyed. But in existence, and very important, were the serious adverse event reports. There were 60 or so serious adverse events, and Duke still had the original reports that were filled out at the study sites by the people who were carrying out the study.
At high cost, they agreed to make them available to our team and we did some negotiation and got the cost down a little bit. We wrote a contract between our university and Duke University that would enable us to have access. Then, at the last minute, they said, “Actually, we’ve gone to our ethics committee and we can’t give you those documents because they can’t be sufficiently redacted to protect the identity of the patients.” This was clearly untrue because I had already provided the same documents to Columbia University in an earlier analysis of suicide and antidepressant trials.
What was equally interesting was that we went to our university and said, “Please support us in enforcing this contract that Duke has already entered into.” But our university wouldn’t do that. We got an American law firm to support us but again, our university wouldn’t let us pursue a legal means. Then when we wrote the whole thing up, our university wouldn’t let us publish any of the correspondence that we’d had with them about it.
One of the things that we do go on about in our book and in the opinion paper is the way in which academic institutions have sold out to industry more generally, and how concerning that is.”
——-
This strikes me as indicative of a kind of “out of touch” group think. Except I think the people doing this are and should be described as out right bullies.
However, as a former member of a very successful grass roots organization and also someone who really had this knack for political STRATEGY, I can only say that, when large entrenched institutions like this develop these types of tactics, changing it is going to take more than merely complaining about it or listing the behaviors, for people to passively gasp in horror about it.
Actually, our media is full of people whining about comparatively trivial injustices compared to this kind of thing, non-stop all the time in such a way that is exactly like crying wolf. By the time you read about institutions engaging in these kinds of skullduggery tactics re: Big Pharma, you’ve heard so much else, it’s like you’ve been lulled into complacency and into accepting this notion that things never change, never can be changed.
But that’s not true. Things CAN change. You just have to know how to go about it right. Tocqueville mentioned many many times that, when a people is deprived of political freedom for too long, they lose even the ability to know how to exercise political freedom if they ever had it given back to them.
Anyway, when I hear about such tactics, it strikes me that those interested in combatting this kind of stuff should read two books I and others read when involved in this successful grassroots political organization. One an old Chinese book titled “The Art of War” and the other book, “Rules for Radicals.”
I would say reading such books helps provide inspiration for the approach one should take, or even the attitude one should have, when seeking to change these kinds of things. Even while I’ll say this is something that is an art where you just have to do what you feel is right sometimes.
I personally feel that humiliation and shaming is what is necessary for officials in academic institutions who engage in that kind of behavior. And I mean it. The kind of humiliation that is ugly, like ugly name calling, as if they have gone so far that it really would take something as severe as that to give them a dash of cold water they need to wake themselves up.
Sometimes you can’t be nice. Sometimes the world is about dominance and submission, and when some people are way too uppity or outrageously asserting too much privilege over others, you just need to out dominance them and do whatever it takes to do that.
I should note, I have sometimes been “bad,” you might say or had “adventures.” I’ve dealt with academic bureaucrats who are just like that, and I have also dealt with the kinds of dregs of society drug dealer types who hang out in Dorchester, MA, fields corner, or outside the Pine Street Inn Homeless Shelter in Boston.
But that’s how it goes. Those who have too much of a reputation for being “nice” and “respectable” can end up devolving to levels of criminality and sleaziness that far outweigh those with reputations for criminality and low-classness and sleaze. It’s really true and I’ve dealt with a diverse array of people, unlike most people, so I know.
It’s bad when you are told you are “nice” or are part of the “upper classes,” and then told there are so many people out there who are beneath you, and you never deal with them so you don’t know any better. It’s like being spoiled. And how do children who are spoiled behave? Badly, right?
Bottom line is, we are a society where people need to be put in their place sometimes. And this sometimes means classes of people as well. In this case, I’d describe psychiatry as a big part of the “White Establishment.”
Actually, I think no one has ever pointed this out, but although I have never been to such meetings of all the psychiatric movers and shakers, I am right if I guess that all the movers and shakers in this industry who are “part of the problem” are 100% white, and that’s not even rounding up.
See, when I had my own issues with corruption at Harvard, and it is somewhat tangentially tied to this issue, I was a musician who played the pipe organ and I had my own problems with the organ world as a result. The organ world then, which was very well ensconced in all sorts of academic institutions all over America, also happened to be 100 percent white. And I mean that. 100 percent. Well, ok Asians were allowed. But zero blacks.
I can be even more precise about it. I played the organ starting in the late 80’s. And I was very talented and all that. So, from the late 80’s until maybe 2016 or 2017, I never met, heard, or saw — or even heard OF a black organist. With one exception. I once mentioned to Murray Somerville of Harvard something about how I noticed, some black people seem to have an amazing musical skill that really would lend itself so well to the organ, so why aren’t there black organists. And I think I even said that part of what makes my skill so special is that I’m similar to blacks in that way. He told me that he agreed with me, and even told me he knows of one black organist, and “his playing is very special like that” or something like that.
I should note, eventually when I had my problems with Harvard, they tarnished me with all the same Jim Crow stereotypes directed against black men. And, later on, I’d get stalked and harassed by people, who always would insult me using terms of poor mental health. E.g., it’s as if the mental health system, they viewed, was put in place to marginalize people they didn’t like or who they felt jealous of in some sense. So, if I had a problem with Harvard, that meant I was “crazy.”
It’s kind of like a “I bet those grapes are sour” wanting to stigmatize someone they feel jealous of as “mentally ill” in this arbitrary and capricious way which reflects more the kind of ostracism you might see on the school yard. And, true to form, blacks really are diagnosed schizophrenic at a rate four times that of whites, meaning the degree of bias that must permeate the mental health system, just based on that fact alone, is horrifying.
And, here’s the thing. I’ve always noticed that I seem to have much more affinity for black people than most other whites, especially those types of whites I have had such above mentioned problems with. And I do feel it’s my expressive style and all that — those same traits that inspired all those problems in the first place — that is why I get along with black people as well as I do.
But, here’s the thing, what do you do with bullies? How do you handle bullies? You cannot try to reason with them in a wishy washy way and get anywhere. They will not listen to reason, and if you try to reason with them, they will laugh at you and have no respect for you, because you are naive enough to actually think they are capable of listening to anything but outright force and dominance, as opposed to a polite request to voluntarily abide by rules of right versus wrong. They know only dominance and submission. You either out dominance them, or you don’t. That DOES mean you have to be tough — or, another way of putting it is: mean.
That, by the way, is exactly how you have to deal with drug dealing riff raff hanging out in bad areas of town too.
As an afterthought, I should even mention that, when I was victimized by the mafia in connection to Harvard, I was living in Dorchester then, in an alleged “bad neighborhood.” Well, I was not menaced even once by a single black “hoodlum.” However, after being date rape drugged by a bar in Boston, and involuntarily drugged other times, many incidents occurred involving gay men DRIVING DOWN from hoity toity neighborhoods like Boston’s South End, Cambridge, Melrose, etc., to do all sorts of bad and criminal things to me.
The only reason perpetrators wanted me to live in that neighborhood was not because residents were especially criminal compared to anyone else, but because residents were poor enough and easily intimidated enough so the perpetrators could get people from “nicer” areas like Cambridge to come down and do bad things to me, and they trusted the neighboring residents would be too INTIMIDATED to talk or come forward as witnesses admitting they’d seen things untoward happening.
I realize, I should point that out, because it flies so far in the face of typical societal stereotypes regarding who is behind most crime, The kinds Republicans use to justify their “tough on crime” stance. I realize I need to actually explain this or else people just won’t on their own guess that this was true. In my case, all perpetrators were either white or Asian.
And it just couldn’t be any other way.
One reason for the race disparities in Mass Incarceration, I believe, is to help it so whites only can monopolize these areas of crime, as they are quite lucrative and also come with valuable “party privileges.”
I guess I can only respond to this by noting just how common this type of corruption is. It is not only limited to psychiatry but is also a problem in all sorts of other sectors of the economy. And, mainstream economics in academia basically refuses to even acknowledge or recognize this problem, insofar as I understand, and to that degree, they should be debunked as a corrupt discipline most likely taking money and bribes perhaps not from Big Pharma so much as from plenty of other similarly corrupt business sectors.
I am particularly struck by this:
“Jureidini: I think we are. I don’t want to denigrate the concept of evidence-based medicine, because evidence-based decision-making is a good thing. Our concern is that true evidence-based medicine isn’t what’s practiced, largely because of the influence of industry but there are other reasons too.
One of the most striking shortcomings in the current approach to evidence in medicine is the absence of rigorously trying to set out to disprove a favorite hypothesis. What happens mostly in medicine is that people get an idea that they like and then try and massage the data to support that point of view rather than having a good idea and thinking “I’d really like that idea to be meaningful but before I go out there and tell people that I’ve got this great idea, I want to do whatever I can to challenge the idea.””
——-
Where else have we seen this kind of problem? I do know that, in Ancient Rome, for instance, lead poisoning was a favored medical practice. ESPECIALLY among the upper classes. Or at least the middle classes. (I bet there were a bunch who saw the writing on the wall and swore off it. If so, Rome was not a society that very thoroughly documented all opinions, as they did not have printing presses, let alone the internet. So, such dissent would have left no trace 2000 years later.)
However, I believe that there was, long ago, such a thing as the “guild system” which was said to get in the way of “progress.” A guild system involving the trades. And what were they called? Luddites?
Here’s the thing. A very basic understanding of the economy can be envisioned, simply by noting all the things we need, and then thinking about what systems of exchange have to happen, in order for everything to work out right. Meanwhile, technological progress in the production of food and other necessities allows for the transfer of labor from such sectors as food to other sectors.
Furthermore, if jobs are eliminated in work producing “essentials,” other sectors of the economy HAVE to expand in order to keep people employed and busy and with the money necessary to buy the necessities now produced efficiently by fewer people. Once efficiency is improved re: production of necessities, we must create inefficiency in other parts of the economy, or I should say superfluousness in other parts of the economy, in order to make the economic system work and keep people employed.
Absent that, only government welfare can suffice. However, you might as well say that many superfluous jobs created in response to excess efficiency in necessities are little more than glorified welfare masquerading as work. In a class system, we say the lower classes are “on welfare” or “on the dole.” But the upper classes? Oh they are deservedly being paid much more, to do “a whole lot of good.”
I am reminded of the door to door insurance salesman. We must always interrogate and question which parts of our economy really TRULY are “doing a whole lot of good.” Just because there is a lot of hype doesn’t mean you should believe it.
Do you know what is especially ….. I don’t even know what to say or how to say it ….. especially mind numbing about this?
This is sooooooooo bad, what they are doing here, it is so bad, it is shocking to the point of being unbelievable.
At the same time it is this bad, drug companies have managed to rope all sorts of institutions of higher learning into schemes this bad, all of whom work so hard to develop this aura of properness and respectability, complete with all sorts of authoritative jargon and very dignified sounding speech.
Even to the point where Harvard itself is complicit in this too.
Indeed, I remember when I was being victimized by the mafia in connection with Harvard, for awhile I spoke with this Malena person, who was Russian Jewish and told me she knew many holocaust survivors. She told me that my situation reminded me of a story she heard regarding a concentration camp inmate who scaled the barbed wire fence and tried to escape. And, normally, the guards would have shot him, but in this case, they spared his life, and also proceeded to explain to him: “why are you even trying to escape here? Don’t you understand, the things that go on here are so unbelievable and so far beyond the realm of human comprehension that, if you escape and try to tell anyone what goes on here, they simply will not believe you but will think that you are crazy.”
I think drug companies have the same thing going on with their bribery of doctors and institutions of higher learning. It’s outright criminal, what is going on, and they should be criminally prosecuted for this. Even worse, ALL OF THEM are doing it, so many that, in order to crack down on this, you’d literally have to expand the prison system in order to house all the co-conspirators.
But then, they are doing it all in plain sight, not even trying to cover it up, and trying to rely instead on bluff, an arrogant kind of bluff. If anyone questions them, they will act outraged and be like “I’m a [insert title and qualifications] how dare you question me?” Which is nothing but outright intimidation.
People just want to be enablers and just want to believe. It is sort of like wanting to believe in the good and wanting to think positively. You don’t want to believe that many people could be this bad and lie through their teeth this badly, so you choose instead to believe they are probably mostly doing the right thing.
That’s a mistake. It is necessary to be that cynical. Sort of like how you have to fight fire with fire.
Oh, even worse, it is necessary to be so cynical and such a “conspiracy theorist” that the very definition of schizophrenia begins to loom as a potential source of fear. You have to harbor a kind of distrust of the psychiatric profession that would give them the perfect opportunity to diagnose you schizophrenic or at least “paranoid.”
Except, actually, it’s HEALTHY to be that skeptical and not healthy to blindly trust OTHERS about your own health. Part of recovering from various health issues is listening to your own body, trusting yourself, and — it is almost as if you are the one in charge of your own health and you are the one who knows the best regarding your own health. Including or especially mental health. And the ability to “mind over matter” heal oneself has been underestimated by the medical profession.
Remember, health outcomes are way better in Europe than the United States, and they have government provided healthcare, and you know what the government is like. I once was hospitalized in Quebec so I kind of know. Everyone says the private market does way better than the government at catering to the consumer, and that is true. Health is an area where you do better when you are catered to much less. And what those government health agencies are telling European populations, with their rationing and long waits is: “you are on your own.”
That, in and of itself, might be responsible for much of improved European health outcomes. I am reminded of how victims of PTSD induced “dissociative disorder” need to “pull their brains together” in response to the trauma, and I note it’s been said that anti-psychotics hinder rather than help that.
Well, even if you don’t have PTSD, I think somehow the same principle might hold true with respect to your health. Europeans know they are on their own, and that makes them more attentive to their health in ways Americans are not, because Americans are coddled too much by consumer culture.
I think our whole entire culture might somehow impact that kind of thing too. And we in the USA are not even aware of it because we are too used to it.
The truth is, we are an empire similar to how Ancient Rome was an empire. And lead poisoning was a favorite for them.
Also, in contrast to America, Europe is a much older country and Europeans still cling to traditions more — which can have its downside, but also has its upside. And Europeans resisted jumping on the psychiatric bandwagon far longer than America did.
See, in America, you can have someone be the “big man” and do a bunch of smoke and mirrors “authoritarianism” sounding tricks, and it works. People here get brainwashed. Not so much in countries that are older and held onto tradition more.
I suddenly am reminded of Obama saying those who vote against him are ones who’d “cling to guns and religion.” Which is rather insulting. Actually, even with religion and guns, it’s as if America does traditionalism in the same wrong-headed way too. The problems of American culture EVEN INFECT those who would want to “cling to tradition more” in a healthy way, so it just becomes like another version of all the same wrong-headed stuff in psychiatry.
Removed for moderation.
Do you know that infrared light, shone on the skin, will increase serotonin?
Here, let me post this link:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935255/
And then this:
https://saunas.org/infrared-therapy-for-depression/
“Several biochemical changes occur in the body as a result of exposure to near, mid, and far-infrared light. The triad effect of increased release of dopamine (a neurotransmitter), beta-endorphins (a neuropeptide hormone), and serotonin (the precursor to melatonin) during and after an infrared sauna therapy sessions may raise as well as stabilize mood (4).
This cascade of pleasure hormones released in response to the infrared light wavelengths makes this particular healing modality an excellent choice for individuals suffering from depression.”
—-
Now here is the thing. I have a cold laser and have tried using it to treat my head trauma symptoms. And I’ve used infrared heating pads in the past. I feel like I don’t like the infrared heating pad because, while it definitely will cause a temporary high, my brain adjusts to it. Plus, I don’t want to be dependent on it.
However, I DO like outdoor exercise. Which is known to cause permanent improvement, including building more brain tissue. Stimulating the growth of more brain tissue.
I believe that, when you exercise outdoors, you get the infrared light rays from the sun shining on in and into your head, which you don’t get indoors. And newer buildings are worse than older buildings in terms of what light rays they block in order to be energy efficient. At the same time, you get various olfactory stimulation outdoors you don’t get indoors — again, newer buildings really bad in this regard.
But, somehow, I think the outdoor exercise does more than mere symptom treatment but actually reprograms the brain somehow. E.g., you are getting the light rays and olfactory stimulation at the same time as your muscles are working and producing various chemicals on their own — which, I think, somehow tell the brain to get better.
And I think it’s a mechanism where you need all three conditions — outdoor olfactory plus infrared plus exercise — in order for it to work. Can’t have a missing piece of the puzzle, you know.
Anyway, I would suspect the people who benefit from SSRI’s probably would also benefit from infrared light therapy as well. Except that’s artificial. They’d probably benefit from the right type of outdoor exercise.
Oh, you know, it never occurred to me before but I’m realizing it now. Little kids with ADHD might also be having issues with modern buildings that block certain light rays their brains need in order to grow right. Something like that.
Oh, look at this. Skull thickness really makes a difference as to light rays penetrating your head and stimulating your brain.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1224277/
Notice white women do get depression lots.
Also, I should explain, infrared light hitting the SKIN causes a reaction that produces serotonin and a few other chemicals, I think. However, infrared light also penetrates the skull and directly stimulates the brain as well. Meaning, there are two mechanisms for stimulation of red light.
Hmmmm, you know one could speculate that lower levels of depression in black people could even be because black skin absorbs light that much better than white skin, isn’t that interesting?
See, here’s the thing. SSRI’s seeming to help some people but not others should have been regarded as a clue to what might be going on with depression, that should have called for more research identifying a mechanism that might result in better treatment.
You know what? There is a question I want to ask. And that is, why are double blind studies like this regarded as “the best” or regarded as “the gold standard?” Or, regarded as “the only way” to figure out whether something is good or not?
I just think the world is not that simple, and sometimes alternative methods should be tried.
I think anecdotal examples should be taken seriously, and investigated. We have enormous genetic diversity and many different sub populations. Depression may not even be all one disease but the symptoms of several different diseases or problems. Which could explain why some respond to SSRI’s and others don’t.
Wouldn’t it be nice to try to investigate what the underlying cause is, if not a chemical imbalance? See the declaration of a “chemical imbalance” was almost done in order to forestall additional research like that, which would make the blockbuster prozac look bad. Or reduce the number of people prescribed it, reduce the customer base.
In particular, EVEN WHEN SSRI’s help symptoms, they may be a bandaid. For instance, like prescribing morphine for a muscle imbalance causing pain without fixing the muscle imbalance.
What I hate is this conservative philosophy involving everyone jumping on the bandwagon of a fake “explanation,” but the purpose is to cut off scientific debate, which also amounts to cutting off or preventing areas of research which people who are inspired, creative, idealistic, etc., would love to do because they love science and exploration for its own sake, and not even for money’s sake.
Indeed, it strikes me that there is this cultural problem whereby those who care about money will always exclude or ostracize from academia those who are too idealistic and who will chaff at such reigns being put on them solely for the sake of money.
I ought to note, this is very important because I once spoke to a gay man I hooked up with who was in biotech about the whole issue of corruption in medicine. He said medicine is very corrupt.
And, right off the bat, he told me that perhaps the biggest area of corruption there was with pharmaceuticals was tied to the failure to recognize genetic diversity and the failure to identify and study different sub populations, and design drugs that are tailored specifically towards them.
Pharmaceutical companies insist on the “blockbuster” drug model, where they can find one drug they are able to market to the whole entire population, and they would never make as much money if they studied genetic diversity and assumed that a drug that worked for one person won’t work for another, so they have to tailor each drug for each sub population.
The R&D costs as a ratio of the final profits simply would be too high if they did that.
And this problem is endemic to ALL of medicine. Not just psychiatry. Though this man also said that, while all of medicine is corrupt, psychiatry is the most corrupt. “If you have enough money, you can buy ANY research result you want in psychiatry.”
Another interesting side point is, Identity Politics has made it politically incorrect to even study either gendered brain differences or race/ethnicity brain differences. Currently, the cultural conversation would say that further studies shouldn’t be done because the results would be insulting to minorities, but I am not so sure that would be true.
I personally know that, when I was at Harvard, they had this teaching style in math that was just terrible for me but good for other students, and they hinted to me that they knew I was different in a way that didn’t make me less smart at math (maybe I was more smart at math than the average Harvard math student), but that I was still at a disadvantage anyway because of their style which was “how we HAVE to do it, because this is America.” And they even explained, I should have gone to college in Europe because, if I went to a place like Oxford, they have the more sociable learning style with the kind of mentorship I need for my mind to fully engage.
They didn’t make any smoking gun statements but their beating around the bush suggested guilt of some sort. Many years later, my inevitable conclusion is that Harvard and other colleges in America have deliberately figured out a learning style or teaching style or tradition that is best suited towards upper middle class anglo saxon protestant WASP types, as well as those whose families gave them the best preparation, and is deliberately meant to disadvantage blacks, Italians, some Jews, and other types of more “ethnic” people who tend to have stronger family traditions and are in need of more “sociable” learning styles and are less cold. And who are more likely to be athletic and who are also stronger at the geometrical side of math, even while the Harvard Math Department tends to have a bias towards algebraic types of mathematicians.
And I believe places like Harvard have done research which they never divulged that helped them figure out how to engage in teaching styles meant to advantage America’s elite whites above both black and other ethnic immigrants.
I strongly believe the few studies that were done on race brain differences were artificially rigged so as to make certain minorities look inferior, all the while I suspect lots of “underground” studies have been done designed to develop teaching styles that artificially privilege Establishment American Whites, all so as to make the rigged studies suggesting inferiority of other groups become self-fulfilling prophecies.
America IS White Supremacist, and it is not a few blue collar troll like men in the deep south or other red state areas of the country who are the primary white supremacists. It’s the establishment that is, including the liberal establishment.
I also note health outcomes in America are VERY poor for blacks — and these disparities are VERY profitable for pharmaceutical companies. Knowing what I know about Harvard now, I believe Harvard and similar institutions may well have done underground studies which they covered up using the mafia that may focused on race secretly, and they may have figured out why health outcomes are poorer for minorities, only to cover up the research, deny such groups the knowledge they need to have to achieve better outcomes, and even gone further and tried to promote all the wrong things they knew would guarantee the bad outcomes so profitable to their corporate donors.
