At the beginning of the article posted at MIA there is a link to the publication including this and other articles that I have cited above. Hope this helps.
I recommend that any parent or other person dealing with children should read the following post from parents grieving over the death of their young son due to a heart attack from Ritalin for so called “ADHD” drugs. This story is eerily all too familiar:
I highly recommend the entire web site with updates from other sources for a wakeup call about the dangers of not only “ADHD,” but all of biopsychiatry’s voted in by consensus with no evidence labels and fables to push the latest lethal drugs on patent.
Dr. Breggin is one of the first heroes to warn parents and others about such frequent tragedies perpetrated by the new biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel in the 1990’s when the bogus brain disease or chemical imbalance fictions were promoted with no evidence to improve psychiatry’s image and income as supposed real doctors doling out “medications” while helping Big Pharma make billions at the cost of many lives with the more recent victims our precious children. Dr. Breggin provides a real wakeup call in all of his books, but Reclaiming Our Children is one of the best in terms of urging adults to stop blaming their own and society’s problems on our vulnerable children who are the weakest and most powerless members of society forced to put their trust in us.
B,
I just went through Tyler’s “story” again and to be honest, I think the format is very off putting and frustrating. It would take a great deal of time that I don’t have at the moment to plow through every comic presenting supposed brain malfunctions purported to be the cause of “ADHD” by the so called experts with most complicit with Big Pharma and others probably duped by main stream brainwashing. So, that was a major turnoff for me.
I did examine the pages more completely and it still is difficult for me to understand what Tyler is really trying to do there in that he provides citations for both main stream and critical views including Robert Whitaker and Dr. Peter Breggin.
However, Tyler does say in his post at MIA that he believes in his supposed carefully done “ADHD” diagnosis and he had a great life taking “ADHD” drugs for at least eight years. Thus, he proclaims himself a great success story with his treatment for “ADHD.” Thus, I would say he falls on the side of the main stream view of “ADHD.” He says his parents didn’t use that label with him at first.
Anyway, if you read my posts, you will see that I prefer to trust the real experts like Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, and real brain expert exposing the history behind the voted in by consensus “ADHD” label to push the lethal amphetamine drugs on our children and a literally brainwashed in toxic chemicals public and psychiatrists in bed with Big Pharma to make billions at the cost of countless destroyed lives. Dr. Breggin, a renowned expert, has similar views on “ADHD” and other DSM junk science expressed in this post, his many books, articles, web sites and educational conferences.
I will give Tyler credit for presenting the views of critics of ADHD, but his overall stance seems to be that ADHD is a real brain disorder best treated with kiddie cocaine for those like him with supposed “ADHD.” As others like Steve McCrea have indicated here, I don’t deny that these children and others have certain life, medical, diet, sleep or other problems that could result in various symptoms fraudulently labeled as ADHD to push dangerous but very profitable drugs. There are other ways to help these children with excellent books and other media on the topic.
Thus, I appreciate your pointing out that I may not have given Tyler enough credit for presenting opposing views, but when all is said and done, he is a firm advocate for the “ADHD” label and drugging of those labeled with so called “ADHD” drugs. Moreover, I think it is hard to get past all those very wordy comics expounding on various brain disorders and differences behind the “ADHD” stigma that don’t have a shred of real science or other evidence behind them.
Otherwise, I guess I would have to ask you, “What is your point?”
Hi Someone Else,
Thank you for your validation of my reality. It’s late, but I did find an excellent article by Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, that does point out the different functions of psychiatry and neurology, but then, he goes on to show the total corruption and fraud behind the ADHD epidemic he exposes and shows he has fought tooth and nail as you can see the article below on this great web site. He provides the whole history of ADHD and when he mentions CHADD one should bare in mind that CHADD is a well known Big Pharma front group.
Dr. Baughman does lament elsewhere that despite the previous distinction between neurology and psychiatry with the former dealing with real organic brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and psychiatry dealing with problems in living that were not organic or brain diseases, neurology has now sold out to the lucrative DSM/Big Pharma cartel toxic stigmatizing and drugging of citizens and most tragically, our children. Main stream general practitioners have also sold out to this dangerous agenda with psychiatry advocating for so called “collaborative care” with them whereby nobody will want to dare go for a physical because they risk being subjected to bogus DSM stigmas and toxic drugs that will destroy their lives in every way.
Anyway, if you google Dr. Fred Baughman, you will find tons of articles, information, letters he sent to many people in power to protest this fraud and his book, ADHD Fraud and his web site of the same name.
I agree with your comments too as I am sure Dr. Baughman would also. I really admire his huge efforts to expose this dangerous fraud as has Dr. Breggin, but who can compete with Big Pharma billions enforced by our great government since they all rely on Big Pharma money to get elected and stay in power not to mention getting rich in office.
I had to answer you here because there were no reply buttons under your comments. I highly recommend Dr. Baughman’s enlightening information on the web and elsewhere.
Thanks for your comments.
Steve,
Did you look at Tyler’s web site that he claims is his story?
It looks more to me like a Big Pharma infomercial bringing back to mind recent debates on several recent blogs on ADHD at MIA. This is misleading information to give people the very wrong impression that there is evidence that those labeled with ADHD have real brain disorders/diseases due to various proven brain impairments, faulty wiring or differences that are helped by dangerous amphetamines, which are totally unproven. The history of these dangerous drugs serve as a warning that they should never have been introduced to children in the first place given that women who used them for weight loss and became addicted and ill caused them to be taken off the market for that purpose. The fact they were reintroduced for children for so called ADHD for behavior control and now so called “binge eating disorder” voted into the DSM 5 with no evidence shows that the U.S. and other countries who sold out our children and humanity at large to Big Pharma have lost their moral compass. That is the view of Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, and author of the book and web site, ADHD Fraud, and countless articles exposing that this stigmatizing and drugging of children and others are the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. Many other experts like Dr. Breggin share this view.
In fact, as you know, Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute for Mental Health, has been forced to admit recently on his blog that there is not a shred of scientific, biological, genetic, medical or any other evidence for most of the DSM labels like ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, depression and many other very lucrative voted in “disorders.” The DSM does include a few real brain diseases like Alzheimer’s psychiatry stole from neurology for the DSM though the whole distinction between psychiatry and neurology when they broke into 2 entities is that psychiatry would handle life problems that did not involve brain diseases while neurology would handle real brain diseases like dementia as explained by Dr. Baughman on the web. Thus, Dr. Insel lamented the total lack of validity for all the DSM labels voted in by consensus with no biological or other evidence like ADHD, bipolar, depression and 300+ others with no genetic, biological, brain wiring, chemical imbalances or other science behind them in the first place. DSM committees led by Dr. Robert Spitzer, editor of DSM III onward to the present DSM 5 admitted there was no science behind the DSM while making the dubious claim such evidence would be found in the future. After many decades, no such biological evidence has been found, but the real life problems, crises, losses, abuse, trauma and other emotional distress caused by toxic social and environmental stressors are not only unacknowledged by DSM stigmas, but rather, covered up by them to blame the victims for growing global inequality, poverty, injustice, oppression, sexism, racism, pollution, climate change, junk food, toxic chemicals and many other isms corporate cronyism would prefer to stigmatize as “mental illness” to profit from the suffering they inflict on humanity as well, which can rightly be called psychopathic and narcissistic.
The good news is that Dr. Breggin exposed these damaging myths in his life saving books like Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Talking Back to Ritalin, Reclaiming Our Children and countless others from the 1990’s when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma and the DSM was expanded exponentially to push the latest lethal drugs on patent to make billions globally while destroying countless lives. I highly recommend all of Dr. Breggin’s enlightening books for which I will always be very grateful. Dr. Breggin heroically fought this menace alone in the early 1990’s to the present at great cost and it has only been recently that others in the profession have been forced to admit the emperor is wearing no clothes with the biopsychiatry brain mythology used to manipulate a brain washed public. I am very happy Dr. Breggin lived to see the day when he would not only be totally validated and vindicated, but also, a cherished hero of the survivor movement. He is also greatly respected by many real professionals in the “mental health” system.
Dr. Breggin does a great job debunking the voted in by consensus ADHD stigma to push the dangerous kiddie cocaine on millions of children for huge profits here, in his many books on the topic, his web sites and educational conferences. He also documents all the horrible side effects of these toxic drugs doled out for so called ADHD and how they harm children in untold ways including the over focus on certain things while their ability to socialize is all but destroyed. And as you say, the literally deadly “side effects,” which are the only effects for the most part, are well documented with many children literally dying from these drugs. There are whole web sites about these ADHD drug induced deaths too.
Many studies even covered by Consumer Reports have acknowledged that despite a short term seeming improvement on the ability to focus and appear better to those adults who stigmatized them, children given the ADHD label to justify “treating” them with kiddie cocaine show no improvement overall after about 2 to 3 years. And as you say, due to the toxic effects of drugs used for “ADHD,” these children’s very negative side effects are then stigmatized with the latest fad diagnosis bipolar to justify an even more lethal cocktail or heavy duty, dangerous drugs including neuroleptics and so called mood stabilizers as you say.
It is no accident that Dr. Joseph Biederman first almost single handedly worked for drug companies to create the ADHD child epidemic only to go on to invent the even greater drug company sponsored bipolar child epidemic after they were exposed to the gateway ADHD and SSRI drugs. Bob Whitaker exposes this travesty in his books, articles and talks with other experts.
As for the claims of these toxic drugs supposedly being so helpful, Dr. Breggin uses the term, “spellbinding” for those on toxic psychiatric drugs who think they are doing great and claim to be much improved when in reality, they are doing much worse, alienating people, losing their moral compass, becoming apathetic and even acting out in bizarre ways that can destroy their lives as documented by Dr. Breggin in his books including Medication Madness.
Finally, Steve, I would appreciate it if you would check out Tyler’s web site he promoted in his comment and share your typical well informed views on what you think of its veracity and other factors based on your excellent credentials. I would welcome your thoughts on this.
Thank you.
Donna
Since there wasn’t an immediate reply button, I’m copying Juliana’s great, wise comment here and seconding her praise for the calm, intelligent, very well informed, compassionate and always sensible voice of Steve McCrea who has spent a great deal of time here debunking the toxic ADHD stigmatizing and drugging of our nation’s children since psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, which is all too well documented in Robert Whitaker’s books like Anatomy of an Epidemic, Dr. Peter Breggin’s books like Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Fred Baughman’s ADHD Fraud and all too many others. Thank you Steve.
juliana
on February 25, 2015 at 1:13 am said:
Hello Steve,
I just wanted to sincerely thank you for your great insights and positive educational promotion regarding this issue. In my daily job, unfortunately I see this “ugly phenomenon” occurring often, as a quick “solution” to parent’s complaints regarding their children’s odd behaviour. Parents complain that their 3 year old child asks many questions, or that they are running, jumping, laughing, talking all the time. I even had 1 parent that had put her child on a stimulant, diagnosed with ADHD because this 12 year old boy would touch himself in his sleep. ( I always thought that is a normal thing to happen for a boy that age, out of his control)
As a mother (of a 3 year old wonderful daughter) and healthcare professional, I always wondered…isn’t that though what a child does that brings joy into our boring trouble some adult life? – Asking a lot, talking, running, playing, jumping all over, never sitting still, expressing their boredom when put on a classroom with 50 other kids being asked to do and follow the exact same rules, learn exact same things as the others, like they are some kind of sheep…:( It saddens me to have to watch our children being labelled with a mental disorder, have them act and learn things we (adults) decide they should learn (not yet realising that the most de-humanizing mistakes are made by adults and not children) ultimately become the reason why our children are losing their individuality! And not to mention the children who have suffered trauma in their life, and instead of spending time in understanding their pain we have it easier to give them drugs.
I apologize if my comment has even the slightest meaning of insult to anyone. I only meant to thank you, especially Dr. Corrigan for this article and his work.
Just to clarify again, “real experts” are just that in they act in a scientific, experimental manner seeking answers to important questions and are agnostic about the results.
Fake experts, on the other hand, are like the majority in biological psychiatry whose real agenda is to protect their own guild interests and ideology with no science or evidence whatever with Big Pharma’s regardless of the harm to their many victims they pretend to be helping when they are only harming in the guise of mental health to make billions for Big Pharma and cohorts, and aiding and abetting the increasing social control and theft of human freedoms and rights of our Therapeutic Fascist States pretending to be democracies.
So, there is a real difference between real and fake experts that can be life threatening if one doesn’t know the difference, which is why so many MIA members have done their homework for sure. Since you asked, I am happy to clarify just what I mean by “real experts” as opposed to those just pretending to be such like those doing the bulk of fraudulent biopsychiatry/Big Pharma ghost written, junk science, bought off “studies,” “drug trials,” and other tasks while hiding any negative or life threatening results that could threaten profits and Pharma payments, perks to psychiatrists, government and others involved. Big Pharma has had to pay billions in fines for such fakery of psychiatry when it creates new stigmas to push the latest toxic drugs, ECT and other brain damaging, useless “treatments” while doing all in their power to cover up those lethal effects and the fact the “treatments” don’t work, but make things much worse as exposed in Bob Whitaker’s books and articles. But, obviously, our government knows this, so they obviously have a different agenda than the health of the victims they prey on with biopsychiatry as those in Nazi Germany found out too late when psychiatry gassed to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill” as practice for their huge role in the Holocaust they instigated with their never ending bogus, cruel eugenics/euthanasia agenda in league with past and present robber barons to justify the theft of most global wealth while enslaving the majority or typical psychopathic agenda of the 1% versus the 99%.
Or perhaps they may not be fake experts after all since they are so successful at their role of wolves in sheep’s clothing plotting others’ destruction for greed, power and sadism typical of psychopaths per world authority/expert Dr. Robert Hare who created the psychopathic test, the PCL-R and consults for the FBI. I guess it depends on how you look at it in that they are only fake experts when they speak of any real brain damage, disorder, disease or faked evidence regarding junk science stigmas like ADHD and bipolar while they are experts at Big Pharma/biopsychaitry spin to pull the wool over people’s eyes regarding psychiatric pseudoscience.
Are you saying that Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, was/is not a real expert when he exposed the DSM and with it ADHD and bipolar as lacking any validity or scientific, medical evidence whatsoever despite the fact that the NIMH and Surgeon Generals have been singing the opposite tune for decades and knowingly committing total fraud against the American public as Dr. Fred Baughman and others have rightly accused them of doing? Of course, Dr. Insel just wants to change the same old tired ideology to something new with the same pernicious purposes to attract Big Pharma back to psychiatry’s previous lucrative fold now that the drug pipeline is drying up as Big Pharma has been dumping psychiatry in droves due to its now tarnished image and its own admission that psychiatry lacks the science to pursue new, applicable treatments.
So, feel free to continue to try to obfuscate the above while your own ADHD and bipolar ideology with no evidence to back it up is all too clear.
Amen B!
I suppose the comment from “a Dad” was supposed to be scientific evidence of that poor kid being destroyed by the bogus bipolar stigma and toxic neuroleptic drugs getting great treatment. The “Dad” like the kid’s “doctors” should be in jail if we had a government and society with any conscience, but sadly psychopaths and their sycophants have hijacked the globe.
Again, Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist and author of ADHD FRAUD, has shone the light on this vile topic and exposed that not only is ADHD a total fraud, but also, every one of psychiatry’s voted in by consensus junk science DSM stigmas created in the 1980’s when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma as Dr. Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, describes in books like Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Talking Back to Ritalin, Reclaiming Our Children as well as Bob Whitaker’s books Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. Of course, there are now countless books and articles available exposing the junk science of the invented ADHD bogus stigma to push kiddie cocaine just like the child bipolar fad fraud was created to push more lethal neuroleptics on children.
And if you are not aware that studies have shown that ADHD drugs provide no real benefit and only make things much worse for those really suffering from life problems, abusive environments, bullying, poverty and other social stressors for the most part then it would seem that you have your own reasons for wanting to promote this ever increasing assault on our nation’s children and society in general.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
How about those like Rebecca Riley, a toddler, who died thanks to Biederman’s bogus single handed invention of the child ADHD and bipolar epidemics to push the latest drug cocktails of his real clients, Big Pharma. Biederman has already gone down in infamy for creating the bipolar fad fraud epidemic for children and toddlers no less, probably in many if not most cases the iatrogenic effects of the ADHD stigma and kiddie cocaine epidemic he created just about single handedly just as he did with child bipolar.
You must be aware that many think Biederman is very guilty of great crimes against humanity and its children especially since he sold them out for personal self aggrandizement and millions of drug company money to the point that reporters were shocked when he was on the stand in the courtroom and compared himself with God, typical of psychiatry. Even many drug pushing psychiatrists felt Biederman had gone too far with the child bipolar epidemic while many feel the same about the child ADHD epidemic. Isn’t it odd that with real medicine nobody has to argue whether or not real illnesses or diseases exist within their own profession? With no evidence other than being voted in by consensus and no tests to prove anyone has these voted in junk science DSM stigmas, psychiatrists can argue all day over their fictitious disorders they mostly inflict with their invalidation, disempowering lies about those suffering traumatic life events as being “mentally ill” due to their supposed bad genes or chemical imbalances rather than their toxic environments.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has been forced to admit that all DSM junk science stigmas are totally invalid because they lack any science or medical evidence behind them while their so called treatments leave much to be desired too.
If you don’t think poisoning children’s brains based on bogus, life destroying, voted in DSM stigmas to make billions from the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and others using children as fodder for greed, power and sadism, I guess there is not much else we can say here to convince you that these are horrific assaults against our nation’s children and society in general thanks to our increasingly fascist government using psychiatry to rob people of all their civil, democratic and human rights in the guise of “mental health.”
To put children on lethal neuroleptic drugs for misbehavior is so evil and criminal, it boggles my mind. And this is not medicine in any sense of the word or even antipsychotics. They are merely major, major tranquillizers intended to disable one’s brain, feelings, creativity, sex life, health and life in general to make them poisoned, obese zombies with miserable destroyed lives often with tardive dyskinesia and other horrific effects that cause early death by 25 years on average and that’s only in adults. Think what will happen to those children poisoned with psychiatric drugs and their life spans thanks to the likes of Joseph Biederman.
I can’t believe anyone could advocate perpetrating such crimes against children in the guise of mental health to maintain such a sordid “career.”
And though some abusive, criminal parent thought having their child a drugged zombie was an improvement while doing nothing to check out the toxic effects of these poison drugs says far more about the parent(s) than anything positive about the horrible neuroleptic drug poisons.
The inventor of the lobotomy was given a Nobel prize no less, but modern people see such barbaric butchery for the Dr. Mengele type of human experimentation that it is though psychiatry is doing all in its ongoing ill gotten power to bring back such barbaric practices in full force including ECT, lobotomy, magnetic “brain stimulation” and others in their arsenal to continue their chemical, electrical and surgical lobotomies that no decent, humane person could possibly condone if they fully understood the truth about such lethal treatments.
Thus, winning a Pulitzer or Nobel prize does not make one’s science correct. And Galileo is a great example of those with the real science behind them being silenced, shunned and even jailed though he history has more than vindicated him just like those like Dr. Peter Breggin and Dr. Fred Baughman are being vindicated for exposing the 100% fraud behind the junk science DSM paradigm psychiatry created when it sold out to Big Pharma with the bogus ADHD stigma one of its many billion dollar crimes against children no less.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
And by the way, the APA and CHADD, NAMI and many others are just drug company front groups.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
Dr. Wallace,
I found your article to be very inspiring and it gives me a great deal of hope that someone like you being trained in traditional psychiatry could see through this corrupt paradigm and recognize that yours and your patients’ humanity are the same and equally important and valuable. I was especially impressed that you saw your “patients'” problems were much like your own as fellow human beings.
I hope you keep up the good work while continuing to spread the word to those in your profession at MIA and elsewhere until many more share your helpful, humane, compassionate, humble (in a very good way) and caring approach to those you encounter. Many of us at MIA went through the same type of journey to our “enlightenment” about mainstream psychiatry including finding Dr. Peter Breggin’s life saving books and others throwing us a lifesaver.
Sandy,
My last paragraph expressing my gratitude and admiration for you(despite our differences past and present we’ve agreed could exist while having some meeting of minds) was buried in my post, so I’m recopying it in the hopes you will see it and hang in there. I’m glad to see you still posting at MIA and I appreciate your long term efforts to learn about and fight against the worst of the Big Pharma/biopsychiatry APA/KOL/government industrial complex as you continue to share this process with us.
I now have a famous Dr. Steingard quote I use when I don’t think things easily fall into black and white categories: “I’m feeling “muddled” about this…though that wasn’t your exact quote I’m sure, but the idea sure works when one is honestly “muddled” when trying to make sense of the best choices in very complex, difficult situations that you obviously face daily with limited funds, resources and support.
Here’s my last paragraph in my above post that is a tribute to you though you might not think so reading the rest of my post:
“I’m glad and impressed that Dr. Sandy Steingard read Bob Whitaker’s book with an open mind and has gradually been changing her own views based on his work and her own related research and trials while being more upfront with her patients with informed consent while trying to wean people off toxic neuroleptics as much as possible. (I hope you hear me Sandy).”
I also miss your posts on 1boringoldman and hope you won’t allow the bullies to drive you away as others there expressed as well.
Sascha,
This is a fantastic, gripping and hard hitting story that does really connect the dots of the monstrous cannibalistic global Big Pharma/Corporate and political agendas using psychiatry as a means of brutal social control and enabling fascist totalitarian governments to rob people of all their civil, human, democratic rights in the guise of mental health especially against dissidents exposing or protesting these brutal government/corporate dictatorships as did Stalinist Russia emulated by the U.S., the UK and other so called democracies in modern times.
The great book and web site, Political Ponerology, explains this psychopathic micro and macro hijacking of decent people and governments/organizations via infiltration, manipulation and ultimate totalitarian control as with Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, etc. The author working under such a dictatorship himself while secretly writing this work and trying to get it to influential people to no avail ultimately got it published under great duress in the U.S. to warn others of this psychopathic menace to humanity unless they wake up to their nefarious goals and tactics. Unfortunately, he warns that psychopaths manage to infiltrate and hijack governments during good times when people get too lax until the guaranteed bad times come thanks to the ultimate cruel psychopathic inhumane agendas which require people to wake up and use their growing suffering to fight and take back their power and governments as with Nazi Germany, etc. Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths and consultant to the FBI, also exposes how much human evil and suffering is inflicted on humanity by these intraspecies predators in his books, Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits: When Pychopaths Go to Work based on the classic book, The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Dr. Hare created the PCL-R or test for identifying psychopaths, another name for evil, sadistic, predatory people well described in the works of major world religions.
Thanks for sharing this with us.
Soneone Else,
Thanks for your encouraging comment about my link to the great Dr. Loren Mosher and colleagues with an excerpt from a highly acclaimed book on “schizophrenia.”
This rather short excerpt does a superb job explaining the out and out evil corruption by Big Pharma of all those in power from government, medicine/psychiatry, academia, the supposed watchdogs like the FDA, NAMI and other drug company front groups, the media for the most part, advertising and promotion, schools, the courts, familes and society at large.
I hadn’t realized that Big Pharma was actually literally behind the forced treatment agenda to further expand their lethal neuroleptic drug markets while preying on children, the elderly, pregnant women and babies in utero and any other breathing (if only barely) human being who could be forced on these poisons for their insatiable greed, power hunger and sadism. Of course, this makes sense when one considers that Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths and consultant to the FBI, agreed with the author of the book and DVD, The Corporation, describing its evil agendas and “behaviors,” that many modern day “corporations” as well as those leading them could well be described as psychopathic (or just plain evil, intraspecies predators).
Of course, Jim Gottstein, J.D. gives some involved the benefit of the doubt when he uses the terms duped or complicit describing this debacle, meaning that not all involved were aware of the predatory Big Pharma/biopsychiatry KOL/APA agenda behind the new “magic bullet” supposed wonder drugs or second generation neuroleptics with the best corporate spin money could buy. Even Bob Whitaker said he believed this great miracle story until David Oaks, former Director of Mindfreedom, encouraged Bob to investigate the history behind psychiatry’s great DSM and neuroleptic wonder drug “success” and the rest was history as Bob explains on a blog about Oaks being a great influence on him. And this excerpt doesn’t even touch on the next monstrous invention and expansion of the bipolar fad fraud described in Dr. David Healy’s MANIA: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, that demonstrates that the DSM III and IV addition and expansion of this latest garbage can “sacred symbol” of psychiatry could be used to prey on one and all including perpetrators and victims, Axis II and anyone but the “kitchen sink” to push the lethal neuroleptics and the bogus “mood stabilizers” or reinvented epileptic drugs for a bogus theory that bipolar and epileptic seizures have similar paths. This also coincided with the nefarious Texas Medical Algorithm scandals to push the toxic second generation neuroleptic drugs on Medicaid programs nationally that has led to a vast number of children in the state welfare and orphaned children programs being on these poisons. Fortunately, in recent years there has been a public and media outcry about this toxic over drugging of such vulnerable children thanks to Senator Grassley exposing the child bipolar overreach to justify toxic neuroleptics for children by Joseph Biederman actually working on behalf of Johnson & Johnson. Biederman was supposedly doing an NIMH government study while promising J&J positive study results of their neuroleptic drug before the study was even done, which is illegal especially with an NIMH grant, getting him the usual slap on the wrist despite being responsible for the death of toddler Rebecca Riley and similar victims thanks to his bipolar toxic drug cocktail protocols that single handedly caused the child bipolar epidemic. MIA recently posted an article about how this child bipolar epidemic came about mainly in the U.S.
I guess I was pretty naïve not to realize Big Pharma’s role in the forced treatment agenda, which makes the likes of Torrey, Jaffe, Murphy all the more dangerous.
You cited the quotes by Robert Whitaker as puzzling, but these are actually quotes by the perpetrators quoted by Whitaker in his great book, Mad in America, when Bob first came to realize these sordid truths about the great claims of progress with the treatment with neuroleptics or “magic bullets” of the so called mentally ill. Thus, those quotes are used by Bob to make his points about the bad treatment of those stigmatized as mentally ill and certainly not to condone it. It appears Bob had a pretty close relationship with Dr. Loren Mosher with videos of their talking together about the “mental health system” on the web including a great site called Yoism.
I’m glad and impressed that Dr. Sandy Steingard read Bob Whitaker’s book with an open mind and has gradually been changing her own views based on his work and her own related research and trials while being more upfront with her patients with informed consent while trying to wean people off toxic neuroleptics as much as possible. (I hope you hear me Sandy).
Warning: Reading the following article will probably make your blood boil.
Drug companies and Schizophrenia: Unbridled Capitalism meets Madness
Sleves includes the life, memory destroying ECT as one of the supposed wonder treatments doled out by his group for the “mentally ill” supposedly so eager and willing to have these “treatments.” It is well known that so called patients must pretend to agree with psychiatrists and their enablers about their bogus stigma and the need for their toxic drugs or they risk forced treatment and being indefinitely committed if they don’t play their fascist, humiliating degradation rituals “game” like the current Hunger Games. Often, these victims are falsely accused of some bogus aggression by some family member, police or other fraud to put them in this Orwellian, Kafka like nightmare.
Here is a great article on ECT that exposes the horrors of this brain damaging torture treatment that is one of the most lucrative in psychiatry with all of the supposed “evidence base” invented by those with huge conflicts of interest with ECT machine makers like Harold Sackeim and Max Fink and the fact that they can make much more money by subjecting mainly helpless elderly women to this barbaric treatment to exploit their Medicare while subjecting them to heart attack risks, more memory loss and brain damage and a great increase risk of death that is often not honestly reported. This is monstrous and evil and in my opinion, there is nothing banal about it.
Again, Linda Andre’s excellent book, Doctors of Deception, about ECT is considered one of the best if not the best on the topic.
Dr. Breggin writes about the shocking study that Sackeim finally produced after being paid by the government to do it as one of the greatest promoters of ECT that he avoided for years while making a fortune off ECT and shock machine conflicts of interest like his fellow ECT pushers. The study proves what ECT victims knew all along: it destroys memories, cognitive function, intelligence, creativity and human lives, which drove some of its more famous victims to suicide like Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Wolf:
Dr. Breggin also exposes that all of psychiatry’s so called “treatments” are brain damaging/disabling or chemical, electrical, surgical lobotomies with the latter two barbaric practices making a great comeback.
Though I never knew Leonard Frank personally, I certainly felt and feel that I did. Anyone who has researched antipsychiatry and other criticisms of psychiatry for a long time like me became aware of Leonard Frank’s story and passion about the harms of the “mental health” system he wanted to help others avoid. I give him much credit for his works on ECT and quotations along with his video to educate others. He was obviously a very brilliant, dedicated man.
Like others here I am sad to learn that Leonard will no longer live among us, but he will always be with us in our hearts and minds.
Dr. Hickey,
Based on our past correspondence about the bipolar epidemic and Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s huge contribution to it, I am very pleased about your recent articles on SSRI induced mania now included in the DSM V as justified for a life destroying bogus bipolar stigma for all ages and this one about Dr. Ghaemi’s usual utilitarian approach especially when it comes to his addictive passion to stigmatize everyone on the planet with bipolar as well as the psychotherapy discussed here. To facilitate this goal he is constantly advocating for his version of “evidence based medicine” described by The Last Psychiatrist below with the top priority being to keep the bipolar/Big Pharma gravy train going and expanding exponentially as well as Ghaemi’s role as a supposed “mood disorders” expert. There is little doubt that any so called therapy provided by Ghaemi and his minions would revolve around doling out bipolar stigmas and forcing people to take their lethal drugs depending on what is on patent and making the most billions for the psychiatry/Big Pharma cartel. This is typical of much of what passes for “therapy” today in that it serves to brainwash people to accept their lifelong bipolar or “mental illness,” accept they will live a horrible, disabled life at the mercy of psychiatrist till death do they part (much earlier by about 25 years for the victims due to the toxic drugs) and they can never amount to anything other than being a psychiatric slave for life.
Here is The Last Psychiatrist about this approach by Ghaemi with bipolar:
Thank you for your ongoing take no prisoners meticulous, honest, scientific “analysis” of biopsychiatry, contributions to the bipolar epidemic and certain enablers like Nassir Ghaemi that keep this predatory, destructive paradigm going at the cost of countless destroyed human lives.
Since bipolar disorder is the new “sacred symbol” to justify psychiatry’s existence, I would welcome any future insights you might be willing or able to share about the bogus bipolar epidemic destroying countless lives from in utero to grave.
Sleves,
I find it hard to believe that you are unaware of the fact that we now live in fascist, “therapeutic,” states with psychiatry serving as militant police as everyone, especially our children (just like Soviet Russia), is under constant surveillance at school, work, community, etc. Teachers are “taught” the junk science DSM to stigmatize any normal children misbehaving and collude with school “psychologists” (yes, the ones who developed literal torture treatment for the CIA for so called terrorists without due process) to send them to a psychiatrist to be officially stigmatized and drugged. Most school shooters were found to have experienced such stigma and “treatment” with many suffering rampant bullying, which likely drove them over the edge from the dangerous drug effects and the huge injustice that the bullies were validated at their horrific expense as happens in work places and communities at large, which is called mobbing. Of course, psychiatry does nothing to expose the deadly effect of bullying, mobbing, domestic violence, rampant psychopathy/malignant narcissism by the 1% and their minions or other atrocities that cause immense human suffering with their easy, lucrative “blame the victim” approach to cater to those in power. Even Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, past APA president and psychiatry cheerleader, recently admitted their absence in domestic violence after the NFL debacle. But, that’s not true: psychiatry blames and stigmatizes domestic violence victims including children for their very normal trauma reactions to put the nails in their coffins to aid and abet their fellow abusers with more power and manipulation skills. Thus, psychiatry serves as the chief bullies and mobbers too while destroying the victims with impunity.
And any parent(s) who dares object to such fraudulent, life destroying “treatment” for their children in custody battles, single parenthood or intact marriages face huge risk of having their children taken away, which is happening all too frequently despite what you claim. The fact that many cases like that of Justin Pelletier have made many headlines in all the media makes me greatly question your claims and/or awareness of what is going on. Many of these cases have been covered at MIA as well.
Thus, I stand by what I said in that just because you state or promote dangerous fallacies “nicely” does not make them any less dangerous. We now live in a situation similar to Stalinist Russia whereby anyone can be falsely accused of being “mentally ill” by their own families, coworkers, community and world at large since a third grader could use the DSM or “Book of Insults” (Jim Gottstein, J.D. of Psych Rights), which is just a more sneaky, immature way of insulting someone with name calling with the typical “You’re crazy” to hurt, negate and shut someone up. But, psychiatry’s use of this type of name calling is far more pernicious because this gives them literal license to lobotomize their victims after such psychological and verbal abuse. Mostly abusive men do this routinely to destroy their wives and even children psychologically and make them appear crazy from their abuse related trauma to destroy them in divorces to rob them of everything with help from the mental death profession of course.
Thus, it is not MIA members who are dangerous warning other would be victims against this web of deceit of “mental health,” but rather, those who continue to pretend it helps saves lives when the opposite is all too true.
Sleves,
I stongly urge you to read Dr. Philip Hickey’s posts here and more completely on his web site, Behaviorism and Mental Health, whereby he exposes what most MIA posters had to learn the hard way: that the entire foundation of psychiatry is spurious because it medicalizes typical human problems, suffering, grief, stress and other normal reactions to life itself. As you should know, all DSM life destroying stigmas were invented and voted in by consensus without a shred of science or medical evidence behind them to supposedly solve their “reliability” problem per Dr. Robert Spitzer, editor of the DSM III. Thus, psychiatry decided to pretend to be more medical and sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s that got us to the near totalitarian therapeutic state we have now due to the billions Big Pharma poured in to corrupt medicine, government and the media to make multibillions themselves at the horrific expense of more and more falsely medicalized victims. Dr. Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, warned that the most dangerous thing one could do was visit a psychiatrist under this new fraudulent paradigm since such a visit was guaranteed to result in a life destroying stigma and a prescription of dangerous, toxic psych drugs within a very short visit. The eminent Dr. Thomas Szasz warned about in his many books like The Therapeutic State, The Myth of Mental Illness, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies and many others. Even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has now admitted that the DSM and its voted in labels are totally lacking in any validity or evidence whatever and the NIMH is moving in a different direction.
And you don’t think stigmatizing people to force lethal drugs on them and subject them to gross human rights violations and deprivation of all civil and democratic rights is a problem?
I regret that you did not like my comments seeing them as negative, but no matter how nicely or pleasantly or persuasively you and others promoting psychiatry speak, the fact that you are spreading deadly, life destroying falsehoods based on a spurious, nonmedical area of medicine is far more cruel, offensive and dangerous than anything I or others at MIA could say. Perhaps you should read more at MIA and elsewhere in the books I cite here to start to learn what many here had to learn at horrific costs to their health, families, careers, financial security, children, human freedoms, civil rights, reputation and so many agonizing other tragic losses.
I suggest you read Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. Dr. Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Mediation Madness, The War on Children of Color, Dr. Grace Jackson, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs; Drs. Kirk, Gomory & Cohen, Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs, Dr. Grace Jackson, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs and Drug Induced Dementia: The Perfect Crime, Dr. Timothy Scott, American Fooled, Dr. David Healy, The Antidepressant Era, Pharmagddon, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, Dr. James Davis, Cracked, Drs. Stuart and Kirk, The Selling of the DSM and Making Us Crazy, Dr. Paula Caplan, They Say You’re Crazy, Dr. Gary Greenburgy, The Book of Woe, Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, The Bitterist Pill and The Myth of the Chemical Cure, Drs. Pam & Ross, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry, Dr. Daniel Carlott, Dr. Linda Andre, Doctors of Deception (about brain damaging ECT), Psychiatry Unhinged, and countless others you can find at Amazon or the web.