I just wonder, though. Do you think Identity Politics in and of itself — which was a creation of academia and of our cultural elite — do you think that might be a forces which is helping to give academia an excuse to avoid study of sub populations and genetic diversity, so as to prop up the blockbuster “one size fits all” drug model most convenient to Big Pharma?
I think it might be. And I say this in large part due to having lived for awhile in Dorchester in a black area myself, and learned of some of the appalling things that go on, which are none other than systemic racism practiced by the most ardent adherents to Identity Politics. And which include doing unethical involuntary medical experiments on poor blacks from the inner city, which are no different from how Hitler experimented on the Jews in Auschwitz. So, I mean, come on. Those trumpeting Identity Politics aren’t doing it for the minorities themselves. So who else might they pushing Identity Politics for? Maybe the corporations with the money?
Take, for instance, the black-white schizophrenia diagnosis gap. Victims of unethical medical experiments perpetrated by the mafia usually do end up getting diagnosed fraudulently with schizophrenia to cover up the crimes. So that, in and of itself, might be a good explanation for the wildly divergent rates of schizophrenia diagnoses. E.g., certain black neighborhoods are laboratories for unethical medical experiments, but absent being honest about it and putting them in concentration camps, complex criminal racketeering schemes involving a fraudulently imposed diagnosis of schizophrenia suffice instead.
You know what would be a really good idea to do?
Have a study done which lists the causes of death of those prescribed certain psych meds. Take, for instance, diabetes, but also take the added obesity rates and project deaths by heart disease or cancer or whatever.
As opposed to old age.
You might want to do this for some of the blockbuster atypical anti-psychotics like Zyprexa, known to cause lots of obesity and diabetes.
But here is where you want to get some really good mathematicians to calculate the increased revenues derived by the cancer industry, heart disease industry, and diabetes industry, all due to the prescriptions of anti-psychotics.
Let me ask, how much did zyprexa cost per year, when it first came out? Was it something like $10 a pill or $10 a day? So perhaps that comes out to $3650 a year? Profits realized only for 20 years per patient, and then price goes way down as a generic. That would be $73,000 for the original drug company, over the lifetime of that one patient.
Oh wow, look at this:
https://www.ajmc.com/view/ajmc_10marnicholswebx_e86to93
“The total mean direct medical care costs for patients with established cardiovascular disease (CVD) were $18,953 per patient per year. Cost estimates varied widely, however, depending on the presence or absence of other health conditions.”
Oh wow. That’s six times higher per year than the direct cost of prescribing a patient zyprexa for 20 years. But I suspect zyprexa would raise heart disease rates far more than even the corresponding rise in obesity, by itself would.
Let’s say 20 percent of zyprexa patients get heart disease — coronary artery disease, I mean — and they wouldn’t have gotten it but for taking zyprexa, then the Heart Disease Industry should be counted as having realized even more increased revenues than Eli Lilly did.
My mother outright told me that elite Wall Street investors will network with institutions like Harvard, studying the effects of newly released blockbuster drugs like zyprexa, specifically for the purpose of getting an “inside edge” to the market. E.g., if zyprexa is going to cause a huge increase in heart attacks, they figure it out long before anyone else does, working with institutions engaging in unethical involuntary human experimentation — often using identical twins for that purpose — and here is where they add insult to injury. If they learn that a drug like zyprexa is bad, will cause very serious long term health problems, and should be taken off the market, they usually will cover up that knowledge, so they can experiment with various insider trading schemes designed to exploit, for profit, this secret knowledge they have about a product, which they expect nobody else will become aware of for decades.
But think of the carnage. These crooks are knowingly condemning large sectors of the population to health problems they know will happen, so they can profit from it. I find that part terrible.
I would say multiple RICO cases is the way to go. The only problem I will point out is that when college tuition is something like $200,000 per person, and then the correspondingly high salary increases you get for getting your degree are that much more rewarding compared to if you didn’t, and when the college educated population starts swelling bigger and bigger and bigger, you end up with a problem that people cannot back out of the system or choose a different occupation, the moment they find out their jobs involve criminal racketeering.
Once you invested in your medical school education, you are married to the mafia for life, basically. When people can’t back out, which people used to be able to do with respect to jobs that only required a high school education, the system is now capable of increasing the amount of criminality it requires of its participant employees, and how can they say no?
The legal system can police criminality so long as criminality is not the norm. When it IS the norm, I don’t know what they can do. They don’t have the time. The criminal racketeering that goes on today that academic institutions and corporations are involved with deliberately goes out of its way to introduce the kind of complexity and convolutedness to their schemes, so that it may not be impossible to bring RICO cases in certain circumstances perhaps. The biggest problem is the sheer number of man hours that would have to be involved, in just bringing one single case. And there are thousands of such cases, too many to count. The FBI cannot even begin to wade through it.
Let me see, how can I illustrate this. In 2010, I believe, or perhaps it was 2011, I had just started working with my second attorney on the racketeering scheme I had been a victim of since Harvard, which I had by then spent 15 years collecting evidence on, and trust me, this was a very good case and what I did was very clever. It’s an amazing legal case I mustered up. Exquisite. Something I am very proud of.
Well, around that time I have an email I wrote to one gay man I was emailing online about the matter, explaining that the number of computer files I have which are relevant now amounts to 8000 files just for the five year period from 2005-2010 alone. It would be 15000 files if I include everything from Harvard starting in 1994. However, some of these files are block files, which means each of them include hundreds of documents all saved in one file. So that’s an under-estimate. And this was all from simply doing a quick computer count on all the relevant files I had which I’d saved in various folders and marked as relevant. A quick computer count which does not separate out tons of block files which contained hundreds of different documents each.
In addition to all of that, however, I should note that the moment I started emailing the second attorney I had, I suddenly started being deluged online by huge numbers of gay men on a certain hook up site, all placating placating placating me. This was because my computer and gmail account were being hacked, so I could do nothing without the perpetrators finding out everything I did and staying one step ahead of me.
This placating of me — only after I go to that second attorney — was in such contrast to the non-stop campaign of death threats, hate mail, and harassment which same online community had been heaping on me for two years straight that I knew, this sudden contrast was very very relevant to “proving” that the (gay mafia) existed, or even if that’s not the best way to characterize it (it’s really more of a Harvard and corporate mafia run by straight male CEO’s than a gay mafia), at least it proves the gang-like pattern of behavior this community was engaging in nearly without exception. Let’s just say I had a legalistic background from before, so I knew how legally relevant these placating emails were.
So I started copying every single one of them, hitting print screen and saving to microsoft word, over and over and over again. Since, by now, the same website which maybe netted me on average two or three or at most five or ten emails a day from other guys probably was netting me hundreds of emails a day from guys, all placating me in the same way. And I saved every single one of them in a graphics file, except these were pasted to MS Word documents which quickly got hundreds of pages long and then had to be saved and then I’d start up another document which I’d say after it was well over 100 pages.
In less than a month, I wracked up maybe — I can’t remember if it was 5 gb or maybe more like 12 to 14 gb of memory. The files started taking up some ungodly amount of space, and then I simply had to stop further documentation. Because I knew if I continued it, I’d need to buy a bigger computer and I knew I couldn’t afford that.
So, by the time it would be a RICO case which the FBI might be in a position to investigate, there were probably thousands of emails from gay men online, just from a very short time period, which were suspicious enough so they all would need to be tracked down and very thoroughly investigated.
Except, I am sure, you know how the mafia works. Where one perpetrator may do something, only if it’s criminal racketeering and you investigate it, you might learn of dozens of people involved behind the scenes, for every one person who did something “overt” and in need of investigation.
Now I did all the right things which would make it easy for a government agency to investigate matters. You could say what I did was brilliant. And yet, it still would be a really really tough investigation involving extraordinary amounts of man power. Even while I carefully manipulated the perpetrators into at times making all the right explicit confessions that are easy to follow up on. Meaning, I was smart enough not only to make my situation become a legal case, but I was also smart enough to figure out how to make it so it can be efficiently investigated so as to reduce the number of man hours put into it.
Most victims don’t do the right things so they can be helped. And even if some of them do enough of the right things so they theoretically could be helped, they still can’t be helped because, well, the way investigations work, if something is too ambiguous, if law enforcement REALLY tries very very hard, as in devotes an enormous amount of time, yes they can still crack the case anyway. They are only able to reserve that kind of effort for a small number of cases like murders. Otherwise, they just don’t have the time.
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I have very little respect for the bipolar diagnosis these days.
Do you know that Harvard University tried to get me fraudulently diagnosed bipolar? All so they could invent a pretext for refusing to investigate my claims of misconduct against the then organist at Harvard and some of his students?
See, I had this talent at the pipe organ that made it so many teachers said I was probably one of the best in my generation at it. Meaning I was better than all the other organists at Harvard, even though I was a student. And not just a little bit better. A lot better. There was no comparison.
Guess what other organists did? It was just one problem after the other after the other. I was forced to quit a job playing the organ at Harvard due to intolerable working conditions. But then, other students started doing things like rope me into agreeing to give performances, and then not tell me the right pieces I’m supposed to practice or play until the very last minute. One told me “I only want you to accompany these four pieces” at first, only to then tell me, less than a week before the performance, “actually, I need you to accompany ALL 21 pieces of this work.”
It was just one thing after the other after the other like that. I had low self esteem due to not having the most supportive family, so actually what happened was that the things I tolerated for very long without formally complaining were actually quite outrageous. Most other people would have complained long ago and I didn’t because I had such low self esteem. However, eventually the antics of the organ world at Harvard got so outrageous and over the top that I finally do officially complain.
Harvard literally corruptly arranged for their doctors, who had previously insisted I was not bipolar, to suddenly insist I was bipolar. And my official complaint against the organ world at Harvard was the proof of my insanity, they said. And that meant they were not obliged to even investigate my claims in the first place.
Of course, they knew that such an investigation would show up very serious wrong doing detrimental to Harvard’s reputation. Not only that, but I’m gay and Harvard arranged for a large portion of the gay community to harass me and ostracize me on behalf of Harvard, so that years later, I’d still have gays come up to me who shouldn’t have known me from Atom and accuse me of being “crazy” in a manner that was obviously linked to my experiences at Harvard.
Or, in some cases, they would harass me in subtle ways which were sneaky but just a repeated pattern of sneaky nasty behavior engaged in over and over and over again. Until I’d eventually get fed up and confront them on it. And they’d suddenly accuse me of having a mental health problem the moment I did. It was as if Harvard was a kind of mafia.
I started documenting much of the behavior, and have an enormous amount of computer files on it. However, in one instance, a somewhat indiscreet gay man ended up kind of summarizing, very accurately, the systematic abusive behavior from the gay community, which can be traced back to my problems with Harvard. But, already, you can see here the abuse and corruption of the mental health system in all of this.
It also became true that, when it eventually came to rape, cops refused to help me, and they made reference to this same “mental health excuse” that everyone else started making in conjunction with abuse of me, ever since Harvard got their docs to suddenly impose a bipolar diagnosis on me for asking for an investigation into the misconduct of other organists.
Also, if you see this series of emails I post, from one “JPBoy” — notice how he says “hundreds of guys know about you” and I correct him and say that I think it is 1000’s. I was right.
https://pbase.com/damian1974/jpboy_about_justin_who_was_then_age_23_but
I eventually hire a lawyer to deal with these matters, and was almost murdered with rat poison, which was an incident staged by NYC cops, and if I’d died of it, they were planning to do faked forensics in a manner similar to what happened in the Matthew Shepard “hate crimes” case where a fake narrative was imposed to cover up the antics of the gay crystal meth scene, and everyone pretended the perpetrators were straight. In my case, after the rat poison gets into my system, someone comes into my hotel room, breaks my laptop in half and trashes it. But police were going to pretend I’d done all that myself in some kind of psychotic rage.
And they probably were going to arrange for me to maybe fall off a balcony and hit my head or something – this as a way to cover up what was a whole series of brutal crimes carried out by gay men with the blessing of the police and mental health system. Or, rather, which police and the mental health system had COLLUDED with.
The perpetrators wanted to be able to somehow portray me as a difficult person who flies off the handle and goes into all sorts of psychotic rages, all so that the hordes of gay perpetrators could all go lie and say they had a difficult time with me, I was so difficult, etc.. People at Harvard could have then gone and explained that, all the problems I had had there was because I was that difficult too.
Well, it all didn’t work because, as a result of some kind of fluke, I got only a tiny portion of the rat poison/warfarin dose that was intended. So after the person who trashes my hotel room leaves, I escape in my jacket and underwear … The hotel clerk at the front desk refuses to call the police on my behalf so I have to run to another business to call the police. They instantly take me to the hospital and they all knew it was warfarin and they treated me for warfarin overdose without having to ask me a single question about any kind of symptoms.
Basically the same “system” that had colluded to try to murder me had to then go and save my life after I was seen escaping the hotel room in the middle of January in my underwear. Because if they had let me die of warfarin poisoning, there is no way they could have faked it so as to make it look like anything but a murder. Too many witnesses saw me running outside. And they could not cajol me back into my hotel room, only to have me fall off a balcony or something. It would be like, if I’m running out of the hotel in my underwear, if it isn’t a crime, at the very least I need medical attention. Well, they can’t have me dying in the hospital, you know. That’s not according to plan. So they had to save my life instead.
What you have here, though, is the police and mental health system acting as a kind of criminal gang. However, no one can accuse the police and mental health system of doing that. The very accusation would be used as “proof” the person making the accusation suffers from schizophrenia. It’s a really bad problem. But, see, after experiencing THAT from the system, I really do not have much respect at all for current diagnostic categories like bipolar.
Well, the way it works, while the right is beholden to large corporate interests like Big Pharma, bad psychiatry which disables and marginalizes and creates permanent dependency on drugs as well as permanent dependency on welfare services such as public housing or group homes, all of that creates steady professional jobs not just for psychiatrists but for those professionals who run all of the “affordable housing projects” those disabled people live in.
These are all political patronage jobs handed out by the Democratic Party. And, the way the machine all works, it’s absolutely important that the number of political patronage jobs stays steady and doesn’t shrink. Their system is completely incompatible with any kind of mental health system that actually has people get better.
Let me just say, I know something about the paranoia the system has regarding the potential shrinking of political patronage jobs in such areas as affordable housing. They are obsessed.
Similarly, nobody talks about this but, while Republicans might have the tough on crime rhetoric, Mass Incarceration creates HUGE numbers of political patronage jobs for the Democratic Party.
Although I do believe prisons also creates political patronage jobs for the Republican Party as well. Whereas the mental health system is far more imbalanced in terms of creating political patronage jobs for the Democrats only.
However, our system of mass incarceration along with the mental health system for the poor, both kind of go together and ally with one another. How many prisoners get put on those debilitating psychiatric drugs?
Left wing opponents of Mass Incarceration go on and on and on about how “so many prisoners are mentally ill, we are incarcerating the mentally ill, that’s terrible.” However, I think prisons are pushing drugs on prisoners solely on behalf of the drug companies and not always appropriately.
However, prisons are cheap and house prisoners efficiently. Left wing liberals want those prisoners to be taken out of prison, be declared mentally ill, and then housed in affordable housing projects with mental health services, all of which is probably two to three times more expensive PER PERSON, but that would create how many more political patronage jobs for the left, for them to do that?
Thus, even the opposition to Mass Incarceration is a little bit too wedded to the greed of the whole — well, there is this whole academic corporate complex and the “college degree leads to a high paying job” guild.
Colleges, in order to justify their tuition, need to ensure they can place all of their graduates in decent paying jobs.
Bloating the mental health system is a way to do that. And prisons, by the way, are not such decent jobs. Thus, the political patronage jobs of the prison system do not go to the same crowd of people as political patronage jobs in the mental health system.
Blue collar and lower class people probably without college degrees work in prisons. White collar and more upper middle class people work in the mental health system.
It may be the case that “the system” prefers to house people who are difficult in prisons, and people who are easier to manage in the “mental health system.”
One thing I am aware of, from living in Cambridge, MA and knowing about the politics of the affordable housing lobby is that “affordable housing” in liberal cities is designed primarily to create political patronage jobs for liberal professionals. And these liberal professionals are not the nicest landlords either. They do not treat the tenants very well at all. And they have a sense of entitlement and do not want to deal with anyone who is “difficult.”
Thus, the most needy people are excluded from affordable housing, because they would be regarded as “too difficult.” I remember hearing two decades ago that, in Cambridge, MA, the ideal “affordable housing” inmate was often something like a white woman from a wealthy family who has perfect credit (perfect credit absolutely essential and non-negotiable for tenants of these affordable housing projects) who has decided to quit her job and pursue her calling as an artist.
But, the thing is, affordable housing projects are part of the “nice jobs” program former students are promised after their parents paid an arm and a leg on college tuition. With that kind of money being paid in tuition, it is a requirement that these professionals be coddled afterwards. Part of that is ensuring they never have to deal with mentally ill or other “needy people” who might be regarded as “difficult.”
So I do think you might have some sort of “cross-over” where the prisons often are used to house the mentally ill who are “difficult” and who the spoiled rich kids employed in the “mental health system” don’t want to have to bother with. And since their parents paid that much in college tuition, they are entitled to get their money’s worth for what they paid for in their college degrees.
Do you know what psychiatrists are taught to do regarding patient records? They are taught to write the records in a manner not to maximize accuracy but instead to minimize the chances of a successful lawsuit. Don’t expect medical records to be accurate or even reflect what the doctor personally believes about the patient.
I believe you could do a class action lawsuit. But remember that such a class action lawsuit would be not just a lawsuit but a P.R. debacle for psychiatry and Big Pharma and certain parts of mainstream academia as well. Except, that’s just what’s needed to spur on the maximum amount of change for the better possible.
With that in mind, I strongly recommend such a class action suit to name Harvard University prominently if it can. Harvard is one of the biggest names in the world so such a class action suit would get so much more press if it targets Harvard University as well.
Many attorneys might refuse to take the case in the first place, simply saying that they know it’s better for their careers to stay on the good side of Harvard. I don’t know — how about starting up an association of psychiatric patients who were victimized who can be one of the plaintiffs in such a lawsuit? Where there are regular monthly meetings members can go to, where they attend in person, and the sociability drives the whole dynamic forward.
Lawyers are more willing to take cases if they know there is an active association that regularly makes the news who will endorse their good name even in the face of attacks due to them going up against the establishment. Hard to explain but, the way the media works, they are partial to organized groups who they can regularly rely upon for sources in a practical way which makes their jobs easier to get done.
What about including, for instance, the bought-and-paid-for invention of “child bipolar disorder” by Harvard professor Biederman? If you think Prozac is bad, wait until you hear about the anti-psychotics. Far worse mental straitjacket. And putting children on them? I’m horrified.
Honestly, he’s destroyed their lives, of so many children who were put on those drugs. It’s criminal. Except the parents can’t sue because they needed the welfare money in the first place and can be accused of being bad parents to have let it happen.
And, as for the kids put on anti-psychotics who are now adults, there is not enough evidence out there showing just how much the anti-psychotics permanently disabled them, made them so they will never be normal and never live normal lives, so as to help them sue. That is a problem. I strongly suspect that one of the things academic institutions do for the drug companies is simply to agree to avoid studying an issue in the first place, especially when they strongly believe that conducting such studies might expose major corporate donors to legal liability.
However, let me ask. Is there any group out there which could DO the class action lawsuit? It’s not good enough simply to write an article about it. You have to find a group willing to take it on.
Because, in a money making industry like this, failure is defined as success and success as failure.
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Not sure they will get reparations. Best thing to do for someone is try the best to help them out from now on. Money not the solution to everything. Think of the focus on reparations, even while our whole society and economy has degraded so much that the things money can buy aren’t worth it. So you can’t throw more money at the problem.
I do wonder, though, whether it might help if those charlatans in academic institutions really got the shaming and humiliation they deserve. Sometime punishment helps, and they are a class of people who don’t get enough of that.
I’m not surprised the serotonin hypothesis would have come from Harvard in 1965. My mother worked for the Harvard School of Public Health then, for Jean Mayer in nutrition research. I understand the culture.
What she was aware of was links to the food industry — especially that part which produced grains — donating to Harvard, and the “recommendations” that warned us away from saturated fats, cholesterol, butter, red meat, eggs, etc., not really being supported by any kind of rigorous data.
They just wanted to believe.
Those nutrition recommendations were debunked starting in the 90’s. However, my mother told me as a kid in the 80’s all about how questionable they were. She wasn’t talking publicly about it, though, and neither were other researchers. Or former researchers. She was not on speaking terms with Jean Mayer by then.
This may seem like a side note. However, when I went to Harvard much later, I learned about the strategic significance of the Crimea — which is now one of the reasons for the current war in Ukraine — as being tied to trade between the grains industry of Southern Russia and Ukraine, and the Middle East.
The Middle East depends on grains from southern Russia and Ukraine, as they are a desert. Or they used to depend on that. Most such grains must be shipped through the Crimea, a tiny bottleneck, making it so whoever controls the Crimea controls all the trade between Southern Russia and the Arab world.
This means that leveraging the Middle East (and other countries) for oil production would be made easier by getting the populations of those countries, like the Middle East, addicted to easily transportable grains. Thus, exaggerating the health benefits of grains as compared to meats, milk, butter, etc., would not have only benefitted the grains industry but would have benefitted all industries dependent on cheap oil. As the best way to encourage oil rich countries to produce high volumes of oil for cheap prices is to make them as dependent on possible on food imports from oil consuming countries.
The Soviet Union’s mismanagement of agriculture resulted in all food exports from Russia/Ukraine to the Middle East ceasing, and the Middle East had to get its food elsewhere, and even the Soviet Union had to get much of its food from imports as well. Both the Soviet Union and the Middle East started ramping up oil production exactly as such food import dependency started happening.