Thus, for you to keep extolling the usefulness supposed great benefits of biopsychiatry with its Book of Insults or DSM junk science to falsely stigmatize and ostracize those they target to make them permanent captives of what I call the “mental death profession,” to subject them to what Dr. Peter Breggin calls brain disabling/damaging drugs, ECT or chemical, electrical and surgical lobotomies is highly offensive for those who have not only done huge amounts of research to save our very lives or those of loved ones, but also to validate our reality after being subjected to psychiatry’s self serving brain washing for their guild interests alone.
I’ll let the great author of Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime speak for himself as he identifies all the lies promoted by biopsychiatry, the fact that they can’t be trusted with their toxic drugs, that they are the worst offenders of medical corruption and many other crimes against the most vulnerable in society.
It is very unfortunate when psychiatry’s minions and enablers pontificate and post their infomercials for biopsychiatry without doing the tons of research and homework by many MIA members of the real experts who have not been corrupted by Big Pharma or APA guild interests.
I also suspect that some supposed psychiatric “patients” extolling all the supposed life saving benefits of psychiatry while denying/ignoring the huge harms made clear in The Physicians Desk Reference, patient inserts, billion dollar law suits against Big Pharma and FDA black box warnings sadly after much harm has been done are really psychiatrists or other “mental health” experts and cheerleaders for the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma Mafioso cartel exposed in the great book, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
As some main stream psychiatrists have found, most MIA members are all too well informed to be so easily conned and manipulated by such guild cheerleading for a very broken, harmful paradigm that is biopsychiatry.
Stephen,
Thanks for your comment and validation of my post. I think the issue is that the whole idea of ethics, morality, conscience and their related positive and negative emotions is a very challenging, emotional topic. Thus, I think when we read an article like Dr. Breggin’s here on this sensitive issue, our brains can be hijacked with our own personal experiences and prejudices that make it difficult to give the article a fair assessment unless we are aware of such tendencies. Note the very different reactions to the same article by Dr. Breggin. Obviously, this is a volatile topic with which decent people are apt to struggle unlike the psychopaths/sociopaths/malignant narcissists or just plain evil people in our midst.
And if you reread the article it is obvious that Dr. Breggin is speaking of unwarranted, undeserved guilt children can experience in the beginning and not guilt that they should feel for doing real wrong like harming others.
I want to also thank you again for your many wise, insightful comments based on your own personal and work experience. They have helped to validate my own reality time after time, so I hope you keep sharing them.
Take care.
In my encounters with Dr. Peter Breggin via his books, web sites, media writings, appearances and other noble actions to fight against the harm done by biopyschiatry and warn the public as well at great cost to himself, he has impressed me as a very noble, ethical, honest person who advocates for human empathy, fulfilling one’s spiritual and other higher purposes and the greatest level of morality. Thus, I was initially confused myself as Dr. Breggin started this article explaining that more primitive societies needed more biological forms of shame, guilt and anxiety for “social control” to avoid excess violence, crimes and other serious infractions for the safety of families and their societies and then seemed to say that these emotions are not only useless, but harmful.
However, as I read further, I saw that Dr. Breggin was not saying such emotions are useless, but rather, that for them to be useful, one has to develop one’s ethics or morals in a conscious way with “good enough” parenting and other influences to seriously consider what is right and wrong rather than just acting on primitive biological or animal like instincts that can often lead us astray in human societies that are not the natural state that animals enjoy. At the same time, though our more aggressive behaviors can be harmful, they can also be very helpful as long as we harness them so they can work for productive, ethical purposes. Dr. George Simon addresses this issue in his great book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, which explains the difference between covert aggressives who manipulate their victims with the pretense of good motives to exploit and harm them and those who control their aggressive impulses to produce high quality work or goals without harming others.
Though I loathe the junk science DSM claims in the following article, it does address the work of psychologists in dealing with very damaging excess or undeserved guilt, anxiety and shame that can come from families, schools, societies and one’s self for many reasons that can be intentional or simply unconscious intergenerational carryovers. I think this is what Dr. Breggin is addressing in this article rather than advocating for such a lack of guilt or shame, we would all act like psychopaths or sociopaths with no conscience or empathy:
Here is a great article about theories of moral development in children that shows that there is much more to developing a good conscience, ethics and morality than relying on one’s base animal instincts or abusive, controlling people or systems:
Even in trying to write this post, I am finding this issue difficult to convey, so I will recommend the reviewers at Amazon who give Dr. Breggin’s new book very high praise:
Since I was brought up Catholic in their most rigid, guilt tripping times with an over zealous family and community, I can truly appreciate the need for a book like the above because some guilt and shame is imposed or inflicted due to ignorance or less than noble motives by the guilt trippers, which causes more harm than good as Dr. Breggin explains. I can see where I and others with similar backgrounds could greatly benefit from this book and intend to buy it myself.
C.S. Lewis has lamented that in modern times many people have mistaken “niceness” for ethics and goodness, which are far from the same thing. We now have the tyranny of “political correctness” as well. Lewis also demonstrated that ethics and morality can be twisted to meet the eyes of the beholder with the following famous quotation:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
Doesn’t the above quotation remind you of the very abuses perpetrated by main stream biopsychiatry like brain damaging drugs and ECT that Dr. Breggin has bravely fought to expose and change as the “conscience of psychiatry?” In my opinion, it fits perfectly in that biopsychiatry sure tries to cure people against their will of states we may not regard as diseases, which compares to being treated like infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals, which comprises an intolerable insult. The fact that biopsychiatry has engaged in such immoral behavior while hijacking the world to impose their own version of morality and ethics around the globe is one of the greatest outrages and crimes against humanity ever. This is all too clear when one considers that psychiatry’s eugenics theories invented to aid and abet the robber barons of their times past and present were used by them to instigate the Nazi Holocaust and many other past and recent ethnic cleansings that have expanded to target anyone who can be exploited by the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma/Business/Government cartel including children and toddlers no less. Dr. Breggin has written a superb article exposing psychiatry’s contribution to the Nazi Holocaust with the article quoting those who presided over the Nuremburg Trials who acknowledged that without psychiatry, the Nazi Holocaust would probably never have happened.
Finally, I think if one reads Dr. Breggin’s article carefully, it makes a great deal of sense that in our complicated human society, we cannot just rely on our initial animal type instincts, but rather, we must work our whole lives to develop our own value system of ethics, morality, spirituality and other higher purposes to develop our full human potential.
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
Hi Steve,
Great comment. Right on target!
Donna
Fiachra,
Absolutely!
Thanks for commenting on my response.
Bob Whitaker does a great job exposing Dr. Thomas Insel’s ongoing futile, but very costly never ending latest eugenics agenda in psychiatry that continues to harm countless lives in the guise of “mental health.”
Dr. Jay Joseph, Psychologist, MIA author and author of The Missing Gene, The Gene Illusion and
most recently The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, along with many articles once again debunks the predatory eugenics agenda of biopsychiatry with the goal of blaming the victims for the gross injustice, oppression, increasing inequality, poor schools, poverty, racism, sexism, robbery of global and local resources at the expense of the majority, pollution and other evils inflicted by the latest robber barons whom biopsychiatry has always served via a predatory eugenics/euthanasia agenda as it continues to do today. The only difference today is that the psychopaths in power have learned to torture and poison their victims gradually via toxic food, drugs, pollution, lies, injustice, creating the junk science “mental death” agenda to rob an increasing majority of all their democratic, civil, human rights directly and indirectly with an increasing Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship pretending to be a democracy as exposed the book, Political Ponerology and its related web site and many others. Dr. Joseph lefts the veil of psychiatry’s attempts to cover up their crimes against humanity by demonstrating over and over that their never ending bogus claims of inferior genes, brain circuits and other ideology disguised as science become obvious and irrelevant once the true causes are recognized:
What I found really great about this publication is that rather than just blaming the victims for their so called depression, it addresses the many growing social problems that are causing it as well as the importance of a good relationship between therapist and client that addresses individual needs.
I have copied the editor’s introductory article because he exposes the well known problem of the so called mental health system blaming the victims for their socially/environmental induced stress or “depression:” (Donna)
“Editor’s Note By Rich Simon”
“More than two decades ago, on the opening page of the book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse, psychologist James Hillman told his coauthor, writer Michael Ventura, why he thought psychotherapy was—already, back then!—at a dead end. “We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that . . . a deteriorating world. . . . By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job any more. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system is sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.”
I’m half-inclined to stop right there, since what Hillman was saying is still true today— except that it’s so much truer now than it was even then. If the world’s mental health was “getting worse” in 1992, it’s gone catastrophically downhill since. The numbers cited in Jonathan Rottenberg’s cover article in this issue are stunning. The suicide rate for adults is up 25 percent since 1999. Depression is expected to produce more death and disability by 2030 than war, accidents, cancer, stroke, and heart disease. This is in spite of the fact that antidepressant use has increased 400 percent since 1988—not to mention the vast industry of self-help books published since then! Depression is becoming the most important public health issue in the world.
Furthermore, as Hillman suggested way back then, depression doesn’t happen in a social vacuum. It may be our civilization itself, our high living standards, but also the stresses and strains of modern life and our relentless competition and unflagging desire for more—more money, more status, more power, more stuff, more happiness—that create the conditions for chronic low mood.
And yet, in spite of profound historical changes that make us more vulnerable to depression, the entire mental health establishment still regards the condition much as it did more than two decades ago—as an individual problem, confined within an individual skull, best approached with individual therapies or nostrums. In the face of massive evidence that “individual” depression is really a vast social and cultural problem inextricably linked to the habits, mores, and expectations of our era, our tunnel vision is remarkably unchanged. So why do we continue to use a relentlessly individualized remedy to fight a socially mediated disorder?
Therapy’s individual focus can be a weakness, certainly, but that focus is also its glory. A particular kind of personal, individual (to use those “bad” words) relationship is what makes it work, what helps people, including depressed people, get better. And it hardly needs mentioning that people experiencing suicidal despair won’t be helped much by getting a lecture on the downsides of 21st-century civilization.
Still, it seems reasonable to ask whether as therapists we don’t have a public health responsibility to educate people about the role played by our society in generating unprecedented levels of depression. We should be aware—and make our clients aware—that they’re not in some way abnormal or deficient because they’re depressed. Just the opposite. If we accept Rottenberg’s persuasive account of the evolutionary impulses of our brains—that depression and anxiety are built into our genome—and we live in a time that specifically evokes them, being depressed is, sadly, a pretty normal way to be!
While this issue of the Networker offers no Big Answers to what we can do as a field to address the growing problem of depression, at the very least it proposes that we begin to bring a broader social consciousness into our work than simply assigning DSM-5 labels to the clients who pass through our offices.”
Perhaps this publication and its articles might provide some people with some real help rather than just conning and stigmatizing them with bogus DSM labels per the article above. (Donna)
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Published in 2014 November/December
Great Washington Post article that backs up the above post on the many problems and challenges of “legal” and “illegal” “painkillers, addiction, medical pain management and modern drug cocktails prescribed regularly or obtained via friends and family leading to 100 deaths per day. Keith Humphreys, one of the nation’s leading addiction researchers who teaches psychiatry at Stanford and is a scientist in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System is interviewed about the many challenges surrounding the current overdose and death epidemic among such legal and illegal drug users. He cites the tragedy of the death of the great actor, Philip Seymour, and how lack of one’s usual tolerance after abstinence can play a great role due to lack of information provided to those at risk coming out of jail, rehab and other risky times. Humphreys also points out that making opioids prescription only from licensed medical professionals has not solved the problem of massive harm caused by these drugs. Further, since heroin is cheaper, many users are driven back to the streets and violence that legal prescriptions are meant to avoid. This can easily happen when the many people suffering great pain get addicted to legally prescribed opioids, lose their health insurance and can no longer afford the drugs. Humphreys also laments that the current prescribing of benzos and psychiatric drug cocktails that get mixed with heroin, which was previously uncommon, has greatly increased the death rate in this at risk group. Humphrey describes many other challenges that contribute to this human holocaust that might be changed or avoided. The greed of both criminal minded or lax doctors and Big Pharma have also played a huge role in this tragic drug cocktail epidemic.
I think this post is great and I’m glad you are back at MIA. I also love your blog with your very hard hitting honest articles exposing many inconvenient truths about biopsychiatry.
I hope to see more of your posts at MIA. Perhaps you might be willing to post your blog posts here too?
Like others commenting above, Dr. Peter Breggin is one of my greatest heroes and saviors thanks to his ground breaking, life saving books like Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Reclaiming Our Children, his fact books on drugs and so many others that were crucial to my being literally able to save the very lives of loved ones.
I will always be very grateful and indebted to Dr. Breggin for having the courage and conscience to speak out when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s when he warned that the most dangerous thing one could do was visit a psychiatrist because one would leave with a life destroying stigma and a prescription for toxic, life threatening drugs within minutes of such a visit.
Of course, the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel struck back against Dr. Breggin with a vengeance in an attempt to destroy him, but he was too qualified, honest, brave and ethical to allow them to win. Having the truth on his side and a much better proposal for dealing with “problems of living” with empathy and common sense rather than stigma, lies and violence was crucial for Dr. Breggin’s not only surviving but thriving to this day. Though the KOL’s and others in the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel may not be so thrilled with him, Dr. Breggin has far more admiring, fiercely loyal, very grateful fans like me than he can ever imagine thanks to the many lives he has saved and continues to do so.
I am absolutely thrilled to see Dr. Breggin posting at MIA and I greatly hope he will continue sharing with us here.
THANK YOU Dr. Breggin from the bottom of my heart!
I would say that the “party line” for biopsychiatry has been eugenics, eugenics, eugenics shoved down everybody’s throats for the most nefarious reasons with no evidence whatsoever. It is simply an ideology used to justify psychiatry’s brain disabling/damaging “treatments” that are really human rights abuses with the pretense that those falsely accused of having bogus DSM stigmas are an inferior race deserving of such horrific rights violations for power, greed, status and wealth for the 1% at the expense of the 99% since anyone can become a victim of the over 300 so called “disorders” in the DSM. Even grieving for a loved one can get one falsely accused of being “mentally ill” and with forced drugging and ECT no less probably based on their faulty genes for not being a perfect robot.
As Dr. Jay Joseph and other gene experts point out, we have had tons of so called studies with genetic claims for voted in junk science DSM stigmas, but they have not been replicated. So, as it stands now there are no proven genes for autism or other so called DSM labels as Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the National Institute for Mental Health, and the author of the article of this post and many others have exposed.
There are tons of THEORIES about autism, but one thing is for certain. Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, recently admitted that the DSM and ALL of its so called disorders are totally invalid because there is not a shred of scientific, medical, physical or any other evidence to back them up. There is not one gene proven to cause ANY so called “mental illness” or APA voted in DSM label.
So, anyone claiming various genes for this or that so called DSM disorder is a part of the ongoing bogus eugenics movement that psychiatry started in the 1930’s that resulted in the so called mentally ill being gassed to death as “useless eaters” by psychiatry that led to psychiatry instigating the Holocaust and moving their gassing units from the mental death wards to the concentration camps. Sadly, these horrible theories started in the U.S. with calls from psychiatry for sterilization, ostracism and institutionalization, and calls for euthanasia with the latter two atrocities passed into law in the U.S. The Germans put the last euthanasia agenda into action, which won them an award from the U.S. Thus, the U.S. can hang its head in shame for this evil contribution to the horrific treatment of the most vulnerable and others in the Nazi Holocaust.
Anyway, here’s another idea about autism that many have found very compelling including me.
Also, I find it great news when a study announces evidence that a so called disorder isn’t genetic because very few are per real gene experts not prostituting themselves for Big Pharma/Business because there is hope that new remedies can be found.
See Dr. Jay Joseph’s The Gene Illusion and The Missing Gene and other ethical genetic experts exposing the real nefarious reason the 1% wants all these bogus gene studies and claims made. Answer: it allows them to prey on people and destroy them with impunity while blaming the victims’ supposed faulty genes for their deadly products, destruction of the environment and other destructive actions. The tobacco companies sought the lung cancer gene for decades with “doubt as their product” as they denied the harmful impact of smoking, but eventually they were exposed just like Big Pharma today. Of course, I realize the billions in fines are just the cost of making far more billions, but at least it exposes the truth. Psychiatry wants to work with the 1% power elite to blame the victims’ supposed faulty genes for the same reasons and to also deny the real traumatic consequences of growing inequality, poverty, abuse, trauma, stress, oppression, sexism, racism, their excess greed and theft at others’ expense and to make billions from their useless, toxic drugs pushed for the bogus DSM stigmas created by their henchmen in psychiatry.
I just read in the New York Times that the former eugenics office in the U.S. closed recently, but certain people want all to focus on it to remember the horrors of Nazi Germany caused by eugenics theories while being gravely concerned about the many bogus gene claims made in the present mostly for the same reasons and the horrific consequences that can result from such “research.”
Actually, it appears that none of the links I copied from my post at AlterNet are working at MIA, so they can be found by titles or authors at Amazon or accessing the article at AlterNet.
Sorry.
For some reason the link to Dr. Mosher’s famous resignation letter from the APA above doesn’t work at MIA, but works at AlterNet.
I agree. But, whether “schizophrenic symptoms” or toxic neuroleptics cause the lower, inadequate Vitamin D levels, it seems that encouraging such people to take Vitamin D supplements would be of great benefit until the cause of their deficit is sorted out since this can happen with anyone and not just those stigmatized by psychiatry.
It would be great to find out that “schizophrenic symptoms” could be improved, healed or eliminated just by increasing one’s Vitamin D levels, but healthy habits apply to all whether one is stigmatized with bogus DSM labels or not. Vitamin D is crucial for everyone’s health and well being, so it is good to see that certain researchers are focusing on this health threat.
Great article as usual Rob. It was very frustrating to read many of the comments expressing either complicity or ignorance, which you handled well. Perhaps some articles and quotes by experts might help too. I regret I missed this article until I saw it on MIA today.
I spent quite some time posting a response to your article to provide some of the evidence base that exposes biopsychiatry as scientifically, morally and medically bankrupt. I have copied it here because my comment may mysteriously disappear as has happened when I have challenged the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel at AlterNet before despite their claim of being an alternative:
My comment on Rob’s article at AlterNet:
The ignorance about the “mental death profession” here is appalling. Here is the famous letter of long term, highly renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Loren Mosher, whereby he resigns from the American Psychiatric Association protesting the complete sellout of psychiatry to Big Pharma in the 1980’s that has only grown worse with more time. Dr. Mosher was famous for his highly successful Soteria project much like the great Open Dialogue approach today to treat those with so called “schizophrenia” often with little or no toxic drugs with complete recovery for many. The best the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel can offer today is to force life destroying bogus stigmas with the latest fraud fad bipolar and toxic drug cocktails on their victims that will destroy their lives completely in a majority of cases. For those who don’t opt out via suicide due to psychiatry’s abusive, cruel, fraudulent “treatments” or aren’t driven to suicide by the useless, deadly drugs with suicide as a “side effect,” they can live in near poverty, isolation and stigma on SSI disability at the huge expense of tax payers or burden relatives in many cases. Today, SSI is also the alternative welfare whereby children must be given bogus psychiatric stigmas with forced drugging so families can quality for survival money in our horrible economy. The 1% who are the real “patients” of biopsychiatry continue to profit from the billions in profits in the “mental illness”/prison industrial complex while enslaving the rest of humanity with their increasing Orwellian fascist psychiatric agenda. This is because such crony capitalists have no conscience or ethics as shown in the book and DVD, The Corporation, and books like Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits by Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths. These people now running the globe are what Dr. Hare identifies as intraspecies predators who have been corrupting society and causing untold human misery since human beginnings.
For those not just pandering here because they are part of this oppressive system, there are tons of books, web sites and other resources for society to educate itself against modern psychiatric oppression and their ever growing threat to basic human, civil, democratic rights. Here are some samples of some of the best ones while many others are available at Amazon and elsewhere:
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America Paperback – August 2, 2011, by Robert Whitaker
Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare Paperback – August 31, 2013 by Peter C. Gotzsche (Author), Richard Smith (Foreword), Drummond Rennie (Foreword)
Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry” Paperback – August 15, 1994 by Dr. Peter R. Breggin (Author)
Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications Paperback – July 10, 2007 by Peter Breggin, M.D. (Author), David Cohen, Ph.D. (Author)
Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications Paperback – July 10, 2007 by Peter Breggin, M.D. (Author), David Cohen, Ph.D. (Author)
Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex Hardcover – December 17, 2007 by Peter R. Breggin MD (Author)
There are now tons of books, articles and web sites exposing the fraud and menace of biopsychiatry, so anyone who is not just looking to profit from others’ suffering like some of the so called commenters below or those who have not done the extensive research required, I urge you to check out the above books that will lead to the many other sources exposing the truth. And nothing like the truth to set us free from the fascist, coercive agenda of biopsychiatry that exists only for the purpose of coercion and social control as exposed in the great book, Mad Science, above.
The above article by Rob Wipond exposes just the tip of the iceberg of the many suicides and deaths caused by the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel, so those who think ignorance is bliss, never forget what happened in Nazi Germany. Psychiatry came up with the horrific bogus eugenics theories that instigated the Nazi Holocaust after they practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as mentally ill. Psychiatry had passed many shocking eugenics laws in the U.S. that led to forced incarceration, sterilization and euthanasia recommended by psychiatry in the 1930’s, but Americans were decent enough to feel ashamed by the Nazi’s use of such theories so they closed their eugenics office. Eugenics remains alive and “well” today as psychiatry promulgates bogus gene and other so called biological theories of so called “mental illness” exposed by many real gene experts like Dr. Jay Joseph in books like The Missing Gene and The Gene Illusion and by ethical psychiatrists like Dr. Peter Breggin.
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Needless to say, this took a lot of time, but I think it’s important to spread the word wherever and whenever possible.
It would be great if others at MIA could support Rob’s great article by helping to promote the message of MIA and the truth about the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel that could include personal harm to many of the survivors here and/or their loved ones.
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John,
In a study on the same topic of the connection between “schizophrenia” and Vitamin D posted at MIA in August 2014, the authors admitted they didn’t distinguish between those on or off psychiatric drugs. The authors also point out that the lack of Vitamin D is being recognized as a contributing factor to many diseases/illnesses including diabetes and heart disease while it is even being linked to Alzheimer’s by others, so it wouldn’t be surprising if it also contributes to so called “schizophrenia” and other symptoms.
Here is a link to the previous article on this topic posted at MIA discussing the issue you cited:
Great enlightening, validating post exposing one of many or all bogus psychiatric stigmas/degradation rituals. I appreciate the exposure that this insult stigma mainly applied to women to abuse and denigrate them all the more has to do with the victim’s trauma than any of the fraudulent eugenic theories of “mental illness” still perpetrated as if we still lived in fascist, Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia!! What can one expect when their great mentor, Krapelin was the ultimate eugenicist predator himself?! Psychiatry can be really proud of this “accomplishment” and hopefully some day they will get their own “Nuremburg Trials” if not literally at least in terms of getting their proper place in history and public opinion once exposed as psychopathic enemies of mankind or intraspecies predators per Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths. See great books, Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits. Of course, the term “psychopath” simply describes the traits of evil, vicious, abusive, traumatizing, sadistic people who prey on others with impunity with their phony charm, mirroring, lies, manipulation, smear campaigns and other nasty tricks like phony charm, the ability to mimic normal humans to hide their total lack of empathy, conscience, etc. Many of them are clearly described in the Bible and similar works. Though I’m not into labels, I think the perps doling out the labels should get a taste of their own “medicine.”
Though I realize there have been and remain some people within psychiatry who fight the main stream paradigm and try to really help people, they are in the great minority and can’t even begin to challenge the huge deadly psychiatry/Big Pharma/corrupt government hacks cartel that keeps the death trap of biological psychiatry churning.
Another useful book and web site is Political Ponerology for a great understanding of our global suffering.
Great quotation, Stephen! Very “enlightening!” Thank you.
Comments on this article from the borderline article by Brent Potter et al on MIA:
John Hoggett on October 23, 2014 at 1:27 pm said:
clearest thing I’ve read all week.
The only thing I’d add is that Lucy Johnstone’s article on alternatives to diagnosis, on this website, proposes Formulation, which simply involves asking people what thier problems are, what caused them and what might help. This is then agreed between the patient and the professional. It highlights and puts at the core of any professional work the person who is distressed voice and is no more than what anyone should do when trying to help someone who is distessed.
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Brent Potter (MIA Author)on October 23, 2014 at 2:56 pm said:
Glad you liked it, John. I appreciate too your mention of Lucy’s piece. That is the way to go, at least in my opinion. There’s absolutely no reason to have labels whatsoever. It is entirely possible to simply stick with someone’s own description of where he or she is ‘at’ and what he or she is asking for. This and similar avenues are what I try to present towards the end of the book. I am grateful to a number of different non-psychiatric organizations for allowing me to publish them as resources. Anyway, thanks again!
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Another great media article about the MIA Film Festival:
I totally agree with you and there are other decent experts out there providing the same message that one can change one’s mind/brain without drugs including bad habits, OCD and other problems like Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz in his great program and book, You Are Not Your Brain: The Four Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits.
Since our entire society and most of the world has been “brainwashed” by the mental death profession to believe their never ending blaming the victims evil eugenics lies, we do need to be unbrainwashed and realize that the lies inflicted on us by verbal and psychological abusers are projections of their own narcissism and lack of empathy/humanity/conscience.
So, I agree that this article is a very positive one and it sure is a welcome antidote against psychiatry’s never ending assaults on humanity and children especially that they have defective brains, will be “mentally ill” for life and need to under psychiatric/police surveillance for life while robbed of all human/civil rights and take their toxic drugs, ECT and/or the latest brain disabling/damaging “treatment” du jour that lines their pockets with the current 1% robber barons they truly serve.
It’s great to see someone as honest, compassionate and decent as Pediatric psychiatrist Sujartha Ramakrishna, a rarity it seems in pediatric psychiatry. This is a very moving, impressive article and gives me some hope to the end of the evil psychiatric assault against children and humanity in general as some younger people in the profession are speaking out against this ongoing murderous eugenics enterprise.
Fiachra,
Thanks for a great informative post! I’ve posted many items about the fact that abuse/trauma victims are routinely misdiagnosed as bipolar, delusional, ADHD and other life destroying, bogus stigmas, so I appreciate your adding to the greatly necessary exposure of this monstrous evil!
This Dr. Ivor Browne seems like a very kind, decent, honest person and I plan to check him out more.
It is my impression that anesthesia can always pose a danger to people, so using it for PTSD sure seems like literal overkill to me.
And as you and others have noted here, brain disabling and brain damage are part and parcel of psychiatry’s so called “treatments” in keeping with their eugenics genocide they practiced when they instigated the Nazi Holocaust and other ethnic/racist “cleansings.”
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Vegwellian,
I suggest you google SSRI’s and school shootings. As I said above, I think you know alot of this because you are trying to promote your agenda here. Many of the legal cases won when the drugged victim committed murder of family, fellow employees or students also died by suicide or cop. Your claim that there is no connection between psych drugs and violence is quite false to say the least when all you have to do is google it or check out SSRIstories.
Any so called relief from psych meds is spurious and maybe a placebo effect but evidence shows they cause far more harm in the long run than the minor short term relief they might provide short term in the beginning. They are also very dangerous for suicide, violence, illness and early death by about 25 years on average.
Thus, I find it odd that you are here touting main stream psychiatry as if you were/are a Big Pharma sales rep! Maybe you are!
Yes like the woman played by Ingrid Bergman in the movie Gas Light when her new psychoapthic husband was out to make her appear crazy so he could find/steal the jewels her aunt left behind when this monster played by Charles Boyer killer the aunt.
Sadly, psychiatry continues this evil, sick game by colluding with their fellow abusers to torture their victims with crazy making gas lighting and toxic drugs so both can profit at the victims’ expense.
Sounds to me that Vegwellian is making quite a sales pitch for main stream psychiatry and the neoliberal agenda of GMO’s, toxic vaccines and all the other schemes of the current robber barons or 1% at the cost of countless lives that are not so privileged.
At the same time, anyone not willing to be cheerleaders for this predatory agenda is vilified including those doctors seeking alternate means to avoid toxic main stream medicine with its selling sickness agenda to push statins, diabetes and other drugs.
Vegwellian could even be a psychiatrist in disguise since the mantra pushed by her/him is the typical shallow kool-aid touted by psychiatry while smear campaigning anyone who differs from them.
Agree 100%~
Vegwellian,
This is the pot calling the kettle black. I lost track of the many bogus claims you made about psychiatry and its bogus theories. Rather than showing a little humility when you were exposed, each time you just proceeded to a new version of the same lies and fraud.
I have read many articles by Dr. Mercola and think he has a great deal of excellent health information on his site. But, he does expose junk science like the mental death profession stigmatizing children with bogus bipolar as the new targets for lethal neuroleptics in their never ending predation with Big Pharma on one and all.
I really find it quite amazing how you can attack everyone else while totally lacking any recognition or admission of your total inconsistency, lack of any solid evidence for what you say and your demeans and demands for everyone else.
I suggest you read Dr. Marcia Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies to learn about all the corruption in so called evidence based medicine due to huge conflicts of interest.
Also, see book, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, showing how medicine has gotten so corrupted by Big Pharma, it is even worse than the Mafia with psychiatry being the most corrupt due to lack of any real evidence for their DSM stigmas or bogus treatments. Much of their “evidence” is bogus studies with ghost written articles in journals while covering up all the life threatening side effects of their toxic treatments and refusing to publish negative studies. See the Paxil 329 study debacle.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the so called evidence base of psychiatry is total fraud, Big Pharma junk science!
Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, a mainstream psychiatrist who has a current article on this site, has exposed the great social control aspect of psychiatry in that it medicalizes normal human problems, crises and reactions so they can rob people of all human/civil rights in the guise of mental health. She wrote about this in an article, “Psychiatric Imperialism.”
Szasz was 100% correct!
Sad. Those familiar with their crimes against humanity can no longer wear blinders like some people here!
You have yet to cite any credible evidence of your own spurious and questionable claims, so when you provide evidence maybe we will provide more than all the evidence cited already.
And the bogus gene theories of bogus DSM stigmas came about because parents didn’t want to be blamed for their bad parenting, so you have that wrong too, but you are trying to vilify anyone who disagrees with your eugenics claims even if you have to invent a “theory.”
Again, Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has had to admit that the voted in stigmas like schizophrenia and bipolar are INVALID since there is no evidence behind them. And you keep citing your junk science pretense of proof about family genetics, etc. There is the book, Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion? by Dr. Mary Boyle you may wish to check out since there are tons of so called symptoms for this garbage can stigma like bipolar with many variations since they are so lacking in science or medicine.
And Dr. Insel has also admitted that treatment with psychiatric drugs leaves much to be desired based on studies Bob Whitaker and Dr. Sandy Steingard posted on this web site. In many cases people do much worse in the long run on psych drugs which is why it was found that people in third world countries with similar symptoms tended to fully recover and lead full, productive lives unlike those preyed on with stigma and drugs by mainstream psychiatry in the U.S. who tended to become permanently disabled and unable to work/function normally. You might try reading Bob Whitaker’s books, Mad in America, Anatomy of an Epidemic among many others cited on this site.
To pretend anyone who disagrees with you is an outlier, conspiracy theorist or whatever other insult you throw out is not conducive to an intelligent conversation. It’s obvious you have not done the research on many of your bogus claims like mental illness genes, but rather, you are merely reciting the kool-aid doled out to you by mainstream psychiatry continuing to profit from this horror show while destroying countless lives. I have no doubt psychiatry will keep making its bogus gene and other claims that you can mimic, but kindly don’t turn the tables on us and pretend we are the ones lacking science or knowledge about the topic because it is very clear that any member of MIA having read lots of the articles here could easily challenge your spurious claims. Your claims sound like they just came off a Big Pharma funded web site and I resent your trying to mislead people here with such gross misinformation.
You just cited the supposed evidence for the bogus mental illness genes and now when challenged, you invent another story or position about these false claims.
I think you should follow your own advice about not pushing junk science and make sure the evidence is there before you try to force your opinions on others.
There is every reason to throw out the evil eugenics theories that have allowed psychopathic predators to prey on others who are less powerful and wealthy with the pretense that they have inferior genes or biology.
This is exactly what the robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller did with psychiatry to prey on less fortunate people and condone the Nazi Holocaust. Many similar prejudiced people have tried to do the same with black people to justify racism.
So, I find it odd that you would wish to uphold this monstrous agenda of the never ending waste of billions of dollars to keep searching for the nonexistent genes when it is well known that oppression, abuse of power, poverty, abuse, bullying, trauma and other negative social/environmental conditions cause great psychological distress.
AA,
What has happened in many cases is when so called experts claimed those stigmatized with schizophrenia or ADHD claimed MRI’s found shrunken, faulty brains, it became apparent that the differences/changes were a result of the toxic drugs forced on the unfortunate victims and had nothing to do with any faulty brains. Again, like the bogus genes claims I cited above, psychiatry is so vicious it longs for the day it can prove their neverending predatory eugenics claims to justify their assaults on their many victims that often destroy their brains and lives.
Dr. Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, and called “the conscience of psychiatry” along with others like Dr. Fred Baughman exposed this heinous assault on humanity and on children in particular.
Vegwellian,
Thanks for posting the total junk science of the fraudulent genes claims by psychiatry or AKA, the mental death profession with the pretense they are FACT. This is the type of thing posted on NAMI and other BIG PHARMA funded webs sites or parroted by others under their control. These bogus genes claims have been debunked as have the absurd gene studies supposedly proving genes for invented, voted in bogus stigmas like the latest bipolar fad fraud created to push the latest lethal drugs on patent. The twin and other studies used were laughable. See Dr. Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Jay Joseph’s The Gene Illusion and The Missing Gene, Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of NIMH, blog, “Transforming Diagnosis,” whereby he admits this past year there are no genes or any other evidence for DSM voted in stigmas forcing him to admit they are INVALID!! But, bogus genes claims for bogus, voted in DSM stigmas keep coming with no letup!
Thus, I find your posting such garbage as the bogus gene claims of biopschiatry while trying to intimidate others based on their supposed pseudoscience or “conspiracy theories” (typical attack used by main stream psychiatry; when will you call us Scientologists, psychiatry’s greatest smear campaign for any real experts that dare challenge/expose them).
Thank you for showing the quality of your own great expertise by repeating the fraudulent gene claims of biopsychiatry they have been making for the last hundred years with no results.
AMEN! See below.
Vegwellian,
I’ve been reading some of your comments and I’m reminded of a bully on the playground bossing everyone around as to the proper way to think and play.
What you are pushing is the mainstream junk science of the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma/bought out NAMI, corrupt government hacks psychopathic cartel that has been debunked a zillion times in a zillion sources including this web site and the books by the creator of this web site, Robert Whitaker.
There are also a ton of so called “survivors” of this evil, intraspecies psychopathic predation on humanity using the same old bogus eugenics theories used to create the Nazi Holocaust by the robber barons of that time; now, the only difference is that everyone but the 1% psychopathic malignant narcissists and their enablers/henchmen like psychiatry at the top are targets.
I suggest you read the great book, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry, by Dr. Alvin Pam and Dr. Colin Ross that expose the many, many false claims you are making about the latest bogus, evil eugenics claims of psychiatry for their junk science voted in DSM stigmas that even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has declared invalid since they lack any science or medical evidence whatever.
You’ve attacked everybody and everything on this post and elsewhere as if you are some great expert when you are merely parroting mainstream psychobabble used to stigmatize and destroy people to push the latest lethal drugs on patent and target the less powerful for pernicious social control.
So, though you are right that everyone has been pretty tolerant of your pretending you know better than anyone else here, I have to tell you that you don’t know what you are talking about in much of what you say. Therefore, it may prove helpful if you read a great deal on MIA and many expert books like Mad Science, Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Pharmageddon, Rethinking Psychiatry, The Myth of the Chemical Cure and countless others exposing the deadly fraud and menace of biopsychiatry. You don’t even seem to be aware of all the controversy surrounding neuroleptics, SSRI’s and other toxic psych drugs. Did you know that many school/public shooters have been on these toxic drugs?