Long digression, but it suggests we have a systematic problem with how huge sectors of the economy are capable of warping scientific “opinion” and skewing in all sorts of ways, with psychiatry perhaps just the tip of the iceberg, a small part of a much larger problem worldwide.
On top of it, actually, in an economy with lots of technology assisted mass production, it becomes necessary either to have huge welfare systems for all those not employed, as machinery makes things so efficient only a small number of people need to be employed feeding everyone. Or, alternative to welfare systems, whole areas of the economy that simply provide non-essential goods and services need to kind of sprout up, to create excuses to employ people, and to spread the wealth around.
Something HAS to happen to put money in the hands of all those not employed producing the bare necessities of life, which is a lot of people now with technology. It either has to be welfare, or “non-essential” products and services.
I believe there is a connection, for instance, between Europe’s super generous welfare system, compared to the USA, and the fact that they have lower rates of ADHD diagnosis and ritalin prescription, and lower rates of psychiatric drug use and cheaper healthcare systems. Indeed, welfare reform in the Clinton Era piggy backed on Harvard professor, Joseph Biederman’s bought and paid for diagnosis of “childhood bipolar disorder.”
I think this can become a problem, as whole business sectors lobby to try to get government to “decree” THEIR goods/services to be more “essential” than the rest, and it all gets decided politically. When we were much poorer and 70 percent of the population worked only to provide us the food we need, there wasn’t much choice, what the other 30% of the economy was.
Now, we actually DO have choice, theoretically. Oddly enough, I think technology has created a situation that enhances the power of the government so much compared to what it used to be that, although we theoretically have more choices regarding what we can do with our economy than we used to, in practice, we are less free. Wealth has created tons and tons of straitjackets.
Because businesses and special interests lobby lobby lobby to try to make it all “not a choice.” And they are all extraordinarily wealthy compared to before. And our economy is, in some ways, more fragile because it is so complex. And so centralized. If a war in Ukraine can potentially cause mass starvation in so many other parts of the world, that portends to an enormous amount of economic centralization. Some of the countries threatened with the worst starvation due to the Ukraine war are actually parts of Africa that have very very fertile soil — but, political conditions have resulted in governments being bribed by foreign interests interested in exploiting such countries for raw materials mining, and these governments have undermined local farmers so badly as to make those countries dependent on food imports — which are only granted in return for raw materials exports. The undermining of local farmers the only tactic that can work to create threatened starvation level conditions, unless men agree to go work in dirty hazardous mines.
However, the extreme exploitation of the third world countries, for cheap labor, creates a completely different problem for us at home. We are like the fat and sedentary middle classes of Ancient Rome, who were granted political patronage off the surplus the Roman Empire extracted from the provinces, only they lead poisoned them into passivity and complacency.
Also, it’s almost like the machinery of the centralized economy wants the bribed middle classes who get all the “goodies” to kind of be steady recipients of largess. Except, the market for luxuries and non-essential goods is anything but steady. In order for the economy not to be at the whim or mercy of transient fads too much, authorities can only make the economy work by making certain non-essential goods “essential” in this steady way.
Computers and internet service is a good way to create economic stability and predictability. And the healthcare system is a good way. Long long ago, I believe foot binding of women in China may have had a motive of limiting the kind of disruptive fluctuations to the economy that would happen when women had babies who took all their time, and then became more mobile and able to do various work as the babies got older. Foot binding limited their activities to stuff like textiles — and textiles can tolerate more fluctuation in the labor force than necessities like food production.
Think about it this way. Women help produce food too, then there is a baby boom, so many women are taken out of food production even while more food needs to be produced. It’s better if such women never STARTED helping out with food production in the first place. Since the economy is somewhat flexible. If there are, initially, lots of young women helping out with food production, you need fewer men working at food production. So several young men become blacksmiths, carpenters, etc, who would have stayed in food production.
Then there is a baby boom and tons of women drop out of producing food to have babies, who eat more. Then, and only then, does society figure out “we have too many young men working as blacksmiths and carpenters, more than we need — and how do we get them back to producing food, that is not so easy. It’s better if women had never started helping out producing food in the first place. What if we do foot binding for women, that will keep everything steady and predictable for us.”
I feel like some sort of economic “pressure” like that was responsible for foot binding of women in China. And somehow the same economic “issue” may also favor psychiatric drugs that create permanent dependency. The need for stability. And I think maybe the exact same economic “issue” might have caused mandatory lead poisoning in Ancient Rome.
In each case, you have products or policies that cause systematic disability and predictable dependency, all of which helps to provide a predictable “stabilizing” force to the economy. And, somehow, wealthy economies worry about such predictability more than less wealthy economies.
I should note, I believe the economics departments of college campuses may suffer from corruption similar to that of psychiatry. Let us suppose that is so. Maybe what I am talking about, the common thread you can weave through foot binding, lead paint in Rome, and psychiatry and bad nutrition recommendations — maybe that is some sort of economic phenomenon we could figure out and publicly identify, and we can’t expect college economics departments to do it. More than the mere fact that business sectors are self interested and lobby. Because everyone lobbies — but it seems the business sectors who enjoy the best success may be those that, in some STRUCTURAL WAY, are able to provide some sort of economic predictability and stability.
Well, universities do think long term, and they want not a big one time donation, but several small ones that go on in perpetuity. It is also true that, because most of the economy is non-essential, it is a fact that academia monopolizes part of the non-essential economy, but other parts of the non-essential economy don’t require workers with college degrees.
Bloat or expand psychiatry, and you raise the value of a psychiatric education in academia. If less money were spent — in the whole economy — in psychiatry, where else might it be spent? How about Disney world. Well, you don’t need an advanced education in order to work at Disney World. Colleges want to maximize the need for EDUCATED WORKERS.
The problem with that is, sometimes you end up with academia acting as charlatans. They want to find fault with EVERYONE who is not under their tutelage, or who hasn’t purchased an expensive education. You even have that in the diversity industry.
More and more and more, it’s all about “education education education.” Always for a price. The solution to everything. And if you don’t have an education, what are you? Backwards, archaic, inferior. Even one of the latest Nobel Prize Winners, Malala, was all about “sending girls to school.” I hate sitting still for long periods of time. I hate being cooped up indoors under a schedule imposed by others. My mother hated school too.
I think someone needs to voice the opposing view.
“Another area of research has focused on serotonin receptors, which are proteins on the ends of the nerves that serotonin links up with and which can transmit or inhibit serotonin’s effects. Research on the most commonly investigated serotonin receptor suggested either no difference between people with depression and people without depression, or that serotonin activity was actually increased in people with depression – the opposite of the serotonin theory’s prediction.”
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I sort of feel as if depression is likely a ‘brain activity imbalance’ sort of like a muscle imbalance. Just as muscles atrophy with lack of use, parts of the brain go into disuse, which is like atrophy though the cells are still there, though it’s also true that such parts of the brain eventually do start to shrink as well.
If depressed people have higher serotonin, maybe that’s like the body trying to re-activate certain areas, or like the brain doing the equivalent of compensating for weak muscles by simply flexing them harder. And SSRI’s is like boosting the part of the muscle that causes electrical activity and flexing, rather than lifting weights so that your muscle fibers get bigger or you develop more muscle fibers. E.g., try to force weak muscle fibers to work harder rather than make them bigger.
But it’s possible SSRI’s tricks the brain into thinking it doesn’t need to start the processes that fix itself. Or, if depressed people have higher serotonin, is that temporary? A temporary response to depression and how the brain tries to recover? Or were they always that way?
Depending on the answer to that, SSRI’s might go and, when they boost serotonin themselves, they force the body to refrain from starting up the process that assists depression recovery, in order to avoid Serotonin overload.
I don’t know.
I think they have not thought to do such studies, have they?
See, I majored in math and also studied some physics and I was wondering whether it might help for psychiatry to see whether their departments could benefit from networking with mathematicians.
There is a whole field called “neural networking” that the mathematically inclined really love. And my mathematical intuition as well as study of physics is exactly what makes me inclined to think of the brain in this manner. Indeed, the brain works kind of like how waves work in the study of physics.
There may well be studies you could even do of brain activity of depressed people, where you can actually figure out quite a lot, if you got the right mathematicians to theorize right about the causes of mental illness, and to test out different theories and see whether they could possibly spot different patterns here or there.
Of course, one wonders how psychiatrists might react to not fully understanding the math behind their own subject. You either have a mathematical brain, or you don’t.
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“As to the nature vs. nurture debate, it seems the truth is likely some combination of nature and nurture – not one or the other. I do believe there may be a genetic component to IQ, given my father and son both graduated from university Phi Beta Kappa (within the top 10%, within the top 10% of universities).”
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Actually, I majored in math at Harvard and do have a very good memory and very good intuition in math as well. And physics too.
The whole nature versus nurture debate could be a VERY interesting math problem. Because, well, think about it. Imagine the brain growing and developing like how a tree or shrub grows, and then nurture is like outside influences exerting influence at times, but the brain is still genetically programmed to grow in only certain ways in response to those outside influences, so you get a combination of nature versus nurture.
Maybe certain parts of the brain are stubborn, though, and will not bend to nurture too much. Like the heart, for instance, has to be within a certain range regarding geometric shape and other stuff, and cannot stray too far from the norm.
Other things like survival instinct and how you respond to danger – like when you get PTSD and it’s stubborn and irrational. You can try to reason yourself out of PTSD but, no, you can’t.
You know you are safe. It doesn’t matter. Another part of your brain over rules that and can only be treated the way it can be treated.
It’s stupid to have a debate where some academics say it’s all 100 percent nurture, some say it’s all nature, when in fact you could try to develop a whole science that starts out with the assumption that it is a combination of both, one where it’s going to be very hard to sort things out, but at least you can try.
I just know what the culture was among researchers in the 1990’s. America has been a crass country that is one of the only countries that refuses to enact family leave laws, arguing that the “free market” should decide everything.
This has been politically rigged by the “community” of large corporations who donate excessively to academia. And part of that rigging, I believe, may involve using the power of “strings attached” donations to academia to promote the exact same corruption of economic research and behavioral science relating to parenting and development that we all acknowledge Big Pharma does to academia with respect to psychiatry.
And it is also true that these corporations try to corrupt or influence the media and other parts of our culture as well. And we might also want to acknowledge or look back through history to understand it better. For instance, some researchers have argued that the debilitating foot binding of women in China which only stopped during the 20th century was tied to economics as well. Helping to create a “captive” pool of female workers in textiles, where the disability caused by foot binding made them less able to bargain effectively for better wages since they couldn’t do anything else, and they were also more reliable and steady workers since they couldn’t do anything else as well. If it hurts to walk, you will prefer to just sit down and sew.
However, elites in China never actually openly proclaimed “we want you to do foot binding because it will make you better workers.” Instead, elites got women to do that by promoting it as a fad and glamorizing it. Pretending that men wanted it. (As a man, I can say I don’t think most men care about feet, and when they do, they prefer them natural.)
The question I’d ask is, might researchers for this twin study have WANTED to say parenting doesn’t matter? So as to minimize family leave and maximize female labor hours?
I should also explain, people should try to bone up on the economics laws of supply and demand. A policy like family leave will take (female) workers out of the job market, and this increases competition among companies for workers, forcing them to pay the remaining workers higher wages in order to retain them. The more guilt mothers have regarding whether parenting matters or not, the more of them will drop out of the work force to spend more time with their kids (or at least cut back their hours) and a trend like this really can force companies to try extra hard to keep workers in the workforce, inevitably leading to higher wages and lower profits.
So, per economics, the laws of supply and demand mean that rigging a study to say that “parenting doesn’t matter and it’s all genetic” is going to keep more women voluntarily in the workforce, and help companies keep women’s wages lower. And if you publish a study that says parenting DOES matter, and it triggers feelings of guilt in working mothers who work long hours nationwide — you really could cause a trend among women cutting back work hours, dropping out of the workforce entirely, this lowers the pool of female workers, forcing those wages up, and that will lead to lower profits and higher wages.
Look at the corruption Big Pharma has been able to achieve with psychiatry, simply by donating to academia? I believe the rest of the business world, all the other corporations who donate to academia, are doing a lot more distorting of the output of academic researchers than MadInAmerica focuses on.
And this distorting of academic research may be part of why wages for Americans have systematically dropped in the last few decades. Academic fraud is what helps manipulate the public or mislead the public just right so politicians getting money from the same corporations can “pretend to help” or “pretend to be trying to do the right thing” and it all just doesn’t work out for anyone but the corporations.
We have a democracy, but if corporations can infiltrate academia and distort academic science and economics and everything else just right, they can run the show like dictators.
What if it wasn’t actually the money that helped but merely the mother having people in her life who demonstrated that they cared via giving of money, in such a way so as to make her feel more secure, and that sense of security helped her child’s development?
“…debates over income transfer policies for low-income families have “centered on maternal labor supply rather than child well-being,” often with moralizing or paternalistic policies that blame low-income mothers for their own marginalization….”
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People need to make a really big fuss. And change the culture so that academic institutions who take money from corporations stop going so far in pushing crass materialistic self interests and feel obligated by culture to have some semblance of morality.
It needs to be a situation where academics would be too embarrassed to push certain stuff in the first place. Rather than aggressively pushing for all the wrong things on behalf of corporations, and then trying to badmouth, attack and shame those who oppose them as “backwards” and “ignorant.”
There is far more than just industry payments that are at issue.
There is such a phenomena as the whole psychiatric profession almost policed in a way by a mafia of sorts, where if someone strays out of line, they will be blacklisted or just not have favorable career prospects. And you can even have problems such as men finding it difficult to get dates if they dare cross the party line. Or women having their characters assassinated or reputations ruined in the whole world of female relational bullying, which results in men shunning them.
As a gay man, I will say, among gay men, the way it works, conformity is policed via the drug scene most of all. And by economic blacklisting as well. All of which creates a situation where industry does not have to directly finance certain stuff to exert influence.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt even said this was what got Adolph Eichmann to participate in The Final Solution. Namely, that he wasn’t a bad person. He merely was someone who “wished to belong.”
She was pointing the finger to some kind of social ostracism and cancel culture among the Nazis.
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Do you know something? I’m a classical musician, I play the pipe organ and am very talented.
There has been a similar type of dogmatic pseudo-religious “movement” among academic types starting in the 80’s, regarding the “authentic interpretation of classical music.”
Where I feel it’s like they try to emulate a super stiff and stultified version of what they think courtiers for snooty nobility used to be in the past. Except it’s kind of childish in a way that would almost make one laugh.
There are “rules of authenticity” and they get outraged if you violate such rules. I recall my mother mentioning one such musician she spoke to, a conversation, where this woman said something along the lines of “when it comes to the historical interpretation of classical music, I am a purist.”
What’s interesting about this culture, though, is that they want to get you bogged down in the rules, to the detriment of actually playing as fully expressively as those musicians really did play in the past. Musicians like Bach.
It’s as if the same stultifying political correctness now infecting college campuses with super strict speech codes also has infected music. And it’s actually not REALLY authentic, it’s really a product of the 1980’s, but they don’t see that.
The 80’s were the start of mass incarceration, though. And, actually, I even decided to look up what happened with the prison system in the Victorian era, where women suddenly got encouraged to “lay down the law” vis-a-vis strictness and stringency, and always object or faint when a man violated “the rules” in his speech somehow, by saying something vulgar. Sure enough, the Victorian Era was a time of massive expansion of the prison system too.
With “historical authenticity,” I should note — especially in the pipe organ world — what you have is arrogant male professorial types leading the way with the frigidness and aggressive dogmatic approach. Expressing all sorts of dismay at those whose adherence to “proper standards of historical authenticity” fall short.
And they happen not to be personally attractive or charismatic in the least. But women, however, somehow feel obliged to put on this show of fake sounding impressed at their prestige, perhaps not based on their personal charisma but based on them having managed to gain establishment stamp of approval instead.
I say fake sounding because it’s as if, on the inside, women aren’t REALLY impressed, these are men they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, but they are being good sports about it and faking it.
And if you look up certain Jim Crow stereotypes, just look up the brute stereotype. Interestingly enough, it’s actually very attractive and those are just the characteristics you want to see show through in your playing of music, if you are a musician.
https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/brute/homepage.htm
And there is this weird thing going on whereby, in truth, women — or gay men, which I am one — actually find that “brute stereotype” to be very admirable and sexy, and a lot of men yearn to live up to it and try to live up to it, at least in superficial appearances of toughness and masculinity, so long as one is not genuinely assaultive.
So it’s not ACTUALLY an insult to those tarnished by it. It’s more shameful or insulting to be those men who don’t live up to it and are jealous and get angry because of their jealousy. But we pretend it’s an insult, just to assuage their feelings and their hyper sensitivity.
As if, well, it’s as if Jim Crow America had a component to it that shamed and insulted those white men who did not live up to the “animalistic” norms of masculinity black men were tarred with sometimes, as if to arouse their jealousy just enough to help discourage them from helping black men out who were being oppressed.
Now why would I be inspired to say this regarding psychiatry? Well, interestingly enough, my music skills were always on the charismatic side and I eventually did get – only temporarily – corruptly “diagnosed” by Harvard, as a ploy by them to avoid investigating my complaints of wrong doing — hazing and various bullying — on the part of other male musicians, who happened to be nowhere near as good as me, nowhere near as popular. And I also was very handsome, muscular, and well built — so they couldn’t say I “made up for it” in terms of looks either. It was just plain unfair.
Harvard refused to investigate my complaint but instead corruptly arranged for their own doctors to try to “diagnose” it away. Although, the wrong doing had left a paper trail so, in a way, you couldn’t diagnose it away. It was more that such “diagnosis,” however absurd, was part of a campaign by Harvard to threaten me via, see they also started saying “people feel threatened by your complaints” blah blah blah.
Now, the truth was, they felt threatened by how my complaints could tarnish Harvard’s reputation, but they threatened to tarnish me with that very same Jim Crow “Brute Caricature” as what they told me their defense would be, should I try to hire a lawyer and sue. What all these jealous inferior male musicians who had engaged in lots of vicious back stabbing would say about me.
And they even told me they had ties to the media, the New York Times at their beck and call. They will get journalists to pillory me, have lots of people come out of the woodwork to accuse me of having been “menacing” to them, should I sue Harvard.
They even had psychiatrists at their beck and call — and threatened various retroactive falsification of records, and they even threatened to hack my emails and retroactively rewrite all of them, so as to fabricate fake paper trails portraying me in a bad light. (And I did indeed have typos introduced into a few of my Harvard emails by some IT worker at Harvard — just to demonstrate how much they meant it.)
And, at another time, I do have a series of medical records, which actually portrayed me in a very good light, stolen from my apartment. I later try to retrieve them again — they were falsified. Another set of medical records got falsified, portraying me in a horrible light — although these records were too obviously falsified for them to want me to keep them in my apartment, I could have claimed they were obviously falsified and it would have made a good case, so they were stolen too from inside my apartment. (Probably by my landlord.)
I ought to disclose, my story is not so unusual within psychiatry. But is common. Common enough, I’d say, so that I think the whole profession is tarnished by it, and the diagnostic categories deliberately made vague or ill defined, precisely so institutions like Harvard and wealthy corporations can leverage psychiatry for their own corrupt ends like this.
The end result is that psychiatry does not help the people it serves, and the very thinking of the whole entire psychiatric profession is tarnished by it. Ordinary people ill served by it are viewed as collateral damage, in a system that is primarily there to cater to monied interests.
If you are an ordinary person, how much money do you have compared to well heeled establishment players?
I am reminded of what they say about public housing. The managers of public housing treat the residents terribly, because they view their true “clients” as members of the government that is funding them, and not the actual tenants living in the apartments.
This is what the world is like. This is what the world has always been like. I think, in the past, that people were far less naive about society working like this than they are today. Today, we are asked to be gullible and naive. Well, actually, we are all overworked to exhaustion and do not even have the time to research stuff and figure out the truth on our own.
I do have to say it is interesting just how closely Harvard adhered to innuendo that plays into those Jim Crow stereotypes, in their dealing with me. Because it’s as if it amounts to hinting to a well known societal phenomenon that people don’t openly talk about, but instantly know exactly what it means.
Everyone has had issues with “the jocks.” The football players who would pick on the little wusses and give them wedgies. Well, I was home schooled and not exposed to those “high school” dynamics. So perhaps I don’t know. But I do think everyone else does.
I wonder, does psychiatry play off of somewhat absurd stereotypes perhaps? Which are jealousy based and immature? And, recall, psychiatrists were not themselves “the jocks” but were, instead, men who felt jealous of them. And now do they seek, in their diagnostic categories, to “get even?”
Actually, there was one psychiatrist involved in that whole saga who was just awful. He had an unattractive geeky nasal tone of voice but talked in this super authoritative way, like he was the “big man” who as an “expert,” a “guru.”
He apparently told my mother I was a narcissist. Or that whatever psychological issues I had were narcissistic related. I remember thinking, that’s not true. My “issues” were not tied to me craving attention or adulation, as I kind of got swamped with that when young because of my musical talent and got used to it and so it didn’t have an effect on me. My “issues” revolved being excluded by my peers and ostracized, not treated a an “equal” and not allowed to just be “one of them.”
He said that because of what HIS issues were. And he wouldn’t even know what my issues were. But he would have grown up in school, jealous of the “cool kids.” Wanting the same attention.
See there is a “the grass is greener on the other side” phenomenon going on here.
Still, how much of the psychiatric profession, and psychology as well, how much is it made up of a small clique of people — men — who hail from a certain subset of society, or of masculinity. And they have their own issues which they project onto the world?
I am tempted to post this link from Tocqueville on how Democracy has modified the English language.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch1_16.htm
And we can understand that, all throughout history, societies have never really been one entire language without dialects but, actually, there have always been dialects that are usually associated with a person’s occupation. And, in non-democratic societies, those occupations were more fixed and stable and the different languages/dialects end up very precise.