I’m just posting this for any poor person that visits this web site and happens upon this post and thinks that your views represent the views of MIA or those posting here when the opposite is true for the most part.
And where is your credible evidence? Many of us have been researching this topic for many years that had to be done outside the mainstream because psychiatry is so corrupt with its selling out to Big Pharma, participating in ghost written, fraudulent studies, promoting heinous lies about the useless, toxic drugs they dole out, its pretense of fraudulent chemical imbalances and bad genes to justify their life destroying stigmas and lethal “treatments,” having huge conflicts of interest and on and on. Yet, it would take tons of space and time to produce all of this information that is all over MIA when just calling your bluff of pretending to have the most expertise here is all that is necessary, so I call your bluff. Those at MIA are sadder but wiser, so most of us are not too impressed with Big Pharma funded NAMI/biopsychiatry diatribes that you have inflicted on us while attacking everyone else’s opinions here including the authors of this post.
I’ll take the advice of the experts who wrote this post before your NAMI agenda any day of the week.
Just for the record, I greatly disagree with just about everything you have written!
Darby,
If you check out the beginning of the article, it goes on to say that they have used both drugs and different “behavioral interventions” to minimize or destroy certain painful, stressful memories in trauma survivors. What raises a red flag to me is their vagueness about their methods, which worked very well because you interpreted it as quite benign as a savvy long term survivor no less.
But, those of us who know about main stream psychiatry know is it anything but benign and one can count on its so called “treatments” to be “brain disabling” and harmful for the most part as Dr. Peter Breggin exposed long ago.
As you probably know, ECT is alive and well and growing by leaps and bounds now that SSRI antidepressants have been exposed as harmful and mostly worthless. Be careful what you wish for as the saying goes. And now there are the deep brain stimulation and transcranium magnetic brain stimulation, which are new forms of electroshock that can cause seizures, hearing loss and many other negative effects that are lied and denied by their pushers just like ECT and neuroleptics. Dr. Phillip Hickey did an extensive article on DBS at MIA and it was not very positive just like honest articles written about ECT show that it is worthless while causing brain damage, permanent loss of memory, career and other skills and other crucial assets for functioning often leading to suicide once the victims learn the truth like Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath. The book, Doctors of Deception, exposes all the lies and fraud associated with ECT since a small group of ECT shock doctors headed by Max Fink have a monopoly on it and push their lies on either duped or complicit safety agencies like the FDA and so called patients.
Also, you may know that lobotomy and similar horrors have been making a great comeback though called by other sneaky, more innocent sounding names like cingulotomy and other very dangerous brain operations that often leave the victims’ brains seriously damaged so they lose control of their ability to think/function, become incontinent, etc. Many of these “brain operations” are admitted failures or just plain butchery!
I have long admired you as a very tough survivor with much to share with other survivors. I just thought I would suggest that you might want to consider psychiatry’s sordid history before assuming these wolves and sheep’s clothing are adopting nice safe new methods like EMDR that will solve all our problems.
Toward the end of the article, the new mantra of blaming the victims for their trauma is included by perpetrating the BIG LIE that some people are more susceptible to trauma due to their bad genes, bad brains and the usual litany of lies of the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel that have been disproven time after time. Most recently Dr. Joanna Moncrieff’s current blog on the front page of MIA now debunks the latest scam pretense about great genetic discoveries for “schizophrenia” that even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted has no reliability or validity because there is no scientific, medical or other evidence behind this bogus, voted in stigma. Moreover, as Dr. Mary Boyle shows in her great book, Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?, there are many different hodgepodges of a wide variety of disparate symptoms among those so labeled, so the pretense of finding the “missing genes” for their “gene illusion” per Dr. Jay Joseph is totally bogus ideology and not science to justify the greed and theft of all global resources by the current robber barons or 1%.
If you think about it, how could they possibly say that some are more prone to trauma since some people don’t get it when exposed to the exact same experience when no unique individual person could possibly be exposed to the exact same experience(s) past or present as another individual, so this claim is just a way to destroy the credibility of PTSD or the only DSM diagnosis that didn’t use to blame the victims for their symptoms from combat, abuse, rape in wars, homes, work places, society and other war fronts where people have “normal responses to abnormal events.” That’s because war veterans and abuse/rape survivors under the leadership of trauma experts like Dr. Judith Herman, author of the classic, Trauma and Recovery, helped fight the battle to include PTSD in the DSM with Dr. Herman insisting that Complex PTSD should be added for long term traumatic exposure.
Finally, I think it’s important to bear in mind that Francine Shapiro, Ph.D. was/is not a psychiatrist, but rather a psychologist. She discovered EMDR when walking through a park one day and found it helped her with her own stressful memories per the following web site.
As you know, EMDR is a noninvasive therapy with no drugs, lobotomy, shock or other brain damaging treatments. And from what you say, EMDR does not wipe out important memories that may be crucial for one’s survival to avoid repetition, but rather, reduces their emotional impact and distress.
For all the reasons I’ve cited here and many more for anyone who knows the history of biopsychiatry even from just reading Bob Whitaker’s books, it is little wonder the author of this article questioned the ethics of such a goal of wiping out one’s memories after researching it with various psychiatrists.
I hope you don’t see this as a criticism, but rather, my concern that a very important survivor like you who is well aware of the problems with psychiatry does not get misled about psychiatry’s latest brain disabling “treatments.”
Caveat Emptor!
Lloyd I. Sederer, MD, Medical director, New York State Office of Mental Health has written a complimentary testimonial for Dr. Thomas Szasz after a service by him and colleagues to honor this great man. Although most of the article is positive, at times very mainstream Sederer damns Szasz with faint praise or tries to make his theories/ideas of making freedom the ultimate guide untenable while citing absurd examples like dealing with a mental case 250 pound gorilla of a man alone.
But, what I found most offensive is typical of Dr. Sederer’s posts and books; he spouts typical, decades old LIES like this gem:
“What’s more, we now have indisputable evidence of major mental illnesses having neurological (as well as genetic and molecular) pathologies — unlike 50 years ago. And with that proof, neurologists still aren’t rushing to fill the shoes of psychiatrists!”
I find such fraudulent claims from somebody in Dr. Sederer’s position despicable and outrageously dishonest/corrupt. Perhaps he is referring to the recent misrepresentation of the latest very expensive gene research results, which Dr. Moncrieff exposes above:
“In the light of the much trumpeted claims that recent research has identified genes for schizophrenia, it is important to review the track record of this type of endeavor.1 Despite thousands of studies costing millions of dollars, and endless predictions that the genetics of schizophrenia would shortly be revealed, the field has so far failed to identify any genes that substantially increase the risk of developing schizophrenia.”
Dr. Peter Breggin and Dr. Jay Joseph along with many others and several articles at MIA have debunked psychiatry’s bogus gene claims for what are now declared INVALID voted in stigmas in the junk science DSM even by Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of NIMH. Thus, how can genes be found for unreliable, invalid disorders voted in by consensus to push the latest most lucrative lethal drugs on patent, which are now the horrific neuroleptic drugs that Dr. Moncrieff has called The Bitterest Pill? Dr. Moncrieff has lamented the outrageous bogus explosion of bipolar “diagnoses” for minor problems that results in many more people taking lethal neuroleptic drugs that will cause many huge negative, toxic effects while reducing one’s life span an average 25 years while making them prone to early dementia per Dr. Grace Jackson!
And to add insult to injury, I just read that most people stigmatized with bipolar end up losing their jobs within about five years by being fired due to the despicable lies and disease mongering perpetrated by main stream psychiatry to make anyone given this bogus stigma appear to be a deranged, dangerous mental case without their toxic drugs with bogus claims they will never recover, etc. Considering rape, abuse trauma victims are stigmatized as bipolar, such “treatment” is malpractice at its worst. Dr. David Healy exposes the sordid reasons why bipolar became the latest fad fraud which had more to do with pushing the neuroleptic and so called mood stabilizer toxic drugs when others were going off patent for prior fads of anxiety and depression in his great book, MANIA.
Isn’t it time after about 100 years of lies and bogus claims of genetic causes for their invented, unproven “disorders” and especially their “sacred symbols” of bipolar and schizophrenia as their latest garbage can stigmas that these emperors wearing no clothes, wolves in sheep’s clothing and boys who cry wolf should be treated with the contempt they deserve and disciplined for committing fraud as well as the incompetent or dishonest publications that publish these never ending lies to keep the corrupt biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel making their billions by destroying countless lives?
Once again, ideology and neoliberal capitalism/oligarchy trumps citizens’ rights to the truth and protection of their health and even worse the health of their children being destroyed by psychiatry with impunity with the bipolar stigma and neuroleptic drugs.
I think you communicate just fine. In fact, I thought this post and others by your are very well written.
And thanks for the additional reference!
Looks like psychiatry helped add to this violence definition so that they could falsely accuse everyone they fraudulently stigmatized as “mentally ill,” the most vicious, vile, violent speech of all, as the violent ones! The pot calling the kettle black!
I think there comes a point when moral relativity goes too far. That is another problem with psychiatry in that supposedly no one has the right to judge whether things/people’s actions are good or evil, but rather, they are stigmatized as “mental illness.” And who is psychiatry kidding? They have vilified, stigmatized, tortured and falsely accused those they label as “mentally ill” on a par with Satan himself with all their vicious lies and false accusations of dangerousness, violence, psychotic and others against many trauma victims who are not any of these so they can profit from their suffering.
I guess this could be considered violent speech, but I think cloaking evil, cruel agendas of social control, intraspecies predation and profiting by destroying others’ lives is the worst form of violence even if bogus pseudoscience language like the DSM and other junk science is used as a veneer for such evil.
Hi Jim,
After reading your response, I felt somewhat bad in that it may have appeared that I was picking at straws, so I googled the term, “channeling” to see if I had overreacted when associating it with New Age people claiming to channel various wise gurus. Here is what my google search for “channeling” revealed:
As you can see, most if not all the entries on the first page on channeling have to do with communicating with various spirits, interpreting them, etc. I recall feeling somewhat creepy about many of these so called spirit guides with tons of books on this topic being promoted by various authors given my Christian background.
I went back and re-read your article and checked your link to the Merriam-Webster definition and as you can see it is far different than google’s links to the term “channeling.”
I hope you realize I am not trying to nitpick here. This may be a matter of our age difference in that I am somewhat older than you and the New Age and channeling of various spirits was a huge phenomenon a while back, but it seems to be less so now unless I am just less aware of it and don’t notice so much due to lack of interest. For this reason, the term, “channeling” probably didn’t have the same impact on you as it did on me initially. Reading your definition of channeling was helpful in reminding me of this alternative interpretation and your article does an excellent job of explaining how one can use this latter interpretation of channeling or substituting good habits for bad ones or sublimation to enhance one’s life and make it better.
Actually, the term I have seen used a great deal lately is simply that of “habits” with a ton of books on that topic recently. In fact, I just bought another one that got great reviews called, Habits and Happiness by Braco Pobric, which promotes the idea that we are creatures of habit and quotes many highly regarded people, past and present:
“Everything you want to achieve in life–from a successful career, thriving relationships, improved health, or simply to increase your happiness and wellbeing–everything starts with habits. Everything!
Habits and Happiness combines years of research by experts in the field of habits, neuroscience, traditional and positive psychology, and teaches you how to apply this new information in a very simple and practical way. This book will help you understand your habits: why you have them, why you can or cannot change them, and how they can work to help you live a great life.
Implementing habitual behavior in accordance with this book will help you become happier and more successful, will improve your wellbeing, and will assist you to live the life you’ve always wanted to live.
We can learn so much about ourselves by learning about our habits. Our wellbeing increases significantly when we understand the reasons we do certain things, when we learn how to change and introduce new habits if necessary, and when we apply that knowledge effectively in our lives. My goal is not to present a scientific research paper that few will understand, but rather to help you improve your wellbeing by introducing good new habits and changing bad old habits. At the same time I will provide the research supporting these ideas: ”
William James, the father of psychology, stressing that it is crucial for people to develop good habits:
“When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits.”
Or Aristotle:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Exellence then is not an act, but a habit.”
Or Benjamin Franklin:
“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.”
Or Psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz:
You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life:
Two neuroscience experts explain how their 4-Step Method can help identify negative thoughts and change bad habits for good.
A leading neuroplasticity researcher and the coauthor of the groundbreaking books Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from OCD, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions.
Schwartz works with psychiatrist Rebecca Gladding to refine a program that successfully explains how the brain works and why we often feel besieged by overactive brain circuits (i.e. bad habits, social anxieties, etc.) the key to making life changes that you want—to make your brain work for you—is to consciously choose to “starve” these circuits of focused attention, thereby decreasing their influence and strength.
You Are Not Your Brain carefully outlines their program, showing readers how to identify negative impulses, channel them through the power of focused attention, and ultimately lead more fulfilling and empowered lives.
I am happy to say that Dr. Schwarz recommends mindfulness and changing one’s brain by changing habits without the toxic drugs and other “treatments” of mainstream psychiatry.
Your habit reversal training sounds similar to this. You speak of the importance of self control, but from what I’ve read, our will power if that is the same thing can be very limited at certain times if our will power has been tested or strained too much per many books on the topic. Also, studies show that our will power can be more or less effective given the time of day, how much we’ve had to exercise our will power already that day, how tired we are and many other factors:
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Dr. Roy Baumeister:
“Pioneering research psychologist Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control. Drawing on cutting-edge research and the wisdom of real-life experts, Willpower shares lessons on how to focus our strength, resist temptation, and redirect our lives. It shows readers how to be realistic when setting goals, monitor their progress, and how to keep faith when they falter. By blending practical wisdom with the best of recent research science, Willpower makes it clear that whatever we seek—from happiness to good health to financial security—we won’t reach our goals without first learning to harness self-control.”
That’s why it is so important to establish those good habits that we can do almost mindlessly without inner argument like brushing our teeth even though tired at night, etc. I have also read that it takes about 30 days to establish a new habit, which I find to be pretty accurate.
If I sound like a fanatic on this topic, I have had the misfortune of struggling with weight control since childhood, quitting smoking and other gems due to various stressors in my life as well as being born in another generation when such things were viewed quite differently. These struggles also allowed me to work full time while earning all the money necessary to complete three college degrees with honors. Since my parents didn’t believe in girls going to college or having careers I got to be the lucky one to pave the way in my family. Psychiatry also created the junk science DSM and sold out to Big Pharma after I earned my third degree making me wish I had been born in an even earlier time when things were not in such chaos and uproar. Did you ever see the Aviance (perfume) commercial about how women could bring home the bacon, cook it too and be gorgeous goddesses all the time with no problem and have it all?! Boy, were we ever sold a bill of goods! Of course, my young adult son has certainly kept me on my toes and up to date on various issues and even music, so I’m not living in a cave. Ha Ha
Thus, I think all of these approaches using various words or definitions come down to pretty much the same thing: that changing self destructive habits or life styles is almost impossible unless we substitute uplifting, healthy, inspiring habits for positive change or channeling those negative energies into positive ones as you say. It’s like the parable in the N.T. whereby a man’s house is cleared of an evil spirit, but since it remains empty (i.e. he doesn’t fill it with good spirits, thoughts and actions), a more formidable group of nasty demons take over the house and the man is worse off than he was before. This can be applied in a metaphorical sense to our topic of changing bad habits into good ones.
I realize the information on forgiveness may have seemed out of sync with this post. I was going to post it at the end of the first part of this post on forgiveness, but since you said you were doing a two part post on forgiveness I decided to wait until this second part to share this information not realizing this one wouldn’t focus so much on forgiveness, so I regret if it seemed out of place. I just thought you might want to know about the Stanford “forgive for good” program since it seems to be a successful program.
Finally, once again, you’ve given me much food for thought and lots of inspiration and I thank you for that. As you can see, your two part post got me thinking about many different things for the better as usual.
Take care.
Hi Jim,
I was wondering if you had heard about the forgiveness program By Dr. Frederic Luskin of Stanford Univerity:
Since I was familiar with the above work and your latest articles inspired me to continue the struggle against any lingering resentments or lack of forgiveness, I got a copy of this book for further inspiration and am trying to read it and take it in again. Dr. Luskin also has many YouTube videos about forgiveness available on the web and there are inexpensive copies of his books including the ones on forgiveness and stress at Amazon.
I know what you mean by channeling, but a problem with this term is that it is identified with a great deal of New Age type people who claimed to “channel” spirit or voices from other worlds that they reveal to us.
Am I right in thinking that your notion of channeling is along the lines of Dr. William Glasser’s Positive Addictions?
I am just sharing these sources with you in case you haven’t seen them.
Your second part of your forgiveness article is very good and I believe that you are saying that if one wants to turn a troubled life or poor lifestyle habits around one has to “channel this energy” into more positive, wholesome, healthy things as substitutes for the old bad habits/behaviors.
The book, The Pleasure Trap, does a good job showing how our old limbic brain hijacks us to make poor food choices rather than letting our more intelligent brains rule with healthy food choices.
Since I wrote so much on my struggle with forgiveness in your last post, I will end by saying I really appreciate your devoting these last two posts to the topic of forgiveness and how to carry it out. I am sure that I am not alone in continuing the struggle with forgiving, so your posts were an inspiration to me to reconsider the whole issue while inspiring me to look further.
And you had me when you quoted C.S. Lewis on the topic of forgiving because he always knows just the right and most convincing thing to say that is just about impossible to dispute or write off since he is such a spiritual giant. I also highly recommend his fantastic book, The Problem of Pain, which make me marvel at his pure genius while finding him so persuasive in just about everything he says. Unlike many priests and other supposed experts I’ve met, C.S. Lewis nails the “problem of pain” quite amazingly in my opinion.
I also appreciate your struggle to come up with posts that involve typical human struggles without resorting to the bogus DSM and its very annoying labels and fables with even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, admitting their invalidity.
I hope to hear more from you soon along with your great adventures with C.S. Lewis.
Wileywitch,
You’re right that the article is difficult to read like that. I copied this from Psychiatric Times to make it more easily available for MIA people and in the process the paragraph divisions seem to have disappeared.
You can access the article via the link at the end of my post and if you aren’t registered for this magazine, you can sign up and access such articles free.
This is a great, inspiring article by a psychiatrist writing in 1996 who is horrified at the bogus biological paradigm hijacking psychiatry. He says it is/was psychiatry losing its mind and not the patients.
Take care.
Michael,
Perhaps if you read my post as I read yours you may see why I was/am offended by just about anything that smacks of defending the current bogus biopsychiatry paradigm that Szasz so brilliantly exposed in my opinion.
I would like to point out that Dr. Kaiser’s article was written in 1996 before the drugs he thinks work well were/are exposed to be useless but deadly like SSRI antidepressants as exposed in Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs and the horrific brain damaging/disabling neuroleptics that cause so much harm to the brain and body, those conned or forced to take them suffer many horrible physical ailments including obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart problems, eye damage, kidney damage and tons of others along with a chemically lobotomized brain resulting in early death by an average of 25 years after living a destroyed, miserable life. As Robert Whitaker shows in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, the very rare cases of so called manic depression and many with schizophrenia went on to recover after one episode to lead normal lives. But, now that the psychiatry/Big Pharma cartel has expanded these bogus stigmas to assault just about everyone on the planet from babies in utero to the elderly in nursing homes with women and children the main victims of these cowards, there is a growing epidemic of permanent disability and misery with SSI foisted on us tax payers so this oligarchy can continue to make its billions by destroying our lives and forcing us to pay for the damages as well in a true Orwellian Cowardly New World!
But, except for such dated drug information, Dr. Kaiser’s protest against the biological psychiatry eugenics ideology that persists with Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, and his cohorts, is right on the mark when he exposes that it’s all about money and power to keep this vile, self serving gravy train goind.
A superb critique of psychiatry’s Big Pharma/DSM sellout by another conscientious objector!
Commentary: Against Biologic Psychiatry December 01, 1996 | Bipolar Disorder, Cultural Psychiatry, Major Depressive Disorder
By David Kaiser, MD
As a practicing psychiatrist, I have watched with growing dismay and outrage the rise and triumph of the hegemony known as biologic psychiatry. Within the general field of modern psychiatry, biologism now completely dominates the discourse on the causes and treatment of mental illness, and in my view this has been a catastrophe with far-reaching effects on individual patients and the cultural psyche at large. It has occurred to me with forcible irony that psychiatry has quite literally lost its mind, and along with it the minds of the patients they are presumably supposed to care for. Even a cursory glance at any major psychiatric journal is enough to convince me that the field has gone far down the road into a kind of delusion, whose main tenets consist of a particularly pernicious biologic determinism and a pseudo-scientific understanding of human nature and mental illness. The purpose of this piece is not to attempt a full critique or history of this occurrence, but to merely present some of the glaring problems of this movement, as I believe significant harm is being done to patients under the guise of modern psychiatric treatment. I am a psychiatrist trained in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I use both psychotherapy and medications in my approach to patients. I state these facts to make it clear that this is not an antipsychiatry tract, and I am speaking from within the field of psychiatry, although I find it increasingly impossible to identify with this profession, for reasons which will become clear below. Biologic psychiatrists as a whole are unapologetic in their view that they have found the road to the truth, namely that mental illnesses for the most part are genetic in origin and should be treated with biologic manipulations, i.e., psychoactive medications, electroconvulsive treatment (which has made an astounding comeback), and in some cases psychosurgery. Although they admit a role for environmental and social factors, these are usually relegated to a secondary status. Their unquestioning confidence in their biologic paradigms of mental illness is truly staggering. In my opinion, this modern version of the ideology of biologic/genetic determinism is a powerful force that demands a response. And when I use the word ideology here, I mean it in it’s most pernicious form, i.e., as a discourse and practice of power whose true motivations and sources are hidden to the public and even to the practitioners themselves, and which causes real harm to the patients at the receiving end. Biologic psychiatry as it exists today is a dogma that urgently needs to be unmasked. One of the surest signs that dogmatists are at work here is that they rarely question or attempt to problemitize their basic assumptions. In fact, they seem blissfully unaware that there is a problem here. They act in seeming unawareness that they are caught up in larger historical and cultural forces that underwrite their entire “scientific” edifice. These forces include the medicalization of all public discourse on how to live our lives, a growing cultural denial of psychic pain as inherent in living as human beings, the well-known American mixture of ahistoricism and belief in limitless scientific progress, and the growing power of the pharmaceutical and managed care industries. These self-proclaimed visionaries, oblivious to all of this, boast of real scientific progress over what they consider to be the dogma of psychoanalysis, which had up until recently reigned as psychiatry’s premier paradigm. Now, it is not my intention to defend psychoanalysis, which had its own unfortunate excesses, although I do use psychoanalytic principles in the kind of psychotherapy I do. However, it is quite clear to me that the grandiose claims of biologic psychiatry are wildly overstated, unproved and essentially self-serving. Biologic psychiatry has had its successes, particularly with recent antidepressants like Prozac and newer antipsychotic medications such as Clozaril. Medications can effectively improve depression, relieve severe anxiety, stabilize serious mood swings and lessen psychotic symptoms. These successes are real in that they improve the quality of life of patients who are genuinely suffering. But in reality, i.e., the reality of treating patients, medications have profound limitations. I know that if the only tool I had in treatment was a prescription pad, I would be a poor psychiatrist. The center of treatment will always need to be listening to and speaking with the patients coming to me. This means listening seriously to what they say about their lives and history as a whole, not merely listening for which symptoms might respond to medications. Although it seems astounding that I would have to state this, biologic psychiatrists as a whole really only listen to that portion of the patient’s discourse that corresponds to their biologic paradigms of mental illness. It is the nature of dogma that its practitioners hear only what they want to hear. So what are the limitations of biologic psychiatry? First of all, medications lessen symptoms, they do not treat mental illness per se. This distinction is crucial. Symptoms by definition are the surface presentation of a deeper process. This is self-evident. However, there has been a vast and largely unacknowledged effort on the part of modern (i.e., biologic) psychiatry to equate symptoms with mental illness. For example the “illness” major depression is defined by its set of specific symptoms. The underlying “cause” is presumed to be a biologic/genetic disturbance, even though this has never been proven in the case of depression. The errors in logic here are clear. A set of symptoms is given a name such as “major depression,” which defines it as an “illness,” which is then “treated” with a medication, despite the fact that the underlying cause of the symptoms remains completely unknown and essentially untreated. I have seen repeatedly that, for example, in the case of depression, once medications lessen the symptoms, I am still sitting across from a suffering patient who wants to talk about his unhappiness. This process of equating symptoms with illnesses has been repeated with every diagnostic category, culminating in perhaps one of the greatest sophistries psychiatry has pulled off in its illustrious history of sophistries, namely the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (currently in its fourth incarnation under the name DSM-IV), the bible of modern psychiatry. In it are listed all known “mental disorders,” defined individually by their respective symptom lists. Thus mental illnesses are equated with symptoms. The surface is all there is. The perverse beauty of this scheme is that if you take away a patient’s symptoms, the disorder is gone. For those who do serious work with patients, this manual is useless, because for me it is simply irrelevant what name you give to a particular set of symptoms. It is an absolute myth created by modern psychiatry that these “disorders” actually exist as discrete entities that have a cause and treatment. This is essentially a pseudo-scientific enterprise that grew out of modern psychiatry’s desire to emulate modern medical science, despite the very real possibility that psychic pain, because of its existential nature, may always elude the capture of modern medical discourse and practice. Despite its obvious limitations, the DSM-IV has become the basis for psychiatric training and research. Its proponents claim it is a purely phenomenological document stripped of judgments and prejudices about the causes of mental illness. What in fact it has done is the defining and shaping of a vast industry of research designed to validate the existing diagnostic categories and to find ways to lessen symptoms, which basically has meant biologic research. Virtually all of the major psychiatric journals are now about this, and as such I find them useless to help me deal with real patients. Patients are suffering from far more than symptoms. Symptoms are the signs and clues to direct us to the real issues. If you take away the symptoms too quickly with medications or suggestion, you lose the opportunity to help a patient in a more profound way. As an aside, modern psychiatrists, because they have forgotten or dismissed the real power of transference, vastly underestimate the extent to which symptom reduction is caused by mere suggestion. Not that patients should be left to suffer needlessly from what are often crippling symptoms. Relief from symptoms is a part of treatment. Modern psychiatry would have us believe that this is all treatment should be. Meaning, desire, loss and death are no longer the province of the psychiatrist. In this process patients are reduced to something less than fully human, as they become an abstract collection of symptoms without meaning to be “managed” by technicians called psychiatrists. This is in the service of medical progress and enlightened scientific thought. The biologic psychiatrist will not make the mistake of imposing their value systems on patients like in the bad old psychoanalytic days. This is, of course, a sham. Modern psychiatry now foists on patients the view that their deepest and most private ills are now medical problems to be managed by physician-psychiatrists who will take away their symptoms and return them to “normal functioning.” This is more than a bit malignant. One of the dominant discourses that runs through the DSM-IV and modern psychiatry in general is the equating of mental health with “normal” functioning and adaptation. There is a barely concealed strain of a specific form of Utopianism here which blithely announces that our psychic ills are primarily biologic and can be removed from our lives without difficulty, leaving us better adapted and more productive. What is left completely out, of course, are any notions that our psychic ills are a reflection of cultural pathology. In fact, this new biologic psychiatry can only exist to the extent it can deny not only the truths of psychoanalysis, but also the truths of any serious cultural criticism. It is then no surprise that this psychiatry thrives in this country presently, where such denials are rampant and deeply embedded. I am constantly amazed by how many patients who come to see me believe or want to believe that their difficulties are biologic and can be relieved by a pill. This is despite the fact that modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. However, this does not stop psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin, and that it is only a matter of time until all this is proven. This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naive and perhaps delusional. As in any dogma, there is no perspective within biologic psychiatry that can effectively question its own motives, basic beliefs and potential blind spots. And thus, as in any dogma, there is no way for the field to curb its own excesses, or to see how it might be acting out certain specific cultural fantasies and wishes. The rise and fall of biologic determinism in a culture likely has complicated and interesting causes, which are beyond the scope of this paper. A few comments will have to suffice. This is a culture increasingly obsessed with medical science and medical health as a sign of virtue. It is not surprising that our psychic ills would be pulled into this dominant medical discourse, essentially medicalizing our specific forms of psychic pain. It seems to me that modern psychiatry, in step with a culture which created it, assumes any suffering to be unequivocally bad, an impediment to the “good life” of progress, productivity and progress. It is now almost heresy in psychiatry to say that perhaps suffering can teach us something, deepen our experience, or point us to different possibilities. Now, if you are depressed or anxious, it has no real meaning, because as a biologic illness similar to say diabetes, it is separate from the world of meaning and merely is. Now any thoughtful person knows that something as fundamental as depression has meanings such as loss, facing mortality, unlived desires, lack of power or control, etc., and that these meanings will continue to exist even if Prozac makes us feel better. There is much more to life than feeling better or living without pain, and only a superficial and pathologic culture would need to deny this. Yet conclusions such as “depression is a chemical imbalance” are created out of nothing more than semantics and the wishful thinking of scientist/psychiatrists and a public who will believe anything now that has the stamp of approval of medical science. It seems to me that modern psychiatry is acting out a cultural fantasy having to do with the wish for an omniscient authority who, armed with modern science, will magically take away the suffering and pain inherent in existing as human beings, and that rather than refusing this projection (which psychoanalysts were better able to do), modern psychiatry has embraced the role wholeheartedly, reveling in its new-found power and cultural legitimacy. I would be remiss if I left out the obvious economic factors in psychiatry’s movement toward the biologic. Pharmaceutical corporations now contribute heavily to psychiatric research and are increasingly present and a part of psychiatric academic conferences. There has been little resistance in the field to this, with the exception of occasional token protest, despite its obvious corrosive and corrupting effects. It is as if psychiatry, long marginalized by science and the rest of medicine because of its “soft” quality, is now rejoicing in its new found legitimacy, and thus does not have the will to resist its own degradation. The fact that drug companies embrace and fund this new psychiatry is cause enough for alarm. Equally telling is a similar embrace by the managed care industry, which obviously likes its quick-fix approach and simplistic approach to complicated clinical problems. When I talk to a managed care representative about the care of one of my patients, they invariably want to know what medications I am using and little else, and there is often an implication that I am not medicating aggressively enough. There is now a growing cottage industry within psychiatry in advocating ways to work with managed care, despite the obvious fact that managed care has little interest in quality care and realistic treatment approaches to real patients. This financial pressure by managed care contributes added pressure for psychiatry to go down a biologic road and to avoid more realistic treatment approaches. What this means in real terms is that psychotherapy is left out. There has thus been a triple partnership created between this new psychiatry, drug companies and managed care, each part supporting and reinforcing the other in the pursuit of profits and legitimacy. What this means to the patients caught in this squeeze is that they are increasingly overmedicated, denied access to psychotherapy and diagnosed with fictitious disorders, leaving them probably worse off in the long run. It is quite depressing to listen to the discourse of modern psychiatry. In fact, it has become embarrassing to me. One gets the strong impression that patients have become abstractions, black boxes of biologic symptoms, disconnected from the narratives of their current and past lives. This pseudo-scientific discourse is shot through with insecurity and pretension, creating the illusion of objectivity, an inevitable march of progress beyond the hopeless subjectivity of psychoanalysis. Psychotherapy is dismissed and relegated to nonmedical therapists. I actually have no objections to real science in the field, if, for example, it can help me make better medication decisions or develop newer and better medications. But in general biologic psychiatry has not delivered on its grandiose and utopian claims, as today’s collection of medications are woefully inadequate to address the complicated clinical issues that come before me every day. This is all not terribly surprising given what I have outlined in this piece. There will be no substitute for the difficult work of engaging with patients at the level of their lived experience, of helping patients piece together meaning and understanding in the place of their pain, fragmentation and confusion. Patients these days are not suffering from “biologic illnesses.” What I generally see is patients suffering from current or past violence, traumatic loss, loss of power or control over their lives and the effects of cultural fragmentation, isolation and impoverishment that are specific to this culture at this time. How this manifests in any individual is absolutely specific; therefore, one should resist any attempt to generalize or classify, as science forces us to do. Once you go down the route of generalization, you have ceased listening to the patient and the richness of their lived experience. Unfortunately what I also see these days are the casualties of this new biologic psychiatry, as patients often come to me with many years of past treatment. Patients having been diagnosed with “chemical imbalances” despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and that there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like. Patients with years of medication trials which have done nothing except reify in them an identity as a chronic patient with a bad brain. This identification as a biologically-impaired patient is one of the most destructive effects of biologic psychiatry. Modern psychiatrists seem unaware of what psychoanalysts know well, namely how powerful are the words that a patient hears from an authority figure like a psychiatrist. The opportunity here for suggestion, coercion and manipulation are quite real. Patients are often looking to psychiatrists for answers and definitions as they struggle with questions such as who am I or what is happening to me. Of course we all struggle with these questions, and the human condition is such that there are no definitive answers, and anyone who comes along claiming they have answers is essentially a fraud. Biologic psychiatry promises easy answers to a public hungry for them. To give a patient nothing but a diagnosis and a pill demonstrates arrogance, laziness and bad faith on the part of the psychiatrist. Any psychiatrist needs to be continually aware of the very real possibility that they are or can easily become agents of social control and coercion. The way to resist this is to refuse to take on the role assigned through cultural fantasy, namely the role of omniscient dispenser of magical potions. As a whole modern biologic psychiatry has enacted this role with particular vigor and enthusiasm. At the level of individual patients this means a growing number of overdiagnosed, overmedicated and disarticulated people less able to define and control their own identities and lives. At the level of our culture this has meant an impoverishment of the discourse around such questions as what is wrong with us, as “scientific” answers replace more potentially fruitful and truthful psychological and cultural questioning. If psychiatry is to regain any semblance of legitimacy and integrity, it must strip itself of false and hubristic scientific claims and humbly submit itself to the urgent task of listening to individual patients with patience and intelligence. Only then can we have any real sense of what to say back to them. The sole philosophic basis for this new psychiatry is the championing of empiricism above all other measures of truth. Something is valid only if it can be demonstrated through experimental method, otherwise it is disregarded or relegated to “subjective” experience, which is presumed to be inferior. Now, of course, this dominance of empiricism is not limited to psychiatry, and one can easily trace the invasion of the experimental method of the “hard” sciences into the “soft” or social sciences. On a larger cultural level this can be detected in the public’s infatuation with “studies,” statistics and so on. This hegemony of empiricism over other ways of thinking and knowing represents an unprecedented modern achievement which has thoroughly infiltrated the cultural psyche, to the point now where the average person believes easily the claims of the biologic psychiatrist. Now as is clear from my views already expressed, a social science dominated by empiricism is a vulgar science, and there is a vast tradition in philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche which in my view irrefutably demonstrates this. However this is well beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say that modern psychiatrists, like all “scientists” these days, have no time for the basic philosophic questions that have engaged the most brilliant minds of the past. Who needs questions about virtue when there is important data to collect? These biologic psychiatrists never think to ask themselves whether their own precious methods are perhaps standing on very shaky ground, say their own disavowed prejudices about what constitutes the good life. Empiricism is one way of knowing, but certainly not the only or best way. Biologic psychiatrists often use the standards of empiricism to answer their critics, in effect saying that their claims are scientifically “proven” and thus unassailable, clearly a tautological argument. I would further add that in my view many of the claims of biologic psychiatry do not even hold up to their own standards of empirical science, for example their claims about the biologic and genetic basis of many mental illnesses. In my view, the methods of experimental science are inappropriate and misplaced when it comes to understanding the complexity of the human psyche, as they can only objectify the mind and remove subjectivity from the heart of human experience, thus creating an abstract entity in place of a human mind. It is no wonder that psychiatry declared the 1980s the decade of the brain instead of the decade of the mind. In their pursuit of the human brain they have quite literally lost their minds. One way to unmask the dogma that is biologic psychiatry is to ask the question what kind of human being is being posited as desirable, “normal,” or not disordered. Judging by the DSM-IV, it would be a person not depressed or anxious, without perversions or sexual “dysfunction,” in touch with “reality,” not alienated from society, adapted to their work, not prone to excessive feeling states and generally productive in their life pursuits. This is, of course, the bourgeois ideal of modern culture. We will all fit in, produce and consume and be happy about it. Anyone who dissents by choice or nature slips into the realm of the disordered or pathologic, is then located as such by medical science and is then subject to social management and control. Now, psychiatry has always provided this social function, as admirably shown by Foucault and others. I would submit, however, that modern psychiatry, under the guise of medical and “scientific” authority and legitimacy, has surpassed all past attempts by psychiatry to identify and control dissent and individual difference. It has done this by infiltrating the cultural psyche, a psyche already vulnerable to any kind of medical discourse, to the point where it is a generally accepted cultural notion now that, say, depression is an illness caused by a chemical imbalance. Now when a person becomes depressed, for example, they are less able to read it or interpret it as a sign that there may be a problem in their life that needs to be looked at or addressed. They are less able to question their life choices, or question for example the institutions that surround them. They are less able to fashion their own personal or cultural critique which could potentially lead them to more fruitful directions. Instead they identify themselves as ill and submit to the correction of a psychiatrist, who promises to take away the depression so they can get back to their lives as they are. In short, the very meanings of unhappiness are being redefined as illness. In my view this is a dismaying cultural catastrophe. I do not mean to suggest that psychiatry is solely to blame for this, given how wide a cultural shift this is. However, I do think that psychiatry has not only not resisted its role here, but actually has fulfilled it with considerable hubris. Thus in my view the whole phenomenon of biologic psychiatry is itself a symptom or acting out of a larger, underlying cultural process. Unhappiness and suffering are not seen as resulting from real cultural conditions; for example, the collapse of traditional institutions and the ever increasing hegemony of rampant consumerism in American culture. Nor is suffering seen in the context of what it means to exist as a human being in any historical period. Historical and existential discourse about unhappiness is increasingly supplanted by medical discourse, and biologic psychiatry has served as one of the major mouthpieces for this kind of pseudo-scientific and frankly pathetic medical discourse about what ails us. I am increasingly astonished about how unable the average patient is now to articulate reasons for their unhappiness, and how readily they will accept a “medical” diagnosis and solution if given one by a narrow-minded psychiatrist. This is a cultural pathologic dependence on medical authority. Granted, there are patients who do fight this kind of definition and continue to search for better explanations for themselves which are less infantilizing, but in my experience this is not common. There is a frightening choking off of the possibility for dissent and creative questioning here, a silencing of very basic questions such as “what is this pain?” or “what is my purpose?” Modern psychiatry has unconscionably participated in this pathology for its own gain and power. It is a moral, not scientific issue at stake here, and in my view this is why many astute Americans rightfully distrust this new psychiatry and its Utopian claims about happiness through medical progress. So what kind of psychiatry am I advocating here? First of all, I think it is unclear whether the field can extricate itself from its current infatuation with technology and its own power to use it. When one reads psychiatric journals now, one senses a dangerous giddiness about the field’s “discoveries” and “progress,” which in my view are wildly and irresponsibly overstated. All the momentum, which is mainly economically driven, is pushing psychiatry toward further biologism. Having said this, what I am advocating is a psychiatry which devotes itself humbly to the task of listening to patients in a way that other medical practitioners cannot. This means paying close attention to a patient’s current and past narrative without attempting to control, manipulate or define it. From this position a psychiatrist can then assist the patient in raising relevant questions about their lives and pain. The temptation to provide answers or false solutions should be absolutely avoided here. Medications are used judiciously for lowering painful symptoms, with considerable attention paid to the psychological effects of medication treatment. Diagnosis should play a secondary and small role here, given that little is known about what these diagnoses actually mean. Above all suggestion, coercion, normalization and control need to be assiduously guarded against, as these are natural temptations that arise out of the dynamics of power that exist between psychiatrist and patient. A more humane psychiatry, if it is even possible in today’s cultural climate, must recognize the powerful potential of the uses and abuses of power if it is not to become a tool of social control and normalization. As I have outlined in this piece, these abuses of power are by no means always obvious and self-evident, and their recognition requires rigorous thought and self-examination. The psychiatrist plays a particular role in cultural and individual fantasies, and an intelligent psychiatrist must be aware of the complexity of these fantasies if he is to act in a position outside these projections and fantasies. This requires real moral awareness on the part of a psychiatrist who wishes to act intelligently. What I am advocating for in outline form as stated previously are the minimal requirements necessary for the field of psychiatry to reverse its current degradation. What is essential at this time is for psychiatrists and other clinicians to speak out against the ideology known as biologic psychiatry.