In Democracies, you end up with all sorts of confusion and ambiguity. Language gets less precise and that imprecision can be abused and even result in peoples’ thinking being affected.
Tocqueville did not live in a society where there was a race religion that turned into something that policed language about race the most virulently of anything else. But that’s what goes on today.
It’s interesting how I think we can say we have an image in our minds of the typical “racist” or “white supremacist,” and we imagine a working class or super macho muscular type of man with bald head and tattoos. Colorful. And that’s what a white supremacist is, in our minds.
And psychiatrists? No, they have protection. Which is a kind of class protection that makes it so they get away with racism because of who they are. All the while the white man with the coarse language, tattoos, and rough around the edges look gets pilloried in the media and culture as the quintessential racist, because it’s convenient.
The racist is not someone we know. The racist lives on the other side of the train tracks. We stick our heads in the sand.
Now this finding is interesting. As I have read about there being a debate between gender differences in the brain. And studies done by MRI’s show — well, there is such large variation between two different brains of the same gender that it’s not very easy to find significant gendered brain differences.
And here we have the same finding with respect to the brains of depressed people and those who aren’t. “No significant differences” if you ask those who do brain MRI’s.
I feel, though, as someone who studied math that the workings of the brain probably involves stuff that — well, it’s like a chaotic system like the weather. Where, as they say, a butterfly flapping its wings in Arizona could have so much of an impact so as to cause a whole storm to happen thousands of miles away.
Maybe depression — and gender differences — are things that theoretically could be seen but they manifest themselves in ways that otherwise look so subtle if you are trying to see it in the electrical circuitry of the brain that it’s kind of like how, only after a lot of theoretical work was Einstein able to postulate the existence of black holes. And then figuring out how they exist theoretically, they were able to figure out complicated ways to prove they really existed. To infer they really existed.
Now, in academia, they need to lobby donors for funds. And they need to go tell them “the expensive machine you buy us IS DEFINITELY going to yield clear cut scientific findings that you will be able to see right away. And when you publish your company’s annual report and want to boast to everyone of all the good you did with your funding, we will be able to tell you of definitive findings.”
How can scientists go and tell a donor who helped them buy an MRI something like “honestly, we didn’t find anything meaningful or significant yet — just be patient. Who knows, you might be dead before we finally figure out the current problem we are working on.”
In America, they are all too impatient.
The Japanese are wise in comparison, and maybe we need to learn something from them. They will start projects at present that they do not expect to fully come to fruition until several generations down the road. For instance, in gardening, they will go put a boulder underneath a waterfall today, and it will slowly over the course of 100 years or so produce beautiful holes and ripples in the boulder, and then they will take it out and put it in some garden. They have beautiful gardens today with special waterfall sculpted boulders that were originally put in a waterfall by their ancestors over 100 years ago.
Because I think the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression is not only a lie but the truth is depression is kind of like an “activity imbalance” — very similar to how one muscle atrophies and then other muscles take over for it, causing it to atrophy more and more.
SSRI’s create a different “activity imbalance” that treats symptoms — but, in certain ways, things are still a little bit off and it’s just not the same as fixing the underlying problem. Nerve cells with reduced activation.
Strokes create different types of activity imbalances than would occur on their own, and these lead to depression. However, the SSRI then goes and creates another activity imbalance on top of it — which aggravates others leading to low coordination and stuff.
What if you have an atrophied muscle and instead of making the person exercise it, you give them a machine? And then, maybe, if they try exercising it, it’s weak and discouraging so they stop.
By the way, there is evidence that depressed people suffer from brain shrinkage. That’s just like muscle atrophy.
Well, I didn’t read it yet — other than super quick skimming — because I’m an impatient person.
But, the headline jumped out at me right away.
“Euphemism for policing social deviance.”
I have a bit of a problem with failure to fully expound on the notion of “social deviance” all the while just throwing that word out there, and letting the audience guess at what they might call “deviant.”
For instance, some forms of social deviance amount to failure to respect proper boundaries in one’s interactions with others, or failures to conform to social norms in a way that’s polite and considerate of others.
Of course, that is behavioral and drugs cannot handle that. And, that is also NOT what this headline obviously means.
As someone who has had issues with extreme amounts of corruption and mafia like stuff at “respectable” mainstream institutions like Harvard, with ties to the U.S. government and the ability to get the govt to cover up their crimes, and then what you have happen here is an institution where people get excluded unless they conform, and over the years, basically the whole “inside” community goes increasingly further and further and further off the deep end when it comes to how far from mainstream notions of “normal” they are and how deviant they are.
Except, they are not deviant as individuals. They are all deviant as a whole brainwashed group that is like an extremist cult. This could have been enabled by the fact that the FBI failed to ever police them. After initially deciding to go after the mafia, the FBI chose to regard academic institutions and the ivy league schools as “beyond their purview” and “un-investigatable” from the perspective of the mafia.
Which creates a situation — and you can go study economics and economics will say this WOULD happen — which creates a situation where corporations can pour monies into these institutions and turn them into vast profit centers for organized crime. And what do they say about money and how it corrupts?
Anyway, you can end up with a whole entire deviant community, so vastly brainwashed away from mainstream norms that it would be utterly shocking to the ordinary community to discover the truth, yet these individuals on the inside are so used to it, they fail to fully appreciate how bad they are and even develop a sense of entitlement about the wrongs they do — they all agree with each other and all reinforce each other and also arrogantly and aggressively exclude all those who might even say a word that could help them see reality better.
Except, here’s the clincher: I went to Harvard and witnessed that. Guess what? The same corporations paying them off also pay off politicians and mental hospitals and medical institutions and a whole network of charities that are connected and whose sole purpose for their existence, in many cases, is as recipients of corporate bribery which in some ways is a form of money laundering.
So I had crooked cops and crooked doctors, as well as a few local crooked businesses, and actually a large corporation as well (subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway owned by Warren Buffett) all jump on the same Harvard bandwagon and reinforce their brainwashed deviant reality.
On top of it, when I was a victim of the mafia — after dropping out of Harvard due to their horrible behavior — and I note, my subsequent victimhood was a direct result of what Harvard had done and Harvard was clearly involved and had their fingerprints all over it, one of the weird things they did was arrange for me to be stalked by criminals, in the gay scene, mind you, who went out of their way to proclaim their ties to all sorts of horribly deviant groups. Pedophile rings, but worse than just child molesters who do it in a nice way. Brutal rapists who cause permanent damage in some cases and seek to infect the victim — deliberately — with HIV. Or who commit the kinds of rapes with bottles and knives and other sharp objects we hear about in Bosnia. And who also do work for Big Pharma in terms of intentionally trying to raise HIV rates in gay men by deliberately infecting many against their will. Sometimes using date rape drugs for the purpose. Often date rape drugging them in a particular bar, gang raping them to infect them, and dumping them in a public park afterwards to recover.
I got stalked by one person who was acting weird. And then a whole group of other people tell me about these activities or underground groups involved in such activities this stalker was involved with. And they told me online in writing and I went to the police, twice — with logs of the conversation.
Police react totally un-admirably regarding the matter. And then I am retaliated against pretty viciously by a local church I played the pipe organ at, as if they’d informed the mafia I’d been a “rat” or a “snitch.” Indeed, it was a daycare center owner who occasionally used parking spaces in the church who engaged in a weird pattern of behavior and then successfully arranged for me to be banned from parking there, and the minister took his side, unfairly.
And the daycare center owner even went out of his way to make several double entendre remarks, like saying that parents needed “access to their kids” and my car was interfering with access to their kids. And when I said there was enough room, then he said it was about “visibility,” my car interfered with “visibility.”
This was after I went to police a second time, due to someone telling me that the “group” in question also would pimp out the under age children of meth addicts.
Wow. Now isn’t that pretty “in your face?” Shoving their own deviance down the rest of society’s throats, if you ask me. I am reminded of Saul Alinsky’s rules for radicals, where radicals get polite moderate people to cave by breaching all the various boundaries of politeness that more conservative people won’t breach and wouldn’t think of breaching. And they get away with stuff because they are that shockingly aggressive and bellicose about it.
Anyway, later on, I got date rape drugged and criminally abused in all sorts of ways, and it was very obvious I was a victim. When a problem happened, police covered it up and took me to a hospital to have psych docs try to discredit me. Psych docs who knew the truth, said they knew the truth, but told me in no uncertain terms — often really nasty and intimidating — that I am to back off my allegations against this group or they will declare me to be schizophrenic.
I even told them I had a massive paper trail backing my allegations up. They wouldn’t budge.
In other words, again THEY were deviant and they were EMBRACING their own deviance and trying to shove it down my throat.
They were not policing deviance in my case. THEY were deviant and they were policing my normality and trying to bully me into BECOMING deviant, or at least agreeing to it in theory.
Turns out I was a victim of an unethical medical experiment during that time I didn’t figure out until much later on. Ended up being cured of genital herpes mysteriously — permanently. Never had an outbreak again yet, prior to this series of incidences, my immune system was so bad at controlling it that I was always in an outbreak unless I took enough of this particular herb, lemon balm.
The drug companies who profit off management but not cure of herpes were giving money to Mass General Hospital and other Boston area hospitals and institutions. All “respectable” institutions who would never be involved with any of this crazy stuff, right? Well, that’s a clever organized crime ploy. Their aura of respectability combined with the utter crazy lunacy of my story. That means they can get away with it and no one is supposed to believe me. It sounds too far fetched.
Note the story was totally crazy and loony because the perpetrators very cleverly made sure it would be. Because I knew they’d be wanting to cover things up by saying I was crazy, I documented everything on my computer and can establish that the “lunacy” of my story is 100 percent the fault of the perpetrators.
Which illustrates a clever side to the system. You have super respectable institutions involved with the mafia. The media goes out of its way to cover up their dirty laundry and speak of them in super venerable tones. But they are deeply involved in criminal racketeering and, in line with their reputation for respectability, when they go about their organized crime schemes, they make sure to get people to do it all in a super crazy, off-the-wall melodramatic way, with tons of people doing tons of extra stuff to the victim that doesn’t even make sense, so that if you are the victim, you can’t tell the truth without your story sounding crazy.
And, all along, they have people going bullying the victim around that very issue and trying to put them on the defensive. “Oh you sound crazy.” “Everyone has a problem with you, you know, haven’t you ever noticed, the one common denominator here is you. Maybe you need to take a good hard look at your own actions. It looks to me like you are the one provoking all this.” Stuff like that.
The policing of deviance here is really tied to the covering up of organized crime. Which, in and of itself, IS deviant.
On top of it, vast economic class and race differences in toleration of “deviance” hold. Where society engages in most policing of deviance among poor black men and poor white men next most, perhaps, even while whatever deviant behavior they allegedly engaged in to merit such punishment was a tiny fraction of the deviance so many rich white people routinely get away with. Or, alternatively, a small group of black people are allowed to engage in pretty severe deviance — only so long as they participate in the organized crime schemes of white society and, in many case, do terrible things to other members of the black community.
Modern day Identity Politics would completely mitigate against the recognition of such phenomena. Defining racism in this pseudo-religious way and also as totally symbolic. Some person on the other side of the country can SAY a “racist thing” — or perhaps write it in a newspaper article — and all black people are now “victims” of that “racist thing.” As if society is pretending to have ceased oppressing blacks in all the same practical ways as before, and now the anti-racism fight has no other battles to fight, but for the exclusively and purely symbolic ones.
Again, policing deviance isn’t about policing behavior. It’s about policing a person’s social class. With deviance defined according to who they are, not what they do. And what you are allowed to do depends solely on who you are and your social class. The policing of deviance, then, is really about putting someone of a certain social class in their place. It’s about saying “when YOU do it, it’s deviant, when HE does it, it’s illustrious.”
Actually, notice how many high fallutin academics are very incoherent? Not only in their words. But their ideas are incoherent enough so, theoretically, if a poor black person in the inner city tried to say anything that incoherent, they’d be locked up and put in neureleptics for “schizophrenia.”
But when a Harvard academic says something about as bad, we all agree we don’t understand it and it sounds incoherent to us because we are stupid in comparison to them.
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Actually, you know what’s interesting? My mother was involved in the nutrition research of the 60’s at the Harvard School of Public Health. And she told me, the nutrition research of the 60’s was bogus and bought and paid for by the food industry.
https://ur.booksc.eu/book/73513993/02afd8
Actually, here is one of her articles — you can download the PDF.
This was about obese adolescent girls.
This was a paper where two men had tried to write an article, it didn’t get published. Or wait, they tried to write two articles. She combined the two articles into one and this was published. And then Harvard fired the two men and tripled her salary.
However, she later on had criminal things done to her, by the mafia. And, actually, she was herself a guinea pig as a child, where her mother was forced to feed her on a super strict rigid schedule — every six hours as an infant — and this messed up her appetite regulation mechanism of her brain, so she had trouble keeping her weight down unless she took amphetamines. And had an artificial weight problem as a result, which wasn’t what she naturally would have been. Which was a bit sad because she was otherwise a very attractive woman and was able to look quite glamorous when her weight was down.
Anyway, my mother told me about being bullied by groups of women acting as a gang and engaging in social ostracism, or otherwise having lots of problems with women engaging in vicious intimidation of her. Some of which I witnessed as a kid. And which went above and beyond normal melodrama. E.g., it was probably incentivized by the mafia. And in part something food companies paid bribes for. In other words, my mother was just bullied and bullied and bullied for years, mostly by women, and this was an important tactic which very effectively worked to silence anyone who would be whistleblowers over the nutrition corruption.
Anyway, one of the bits of “inside information” my mother told me about this article I post was that Harvard researchers withheld information. The obese girls were all catholic and the non-obese girls were all protestant.
I think this suggests that something went on with the mafia which resulted in systems of extortion and blackmail which effectively worked to help enslave Irish and Italians so they could be used as guinea pigs for unethical medical experiments. And a lot of Jews too, actually. Pretty much anybody was at risk, but newly arrived immigrants the easiest prey for these schemes.
I can say this because I know it was true for my own family — on my mother’s side at least. Italian – Jewish. I won’t go into details but several family members did have medical care that was just plain abnormal and had to have been some sort of unethical experiment. On both the Jewish and Italian side.
And it’s possible same thing might have happened on my father’s side, which was German and English. Well, yeah, I heard a few things there that didn’t sound right. But I was not as close to them.
“De Nadai, Hu, and Thompson focus on data pollution, which they define as “inadvertent errors” in the data. This is distinct from “data poisoning,” which involves “intentional attempts to feed inaccurate data into models.” The current article focuses on well-intentioned researchers whose results are misleading by accident.”
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Where I read this is where I get mad. Or perhaps not quite as mad as in frustrated.
Especially when I hear the words “well-intentioned.” Because I feel like saying “no, there IS ill intent.”
Somewhere, at least. But I feel as if passivity and not caring IS ill intent or should be regarded so. Or people should be afraid enough of being accused of doing something intentionally so that they will be more than well meaning dopes but will think hard enough to avoid the “well intentioned error.”
There is also such a thing as ill intent in education. Perhaps no one person having malicious intent, but everyone showing lack of responsibility and passing the buck. “So long as I get my money, I don’t care.”
But, you know what? Sometimes you have an affirmative obligation to take responsibility. If your work is having an impact on people’s lives. And isn’t just about you climbing the ladder and having your career.
Actually, quite often, researchers will just do anything to get published, because they need to get published in order to have their careers. And they become slaves to “what the media will publish.” And that comes first rather than the whole notion of doing good.
And then they go have families and want to support them financially and all that. Well, ok, their children come first. They need to get published and make a splash so they can get promoted.
And they were well-intentioned and thought the research data was sound, and as for selection bias or other problems, well they just hadn’t thought of that.
Actually, how do you know someone is well intentioned? A lot of people are very good at coming across as well-intentioned, even while they are systematically doing all that is in their self interest. How do we know that they didn’t privately think of it in their own heads, some problem regarding selection bias that only could have been fixed by them getting a second grant to help them investigate or clarify certain issues? So they know FOR SURE?
Well, it’s not going to make as much of a splash if researchers say “we did a study that suggests one thing — however, we realized, if you look at it this way and if you look at it that way, it’s possible the data might be ambiguous, and we can only find out for sure if we get more funds to do a more careful analysis.”
I have a feeling their departments tell them “NO, don’t go there.” In other words, don’t ask those tough questions in the first place. Because there is a system and it’s like a machine and you have to work it in order to get ahead.
I’m reminded of the Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky saga, where democrats were all saying “it’s only about sex, he lied about sex, everyone does it, everyone lies about sex, so he should get away with it.” It made me disgusted, even though I was otherwise a libertarian, and perhaps that’s because I’d already, by then, dealt with the culture of academia. Where indeed, well, you can maybe call them ill-intentioned. But, at the same time, you can almost excuse them by saying “well, everyone does it.”
Everyone, in isolation, could convince themselves “everyone does it, so it’s ok if I do it too.”
OK, fine, but we have a nation of fat people now and it’s partly because nutrition research was corrupted by food industry donations in the 60’s, and researchers were intimidated by an academic HERD.
How can we get to a place where we, as a nation, are NOT a nation of fat people due to such corruption but, instead, are healthy?
At some point I think the solution is that we need to make those people who are “only well intentioned” but goofed in one way or another pay the price AS IF they had evil intent. Start doing that, and watch how quickly people start cleaning up their act so fast.
Maybe we need to say, as a society: “you need to have accurate research findings, and if you put something out there that’s problematic, and people listen to it and follow it and it hurts them, you need to go to jail. EVEN IF it’s not your fault and you didn’t mean it but you were just too stupid to have thought of something.”
How much value do we place on the health of the American people as a society?
I will say another thing. Which is, the definition of mental illness and psychological maladies are skewed to favor and privilege those cultures which dwell in mainstream academia and the professional world.
Which is like — well, ok, when I was young I used to read about King Arthur and his knights. I also read about Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves too.
Let us just say academia has overcome “toxic masculinity” in that regard.
Only to replace it with a completely different kind of bullying. A whole different culture of bullying and back stabbing which is, in many ways, perhaps colder and more brutal even if subtle and understated.
Actually, academics tend to be sneaky and leave the dirty work up to the mafia — I kid you not. I was personally a victim of that sort of thing.
They tend, also, not to be motivated by pride but by greed. They will not leave something up to the mafia because you humiliated them or violated their “honor” or “pride.” They will leave something up to the mafia because you were raped on their campus and that could interfere with their reputation. Or because they got money from some company and agreed to do some scientific fraud on their behalf, and you threatened to whistleblow.
In that sense, there is a Uriah Heep type of “‘umble” obsession with greed that is a bit shameful and self abasing, yet is also very violent at the same time.
And then there is a culture of back stabbing, spreading of false rumors, social ostracism, all of which is quite pernicious but nobody guilty of that is ever really turned into the psychiatric system for that kind of bullying. Because it’s sneaky enough to leave no legalistic “smoking gun” that would allow for law enforcement to easily declare someone “a danger to themselves or others” because of some simply and easy CLEARLY DOCUMENTABLE thing they said.
In that sense, it’s interesting how, in an ultra legalistic society dominated by lawyers, the American Psychological Association bashes “toxic masculinity” which is always something that can be described in a way so it’s EASY to describe it in a newspaper article or even in a short sound bite.
But what does that mean? That means the structural practical realities of the jobs of lawyers and law enforcement and journalists is dominating our discourse of what should be regarded as “bad behavior.” And I question whether this also does not influence the whole field of mental health?
Where you have a society of professionals each trying to make their own jobs easy, and choosing to cut corners here and there.
Except it’s a problem where our whole definition of health ends up being dictated by the occupational structural needs of the “helping” professions.
Removed for moderation
Now I wanted to mention something. I have an incredible sense of balance, love music and dancing, and love athletic and gymnastic type of stuff that uses my incredible sense of balance. And I’m somewhat of a natural performer.
At the gym, I do one set of exercises that are challenging in terms of balance. Then I get used to them and they are no longer challenging so I like to do another that’s challenging, so I am always challenging myself.
Now here is something I want to note. Any kind of balance exercise is like learning to ride a bike. Once your brain has set down those pathways, they are permanent. But that does mean, your brain has to “grow” each time and develop a new set of connections each time.
What if I am someone who simply has to always be active and doing a lot of athletic stuff? (I note, I have had other relatives who were the same and felt obliged to remain very active into their late 90’s, never stopped being active until they died.)
Would I perhaps be more prone to depression, had I not been allowed to develop my athletic and musical side? Because there would be all this brain that “wants” to be exercised and develop doing that stuff — and, if it can’t do that, it won’t do anything. Or it won’t do much. But it would be prone to depression, I think.
Because it’s meant to have that constant stimulus.
Would academics have thought of that? I do think they are a sedentary bunch. Those who are more like me would not have gotten very far there. So they aren’t going to even think of that in the first place.
I was also thinking about psychotherapy — there is a headline I see that says psychotherapy has an enduring effect on depression unlike pills.
I sort of always felt that psychotherapy isn’t really that good for me. Because, sitting down in an office like that, it’s as if I’m not exercising most of my brain while talking to a psychotherapist. I sort of wonder if, having a psychotherapy session walking around outdoors or doing some activity at the same time besides talking, might that impact me better? It might even making me think of things I wouldn’t think of sitting still indoors.
I wonder about that, because I do think there is human variety. And what’s good for some isn’t good for everyone.
By the way, I happen to be a gay man who is — well, were I a woman and like that, the best way to describe me would not be a compliment and not permitted on here. OK, so I get around lots.
And, at the same time, I am a very curious and intellectual person. And, also, if you are talking to someone who is a member of some profession, after you sleep with them, they will trust you more and are willing to tell you all sorts of inside information they would never tell.
OK, so first of all, I met one gay guy in this cruisy video store — very sleazy place, I might add. With little booths big enough so two or three guys can share them. He was a nurse and from a family of nurses. Guess what he told me?