I must say that I found this post offensive because it seems that Michael was/is trying to be very provocative about Dr. Szasz in his presentation when he is writing for a critical or even antipsychiatry group who tend to admire those few heroes who exposed the truth about psychiatry and the so called mental “health” system at huge cost to themselves.
The following article shows that psychiatry has not survived due to its great helping/healing capacity, but rather, due to the fact they sold out to Big Pharma and together made billions that helped buy politicians, the legal system and all the power for themselves that money can buy based on lies and fraud. Thus, this fascist psychiatry industrial complex or the therapeutic state that Dr. Szasz so brilliantly defined and exposed has nothing to do with health and everything to do with supporting the current 1% robber barons at the horrific expense of the majority subjected to the worst kinds of social control, brain/body destruction in the guise of health/help and the violation/robbery of all human, civil and constitutional rights.
I don’t think it was necessary to make such a big deal of Dr. Szasz’ suicide for those of us who did not know because doing so creates the type of circus that has gone on with the death of Robin Williams while the decision to end one’s life can be based on very rational, well thought out reasons based on the pros and cons and not the so called “mental illness” the mental death profession pretends so they can impose their own form or torture/murder instead for profit and power with the pretense of concern and help. But, I think Szasz did pretty well in the media when he died and the fact his many books stay in print and keep selling shows that people brainwashed, deceived and horribly betrayed by modern biopsychiatry and its bogus, invalid stigmas and useless, poison drugs are grateful for support and validation from these noble old timers with a conscience like Dr. Szasz, Dr. Peter Breggin, Dr. Loren Mosher, Dr. Paula Caplan, Dr. Stuart Kirk, Dr. David Cohen and many others when they begin to see through this arrogant fraud. Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, says all DSM stigmas voted in by consensus like ADHD and bipolar are 100% fraud to push the latest lethal, lucrative drugs and other forms of lobotomy on patent. Dr. Baughman claims that such actions by psychiatry constitute the worst medical crimes against humanity ever since children have become the major targets for this vile brain damage demolition enterprise. Psychiatry instigated the Nazi Holocaust with its horrific eugenics agenda they continue today in the guise of genetics research to blame the victims for social oppression, greed induced poverty, growing inequality, racism, sexism and many other environmental and social ills. As practice for the Holocaust psychiatry gassed to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill” or otherwise useless eaters BEFORE Hitler came to power. In fact, Hitler praised psychiatry’s eugenics theories in his infamous book, Mein Kampf before he got involved in politics! It was psychiatry that persuaded Hitler to move the gassing apparatus from mental hospitals to the concentration camps with such “doctors” making selections for work or immediate death and even more horrific “scientific” experiments on twins like those of Mengele just as is done today in the guise of science and “mental health.” Also, psychiatry kept killing patients even after the war ended until they were forced to stop doing it openly by the Nuremburg Trials, Catholics and others opposing their psychopathy and malignant narcissism. Experts who conducted the Nuremburg Trials acknowledged that without psychiatry, the Holocaust would never have happened. So, obviously, people never learn when it comes to “snakes in suits” or demons tempting us in different guises/disguises.
So, when a dubious field like psychiatry has the whole power of a corrupt industry like Big Pharma with their billions and equally corrupt politicians and regulatory agencies with the foxes guarding the hen houses with revolving doors, I don’t think that psychiatry’s supposed success can be attributed to Szasz’ failure. Anyone challenging this Goliath is attacked and discredited viciously as a Scientologist and other garbage with tons of Big Pharma money to destroy careers and terrorize others into silence just as they do with their so called “patients” on behalf of their fellow abusers in power. Psychiatry also plays the role of enabling the outer pretense of a democracy while using the bogus DSM stigmas to attack, discredit, isolate, terrorize, institutionalize, lobotomize and all their other horrors in the guise of mental health just like Soviet Russia and other fascist states pretending to be democracies. So, when Dr. Szasz advocates for freedom while psychiatry’s role is to violate any citizen’s every individual, human, democratic civil right using their fraudulent biopsychiatry paradigm as a cover while also helping Big Pharma and others to make billions, it isn’t hard to see who would/will “win,” but I guess that depends on what one sees as “winning.” Though one may “win” in this rat race, the winner is still a rat. As Guns ‘n Roses sang, “welcome to the jungle….”
I think Dr. Szasz did win and succeed because he left his brilliant thoughts behind in his books and other work and all the lives he touched and saved like Dr. Peter Breggin, the conscience of psychiatry, with their great thoughts, compassion, wisdom and exposure of “psychiatry: the science of lies” and “toxic psychiatry” to help victims to unbrainwash themselves and become survivors/escapees of this horrific plague on humanity! Bob Whitaker’s books have been life savers for many as well as he exposed the truth about the epidemic psychiatry created rather than healing anything.
There is the story of a young boy throwing star fish back into the sea that he finds on the beach. An old man comes along and chastises him on such a futile enterprise since the boy can’t save the huge number of starfish there. The boy responds that it matters to the starfish he is able to save. The same mentality can be applied to those saved from the Holocaust or whenever a human being decides to do the decent thing rather than the evil or expedient thing. Sadly, with the decline of the best of religion, many people have never even learned the basic ethics of the golden rule and other necessities for a decent civilization. I agree with Seth Farber that there is the hijacked Constantinian Christianity and that of Jesus and his followers which is another version of the therapeutic state versus freedom, compassion, wisdom and enlightenment.
I have said elsewhere that I used to feel somewhat grateful that I wasn’t born during the Nazi Holocaust and other horrible times when in reality the fact that psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s when they decided to “dance with the devil” as one APA president with lots of lucrative Big Pharma ties said to justify the destruction of so called patients makes me realize that psychiatry just continues its usual horrific crimes against humanity unabated in one guise or another whether it is state enforced witch hunts, Inquisitions and other fascist abuses just as Dr. Szasz wisely exposed, so he reminds us to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing and other Trojan horses pretending to help during all these “times that try our souls.”
Thank you for posting here, but again, I am offended by some of your post due to my great admiration and respect for Dr. Thomas Szasz. I think you could have been a bit more sensitive and respectful of your readers and I am still not sure I get your message or overall point other than to discredit Dr. Szasz, which I think failed miserably because you are comparing apples and oranges or using a rigged system with the so called “winner” already all too well established to tolerate any competitors or critics.
I appreciate your writing here because your piece gave me much food for thought. Based on what you have added in your comments, perhaps I have misunderstood your analysis of Szasz. I agree with much of what Seth Farber says in that the power elite get to create the accepted version of the so called “truth” or “reality” they wish to prevail just like the winners get to write the history books. It doesn’t make it so!
This article is superb in that it reports the very hard hitting truth about the abuse of children with bogus, INVALID psychiatric stigmas to push lethal, brain/body damaging drugs without mincing words or sugar coating it! It is encouraging that some of the psychiatrists and other mental health workers acknowledged that poisoning children/teens as a supposed remedy for heartbreak from huge losses of parents, family, homes and so much more is gruesome to say the least.
The fools that wax poetic about how helpful these toxic poison drugs are show their gross ignorance, lack of empathy/conscience and inability to deal with these kids in a humane, mature, intelligent way. And one must bare in mind that most if not all so called foster parents get money to do this job, so their forcing drugs on these kids to make them more easily controlled zombies as in nursing homes makes this blood money! Plus, the doctors in the article admit the drugs may work for two weeks to restrain some behaviors if they even do that, but are mostly useless for this purpose overall while causing huge harm to the brains/health of these children/teens.
And children already suffering such loss really need to be made obese, incontinent, shaky, manic, aggressive, suicidal, insomniacs and all the other horrible things that happed to those forced on toxic, useless psych drugs.
The original perpetrators creating the DSM III and selling out to Big Pharma like Robert Spitzer, ed., and his pals for greed, profit, power, status, malignant narcissism/psychopathy and their own obvious inhumanity should have their own Nuremburg Trials. Once this crime against humanity occurred, it was only a matter of time before the Joseph Biederman’s came along and created the child drugging epidemic by selling out to Johnson & Johnson and other Big Pharma greed by single handedly creating the bogus child ADHD and bipolar epidemics with the goal of pushing toxic neuroleptics.
This whole despicable enterprise shows that the U.S., its legal system, politicians, doctors and the medical profession and society as a whole have lost their moral compass if they ever had one.
I think the fact that such an article has been written and published shows that things may be looking up in terms of educating the pubic and would be victims about this evil death trap as more and more people see the truth about Toxic Psychiatry and Mad Science.
I look forward to seeing the second part of the article.
Correction:
Many have been inspired by The Paradoxical Commandments below. I like the ones associated with Mother Teresa that end with “In the final analysis it’s between you and God and them and God anyway.”
There are many versions of this with explanations on the web.
Many have been inspired by The Paradoxical Commandments below. I like the ones associated with Mother Teresa that end with it’s between you and God and them anyway.
The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true friends; succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world your best anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
Excellent letter and very ambitious on your part. How did you know he is gay?
This is very sad and should come as no surprise given that minorities have been most adversely affected with the economic meltdown and growing outrageous inequality and poverty.
Hi James,
Great article and especially relevant for me at this time and always. I’ve struggled with the “forgiveness” issue many times due to great harm perpetrated by evil people against me and loved ones who could be “diagnosed” with malignant narcissism and/or psychopathy.
Another confusing issue is how evil, abusive, dishonest people and/or fools are treated in the Bible and other religious texts in that others are told to cut them off, avoid them, have nothing to do with them and many other negative actions against them. And the bottom line is that hypocritical society often shuns people who step out of line with drugs, alcohol, sex or other supposed taboos though they may be guilty themselves privately.
Moreover, Satan and his cohorts in crime are supposedly condemned to hell forever. At least metaphorically because as C.S. Lewis claims, people choose hell as he shows in his book, The Great Divorce, and other works. Lewis was a great admirer of George MacDonald, a preacher, who ran into trouble because he believed all people would ultimately be saved. Thus, there are many views about eternal punishment from one’s earthly enemies and God.
Another difficult issue is when evil or psychopathic people will not only refuse to acknowledge the harm they do, but given their sadistic nature, duping delight and lack of conscience, they gloat over the harm they’ve done. Thus, they certainly are not seeking forgiveness, but rather, express outrage that they’ve done nothing to forgive if offered forgiveness and/or even attempts to reconcile. They are excellent at turning the tables on their victims and blaming them as Dr. George Simon points out in books I cited on your other posts as well as his web site on manipulative, overly aggressive people.
Here is a question I have pondered when considering forgiving evil people with no conscience. Does God forgive Satan? Are we supposed to forgive Satan? How can you forgive someone or something that is considered totally evil to the point of being damned to hell forever? Did you ever see the great movie, The Exorcist? Should the demon(s) possessing the young girl and trying to kill the exorcists be forgiven? I know these may sound like stupid questions, but where is the dividing line if any in forgiveness? I do know that evil (psychopathic/narcissistic) people can destroy people almost completely psychologically via psychological abuse, violence, smear campaigns, gas lighting and other vicious mobbing/bullying tactics to the point the victims are mere shells of their former selves without any physical blood on their hands. Often, such victims are even driven to suicide. The great book, Stalking the Soul, and the movie, Gas light, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer are excellent examples of this. And another question is that if somebody is so deranged as to be capable of such evil to these extremes or like Ted Bundy, the serial killer, it seems that forgiveness is almost a moot issue though I did see somebody forgive the Green River serial killer on TV because he said God commanded him to do so. It almost seems that “forgiving” such unrepentant people is condoning evil.
Of course, there is the “hate the sin, not the sinner” command, but I find it a very difficult ethical struggle. And because Christian and other churches themselves have been the source of very unethical actions from their beginnings to the present including the recent pedophile scandals, I no longer blindly follow any supposed gurus. At the same time, C.S. Lewis made it clear that though one must forgive, that did not mean that the murderer should not be hung if that was the required punishment by law as would be the case with any crimes and their corresponding punishments. And the reason C.S. Lewis makes such a great spiritual guide is that he is very, very honest and humble about his own shortcomings and belief he fell very short of the mark quite often!
I continue to grapple with these issues as many others do and I can’t say I have any definitive answers. My current view is when one continues to hate an evil doer who has done them much harm, it causes the hater much harm in terms of ill health, bitterness, negative impact on other relationships and many other unintended consequences, so I think it is important to continue the struggle to forgive though one has to do it repeatedly when angry feelings rise up due to ongoing negative consequences and losses due to the perpetrator’s actions. I believe the Buddha said that hating another person is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Or, as Buddy Hackett said, “While your stewing in anger, they’re out dancing,” which can be all the more maddening to think about, but also motivating.
Despite the fact that I think the struggle to forgive is worth it, I do not believe reconciliation or contact with such evil people who are hardest to forgive or even be around once you see through them is possible or recommended since they are too harmful to their targets. Obviously, I am not talking about times when we inadvertently hurt each other due to inattention, selfishness, disagreements or anger periodically in an overall decent relationship because we are all in need of forgiveness for such human failings.
I like others have found it helpful to read some of the Holocaust literature and the works of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mendela as well as Viktor Frankl and Corrie Ten Bloom to learn how people in the worst of situations survived and decided that forgiveness was the only way forward for everyone involved and/or they had to do it to obey God, so they did it and helped others do it.
I was glad to see you quoted C.S. Lewis in your great article as well as others. You answered the question I posed on your last post about your progress with C.S. Lewis in this post. I’m very glad to see that you appreciate C.S. Lewis as I and so many others do. I will use your article as another great, inspiring source to continue my own rocky forgiveness path.