“Zyprexa and similar drugs MAKE YOU INCOMPETENT. I know that because I am from a family of nurses. It’s a scam. Everyone knows it’s a scam.” He also told me all about how abruptly withdrawing causes temporary symptoms of psychosis, even if you didn’t have psychosis in the first place and it was inappropriately prescribed, and “in order to get off of zyprexa or the other neureleptics, you need to be on valium for a whole entire year, and then taper off the valium too, but most doctors aren’t taught about this.”
In other words, all the key opinion leaders out there? They are liars. They all know it’s a scam and they all are lying through their teeth and, at the same time, privately to themselves, or amongst each other and those they trust, they all openly agree it’s a scam, “but the money.”
Someone really should do some kind of undercover investigation involving gay men who are attractive and charming simply trying to sleep with as many medical doctors as possible, relevant in the area of psychiatry, and see if they can get them to admit the truth. That would be interesting.
However, I also once hooked up with a guy in biotech as well. Another interesting bit of inside information he told me was all about how, the whole business model of the one blockbuster drug that gets sold to the whole population and makes billions is profitable but also not the right way to do medicine.
There is human variety, what works for one sub population doesn’t work for another. They should really be working to categorize people into various sub populations, and target specific remedies or treatments to each small sub population, one at a time. If they really want to make medicine more advanced, that’s what they need to do. But they won’t do it because of money interests.
What’s even more disturbing is, maybe you can take a drug that works for one sub population, and if you pick your study subjects right, it looks to be a wonderful success — and then you can turn it into a blockbuster drug prescribed for everyone. And nobody knows, it’s only good for that one sub population and you should not take it if you are not part of that.
At the time I was very interested in the subject of corruption in biotech and medicine, so I was asking such questions, is there systemic fraud? That’s one thing I was told.
However, at another time, I also remember being told, when asking were they looking as hard as they should for an HIV cure, I remember being told that they are not really trying very hard to find a cure for HIV. (It’s so profitable not to cure that they don’t want to.) And he said, they are looking in the wrong direction, and then told me some esoteric stuff I didn’t quite understand.
Something along the lines of how, those seeking a cure are looking to cure it via targeting one particular biological mechanism, “but that is never going to work,” he said. And that they should be looking for a cure via targeting a completely different biological mechanism, because that IS promising and that’s the only way a cure might be found, “but they all won’t do that.”
And he said it looks like they don’t want to, and it’s probably because of Big Pharma funding. Or, I think, he didn’t quite want to say that, he forced me to speculate, isn’t that probably because of Big Pharma Funding, so he could cautiously and hesitantly admit “yeah, it sure looks like it.”
Because there is a whole culture of intimidation in those circles where it’s politically incorrect to be “conspiracy theorists.” Except it has gotten so extreme, you have to tiptoe around their blatant and brazen corruption, all the while they feel no qualms about shoving such brazen unapologetic corruption down everyone else’s throats, with zero remorse as to the millions of people harmed by their research failures. Instead, you must feel like you are walking on eggshells, all ready to apologize to them for pointing out their failures or their lack of stamina and ambition. Not exactly an environment conducive to greatness in medicine — where I note this is people’s lives that are at stake.
Isn’t it disgusting, the culture of the people who make it in those research circles, then? It looks to me like they do not allow anyone to succeed there unless they are scum. Or have been slowly programmed to become scum. I do know the way “ivory tower” thinking occurs. People slowly get brainwashed further and further away from the mainstream, so slowly that they do not even realize just how outrageous they have become.
I say it that way because I really do think this whole notion of deliberately playing dumb and going on a deliberate wild goose chase in the wrong direction you know will never succeed, because you are not going to stand up to Big Pharma, is this kind of sneaky kind of submissive sort of “playing dumb” that is very annoying.
They act like they have no backbones, except they could have backbones, they just don’t care and are greedy.
Now, did you know, there is nothing the psychiatric profession would like more than to be able to diagnose away such annoying and unbearable dissent for them.
And, as you know, the neuroleptics that make you fat are the best tools for which to accomplish that.
Now, this is interesting but, did you know, when I was a victim of this criminal racketeering scheme, it was psych docs who were assisting with the covering up a whole series of unethical medical experiments on me — which happened to involve testing of a successful cure for herpes researchers hoped to cover up so they could be bribed by drug manufacturers of herpes management drugs like valtrex.
Well, when that whole saga was going on, I was being bullied right and left for “daring to talk about the mafia” even while I was being victimized so badly in so many ways. Criminally victimized.
Doctors were acting like the Soviet Union and trying to forcibly medicate me — I did get a few involuntary injections in the emergency room at times — for daring to “talk about the mafia” or daring to tell them I was a victim of the mafia.
However, at the same time, I note I had proof. I had saved copies of several death threats from gay men they did as part of this whole saga, including a promise from this one guy named Pete who wrote me something about how “it will all be over soon” and “the mob will shut you up.” Also, police had framed me and these were obvious frame ups too.
Here is where, see, I had a right to tell other doctors that I’d been told I was being targetted by the mafia, without them instantly yelling at me to shut up and trying to go inject me with haldol. I even told them I had documentation proving it, to no avail because they were so corrupt.
Eventually, I remember suggesting to someone that, if you really need to cover up that this is the mafia that’s involved here, it’s inappropriate for you to be saying that I am crazy or psychotic. You need to then say that PETE is the one who is crazy. (And some of the others).
And I said I hoped the mafia would decide to cover it up by declaring all of these lowlifes to be the crazy ones, rather than me. As it would serve them right.
But, with regard to this Pete guy, I mentioned that he already had love handles when I met him and was ever so slightly out of shape. And something along the lines that I hope they make him take his medicine. Take his medicine. Take his medicine til he is as fat as a house.
Of course, doctors and police all simply never did that. Despite a mountain of evidence I had — I saved every single online conversation I had with ANYONE who purported to be in the mafia and started giving me a hard time — not a single one of these guys ever got declared “crazy” for talking about the mafia and medicated. However, doctors tried their best to arrange for that to happen to me, if I dared talk about it. And they were so corrupt, I was able to get it to be only temporary as they got me to change my story in a way so as to–
Well, ok, here’s the thing. Some of these incidences involved drugs. Crystal meth. Which is known to cause paranoid delusions. So, in one case, I was able to get out of the hospital by changing my story and reversing all of my accusations, pretending that it was all because I had gotten high on crystal meth, but I am all better now.
That’s how bad the doctors were.
I even remember, in one case, talking to this woman doctor or nurse who was being bad like this and corrupt. At some point, she decided to stop arguing with me regarding the fact that all the mafia stuff I was talking about was second hand information I had gotten from others. Regardless of whether it was true, I am merely quoting others and you can’t call a quotation by me of other people a “psychotic delusion.” So then she kind of decides not to argue about that and then merely tells me: “OK, but if these people are all doing that to you, that shows you have some kind of illness and you need to take this medication.”
Can you imagine saying something like that to a rape victim? “He raped you because you are mentally ill.”
One more thing I forgot to mention about the Connecticut incident which eventually resulted in them rescuing me from the water. The way it was, I was terrified — well, they didn’t announce themselves for an hour but just waited silently for an hour before abruptly coming to the water to rescue me and lighting up five strobe lights all at once too. Which they had set up super quietly in the dark.
Btw, I thought about it and did wonder, maybe they were trying a “justifiable homicide” murder and then when I started yelling “help help” and started thrashing around in the water, perhaps they thought it was a shark or something. Somehow felt if they didn’t rescue me right then, or if they let me drown, that would just not look good for some reason.
Not sure. But, anyway, afterwards, well first of all when they got to me the injected something right away that put me straight to sleep. I wake up in the hospital and the doctor says, first, that “they watched you for an hour before coming to rescue you” and then she said that “they said you said you were to swim away from the shore to escape the mafia” or something like that. This was Milford, CT so apparently they were accusing me of having said to them that I had planned to swim from Milford, CT to Long Island.
I, of course, told her that was nonsense.
This doctor was good in the sense of kind of indicating she didn’t believe any of the others, she believed me. It was as if she was kind of warning me, she found all of their stories inconsistent and knew I was calm and in my right mind. But in a very cool and subtle way.
However, I do note, all the information is consistent with cops, after having watched me for a whole hour, having to pretend I’d swum away from shore only to swim back, I guess, so as to perhaps explain why they had taken so long.
All I can say is, the facts are consistent with an attempted pre-meditated “justifiable homicide.” But, I mean, if this is the mafia and Harvard’s involved and etc. etc. etc., one could still speculate: was this to manipulate me into getting the second attorney?
Anyway, the circumstantial evidence all adds up and fits a “justifiable homicide” interpretation. Including why they felt they had to say something to cover up why they were waiting that long.
Oh now I remember what else I wanted to say before, but it slipped my mind because the very process of recollecting what happened with those cops on that seashore in Connecticut aggravated my memory repression issues.
Notice how these intended deaths were to be drug overdoses or justifiable homicide shootings, wherein it’s all covered up by portraying me I guess as a menacing person or something like that. E.g., a dangerous perpetrator type.
Well, the interesting thing about the mafia is they are super practical about stuff. Many years previously, what was the “threat” that some people levied against me? Around 1998 when certain problems I was having at Harvard were “coming to a head” so to speak, I became a subject of repeated warnings that I need to watch out not to become a victim of a Matthew Shepard style hate crime. And I am a very big strong and muscular person too. I was always wondering “why me?” This was when I first started cruising at this cruisy park in Boston.
And I once did indeed have a problem with several drunk college kids parking their car surrounding mine and then acting threateningly for awhile — but I was able to stave them off.
This was all around the time of the Matthew Shepard “hate crime” murder, and then once that murder happened, it all stopped and never happened again. Even some Harvard students went and did things to hint at knowing that I’d been at the fens (that’s the name of the cruisy park), which is where I was repeatedly warned.
I even have a threatening email from the President of the Harvard Organ Society, which he timed literally to coincide EXACTLY with Matthew Shepard actually dying. (He was in a hospital for awhile before he died).
Here he writes, and I copy and paste:
“Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 21:50:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: Seth Moulton
To: Damian Schloming
Subject: organ society
Dear Damian,
I just wanted to take a moment to get in touch with you regarding your
place in HROS. Although we’ve barely talked at all this year, I have
heard of your problems with The Memorial Church. I certainly don’t
intend to take sides in any disputes you may have, but I hope that you can
put them aside and still be a member of the Organ Society. With your
diligent work and wonderful playing, your contribution is not something I
would like to miss.
That said, I do think, however, that you should actively try to
straighten-out your relationship with The Memorial Church or at least with
Murray. Perhaps there have been more recent developments, but last I heard
you missed an appointment for lunch to do just that. Unfortunately, it
seems that it’s a situation you must deal with; everyone can’t just forget
about it.
Please be in touch if I can be of any help, and I’m hoping to see you at
our meeting next Monday. Hopefully you’ll be able to play at Halloween as
well!?
-Seth”
——–
It so happens to be the case that there was no appointment ever scheduled for lunch in the first place. However, I happened to go to the fens when Matthew Shepard was murdered — I was initially TOLD about that murder AT the fens, by a man whose tone I still remember because he said it in this very weird way, almost as if to tantalize or intimidate.
So I stayed up late, and this caused me to oversleep and not see that email. Either that or the Harvard computer center went and slipped that email in later on, back dating it to coincide, and that’s why I didn’t notice that email until months later, when I go over my correspondence from the past. (They WERE that corrupt at Harvard regarding fudging of the records).
The Matthew Shepard murder is also something where it’s been publicly exposed that the official narrative is bogus, and I know that the vast majority of gay men do not believe the official narrative and wouldn’t. If you really ARE gay, and this involves the politicized murder of a gay man, survival instinct is not compatible with believing in a bogus narrative. Some people might pretend to believe for the sake of others. Privately, you do what you know works best to protect yourself.
Anyway, I had wanted to include this point about Matthew Shepard in my above comment on the CT incident involving the potential shooting. And it slipped my mind and I was not able to remember, because that’s how my memory repression issues work and the CT incident was a very scary incident to remember. I finally just remembered it now.
I also suffer from repressed memory syndrome, or maybe it’s that I suppress full memory recall of troubling facts, even though they are relevant to the point I am making, because it’s so triggering and so scary and I’ve worked so hard to get over PTSD and part of that was deliberately “trying to forget” some of the stuff that happened to me.
The rat poison incident was not the only attempted murder. Here is a description of another incident, which I miraculously survived too. And in part I was very clever, which was interesting. Well, I am just someone who survives. Survival instinct can be very powerful.
However, this attempted murder was something police were trying to do and stage as a “justifiable homicide” — or so that’s what it looked like.
One interesting part I should note is how I talk of my parent’s trying to discredit me by calling me “bipolar.” Well, that’s the thing. I think they did that because they knew, if police can’t cover something up by portraying it as a “mental health issue,” they will instead cover it up by arranging for some kind of covered-up murder.
So first it was going to be a police shooting. Allegedly “justifiable,” so they would have claimed. Then there was the rat poison incident. Which didn’t work. And then, after the rat poison incident was over with, there were zero other incidences. I decided “I have enough proof now to nail the perpetrators on everything.”
OK, so here is the description of the Connecticut incident that happened right before I hired the second lawyer. The rat poison incident happened after I hired that lawyer.
——–
This was ten years ago and, since then, Black Lives Matters has been going on and on and on about police shootings. In this instance, the man in CT was trying to set things up so as to make me look like a drug dealer who had just sold him drugs he already had at his place when I got there, and appeared to be trying to “set up” a scene whereby police could potentially shoot me and pretend they didn’t know better, e.g., “justifiable homicide.”
Let me explain what this man did. I won’t go into all details but I knew something was wrong and I knew I had to leave and get out of there. He was not being nice about it. When I get outside, he suddenly says very loudly so everyone can hear “I will get you the money later” or something like that. As if I had delivered him drugs and expected money. But that was not all. I look at my cell phone and saw that I’d gotten three texts from strangers I did not know, all asking me about drugs in a manner so as to make it look like I was a drug dealer. It was scary. Then I go to the back yard and the neighbor next door is there, just waiting, and says “hi” in this almost friendly tone but it wasn’t friendly – it was passive aggressive “we are going to get you” nice.
I suddenly knew this was a dangerous situation. It was dark and police could easily have pretended not to see well, thought I had a gun or weapon, and shot me. I thought to myself, what can I do that might be unpredictable in just the right way so, if they are going to kill me, they decide to abandon the attempt? I stripped naked, went to the ocean to swim, so that it would be clear I did not have a gun on me so they could not shoot.
Police waited there for an hour while I was in the water – that’s exactly what the nurse in the hospital told me “they watched you for an hour before going into the water” – without saying a word and waiting for me to come out. Had I come out of the water, there was nothing stopping them from pretending to think I had a weapon on me, and shooting. I eventually started getting tired and then I pretended to start thrashing around in the water as if I was perhaps drowning. Immediately, they yell “Damian,” turn on five very bright strobe lights, and come rushing into the water so quickly with a rubber raft to “save” me – I wasn’t really drowning, I was just sick of waiting.
The way it worked, so long as I was in the water, they could not shoot me IN the water and pretend they thought I had a gun. However, waiting for an hour for me to come out was not compatible with them having innocent intentions. But it could have worked maybe. Except, if they had LET me drown, then everyone would want to know, why did they see me in the water and wait silently without making a noise and just let me drown? When they obviously could see me the whole time? The only answer to that question was: they were trying to stage a “justifiable homicide” shooting scene, with witnesses there ready to lie and testify to whatever was necessary justify it.
I could tell, though, by the panicked tone in their voices, that they were really scared at the thought of me drowning and them not having an explanation that could fit with a non-murderous narrative. Also, they got to me so fast, it was like they were panicking. I have never seen anyone in a rescue operation go and take a rubber raft and put it in the water faster and paddle out to me faster. In most rescue operations I ever see, they are not that frenzied. And, also, it was true that I dealt with them afterwards and they were VERY sheepish. Like they had a guilty conscience.
It is also the case that I had been active enough in the water so that my legs were covered with scratches all over them from the rocks. Actually, the reason I was constantly diving down and picking up or looking for heavy rocks was in hopes of shielding myself in case they tried to shoot me while in the water. The CT man also had a neighbor who was an accomplice and was waiting out there.
I wake up in a hospital in Connecticut. The doctor – a female – goes and tells me that police somehow got my father’s number (even though I was unconscious) and called up my father and he said “he is bipolar.” I remember asking how did they get my father’s number, I did not have it on me, they said they got it from my license. Which does not make sense. The doctor, though, who was the same one who told me that “police watched you for an hour on the water” told me my father said I was bipolar, and she said “but I can tell, you don’t seem bipolar, you are calm.” I wonder if she was warning me or something.
However, I note, let’s play devil’s advocate and pretend that cops were not up to something really dirty. All the things I had done to elude what looked like an intentional covered-up murder were some of the craziest things anyone can do. And there I was, and you could see my legs covered with scratches from being in the water. The doctor didn’t even ask me why I ended up in the water or how I got those scratches or what the hell had happened. It was as if she kind of already knew, so it didn’t matter. No need to ask me.
And, guess what? They didn’t pink slip me to a mental ward. They let me go nearly right away. That was another thing very ironic to how this whole mafia situation was handled. I was hospitalized so many times, and in all cases doctors covered up the crimes. However, SOMETIMES they go and act like “you have a serious mental health problem if this happened to you” and force me into a mental ward for one or even two weeks. In other cases, I get let go right away. And there was no rhyme or reason to it. In some of the instances where I was discharged right away, IF you were to say “this wasn’t the mafia, this was him having a mental health episode,” then the things I had just done were some of the craziest things a person could do. In other cases, where I get hospitalized for two weeks, I hadn’t done ANYTHING but they hospitalize me anyway. Oh yes and even the doctors hospitalizing me admitted to knowing about some of the crazy things the police HAD just done. “Oh yes, we know, they are like that sometimes.” Because the whole thing was rigged and this was just part of a pre-planned program I was being put through.
Anyway, I wanted to post this because I thought I should include this. This is relevant. Relevant because, especially, Black Lives Matters has been making a big fuss about police shootings that are murders. What happened to me really helps prove just how pre-meditated these police shootings can be.
I am not even all too anti-police, I should note, because I did not think the cops were bad men. It’s a big problem the corruption that hospitals engage in. You can’t trust a hospital to save the life of a cop who defied the mafia, and police sent him on some sort of emergency “call” to some crime scene, where he suddenly gets shot and shooter miraculously escapes and it remains forever an unsolved murder, and the hospital (playing dumb here) “just tried and tried and tried but couldn’t save him.” Hospitals commit murder too. Police who don’t obey can get killed too.
Also, hospitals have access to the types of drugs that incentivize the street thugs who would be one of those who’d “take on” a cop who disobeyed the mafia. Also, another common problem is just how many illegal drug “overdoses” are really pre-meditated murders, and they wouldn’t have succeeded but for what the hospital did. There are so many illegal drug users and they are a huge army that outnumber the police substantially.
If corruption among the rich, the super-rich, large corporations, universities and other charities and government agencies is not taken on, how can you expect police to not also be trapped in the same web of corruption? They are just one tiny little cog in a very big wheel. The biggest factor, I believe, is the massive outpouring of wealth from the top, in the form of systematic bribes.
(Duplicate comment)
Now what can I say about forensic psychiatry? First of all, my twin brother and I were both victims of a criminal racketeering scheme involving using us as guinea pigs for unethical medical experiments on the brain. And the perpetrators did this in a complicated way using the legal system and the mafia.
This now starts to get — well, I’ll be accused of name dropping but it is real.
Harvard University was involved as was McLeans Hospital. And they used their connections to rope in some pretty high profile people in it as well.
Actually, one truly horrible “twist” I might add is how much they warned me that, not only do they have connections to the government and can rely upon the government to cover things up for them, but they ensured me they also have connections to the New York Times and pretty much have the New York Times wrapped around their little finger. Meaning, if the govt does a cover up that smells really bad, e.g., disregards major evidence, well the New York Times will not only cover up the malfeasance of the government but will also work very hard to discredit me as well.
Harvard insiders not only warned me of that but then, as if on cue, the New York Times and NYT owned Boston Globe then proceeded to do some slavish editorials showing extreme favoritism towards Harvard and shameless suck up toady behavior towards Harvard, as well as snarky attacks on a writer who criticized Harvard, so as to ensure that I’d know the threats by Harvard insiders weren’t empty threats.
And then on two well timed occasions, the NYT published articles detailing how they had been “soft on Hitler” during the holocaust and buried news of it on their back pages in order to minimize the holocaust. Everyone knew, at the time I read the New York Times very thoroughly and would not have missed that.
All stuff that might seem like coincidences, when viewed in isolation, but when viewed as a pattern, it just strikes me as too much like lighting striking at the same place over and over again too many times to be “just a coincidence.”
But one can’t say there were any smoking guns because it was all very “Clintonesque.” As in “slick willy.”
Anyway, one such time the NYT has to publish a “we were soft on Hitler” mea culpa was right after my identical twin brother was literally accused of stalking Lauren Bush, George W. Bush’s niece. And I knew something about that and knew that she and one other person were encouraging him or trying to set him up, lure him into doing something stupid so they could accuse him — and he WAS stupid, unlike me. And I will admit/agree he was REALLY stupid there, because I know what he was like.
However, the case was never adjudicated because forensic psychiatrists went and dragged their feet and dragged their feet, delaying things until a judge ruled that the charges were so weak, even if they took him to trial, he would get off on “time served.” And then my parents got a guardianship over him where they had him forced medication, under the pretense that he was schizophrenic.
However, privately I was told that what they really wanted to study was, they wanted to use healthy non-schizophrenic identical twins for a study on the brain to determine that, when studies show that schizophrenics have brain shrinkage, it’s the anti-psychotics causing the brain shrinkage and not the disease, schizophrenia causing it. And they wanted to do this research criminally, and then threaten to repeat same research in a non-criminal setting where it can’t be covered up, and agree not to do so if drug manufacturers give them massive bribes. This was Harvard and McLeans Hospital.
I was the twin who was being used as a “control.” Anyway, I had a ton of documentary evidence showing that all mental illness diagnoses of my twin brother were blatantly fraudulent and indefensible, and that my parents were lying and not to be trusted and that I had caught them lying numerous times.
All forensic psychiatrists refused to talk to me or answer phone calls but talked extensively with my parents. It was like a “white wall of silence.” Not only that, but my twin brother had a language disorder which was entirely the fault of my parents, who isolated him as a kid and deprived him of the opportunity to fully learn how to speak as a kid, so he did not fully learn how to talk until a teenager, and these late-acquired language skills were skills that could go dormant if isolated for too long — like a foreigner whose English language gets rusty if they go back to their own country for awhile.
So what the forensic psychiatrists did was to put my brother in solitary confinement, at all times when he was refusing to take medication, until his language skills got worse and worse and worse, and then he would agree to take medication to get out of solitary confinement, and then the moment he was out of solitary confinement, his language skills came back. And then they misdiagnosed his language disorder as “schizophrenia.” Except this was all super super corrupt. And in order to get away with this, they not only had to stonewall me and refuse to even talk to me, but then I then had a group of people stalk and threaten me and threaten to kill me, in order to prevent me from intervening in the guardianship proceedings that were done via a faked “schizophrenic” diagnosis. And I even got fired as well from my job, where people who were complicit with what happened to my brother worked.
And then afterwards I got date rape drugged and raped numerous times, framed by cops on false drug charges over and over again, and then almost murdered with rat poison but I survived, albeit with slight brain damage that causes occasional language issues just bad enough so nobody can deny I got brain damage from something. I was also involuntarily drugged with all sorts of unknown substances which I still to this day don’t know what they were. By criminals in my apartment, except I could not go to the police about them as they would not cooperate.
By the way, one other issue. Though I refer to me being used as a guinea pig for unethical nazi like “twin” experiments, like how Hitler experimented on identical twins in Auschwitz, there seems to be another problem with the Bush family, having to do with what the motives were for the Iraq war and war in Afghanistan.
Based on what I was told by a graduate student in the Harvard Math Department, apparently the motives for the war were to help the computer industry do a “medical revolution” quickly whereby they could cut ethical corners and do all sorts of human experimentation “quickly” and “cheaply” — which would lead to all sorts of advances in products involving robotics and medicine that could make HUGE amounts of money and assist with all sorts of interesting things, like robotic performed microsurgery, and other similar stuff.
So apparently Iraqi and Afghanistan citizens were experimented on, en masse for all this, as were soldiers blackmailed over — well, these are war crimes, you know. Some soldiers were forced to do it to Iraqis, then blackmailed because they had done it to Iraqis, and experimented on themselves.
Now let me also explain something. I was told all this secretive stuff even while Harvard did its to use its connections to the mental health system to have me tarnished as “mentally ill.” But in a way that wouldn’t really fly, so long as I was still alive. Too many contradictions, with portrayals of me drastically way off from what everyone knows my personality is.
Well, just prior to the rat poison incident, police who framed me on false charges also made false accusations of “disorderly conduct” wherein — you should have seen the way they portrayed me. These were the most embarrassing and humiliating charges anyone can be brought up on, but I wasn’t embarrassed or humiliated because everyone knows it’s not how I would act. At least so long as I was alive.
In some cases, the police made me seem like Marlon Brando in “on the waterfront” – which is not what I am like. In other cases, well, just very undignified.
How did they try to rig the rat poison incident? Well, as luck would have it, I got only a fraction of the dose they thought I had gotten, and it wasn’t lethal. Well, someone goes and when I am in the bathroom, trashes my hotel room and breaks my laptop in half so I can no longer communicate with the outside world.
Since I’d only gotten a tiny dose of rat poison, I was well enough to just run down and try to call the police after the intruder left, only to see that the front desk clerk was shocked, surprised, horrified, terrified. Because he wasn’t expecting to see me alive and well and they were in the middle of a murder that was intended to be covered up by faked forensics, and me coming down and complaining in front of everyone about an intruder is disastrous to would-be murderers in a mafia controlled hotel. He, of course, wouldn’t call the police and tried to urge me to go back to my room, so I ran and went to another business and made THEM call the police. Who took me to the hospital to save my life.
I didn’t even know I had rat poison in me. But the police knew that’s what it was and the hospital knew that’s what it was and they didn’t even need to talk to me, they knew how to treat it without asking a single question. Because they had been working in cahoots with the criminals. But I guess they had to abort it once I was seen by too many witnesses running outdoors for help in my underwear in January.
Anyway, it would appear to be the case that, if the rat poison incident had succeeded, I am guessing they would have said that I flew into a rage and trashed my hotel room and broke my laptop in half in a Donald Trump style temper tantrum.
This whole organized crime scheme was perpetrated by a bunch of progressives, I should note. So, as can be expected, they would falsify things to have me portrayed in the same way as Donald Trump, all the while if my own family dared to suggest the death was suspicious, they’d have a bunch of little twits come out of the woodwork and explain they’d had a bad encounter with me “and it was terrifying.” Or something like that.
In other words a whole bunch of little twits would have badmouthed me in very dishonest ways and I would not have been able to answer back due to being dead. For some reason, I almost think that’s funny and it also reminds me of the classical Jim Crow stereotype of the damsel in distress “terrified” about a black man who “menaced” her, therefore he needs to be lynched.
Oh yes. One other disturbing fact. The Harvard Math graduate student who told me of a “medical revolution” motive for the wars told it to me even before September 11th. Which, of course, would imply that maybe the tech industry was involved in September 11th in some way, even if in a super indirect “laundered” way.
By the way, I hate having to be the one to have to “come forward” about this type of stuff. It’s as if Harvard repeatedly set me up to be some kind of “point man” to “come forward” about lots of corruption. Or tell people about lots of corruption. As if they went out of their way to try to train me to be a conspiracy theorist.
Oh yes and, by the way, regarding Harvard corruption, in the 60’s, my mother worked as a researcher for Jean Mayer in the area of nutrition.
Oh here, this proves it, here is my mother “Lenore” on the lower left, Jean Mayer and other Harvard researchers pictured too. Weirdly enough, in part of the scrap book I didn’t include, my mother had even references a researcher who studied the affects of cold on human bodies in Germany of all places, I do believe. Isn’t that one of the experiments Hitler did on the Jews?
https://pbase.com/damian1974/image/159785949
https://associationofanaesthetists-publications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2044.2004.04034.x
Oh wait, no, here it is:
https://pbase.com/damian1974/image/159785937
“Suisse woman who studied physiological adaptation to cold.”
I don’t feel 100 percent sure if that might not have been an attempt on my mother’s part to hint about Nazi Germany or to hint as to having been privvy to info at Harvard pertaining to corruption as bad, but I suspect it because of things my mother privately told me, going all the way back to when I was a kid.
According to her, what she told me when I was a kid in the 80’s, all the nutrition research from the 60’s was bogus, and was falsified as a result of donations to Harvard (and other places) by General Mills and grains’ manufacturers. At the time, when I was told that, my mother would have come across as a nut, because the findings from the 60’s still held sway. Only starting in the 90’s, all of those studies from the 60’s were debunked and what I witnessed growing up was to see everything my mother told me as a kid being proven to have been right over and over again.
What my mother also told me, however, was of Liz Blount. Who my mother references here:
https://pbase.com/damian1974/image/159785932
Liz Blount drowned in her bathroom from an overdose of sleeping pills, and my mother was “officially” the last person to see her alive, so all witnesses said. It all worked out so police ruled it a suicide all the while — well, according to my mother, that’s why she was forced to raise my twin brother and me as guinea pigs in the first place. “They won’t put us in jail, so long as we move to Maine and raise you the way we are raising you.”
But it is also true that all of the other nutrition researchers from the 60’s knew what had happened to my mother. The truth is, the research from the 60’s was inconclusive, it’s not that studies even showed we should stop eating saturated fats and instead eat lots of grains, high carbohydrate foods, and margarine. A bunch of high status Harvard educated professional men just bullshitted their way through it and “decreed” stuff that wasn’t supported by the data. But no one whistle blowed or called them on it.
Though my mother did tell me something about knowing the woman who used the mechanical calculator to calculate the data, a woman who was “always so tired,” and for some reason that was part of how/why my mother knew the nutrition recommendations from the 60’s were bogus and a scam.
Well, they are, aren’t they? Everyone knows about that too.
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Duplicate comment.
“They are a bunch of thugs” is a nice way of putting it.
Anyway, I personally read that apology and got annoyed.
See I have been around the block a few times, you might say. I’ve strayed away from those portions of society where only “nice” upper middle class people live, and associated with some of those who would be regarded as part of the underclass. As well as, to be honest, a very wide diversity of people.
Because of that, I have seen a much larger portion of our world than most upper middle class “nice” and “respectable” college educated yuppies have seen.
The definition of racism currently being bandied about today is that very definition which is most accessible to being understood by such yuppies. And is most likely to resonate with them or at least garner their support without provoking any of their ire.
What should I say? I tend to get so disgusted, I often can’t help but be sarcastic about it. Let us just say, all “nice people” can agree that the blue collar Irish police officer who is a bit rough around the edges shouldn’t have taken his gun out and shot the “Noble Savage” black man with impeccable credentials for virtuousness — e.g., no occasional partying with illegal drugs and no melodramatic former relationships with women who will badmouth him.
Well, guess what? Those are the easy cases to be anti-racist over. However, the vast majority of cases where police shoot black men are ones where — well, ok, shootings are not the most common problem, the really bad problems are false accusations and wrongful arrests and convictions and all that. And, guess what? The vast majority of men harmed by that unfortunately happen to suffer from “toxic masculinity” which the APA goes apeshit denouncing in hysterical tones.
Which I am going to say IS systemic racism. And it’s sneaky systemic racism too.
And, you know what? Maybe I should go and say, if they can dish it out, they can take it. The APA are made up of men who are not, I would presume, “toxically masculine,” are they?
What are they instead but a bunch of slimey slippery sneaky worms who are like pond scum and like slithering sniveling Uriah Heep of David Copperfield?
America is, above all, an overly litigious society where lawyers rule. And what do lawyers say? Lawyers say, well if nobody can prove it in a black and white way, you are entitled to get away with it. Which is, of course, a legal concept. Guess what? Racism is not a legal concept and people have a right to call things racist which are other than black and white violations of political correctness and which also includes sneaky insidious stuff.
Except, of course, academic institutions and large corporations with in-house legal counsel wouldn’t like that. Because they are masters of all the sneaky insidious stuff — unlike their business competitors, the small mom and pop business owners without extensive legal educations.
Now in the professions we DO have what we might call a “guild system.” E.g., professionals are members of a “special interest group” and they have their financial interests. Big Pharma makes it so medical doctors will subscribe to whatever belief fits with the medical profession’s financial interests. However, the psychology profession will also wish to skew things as well to fit their agenda.
What’s wrong with the psychology profession today, I wonder? My experience of it is that practitioners tend to be from a segment of society that is very non-athletic, unlikely to suffer from ADHD and people who are very verbal and like to talk and who are sedentary as well.
The profession attracts certain types of people who are part of a certain culture. Oh yes, and they also have this non-scientific sort of attitude and tendency towards vagueness. I also was a scientist and math major and I would describe the whole style of the psychology profession as “non-rigorous.” Which I think is a bit of a cop out.
A whole section denounces “toxic masculinity” yet, at the same time, they define it vaguely enough so it appears to be the case that they expect the reader to “fill in the blanks” with their own personal biases, including racist ones. They won’t SAY that black Italian Latino or blue collar white men suffer from toxic masculinity, including the macho guy with the tattoos who walks with the swagger. But maybe they expect you to think that, especially if you were not one of those types and perhaps still have bad memories of being called a wuss in the school yard and having the bullies steal your lunch money. Or, at least they are not taking responsibility for how they expect other people to interpret what they say.
They can argue, as members of a profession that’s a specialty, that they — internally — are not racist and if you get that impression from the things they say about “toxic masculinity,” well that’s just your ignorance and lack of expertise showing. What did YOU major in, in college? Did you even go to college at all? That’s inherently disrespectful, though, if you would claim that your lack of clear communication accessible to the layperson is a result of your superior education and credentials. Conveying an aura of exclusivity.
When I suffered from really bad PTSD, I found dynamic exercise outdoors mountain climbing to work the best for it, not sitting down and talking to someone in an office. I do think it might have helped even more if I could have done all that outdoor exercise WITH someone else walking with me, mountain climbing with me and talking to me along the way. I’d have recovered way faster.
Is it not true that, in the soteria project, they did not merely talk to schizophrenics sitting down in offices but went for walks outdoors with them and talked with them as they were going on those walks with them?
If only they could do further studies and try to contrast the difference. In some cases talk to people sitting down in an office. In other cases, go for walks with them outdoors in nature and see.
Notice in this study, people who walked OUTDOORS grew brain cells.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/well/move/exercise-walking-brain-memory.html?smid=url-share
https://www.psypost.org/2016/07/benefits-physical-activity-depressed-varies-setting-preliminary-findings-43867
This last article in particular very clearly demonstrates the benefits of outdoor exercise:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110204130607.htm
I believe it also matters WHAT sort of outdoor setting you exercise in. I am very intuitive about my own body and I just feel that it has something to do with what you are breathing in outdoors. The olfactory. And that the outdoor environment also makes a difference. Being around a lot of trees, for instance, rather than in the city.
I also think being around high mountains matters, as well as fast running streams with cold water crashing on lots of rocks.
The current psychology profession tends to be part of the humanities majors in college which attracts people who are more sedentary and who have trouble getting themselves to exercise even when they want to. I do wonder, though, if indoor gyms might play a role in that. I was personally never able to make exercise a true habit until I combined indoor weight lifting with outdoor exercise as well. I think whatever makes outdoor exercise best for depression also makes it more habit forming as well. And it can make you develop a habit for indoor exercise at the gym.
In any case, I notice the contrast between “biogenetic beliefs” versus “psychosocial beliefs” strikes me as very limited. “Biogenetic beliefs” implies limited reliance on drugs. “Psychosocial beliefs” implies limited reliance on sedentary sit down “talk sessions” with psychologists in indoor offices.
There is a much larger world out there than those two. You CAN be a rigorous thinker who views certain things as biological and not be one of those psychiatric quack types.
Meanwhile, as for the whole psychology sphere, I note most relationships involve people DOING activities together, rather than just sitting down and talking. I used to be a member of a grass roots organization where we all worked as a team on a shared goal. Which was outside ourselves.
Maybe we can call such relationships dynamic relationships? Or dynamic interactions? As opposed to non-dynamic sitting in an office talking purely about cerebral stuff? Where the conversation is supposed to involve only your head and nothing else? As if the head and the brain is just like a separate organ in the body, to be treated separately from everything else?Kind of like how, if you have a heart problem, we just specialize on the heart and leave everything else alone.
Maybe whatever you might talk about in a “psychotherapy” setting might gell far better if you talked about it with someone in a dynamic setting rather than sedentary sit down setting. Of course, maybe I should also clarify that, probably for me that would really be very important. It might not be as important to others as for me, because everyone is different.
Even so, it’s important to recognize that diversity. Different people have different needs. Our whole mental health profession, does it truly recognize such diversity or are treatment options geared more towards the structural “needs” of different facets of the mental health profession as a business and an industry?
Where it is almost as if the profession is saying: “We do what we do, we refuse to stray beyond certain limited boundaries. We will not adjust to you as a patient. You are required to adjust to us. You have to be someone who can be fixed by what we do. And if you need something that is beyond our limited offerings, we will dig our heels into the ground and refuse to budge.”
I don’t know that you will ever be able to expect more than that from a “profession” like that, of course. Because the economic system is what the economic system is. People need to make money and people need to have lives. There is a certain structure which is compatible only with certain things.
Long ago, in the past, they used to have witch doctors. Who were somewhat sworn to poverty and lived off the donations of others. And who also, I believe, didn’t have children. There is something of a wisdom to that. You do it for its own sake, which means you believe in it and you care. Rather than, you suddenly have babies and THEY are what motivate you. Whatever is best for them.
And then, as a psychiatrist, Big Pharma is very willing to come in and help you do whatever is best for your own kids. E.g., make lots of money. The job of the patient is to have it be that whatever fixes their issues is also whatever is best for your own kids. And, if it isn’t, not to complain about it. “Too bad.”
See in Africa I think they treat schizophrenia by surrounding the person with people and social stimulation, and it works. At least in “primitive” Africa they have had this tradition.
Maybe the person’s “lack of insight” is a behavior pattern that is crying out for him to be surrounded by people, surrounded by sociability, wherein people work very hard to convince him out of his lack of insight.
Which happens to be the best treatment for schizophrenia anyway, is it not?
It’s not lack of insight. Absent chemical restraints or interventions, it’s a behavior that works best to cajol other people into providing the environment that works best for treatment.
The fact that trauma and stress seems to cause it also interesting. The person NEEDS more social support then.
I think the current psychiatric system is based on efficiency and is tied to an atomized society, that seeks to limit human sociability and which has driven human beings apart so we are more isolated from each other today than we have ever been in our entire history.
Psychiatry seeks to reinforce that isolation and “treat” those who can’t cope with it as well, all the while they do not have time to dedicate themselves properly to patients and spend the time necessary. Note how, as I mentioned, in Africa it would have been the people who know a schizophrenic very well who would have bombarded them with non-stop sociability and human connection, as a “treatment.”
Now, in the West, Mental Illness is regarded as a thing to be handled by professionals and not the community. Professionals who do not have the time. Who cannot get intimate with patients. To the contrary, arm’s length “professional” — e.g., cold — relationships are the only thing that’s allowed.
When, in fact, our brains need intimacy and social connection, and the mental health system should be regarded as something of a scam so long as it fails to recognize this.
You should see what Harvard arranged for me, when they were using me as a guinea pig for unethical medical experiments. Something similar.
On the bright side, they were testing a product that cures herpes, genital herpes, the annoying variety, and so I’m free of that, at least. However, the way it works, they will agree to withhold the cure from public knowledge in return for massive donations from pharmaceutical companies who profit off of perpetually managing herpes rather than curing it. So they needed to cover it up in some criminal way.
This criminal cover up involved having goons do stuff to me that was “tied to the mafia” and then police take me to psych wards or meth wards where psych docs can corruptly write my medical records just right so as to discredit me so I can’t say anything. And in the process, when I was asleep, I am guessing they would check to see, was I getting a sore again or was the herpes really gone?
I can allege all this, of course, but I did more than that. Prior to going to Harvard I learned about the importance of keeping records and maintaining proper paper trails. I did all that, and sent everything to a lawyer in the end. We will see what results from that.
Do you think it makes me like a modern day James Bond? Some of my experiences were kind of similar. A James Bond who had herpes for awhile. That part is not what they would put in a movie.
Well, if you are a hunter, someone will be lucky enough to kill an animal, which will be big enough and will spoil soon enough (no refrigeration) so that it is necessary to share and stupid not to.
Removed for moderation.
Yes and, guess what? I don’t know how much these rules are published but it’s an unspoken rule, at least, that if you want to get on — I think it’s SSI disability benefits. If you want to get on SSI disability benefits, their rules are somewhat rigid. A doctor can write something diagnosing you with any sort of condition and he can assure the government that you are really disabled. They won’t listen unless you are prescribed a neureleptic. The moment you are prescribed a neureleptic, that’s “proof” you are disabled enough to go on SSI.
In other words, the bureaucracy itself is corruptly mandating these prescriptions as a pre-condition for SSI benefits. Which is corporate welfare. You don’t get on SSI unless the drug company is allowed its “take.”
The same thing was also done with mostly gay men and HIV. I visited Provincetown a few times and talked to a few gay men with HIV who were on SSI. They told me it was a terrible life. SSI was only giving them $10,000 a year or less to live on. They could not make money elsewhere or work, or they’d lose not only the SSI but their health insurance (medicaid/medicare). Meanwhile, the cost of HIV drugs was, in their case, something like $50,000 a year. That’s literally how much the pharmaceutical companies were making off of HIV.
$10,000 a year for the HIV infected man to live on. $50,000 a year for the pharmaceutical companies per HIV infected man. This was a big money making scam. And, at the time, I heard rumors of several organized groups seeking to maximize the rate of HIV infections, deliberately trying to infect HIV negative men unawares. I’d ask the guys who told me about this “is this something the drug companies are sponsoring” and they’d say “probably.”
I do know one thing. This was something I could not go to the police about. They knew about it and would not do anything.
Well, even if shamanism is a fantasy and all that, perhaps it evolved because, for some reason, it’s a healthy way of thinking. Or a healthy mental exercise, to believe in it.
Well, I am not surprised to see all this research went nowhere.
And, because I think a picture is often worth 1000 words, I’m going to post a google image search of the X Files Fox Mulder’s picture of a flying saucer with the words “I want to believe” at the end of this post.
Because it’s actually true that they want to believe and are obsessed with any kind of quick fix that would involve drugs or something that can be monopolized through the patent system. And I will admit that human ingenuity in the past several decades has been remarkable and I am now typing all this on a miraculous invention called The Laptop and I fully understand why, after seeing the human race build such marvelous machines, a whole culture in academia would sprout up that would involve the love of trying to fix human beings the way you could fix a machine.
The mindset and the whole approach to the thinking of it is wrong.
Living creatures did not get put together like a machine. We evolved over a very long period of time, our brains grew, you might say. Evolved certain structures and patterns. This evolution resulted in some structures that maybe somewhat simple, yet actually there was nothing preventing such things as the structure of the brain from evolving in a manner that is so complicated or subtle that we just don’t have the tools to measure the brain this way.
Oh yes, neuroscientists are obsessed with their own tools they use to measure the brain. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I do remember hearing, in a biology course, that in many ways, life very often COULD HAVE — if it had been intelligently designed by a person — been far more simple than it was. Yet, because it evolved rather than was deliberately created, there are structures or systems in us that simply chose to go about certain tasks in the most complicated manner imaginable — stupidly complicated. At least so an engineer would say. “Why do you have to make it so complicated,” anyone would ask the engineer who designed it.
Yet, with life, it doesn’t matter. We evolved that way. All that needs to matter is that it works.
I remember having this same response to scientists who are in a debate over gender and the brain, who are not able to really see all too much in the way of systemic brain differences by gender, at least not with the current measuring tools. (Or, the differences the see are on the small side.) Maybe that all doesn’t matter, that we currently can’t see it with our measuring tools.
Actually, I majored in pure math where, if one does so, it’s possible to understand how certain brain differences that might result in schizophrenia for one person but not another, or that might cause systematic gendered behavior differences or strengths, might still in both cases result in electrical activity which, when measured, looks so similar, we will never be able to figure out the difference unless perhaps some mathematician who was a genius was able to “crack” the code and figure out the pattern difference.
I just wonder, how about if scientists tried to think of Darwin and natural selection, and then ask themselves, what could mental illness be in the brain? Why would it have evolved?
I have written one post about how maybe depression might be something intended to encourage people to live near tall mountains which have guaranteed rainfall even in drought yet are uncomfortable otherwise. The mere fact that women get it more often and men tend to feel compelled, socially, to do what women want and cater to their feelings, even if they seem “irrational” also possibly connected to all that. Women would have forced everyone to move back to the colder mountains after everyone — during a temporary period of lots of brain — moved to a nice warm dry valley. Some women just couldn’t tolerate it. They just didn’t feel right. They wanted to go back to the mountainous areas. The men were annoyed about it but reluctantly agreed. Then the climate got dryer for awhile. People without depression tendencies starved.
As for schizophrenia — that strikes me as tied to paranoia and anxiety and fear. Now I have a tendency towards anxiety but not schizophrenia or psychosis. I also was a victim of the mafia and went through a period where I feared for my life. Oddly enough, after surviving all that, I still have some amount of ptsd and anxiety that I didn’t have before. But, in so many ways, gone are all sorts of inhibitions I used to have. In a way, it was freeing.
It’s interesting, though, how I think maybe my mind just feels a “need” to find something to be a little scared over yet overcome. After the PTSD from the criminal stuff subsided enough, the “fear” needed to go somewhere — so it “transferred” into a fear of heights. I am sometimes afraid of driving over bridges, for instance.
I feel like schizophrenia is related to anxiety somehow. I just wonder, though, maybe the part of our brains originally geared towards hunting in the jungle where, if one steps on something wrong one can fall and really get hurt, or if one is not alert, one can get hurt by an animal, maybe that part of our brains needs exercise and modern day society doesn’t give us enough of that type of mental exercise.
Studies say if you put people in “sensory deprivation” chambers for long enough, e.g., total dark where they are floating on water and seeing and hearing and feeling nothing — they will eventually start to hallucinate. Maybe the boringness of modern day society and excessive amount of security and safety fails to exercise the brains of some who were evolved to be living in a dangerous jungle like environment.
Oh yes, now didn’t the soteria project involve going for walks with schizophrenics and just talking to them? That’s the thing. Schizophrenia or paranoia would tend to force people to not go out in the jungle alone but bring someone with them. I think it’s interesting how they didn’t merely talk to them but they went for walks with them. I bet the walks were very important and sitting down across a table in a sedentary office from someone just isn’t going to be the same.
Here’s the thing. Why can’t academics go and be interdisciplinary about it? Combine all the sciences. Think about human evolution and ask what are the evolutionary origins of mental illness? Speculate the way I am speculating. And then follow through by designing actual studies that would explore such theories, and then see if they have any validity. And then try to use one’s imagination to figure out what sorts of things might help.
Except, this way of thinking is theoretical in the exact same way as Einstein was theoretical about black holes. Had we just limited ourselves to telescopes and never been theoretical in the way Einstein was, we would never have figured out that black holes exist. Because, like how i said maybe parts of the brain are complex beyond our ability to ever be able to “see,” black holes also are incapable of being directly observed.
Oh yes. Another thing. Intuition and what we call “psychic” ability. Some of it may well be something tied to quantum mechanics in the brain — and quantum mechanics IS weird in the sense of sometimes having “retrocausality” with future events in tiny circuitry capable of influencing the past or present somehow. And tiny circuitry is exactly what our brain is full of. And then, go and be Darwinistic about it. If it was theoretically possible for the brain to evolve certain types of intuitive skills that harness quantum mechanics and help one sometimes see into the future in some ways, often with respect to sensing danger, well natural selection does say, if it could have evolved, it would have evolved as it would have given us MAJOR survival advantages.
If that’s what it is, it would be SUPER complex. Then again, nature does not favor or mandate simplicity. Some of those academics who argue that psychic ability is “absurd” have not thought that maybe parts of the brain are mind bogglingly complex. Because there was nothing stopping us from evolving that degree of complexity. It is actually superstitious and un-scientific to argue “it couldn’t possibly be true.”
The scientific thing to do would be to be open minded enough to try to theoretically explore the topic. “How might it be true?” Which most academics won’t do — because they are being paranoid and fear looking “superstitious.” Because academia is a pretty intolerant place full of back stabbing and intimidation, is it not? Culture of intellectual intimidation. Everyone afraid of saying something out of place.
https://images.newrepublic.com/82a6d0770aeaafbae8f26bf40a822b9b79a5c412.png?w=800
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“These days, we in psychiatry are beholden to this idea that neuroscience will produce magic bullet solutions on the molecular level and that we can identify everything in the brain. This ideology ends up reinforcing the same class and race hierarchies that we were discussing. It presents itself as neutral because you’re talking about a brain. It doesn’t matter where somebody lives. It doesn’t matter the color of their skin, what their job is. It’s just the brain. It shouldn’t matter where they live, what they do, who they are.”
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Maybe these psychiatrists should talk to the right kind of mathematicians. Abstract mathematicians.
Calling some things a brain disease does NOT mean there will be magic bullet solutions.
Like, ok, take cancer. There is a tumor located in one spot and you can see it.
In contrast, psychiatric illness, in the brain, is like a complex weather pattern, and how well can we predict or control the weather? This takes chaos theory.
There will be no magic bullet solution as psychiatrists hope. If anything, the best science may well dash their hopes for one, all the while perhaps the math behind it might be complex enough so very few people can really understand it and xenophobia within various professions will prevent it from being accepted or recognized.
I will note, however, that some research suggests outdoor exercise is capable of stimulating brain growth — growth of a nature that is capable of rectifying just the imbalances that would lead to depression anxiety and paranoia.
Here’s the thing. Parts of the brain grow and shrink, depending on what sensory experiences we have and what we are trying to learn. Even pregnant women experience brain shrinkage during pregnancy, all so that their brains have room to remodel themselves in compatibility with the nuances of what their infant best needs re: social stimulation.
Now I just wonder, is the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness still being taught today? I know, long ago, Rob Whitaker said it was a bogus theory that was utterly lacking in evidence. Just something medical schools decided to declare in an evidence free way because it helped Big Pharma market drugs better.
Well, the whole issue of brain growth and shrinkage utterly discredits the whole “chemical imbalance” theory. On top of it, Rob Whitaker had problems with anti-depressants and other psych drugs because they acted as ENABLERS. Once put on those drugs, the brain would never fix the problem that caused these issues, and instead become more and more dependent on the drugs, as well as experience cognitive decline.
It made me think, depression is likely an activity imbalance in the brain. But the brain needs to make more connections or make some connections stronger in order to fix it. That’s where outdoor exercise might work. Medications prevent all that from happening entirely, though. The underlying problem caused by the drugs only get worse.
Here’s the thing. There are many things about our modern society that create conditions for poor mental health. I don’t know that academia is too interested in studying them or exposing them. The whole economic system depends on them not doing so.
It’s not just the influence of Big Pharma which is the problem. All sorts of other swaths of the business community might find their interests threatened if we couldn’t just say “don’t worry about changing your lifestyle — we can provide you a quick fix with drugs.”
What about long work hours? What about excessive time indoors? What about homes that are energy efficient but keeping out the outdoor air worsens our mental health? What about the influence of nutrition as well as poor physical shape? Excess work hours and sleep deprivation?
I would think, actually, that sleep deprivation might be the worse of it. Interestingly enough, I do feel as if sleep deprivation is way worse due to our sedentary lifestyles. People who are working hard physically exerting themselves hard all day will end up sleeping extra soundly those hours they do sleep, so they end up ok. If you are sedentary all day, you won’t sleep as soundly, and the side effects of sleep deprivation are so much worse.
Nice questions to ask, right? All of them will carve deeply into corporate america’s current privileged existence it enjoys with respect to the matter of long work hours and cheap labor. A privilege you will notice it is obsessively interested in preserving, all you need do is read some of the articles in the feminist sections of mainstream publications like the New York Times, The Atlantic, etc., which obsess about female labor in ways which — well, ok they SAY this is all for “the good of women” but, please. Read enough of it, and you can tell it is about corporations and money. Even if you don’t have any education or insight about economics, I think you can tell. But you can definitely tell if you are economically literate.
If the labor supply went down, wages would have to go up, and would cut into their profit margins. But women do try to pull out from work to spend more time with the kids, so it’s a constant tug of war. A constant battle to keep the labor supply of women up, hence the non-stop propagandizing. Mercenary is the word I like to use to describe all this. In a somewhat crass way too.
Oh yes, take the economics of free childcare versus mandatory paid family leave.
Free childcare will increase the labor pool of women — supply v. demand means free childcare will make wages of women go down. Mandatory family leave will decrease the labor pool of women, making women’s wages go up. Democrats now want two years of free child care and only 12 weeks of paid leave — lopsided ratio means the child care is going to reduce wages far more than paid leave will increase wages. On top of it, as wages go down, women will need ot work longer hours and NEED the free childcare more and spend less time with their own children. Not a SINGLE media publication out there has pointed that economic reality out.
This shows you just how much our whole establishment is enslaved to the interests of corporation over and above the interests of people.
I note, our brains are developing faster during our infancy than at any time in our development. We were meant to have our mother there to help nurture and stimulate our developing mind. Daycare is absolutely an unhealthy environment for that.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-of-early-extensive-day-care
However, the needs of corporations and the running of the economy happen to be coming first here.
By the way, I can’t help but be Darwinistic about this whole topic. We were evolved so as to have a mental need to engage in regular exercise, even if we were being fed enough, so we’d be in good physical shape to do the hunting and/or gathering necessary to get food when times were tough.
It also is the case that the best climates for mental health are in mountainous areas with lots of running fresh water, lots of cold streams and brooks and rivers. Well, let’s say the climate in a particular valley area was suitable for human life during a warm spell but then dried up when the sun got colder. If some of us have mental health problems in a valley area, and those with mental health problems force everyone else to live near the mountains, when a dry spell hits for a long time, they will all survive and those humans without such mental health problems won’t.
Even though the valley is more comfortable than the mountainous area is.
Um, wow. I think, in some ways, depression and ptsd are neurological — but just in such a super complicated way, science won’t figure out directly how they should be treated. Humans evolved with instincts that help them instinctively “know” or be able to “figure out” how they should be treated.
Just as, I think religion evolved, organized religion evolved, because it has always been some form of societal construct that results in positive mental health rather than negative mental health.
That is a scientific way one can think of it. Dry and scientific. And no fun.
But I believe in the spiritual too and feel there is no sharp dividing line between the “dry scientific” and “spiritual.” I do suspect some intuition and foresight maybe could be seen as quantum mechanics in the brain.
Meaning, it’s “scientific.” Even so, I would still not dismiss the spiritual.
I DO think a big problem with modern day society is that science does not respect or even positively DIS-respects the spiritual.
Which is strange and awful — and also anti-scientific too. It fully makes sense to argue that the spiritual amounts to collective wisdom we evolved over eons, because it gave us a competitive advantage.
Just like how maybe WE as babies are not born knowing how to walk, yet deer are born knowing to walk, because they evolved that ability HARD WIRED in the brain, we evolved the tendency towards spirituality HARD WIRED IN THE BRAIN.
Scientists and academics need to RESPECT THE SPIRITUAL much more. Respect it AND respect it AS something that is scientific. Respect it in a scientific way.
Rather than, we have a form of ghettoization today where those who would embrace the spiritual try to define themselves overly in contrast to science, and in such ways so that they don’t really have the best language for describing the various spiritual or psychic phenomenon they both believe in and experience and know others who experience.
I have been both very scientifically trained and also with lots of spiritual ability and someone who hung out around psychics, lots of psychics, and maybe was “trained” in that too, in some kind of informal way. But all in such a way so that I can speak both languages. As well as see the scientific consistency in much of my intuition.
Much of which I have actually written down, over the course of many years, and ended up stored in my computer files. It’s very interesting, actually.
Anyway, what’s the difference between “psyche” and neurology? Maybe “psyche” is neurological in such an extraordinarily complicated way that we will never be able to have advanced mathematics complex enough or sophisticated enough to be able to study it using tools of neurology. But the psyche evolved along with innate wisdom about the psyche, enabling us to rely on that innate wisdom, when scientific tools would fail, and we call that reliance on innate wisdom “psychology.”
But here’s the thing. Psychology can be distorted and corrupted, in a societal way where the whole society ends up somewhat unhealthy. And when that takes place, the only way it can be fixed is by people who believe in themselves strongly and believe in their intuition very strongly, and who resist the lemming-like mindset of the herd. And who resist it strongly enough so the herd eventually rights itself. Here is an interesting fact about human society. All of society can start going in the wrong direction, in a lemming like manner, where the majority all “agree” with one thing that is wrong. All “agree” — but not really too fervently.
It only takes a VERY few group of people in society, who are REALLY grounded and who REALLY believe in themselves. To speak up, speak the truth, hold their ground, and not back down. And get the majority to wake up, think about things, and change their minds.
Feminist legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, wrote a book called The Butterfly Effect recently. The title of her book recognizes that same point.
“Why not leave the brain work to neurologists and return psychology (and psychiatry, if you could ever drag them away from their love affair with drugs and other toxic interventions) to the actual study of their subject, the psyche?”
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Because mental health issues, all of them, ARE of the brain. What is the “psyche” anyway? It’s ill defined.
Everything is neurological. I am a victim of brain injuries so I know. Also, sitting down and talking to a therapist? Honestly, the truth is, we are brainwashed into doing that — rather than a whole bunch of other things — because therapists need jobs and steady careers.
I believe the soteria project involved people talking to schizophrenics and curing them of it — not sitting down in an office but WALKING WITH THEM. The walking with them part VERY important.
Academia just has this psychology profession, which makes a lot of money. And it all works out so the (fake) notion is that you solve “psychological problems” by going to some psychologist, sitting down with them in their office, and paying them money.
I have seen therapists in the past and, frankly, found it all to be really stupid. The social stimulation is good. But you can get that anywhere. The idea that you need to see a “professional” is — well, maybe it’s not 100 percent a scam, but to some degree it is. We used to have religion that involved teaching universal moral values, and I am not big on Christianity, but I have to say, the advantage of going to church is that enough people in the community get innoculated as to the right values of living in a social society, so it’s almost like you don’t need professional psychologists as much, if everyone went to church once a week — or something that was LIKE church. After all, I agree Christianity is obsolete, but something more modern should be put in its place to fill the gap it left. There is a NEED for that in human society.
By the way, are you aware that Adolph Hitler did a ton of experiments in psychology? Well, not him personally. Nazi doctors. And some of what they figured out was imported to America, tricks to be used by the mafia.
And then George W. Bush also goes and pays psychologists on some project regarding psychological torture and terrorism. Which everyone agrees was not a terror prevention program.
Who knows what their interests were or what their agenda was. But the truth is, people usually have a pretty good understanding of their own self interests and are not stupid about it.
For some reason, the conventional wisdom is that the government war on terror apparatus was “just being real stupid” with regard to their obsession with psychological torture and terrorism. The truth is that, as regards how to get confessions, no new research ever needed to be done. It’s common knowledge what works and what doesn’t work.
I really feel, though, that psychological torture as a tool in the hand of would be terrorists, who wish to use it to incite OTHERS into committing terrorism, strikes me as much more of a research area where interesting things could be explored.
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The truth is, we are living in the dark ages when it comes to psychiatry and mental health and understanding the brain.
Also, another interesting thing is, the brain is a mathematical system. Where I do think brain activity — and imbalances in brain ACTIVITY — can be seen similarly to what physicists call “standing waves.” You know how, in the brain, when one part of the brain gets extra active, it will selectively activate certain other parts of the brain while selectively dampening other parts. Similar to how, in a container of water, you will have several waves with peaks and troughs.
When I was recovering from criminally induced PTSD via mountain climbing and other stuff like that, first of all I noticed that the same exercise indoors didn’t help, it had to be outdoors, and then I intuited, the biggest difference is the olfactory stimulation you get outdoors. Sure enough, olfactory sense networks with a bigger part of the brain than any other sense, meaning the capacity for olfactory sense to stimulate the brain or affect stimulation is bigger than anything else.
The olfactory sense stimulates the brain — even while muscles produce chemicals in response to exercise, which get into your blood stream and go right to your brain. I will say, I think various parts of the brain will ignore those chemicals, if not being stimulated via olfactory sense the most (and the other senses too) at the same time. But, somehow, these chemicals plus the sensory stimulation causes the part of the brain that over reacts in response to ‘fight or flight’ adrenaline and causes PTSD — and which probably is implicated in schizophrenia which is something like a malfunction that is still tied to the brain’s “sensing of danger” — to re-evaluate, re-program, and change course. Permanently, though.
As someone who took courses in math and physics, though, as I see myself slowly overcoming PTSD via mountain climbing, I visualized the process via thinking of physics and standing waves. The anxiety/fear/PTSD part was like a whole part of my brain had gotten way over stimulated or too liable to stimulate too intensely. Too active. And so strong, it stifled and totally clamped down on and completely shut down other parts of the brain more willing to re-evaluate “danger” and agree I was no longer in danger then (which I no longer was — but knowing that in an “intellectual” sense wasn’t the same as REALLY knowing that in ALL of my brain).
The mountain climbing, I just know, helped to calm down the anxiety part some, helped to stimulate the strengthen the other parts capable of keeping that anxiety part in check. Not just temporarily but, over time, permanently. But, actually, part of it is I distracted myself by becoming involved with intellectual stuff — which meant kind of “growing” a different part of my brain, which then got strong enough so as to shut down the over active “anxiety/fear” part.
I ought to note, when studying math, I did a bit of set theory and then on my own started to think of how you could use that material to mathematically model the brain — which I later found out was a topic that had already been invented before I thought of it. “Neural networking,” it is called.
I think they ought to get mathematicians, and good ones too, to start to think about the field of mental health, and see what they can imagine. Because I bet you could make some breakthroughs. Most psychiatrists, I note, are not mathematicians. And do not have mathematical literacy, which is something where it’s all hard wired into the brain. You either have it or you don’t. If you don’t have it, you will be incapable of being educated into it.
So I imagine most psychiatrists would not like my suggestions at all. Especially the male ones who guard their academic “territory” very ferociously. I’ve been through this before. As a teenager I was involved in grassroots politics and wrote letters to the editor of local papers, including an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal at age 19. This was in Cambridge, MA. Well, I remember one Robert Winters who loved being an expert and talking in an authoritative way, like how some psychiatrists are. Well I was shy and didn’t talk, usually. But there was one time I’m standing with people in a conversation with Robert Winter about something, they are talking about something I know about. So I bravely muster up the courage to pipe in and say something. The moment I start talking, he instantly and very aggressively interrupts, cuts me off, and says something authoritative just to prevent me from joining in. It was clear he felt “threatened” by me, as a lot of people say.
“They’re just threatened by you,” I have heard over and over again. Referring to my intellect, not my muscles, I note.
Anyway, they should have mathematicians join the field of mental health, and see if they can use their math skills to somehow gain insights that might help. However, they will have to watch out for the attack dogs presently in the field. When I was at Harvard, I was told by administrators all about how each field is like it’s own fiefdom, where they ward off outsiders, and this results in intellectual segregation that is very bad. It is possible for people of another discipline to contribute insights to a discipline different from their’s. All sorts of amazing work could be done. It all isn’t done because of the territoriality of people in each discipline.
Academia ends up being pretty stupid because of that. I would say the social studies, in particular, are especially dumbed down due to lack of contributions from people with anything even approaching rudimentary math skills. Actually, my mother had math skills and tried to go into sociology. Let’s just say, it was quite a disaster. Ostracism, backstabbing, etc.
And I am not surprised. Every time I read an article that discusses sociology or anthropology or even theories regarding evolution, as someone with rigorous math skills, the stupidity and mathematical ineptness I can obviously see from the people presently in the field is very annoying. I get inspired to write facebook posts or blogs contributing my own insights, based on my mathematical mind, and I think they are good ones too. But no one, currently in the field, ever thought of them.
Can you imagine trying to socialize with existing academics in a field like that? And, of course, I am a socially sensitive person who would know better than to explain to people that they are being stupid about something.
Actually, one of my ideas I had re: evolution was, I noticed that the best way to deal with anxiety and depression is not merely to do outdoor exercise. Location and climate matters too. The white mountains of New Hampshire which are somewhat high altitude, and have lots of streams with cold water crashing over rocks makes the biggest positive impact of all.
Why would we have evolved that way? Because routine climate change occurs. Absent those mental health issues, during wet periods, human beings might have chosen to move to much easier-to-navigate valleys that would, in time of drought, dry up causing everyone to die. But not if depression and anxiety – especially among women – forced everyone to live closer to mountainous areas. Which will be the places that stay wet in times of drought, unlike the valleys and plains.
The moment people move — in wet periods — to the seemingly more welcome valley, some women, more prone to depression, will start saying “I just don’t feel right, I feel scared, I want to go back to the mountains, I felt better there.”
Oh yes, here is the facebook post I wrote about it.
https://www.facebook.com/damian.schloming/posts/10220089305435377
Isn’t it a theory that ought to be considered potentially valid?
Now in my case, well I really do suffer from ADHD and a tendency towards anxiety, but that is all. And so does my twin brother. We were given fake diagnoses and lied to by doctors at Harvard who wanted to conduct unethical medical experiments on us — and it’s a long complex story.
However, eventually — well, the sickening part of it was to conduct a series of horrific crimes perpetrated by the mafia, cover these crimes up, and then fraudulently portray the very severe PTSD and trauma as spontaneously appearing symptoms of schizophrenia — and they hoped they would be able to claim no one had done anything to us.
I was legally savvy. My twin brother wasn’t and I couldn’t get him to listen to me about the importance of keeping paper trails. Anyway, I kept paper trails and took them to a lawyer and they proved the abuse badly enough so people were willing to admit that I’d been abused and my then fragile mental state (not what I started out with, what the perpetrators caused in me by what they did) was the result of abuse and very serious crimes. Actually, I even had physical damage from some pretty undeniable rapes, it was that bad. As well as clear cut brain damage.
However, had I not gotten a lawyer at the right time, they would have declared it all schizophrenic — and then if you put someone suffering from that kind of PTSD on anti-psychotics, it inhibits the part of the brain that might have the capacity to recover on its own.
They know that too, and the sickening part of psychiatry is how often they will misdiagnose trauma, and how much they know if such a misdiagnosis leads to an anti-psychotic, they can use the anti-psychotic to permanently incapacitate an abused and exploited victim. And, yes, they do this fully knowing what they are doing, it’s that evil.
Actually, in my case, it wasn’t just trauma trauma. I had head trauma inflicted which, again, makes it even harder for the brain to re-develop the connections it must develop to overcome PTSD. And would have made an anti-psychotic even more debilitating and detrimental to my recovery.
But that is all theoretical. And that is all the danger I knew about, hence my rigorous keeping of paper trails and legal savvy I used to protect myself from that.
However, even after getting the attorney, I was still in a very debilitated state of mind. Terrible PTSD which could easily look like schizophrenia if you didn’t know what had happened to me.
The one thing that worked the best for my recovery was outdoor exercise and mountain climbing. For some reason, exercise combined with exposure to nature — which stimulates the olfactory sense, biggest interface between one’s environment and the brain — helped my brain overcome those ingrained “ruts” I was stuck in with PTSD. And stimulated it to grow new and more positive connections.
Actually, there was a study done on elderly people which shows OUTDOOR walking — but not indoor exercises — stimulates the brain to grow more brain cells and make more connections.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/well/move/exercise-walking-brain-memory.html?smid=url-share
I am certain that overcoming PTSD — but also probably overcoming other issues like schizophrenia — is best done by stimulating the brain to grow more brain cells like this. And I speak of this as a victim of trauma and ptsd and brain damage leading to certain cognitive impairments. Mountain climbing outdoors IS like a drug that impacts one’s brain. Also, the environment one does it in counts too. Higher altitude mountains with lots of cold running water crashing over rocky streams has a better or at least different impact compared to hotter, lower altitude and more “stagnant” air environments.
Hiking the white mountains of New Hampshire will have a different impact from hiking short rolling hills in areas of New England near sea level, even though both are good.
Anti-psychotics does the exact opposite of grow brain cells. It causes brain shrinkage. It’s the exact opposite of the right thing to do. They act as enablers. This is as bad as ancient rome prescribing lead poisoning to the upper middle class.
Actually, part of the unethical experiments I was forced to endure involved many years of excruciating physical pain due to an untreated muscle spasm, which even when treated caused me a neurological pain syndrome that is hard to recover from and hard to shake off.
I now, occasionally, have fake pain in certain spots, that my brain neurologically “creates” — or gets fooled into thinking is real — that is a result of me having spent 25 years in untreated excruciating pain. Fibromyalgia is what it’s sometimes called. However, most people with fibromyalgia were born with it whereas I had it programmed in me due to a horrendous experience that’s almost unheard of.
Anyway, what I suffer from now are what could be described as pain hallucinations. E.g., the same pain that used to be in my upper back left shoulder blade area will remap itself to different parts of my body, which then will sometimes “feel” like they are in the same pain I used to have before.
The moment I was informed it was a pain syndrome and not real injuries in those spots, I instantly started to “mind over matter” start to will the pain away and mentally take control over the pain and start training myself into mentally reducing it. That went on for awhile during a two year haitus from mountain climbing. And I improved the pain somewhat. Then I start regularly mountain climbing in New Hampshire again — and the mountain climbing itself DRASTICALLY reduced the pain.
I can say, the mountain climbing stimulates your brain into “re-evaluating” what IS reality and what ISN’T reality. Re-evaluating the “pain” it was wrongly feeling into “not-pain.” But I think PTSD is the same way, and likely schizophrenia probably is too. As well as depression. Your brain can do re-processing of stuff. Re-programming of stuff. Somehow, it is stimulated to automatically do it much more in an environment involving outdoor exercise in nature. And I think, if it were researched better, we would learn why.
My gut feeling tells me, your brain is sensitive to what you are breathing in, the olfactory sense, as well as the exercise and the exertion. But olfactory stimulation in the absence of exercise and exertion won’t work. I just know it’s the combination that does it. Also, mountain climbing involves exercise on un-even terrain — not the monotonous “same movement all the time” repetition of a gym treadmill, which also means your whole entire nervous system is being stimulated and exercised as you mountain climb. Forcing your brain to be “there.” Monotonous treadmill — your brain can fall asleep while you do that. It’s not the same.
Thinking of evolution, our brains developed in environments where, when we trekked long distance through unfamiliar territories, our brains had to be on the look out for dangerous predators or other dangers. Schizophrenia and ptsd are diseases related to paranoia and the sensing of danger. Maybe our brains were developed so we “need” some amount of the conditions associated with real danger in our lives, or it’s like — I once heard about how people, if put in sensory deprivation chambers for too long, will start to hallucinate. Maybe modern day civilized life is, to some people, too much like a sensory deprivation chamber.
Well, I have a rather complex paper trail of evidence on my computer, from when I lived in this lower income black neighborhood of Dorchester, that backs up the contention that large corporations, wishing to make money off of illegally involuntary “Nazi style” medical experiments on marginalized people (e.g., the poor, or black people, etc.), will resort to using both the psychiatric system, crooked cops and mafia connected gangs to accomplish their aims.
The idea is that, in a neighborhood that is poor enough, the mafia can get away with things and residents there can be intimidated into denying any knowledge or pretending to have witnessed nothing. You will have gangs engage in rather bizarre elaborate “conspiracies” or antics, outside in the neighborhood, playing minds games on and otherwise targetting and hazing a particular victim — often after they have been plied with drugs. Then same individuals will engineer some “incident” that results in police being called, police then go and take the person to a hospital, which may conduct any number of unethical experiments on them (for which they are getting bribed with corporate money, or else maybe some research institution like Harvard got the bribe), and then they will falsify records just right and accuse the victim of suffering “psychosis” (usually drug induced).
The key thing is, if the victim later on tries to make any accusations, part of their story is going to include the rather fanciful antics of the “mafia” like gangs in their neighborhood, just prior to them being taken to the hospital where bizarre things were done to them. All neighbors will deny responsibility or knowledge, the victim is genuinely going to look like they really did hallucinate the whole thing into existence.
It’s a very clever cover up.
I was personally a would-be victim of such a scheme. However, I did a number of things that ensured some of the abuse wouldn’t get covered up. For instance, some of the “Hazing” involved death threats and other bizarre threatening stuff communicated to me online on my computer — which computer hackers from the online server (not in my apt) the communications were going through systematically kept deleting, leaving no evidence I’d been threatened and harassed. I started hitting print screen and saving to microsoft word, systematically capturing those threatening antics, e.g., the threats which would appear in my inbox, and then magically disappear via computer hacker, in a manner intended to make it look like they’d never been sent and I’d just imagined them. In one instance, I had a print screen of a particular folder obviously full of threatening emails — and a minute or two later, a print screen of the same folder, with all the threatening emails gone. And this was a folder where no one, not even me, can delete old messages, they automatically disappear after 30 days and not before. That — and a whole bunch of other things I documented as well — was enough to prove it.
In my case, I was experimented on with pharmaceuticals that were not approved of by the FDA. Including — well, I believe the perpetrators have a successful cure for genital herpes they are covering up, in return for bribe money from Big Pharma. Just one example of the kind of corruption that is out there.
But I do need to note. The threat to fraudulently diagnose victims of crimes “crazy” or with some fabricated mental health diagnosis in order to cover up crimes perpetrated by the mafia is very common. And endemic to psychiatry. Which, by now, is a discipline that networks with other medical industries.
Actually, in my case, I believe some of the faked diagnoses of me, even while not very credible, were strategically clever enough so as to render my potential testimony against any numbers of criminals “not quite credible enough to indict them.” These criminals — who were mostly drug users doing what they had to do in order to party with cocaine and crystal meth safely — were later blackmailed and forced to submit to unethical nazi style medical experiments done on them, in the arena of computers, robotics and medicine. Testing out such devices on them as robotic rectums intended eventually for elderly incontinent.
Again, use of the psychiatric system proved to be very advantageous for this kind of plot. The key thing was for medical doctors to tarnish me with bogus psych diagnoses making my testimony just questionable enough so that, if no one else came forward so as to back me up regarding my contentions that I was a victim of certain crimes, no one could be indicted on my testimony alone. And then third parties helped blackmail the perpetrators by waiting in the wings, threatening to come forward in a manner that might bolster my testimony, but agreeing not to do so, if the criminals submitted themselves for medical experiments.
This is the kind of subtle and sophisticated criminal racketeering that goes on, using psychiatry. But, I mean, with psychiatry being leveraged for the purposes of organized crime in ways as elaborate as THIS, please, how can it possibly be a credible discipline with respect to actually trying to help people with their mental health?
You simply cannot do good mental healthcare, when a huge portion of psychiatry has been distorted so as to make it useful for criminal racketeering.
Removed for moderation.
Removed for moderation.
Let me copy and paste a comment I made on Actress Ashley Judd’s facebook page. One of many comments explaining the benefits of outdoor exercise but I’ve done it lots and have to say, figuring out what exercise works best IS a science in and of itself. It is a cop out for the medical system to say “just exercise” without saying how.
What exercise you do should be a whole entire field of study.
But, it is also true that not everyone is the same. And I was thinking, why is it that I find — I am fair skinned white but partly Italian — that the mountain air really helps but lots of running water is important and high altitude mountains are important? And then I thought, if my ancestors tended to be prone to depression and anxiety UNLESS they lived in just the right environment, well that’s why they stayed in those colder harsher mountainous areas during 30-50-100 year periods where the weather on earth was very wet, and didn’t migrate to lower lying areas, which then get too dry during droughts so everyone who migrated to the wrong areas ended up dying.
Just a thought. But it’s the type of thinking that would be useful to do in situations involving mental health. Another thing. I’ve also commented on the debate over whether there are ingrained gender differences. Corporations also want to pretend there are none, we are all the same, women who want to be “women” and not be “just like men” were brainwashed and need to be brainwashed back — an argument eerily similar to those who say homosexuals should just get over it via “conversion therapy.” But, when I thought about whether there really ARE ingrained gender differences or not, and I remembered how math works and all, my mathematical intuition tells me that a single population that lives in the same environment for a long enough time without mixing it up will develop increasingly ingrained gender differences IN THAT ENVIRONMENT (probability theory says that will be so given a small number of non-overlapping distinct sex genes free to ‘go their own way’ re: evolution and natural selection). But, there is no guarantee that the gender differences that develop in a population IN ONE PARTICULAR ENVIRONMENT will at all be the same as those that developed among humans living in a different environment. The way humans have migrated and interbred with people from completely different environments means, everyone is mixed up. We are less “standardized” now than at any other time in human history. Medicine ought to reflect that. Diversity does not mean we need to force everyone into the same standardized box. The opposite is true. Yet, the “magic of the free market” idea with economic centralization means, the more “diverse” our society becomes in terms of being homogenized, the more corporations just want to pretend everyone is standardized so as to facilitate their mass marketing to everyone.
From my facebook post.
“I have to ask, why would I just feel it that the mountain air — from high altitude mountains but not lower mountains, and they have to be wet and have a lot of running water that splashes lots — have positive mental health effects, especially depression and anxiety which COMPELS you to seek help to fix it? And women are more prone to it than men? And, go away from that environment, and you are more prone to depression and anxiety? I just remembered my meteorology class from high school. What happened to those of our ancestors eons ago? And their neighbors who did not survive? There were droughts, and there were wet periods, and the wet periods sometimes lasted longer than one or two or three generations. Long enough for people’s memories passed down from their ancestors to be weak. Tall mountains with certain altitudes will STILL have rain in the droughts. Those humans who moved to flatter areas with low hills during wet periods all DIED when there were droughts. Those who couldn’t live there because they got depressed — or at least the women got depressed and the older men did — they stayed in the mountain areas that were always going to stay wet. And survived. So, when I say, hiking in NH helped me so much with PTSD and even helped my (former) bronchitis, permanently, and that it was the air there, and the air in small hills down in Rhode Island is NOT the same and won’t work as well, isn’t it interesting that science could explain that? Also, if you are a man and in a bad area, you will want to avoid that depression and anxiety by getting lots of exercise and staying in good physical shape. So, in the drought, you can still get the hell out of there to better environments anyway despite not enough food. If you are a woman — better not stray too far from a hospitable environment. Consider it a very ingrained “memory” of the history of weather conditions. ** Outdoor exercise new hampshire mountains **”
I sort of think that the whole model corporations follow where it is all about making money and marketability is inherently anti-science.
So long as they can figure out some way to rope people in to using their products and spending money on their products, they don’t care. Even if it’s a sledgehammer and this is the brain and neurosurgery we are talking about.
It’s terrible to go study a drug on a general population when, in fact, there is a huge amount of biological diversity in the human race. With origins in hot areas of Africa for some, while others migrated north to very cold areas.
If they really were serious about solving health problems, they would try to figure out ways to isolate and segregate and study sub populations of human beings, where they segregate out those who have the exact same brain characteristic — scientifically determined. And psychiatry, in its current state, is pathetically not a science, I would suspect.
I have long been a fan of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, where they talk of the magic of the free market, and in some cases that works. But, with health care, well … see I kind of know what the problem is.
There are people out there who are creative and who are scientific, and who have pride in their work. When it comes to health, if they ever REALLY tried to figure out how to work on the mind and on conditions like depression or anxiety and get it right, they will probably end up concluding that it is complicated. Each sub population they can isolate and figure out the problems of will need a different solution. It might not be what the company donating money for research is going to be able to make much money off of. But such scientists will continue such studies because they like being creative and smart and they have a sense of pride in their work that is OTHER THAN the “profit motive.”
Especially when, actually, the “profit motive” is that of a corporation — which is economically centralized inasmuch as one corporation will produce one product that is meant to be distributed over a large area and serve a lot of people, with the more people buying it ensuring the bigger profits. That principle works excellently when the problem — as it’s been for most of human history — is making sure human beings and civilization has enough food to keep everyone alive and no famines.
Food is food. We can all pretty much eat the same thing and stay alive. The “magic of the free market” works wonderfully when the goal is to get people a lot of food.
With healthcare, science and nuance are what matters. Corporate Donations to academia stifles creativity and researchers who are there because they are scientists and have egos and care about creativity more than money hate it.
Oh and that’s a bit of a problem with a certain brand of “feminism” promoted by corporate/academic interests, with rigid and self serving definitions of “gender equality” that involve “advancing women” who would rather be mothers and who are grudgingly doing it for the money solely in order to pay back exorbitant student loans for skyrocketing tuition rates. They don’t have the sense of pride in their work and desire for their work to be MORE than just the making of money. So Big Pharma loves them. They’ll live with the stultifying rules.
Not politically correct, what I’m saying. It’s TRUE and I am not going to live in a society where damage is done by lying and pretending it isn’t true.
Third paragraph error: meant to say “yes they are corrupt BUT there is huge variation from one state to another….”
Sorry in second paragraph I meant to say you had a prison system which profits off of dysfunction. Cellphone autocorrect error.
So there was an interest in “mothering the mother” amid the great society and then interest waned? What I heard about the great society was that this “welfare establishment” developed that became very interested in monopolizing federal funds for themselves, and I’m talking about employees and various corrupt profiteers attached to the welfare system sometimes more or less loosely.
You ended up with mass incarceration which is feeds a hugely profitable prison industry which profits off of distinction. And, some of the housing projects out there are not much better than prisons. The problem with federal money is that it is so easy for corruption to develop. Before the great society welfare systems were administered by the states — and there was all sorts of corruption and abuse. It was very obvious too given how one state might vary from another depending on the political conditions in each. So the Feds step in but corruption is something that is not limited to the states, but it takes time to develop. It seems that it is only a matter of time before it will develop.
Government has always been this way throughout history. Thing is, when individual states are more powerful, yes they are corrupt because there is huge variation from one state to another, and people exchange information. Good example is lead paint and childhood lead poisoning. In states with older housing stock and tight housing markets — eg real estate interests have potential to make lots of money off new construction, those states have distorted the science somewhat in order to falsely blame lead poisoning on lead paint, and mandated very expensive deleading procedures dangerous to children but which helps to prop up the price of new construction painted with non lead based paint. Other states without the same market and corresponding political conditions actually ban some of those procedures because studies have found time and time again they not only do not protect against lead poisoning but often cause it.
So if you look at the variation from one state to the other between lead paint laws, and what the state “experts” claim the truth is, it is readily obvious there is serious amount of corruption. The temptation is towards the federal government applying a uniform code. When it does so, the uniformity of the policy makes it much harder to see how it might be influenced by corruption. You’d have to compare the USA to Mexico, Canada, or Europe to see it. And I think corruption gets worse always when it is the least noticeable. With regard to lead paint laws, I do know the truth is slowly prevailing and various states feel compelled to recognize reality. Partly because various parties can point out the differences between each state and in some cases force entrenched interests to cave.
I believe the European healthcare system is less corrupt than the USA because, though they are all government run in Europe, each different country has its own system, and each country is right next to one another, information is shared from one country to another, and reality or the truth has an easier way of influencing policy. The USA is isolated from the rest of the world with power centralized in Washington.
But who, in the psychiatric profession, are ever going to have the guts to get their hands dirty by labeling — and possibly provoking — individuals who might be obvious to people as sociopathic or sick people? One thing you can’t expect of upper middle class people who spent tons of money on advanced degrees is for them to get their hands dirty in any way. The default human tendency, when confronted with evil, is always to not want to get involved. That speaks to an inherent limitation psychiatry has, and always will have.
To drive home my point: for him to label his father as a sick person IS labeling — but it is not “wrong” because it is TRUE his father is a sick and sociopathic bad person who abuses and hurts other people. The labeling that is being criticized here is a mislabeling of victims of abuse as not having been abused but instead having something wrong with them — which is wrong because it is inherently inaccurate and also can trap the victims in continued abusive situations. Labeling is bad when it is inherently dishonest and enables abuse — but, when someone is a sick sociopathic person, nothing works more effectively to protect others from their abuse than to have the guts to label them as such.
If his father is a bad person who engages in psychological abuse, who lacks a consciense and lacks normal emotions of empathy towards others, popular culture generally labels such people as sociopaths, or criminally insane, and it is a valid label.
A label such as that, I want to note, is applied to people who have a pattern of abuse towards others, a pattern of hurting other people, and that’s when they are labeled criminally insane or sociopathic.
Isn’t it interesting how the medical community wants to wipe away all “stigma” from mental illness — and make very clear that mental illness is not a label that is to be applied to people who are bad people? The words “sick” or “criminally insane” are words the medical profession shies away from.
Instead, they want to label symptoms a person experiences as mental illness, symptoms which are often induced in people when they are the recipients (but not perpetrators) of abusive behavior, and then first they want to erase all stigma: no this doesn’t mean the subject is bad. But, at the same time, they will jump through hoops going out of their way to avoid ANY kind of judgement regarding the CAUSE of such symptoms that could implicate a member of the subject’s family or immediate social group as having engaging in any kind of abusive behavior, in favor of asserting that such symptoms spontaneously arose in the individual because something is medically wrong with them, and therefore they are required to use the paid, expensive, professional services of a doctor, and all those pricey drugs, for the rest of their life.
This is nothing other than an inherent built-in bias of a medical profession that needs to make money. Go get training for any kind of sales job, and you will have it drilled into your head countless times just how drastically making any kind of value judgments perceived offensive to some people can cut into your bottom line and reduce your market share.
While therapists are most likely individuals voluntarily choose to seek out, psychiatrists are professionals most likely to receive patients who have been turned into them by family members. How quickly and drastically would the psychiatric profession be financially decimated if psychiatrists admitted that abusive environments can cause symptoms of mental illness, or that mental illnesses can be cured by the right sort of socially based therapeutic environment?
Doing so gets into the tricky area of possibly making some sort of judgment (direct or implied) regarding the family members of the mentally ill, who are the ones who pressure mentally ill people into seeking treatment.
The best way for psychiatry to increase it’s market share is to systematically diagnose indiviuals with having something wrong with them — e.g., chemical imbalances — while also scoffing at any claims by them that they were abused or mistreated by family members, and chaulking up such claims to their “imaginations” which are “tarnished” by the “illness.”
Doing so not only prevents the problem of psychiatrists offending the very family members whose cooperation they need to keep patients, but also gives family members an incentive to use the psychiatric system, to help them absolve them of any kind of abusive implications.
Furthermore, nothing works better to keep a patient trapped in the mental health system for life, than to systematically enable abusers whose behavior may well be causing symptoms — and there is a lot of money to be made from a model of psychiatry that causes poor long term outcomes. And allying with bad or abusive people against victims of such behavior is hugely in the financial interests of the psychiatric profession.
So, in my opinion, it is actually important to label an abusive person an abusive person — and labeling someone abusive when it is obvious they are is the sort of common sense thing which the medical profession seems notoriously willing to cop out on, in favor of labeling victims as only imagining abuse and having something “inherently wrong” with them — e.g., something medicalizeable.