As you can see, I didn’t jump to respond to this post because I wasn’t sure I wanted to respond to this thorny issue and if I did, I wanted to give it a great deal of thought since I don’t see myself as a great model of virtue in this area though I continue to try very hard!
This article also criticizes the bogus chemical imbalance/brain disease theories for “depression:”
This is an excellent post and I greatly appreciate it. I feel increasingly demoralized to see new “studies” about the supposed 108 genes associated with schizophrenia or the supposed genes associated with all the 5 major “mental illnesses” like the latest fad fraud bipolar that is used for serial killers, domestic violence/rape victims and other absurdities. It was well known this was a garbage can stigma by the creators of DSM III led by the malignant narcissist Robert Spitzer when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma because Freudian analysis was waning.
Thus, your latest post is very positive and hopeful. You talk about a growing revolution. I hope you write another post soon explaining any such gains in sanity despite the insanity of the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma/Government Industrial Complex. Yet, the NIMH in the U.S. under the ongoing ideology of Dr. Thomas Insel and his cohorts are much enthused about his big brain and other bogus blaming the brain projects. There was some hope when he admitted that DSM stigmas are invalid in the article, Transforming Diagnosis, on his NIMH blog, but it’s back to business as usual with the latest bogus gene claims for bipolar and schizophrenia touted by Insel and his cohorts. It doesn’t look too promising in the U.S. for sure given this agenda. One positive thing I’ve read is that many experts have been fighting the great brain project in Great Britain. Have you been part of that?
I look forward to reading more of your great, uplifting posts in the future.
Steve,
You nailed it! It is obvious this is a puff piece or infomercial for the usual bogus claims of the supposed great necessity of more psychiatry to deal with the increased huge global burden of “mental illness” they must fight just like cancer to save lives. As anyone who has had to fight for funding knows, the greater and more critical/important the need as well as having increased participants with special emphasis on children no less, the more funding is required goes the usual pitch and often granted. And the psychiatry/Big Pharma cartel are experts in promoting their life destroying agenda for greed, profit, power and status in the guise of health. The fact they prey on children the most in modern times with their latest eugenics agenda exposes them for their total lack of conscience, ethics, empathy, decency or anything else that makes one human.
However, they seem to ignore Dr. Thomas Insel’s blog, “Transforming Diagnosis,” when he acknowledged that “other” medical specialties were making huge progress in curing diseases and saving lives while psychiatry’s record of such success was dismal and sorely lacking for the last 100 years. This was when he acknowledged the DSM is a total INVALID fraud with no science, evidence or anything medical behind its voted in stigmas to collude with Big Pharma to push the latest lethal drugs on patent. Of course, anyone doing the least amount of research about psychiatry has been well aware of that for decades, so Insel had to come up with the new con of bad “brain circuits” to hoodwink the public. In the meantime, I’m seeing more and more “studies” claiming the schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, ADHD, autism and other supposed genes of these invented “disorders.” These are the same bogus claims made for the last hundred years debunked by those like Dr. Jay Joseph in books like The Missing Gene and The Gene Illusion, which shows they also have no shame and engage in constant pathological lying. It’s not hard to see that these are all traits of psychopaths.
Thus, though psychiatry likes to boast about its great importance to everyone’s health and survival and their great growing burden, as you say, Bob Whitaker nailed it when he exposed the real reason behind the huge budget busting growing epidemic of disability and death unleashed by the mental death profession!
Thus, they should not be bragging about the great increase in their numbers of so called patients because the number keeps growing as they con more so called patients into their death traps with life destroying stigmas, brain damaging/disabling “treatments,” and more forced treatment. It’s not like all their so called patients have sought them out, so they should be seen as more like jailers running prisons in the guise of “mental health” as many experts have pointed out. Those visiting them for life problems are routinely betrayed with a bogus bipolar stigma and a lethal cocktail of drugs as they blame their victims for any crisis, abuse, loss, bullying, mobbing, poverty, being the wrong sex or color and other traumatic experiences while lying and denying them at the same time by claiming they are brain diseases.
World citizens need to unite and fight the growing menace of the psychopathic 1% globally if they hope to avoid/change this growing path of destruction. This is especially true as the U.S. and other so called democracies become increasingly fascist, authoritarian, militant and power hungry with psychiatry serving as the current gestapo SS!
Per the link below, Robin Williams’ wife sent a news release that he was suffering the early stages of Parkinsons disease.
So much for all the mental death disease mongering “experts” trying to use this and other crises and tragedies to push for more money and forcing mental death stigmas and drugs in the guise of treatment for everyone on the planet except the 1% psychopaths hijacking the globe.
Another speculation is that given most if not all psych drugs cause brain damage and Parkinson type damage, it wound not be surprising to find that Williams took some or many of psychiatry’s toxic drugs for so called depression that brought or worsened many of his symptoms. Dr. Healy has shown that antidepressants (not to mention Xanax or booze in a pill) can easily drive people to drink and many have reported just that on his Risk.org web site).
When all is said and done, the mental death profession did Williams far more harm than good since they are the ones who demonized and tormented those with addictions to push their bogus multibillion drug/alcohol treatment industry while hijacking the free 12 step groups as their great program though results of such so called treatment are increasingly dubious. Many experts are going back to the common sense theories that people are driven to drink due to excess stress, trauma, unbearable powerlessness in horrible situations like work/domestic/school bullying and mobbing, etc. Dr. Lance Dodes, author of The Heart of Addiction and Breaking Addiction brings back common sense by showing how one can easily become addicted to drugs/alcohol when trapped in seemingly no win situations he helps people explore to escape such death traps.
So, not only was the mental death profession useless to Williams, but also, helped to drive him over the edge as he repeated AA slogans of self loathing, labeling, contempt and self blame enough to cause anyone to be depressed and wanting to self harm as those around the so called monster addict add fuel to the fire by blaming all their woes on the so called addict or new scapegoat.
There has been speculation that Williams was bipolar and it would be no surprise IF he had been so labeled since anyone with an addiction is now automatically given this bogus fad fraud stigma per Jill Litrell on another MIA post. Those with “depression” are converted by fiat or due to the toxic effects of useless but deadly SSRI’s, benzos and other psych drugs to push the latest lethal billion dollar drugs on patent: neuroleptics and epileptic drugs fraudulently misnamed mood stabilizers by drug companies “repurposing them” per Dr. David Healy in his great book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder.
I have been totally furious and disgusted to see all the mental death disease mongerers pretending to feel such loss and sadness about this tragic death and pushing for more of their evil, horrific life destroying stigma and poisoning in the guise of treatment. It is all the more vile and repulsive while they treat most they encounter like objects to be stigmatized and drugged within minutes for greed, power, profit and status and sent on their way without a shred of concern for their real problems, suffering or humanity. And any questions or resistance brings out the worst viciousness from these supposedly concerned, helpful mental death experts. I won’t deny I am very angry at all the suffering caused by the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel created ONLY for profit and social control to create the current horrific fascist therapeutic state that has made life hell for so many including even wealthy, powerful people like Williams.
There seems to be a problem with the link to the above article. Here is the link that appears to work:
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/what-the-quest-to-map-the-brain-tells-us-about-government-funded-science-revolutions?utm_source=Pacific%20Standard%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=b3ce3ed03c-daily-rss-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a4fd1bcb7e-b3ce3ed03c-80439297
BPDTransformation, B.A,
http://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Behavior-Therapist-Oct-2015.pdf
At the beginning of the article posted at MIA there is a link to the publication including this and other articles that I have cited above. Hope this helps.
Hi Steve,
I found the correct link:
https://aeon.co/essays/can-self-help-books-be-better-than-medication-or-therapy?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=9a8f65fb0b-Daily_newsletter_Monday_16th_November11_16_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-9a8f65fb0b-68651277
I recommend that any parent or other person dealing with children should read the following post from parents grieving over the death of their young son due to a heart attack from Ritalin for so called “ADHD” drugs. This story is eerily all too familiar:
http://www.ritalindeath.com/
I highly recommend the entire web site with updates from other sources for a wakeup call about the dangers of not only “ADHD,” but all of biopsychiatry’s voted in by consensus with no evidence labels and fables to push the latest lethal drugs on patent.
Dr. Breggin is one of the first heroes to warn parents and others about such frequent tragedies perpetrated by the new biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel in the 1990’s when the bogus brain disease or chemical imbalance fictions were promoted with no evidence to improve psychiatry’s image and income as supposed real doctors doling out “medications” while helping Big Pharma make billions at the cost of many lives with the more recent victims our precious children. Dr. Breggin provides a real wakeup call in all of his books, but Reclaiming Our Children is one of the best in terms of urging adults to stop blaming their own and society’s problems on our vulnerable children who are the weakest and most powerless members of society forced to put their trust in us.
B,
I just went through Tyler’s “story” again and to be honest, I think the format is very off putting and frustrating. It would take a great deal of time that I don’t have at the moment to plow through every comic presenting supposed brain malfunctions purported to be the cause of “ADHD” by the so called experts with most complicit with Big Pharma and others probably duped by main stream brainwashing. So, that was a major turnoff for me.
I did examine the pages more completely and it still is difficult for me to understand what Tyler is really trying to do there in that he provides citations for both main stream and critical views including Robert Whitaker and Dr. Peter Breggin.
However, Tyler does say in his post at MIA that he believes in his supposed carefully done “ADHD” diagnosis and he had a great life taking “ADHD” drugs for at least eight years. Thus, he proclaims himself a great success story with his treatment for “ADHD.” Thus, I would say he falls on the side of the main stream view of “ADHD.” He says his parents didn’t use that label with him at first.
Anyway, if you read my posts, you will see that I prefer to trust the real experts like Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, and real brain expert exposing the history behind the voted in by consensus “ADHD” label to push the lethal amphetamine drugs on our children and a literally brainwashed in toxic chemicals public and psychiatrists in bed with Big Pharma to make billions at the cost of countless destroyed lives. Dr. Breggin, a renowned expert, has similar views on “ADHD” and other DSM junk science expressed in this post, his many books, articles, web sites and educational conferences.
I will give Tyler credit for presenting the views of critics of ADHD, but his overall stance seems to be that ADHD is a real brain disorder best treated with kiddie cocaine for those like him with supposed “ADHD.” As others like Steve McCrea have indicated here, I don’t deny that these children and others have certain life, medical, diet, sleep or other problems that could result in various symptoms fraudulently labeled as ADHD to push dangerous but very profitable drugs. There are other ways to help these children with excellent books and other media on the topic.
Thus, I appreciate your pointing out that I may not have given Tyler enough credit for presenting opposing views, but when all is said and done, he is a firm advocate for the “ADHD” label and drugging of those labeled with so called “ADHD” drugs. Moreover, I think it is hard to get past all those very wordy comics expounding on various brain disorders and differences behind the “ADHD” stigma that don’t have a shred of real science or other evidence behind them.
Otherwise, I guess I would have to ask you, “What is your point?”
Hi Someone Else,
Thank you for your validation of my reality. It’s late, but I did find an excellent article by Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, that does point out the different functions of psychiatry and neurology, but then, he goes on to show the total corruption and fraud behind the ADHD epidemic he exposes and shows he has fought tooth and nail as you can see the article below on this great web site. He provides the whole history of ADHD and when he mentions CHADD one should bare in mind that CHADD is a well known Big Pharma front group.
http://www.ritalindeath.com/adhd.htm
Dr. Baughman does lament elsewhere that despite the previous distinction between neurology and psychiatry with the former dealing with real organic brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and psychiatry dealing with problems in living that were not organic or brain diseases, neurology has now sold out to the lucrative DSM/Big Pharma cartel toxic stigmatizing and drugging of citizens and most tragically, our children. Main stream general practitioners have also sold out to this dangerous agenda with psychiatry advocating for so called “collaborative care” with them whereby nobody will want to dare go for a physical because they risk being subjected to bogus DSM stigmas and toxic drugs that will destroy their lives in every way.
Anyway, if you google Dr. Fred Baughman, you will find tons of articles, information, letters he sent to many people in power to protest this fraud and his book, ADHD Fraud and his web site of the same name.
I agree with your comments too as I am sure Dr. Baughman would also. I really admire his huge efforts to expose this dangerous fraud as has Dr. Breggin, but who can compete with Big Pharma billions enforced by our great government since they all rely on Big Pharma money to get elected and stay in power not to mention getting rich in office.
I had to answer you here because there were no reply buttons under your comments. I highly recommend Dr. Baughman’s enlightening information on the web and elsewhere.
Thanks for your comments.
Steve,
Did you look at Tyler’s web site that he claims is his story?
It looks more to me like a Big Pharma infomercial bringing back to mind recent debates on several recent blogs on ADHD at MIA. This is misleading information to give people the very wrong impression that there is evidence that those labeled with ADHD have real brain disorders/diseases due to various proven brain impairments, faulty wiring or differences that are helped by dangerous amphetamines, which are totally unproven. The history of these dangerous drugs serve as a warning that they should never have been introduced to children in the first place given that women who used them for weight loss and became addicted and ill caused them to be taken off the market for that purpose. The fact they were reintroduced for children for so called ADHD for behavior control and now so called “binge eating disorder” voted into the DSM 5 with no evidence shows that the U.S. and other countries who sold out our children and humanity at large to Big Pharma have lost their moral compass. That is the view of Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, and author of the book and web site, ADHD Fraud, and countless articles exposing that this stigmatizing and drugging of children and others are the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. Many other experts like Dr. Breggin share this view.
In fact, as you know, Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute for Mental Health, has been forced to admit recently on his blog that there is not a shred of scientific, biological, genetic, medical or any other evidence for most of the DSM labels like ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, depression and many other very lucrative voted in “disorders.” The DSM does include a few real brain diseases like Alzheimer’s psychiatry stole from neurology for the DSM though the whole distinction between psychiatry and neurology when they broke into 2 entities is that psychiatry would handle life problems that did not involve brain diseases while neurology would handle real brain diseases like dementia as explained by Dr. Baughman on the web. Thus, Dr. Insel lamented the total lack of validity for all the DSM labels voted in by consensus with no biological or other evidence like ADHD, bipolar, depression and 300+ others with no genetic, biological, brain wiring, chemical imbalances or other science behind them in the first place. DSM committees led by Dr. Robert Spitzer, editor of DSM III onward to the present DSM 5 admitted there was no science behind the DSM while making the dubious claim such evidence would be found in the future. After many decades, no such biological evidence has been found, but the real life problems, crises, losses, abuse, trauma and other emotional distress caused by toxic social and environmental stressors are not only unacknowledged by DSM stigmas, but rather, covered up by them to blame the victims for growing global inequality, poverty, injustice, oppression, sexism, racism, pollution, climate change, junk food, toxic chemicals and many other isms corporate cronyism would prefer to stigmatize as “mental illness” to profit from the suffering they inflict on humanity as well, which can rightly be called psychopathic and narcissistic.
The good news is that Dr. Breggin exposed these damaging myths in his life saving books like Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Talking Back to Ritalin, Reclaiming Our Children and countless others from the 1990’s when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma and the DSM was expanded exponentially to push the latest lethal drugs on patent to make billions globally while destroying countless lives. I highly recommend all of Dr. Breggin’s enlightening books for which I will always be very grateful. Dr. Breggin heroically fought this menace alone in the early 1990’s to the present at great cost and it has only been recently that others in the profession have been forced to admit the emperor is wearing no clothes with the biopsychiatry brain mythology used to manipulate a brain washed public. I am very happy Dr. Breggin lived to see the day when he would not only be totally validated and vindicated, but also, a cherished hero of the survivor movement. He is also greatly respected by many real professionals in the “mental health” system.
Dr. Breggin does a great job debunking the voted in by consensus ADHD stigma to push the dangerous kiddie cocaine on millions of children for huge profits here, in his many books on the topic, his web sites and educational conferences. He also documents all the horrible side effects of these toxic drugs doled out for so called ADHD and how they harm children in untold ways including the over focus on certain things while their ability to socialize is all but destroyed. And as you say, the literally deadly “side effects,” which are the only effects for the most part, are well documented with many children literally dying from these drugs. There are whole web sites about these ADHD drug induced deaths too.
Many studies even covered by Consumer Reports have acknowledged that despite a short term seeming improvement on the ability to focus and appear better to those adults who stigmatized them, children given the ADHD label to justify “treating” them with kiddie cocaine show no improvement overall after about 2 to 3 years. And as you say, due to the toxic effects of drugs used for “ADHD,” these children’s very negative side effects are then stigmatized with the latest fad diagnosis bipolar to justify an even more lethal cocktail or heavy duty, dangerous drugs including neuroleptics and so called mood stabilizers as you say.
It is no accident that Dr. Joseph Biederman first almost single handedly worked for drug companies to create the ADHD child epidemic only to go on to invent the even greater drug company sponsored bipolar child epidemic after they were exposed to the gateway ADHD and SSRI drugs. Bob Whitaker exposes this travesty in his books, articles and talks with other experts.
As for the claims of these toxic drugs supposedly being so helpful, Dr. Breggin uses the term, “spellbinding” for those on toxic psychiatric drugs who think they are doing great and claim to be much improved when in reality, they are doing much worse, alienating people, losing their moral compass, becoming apathetic and even acting out in bizarre ways that can destroy their lives as documented by Dr. Breggin in his books including Medication Madness.
Finally, Steve, I would appreciate it if you would check out Tyler’s web site he promoted in his comment and share your typical well informed views on what you think of its veracity and other factors based on your excellent credentials. I would welcome your thoughts on this.
Thank you.
Donna
Since there wasn’t an immediate reply button, I’m copying Juliana’s great, wise comment here and seconding her praise for the calm, intelligent, very well informed, compassionate and always sensible voice of Steve McCrea who has spent a great deal of time here debunking the toxic ADHD stigmatizing and drugging of our nation’s children since psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, which is all too well documented in Robert Whitaker’s books like Anatomy of an Epidemic, Dr. Peter Breggin’s books like Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Fred Baughman’s ADHD Fraud and all too many others. Thank you Steve.
juliana
on February 25, 2015 at 1:13 am said:
Hello Steve,
I just wanted to sincerely thank you for your great insights and positive educational promotion regarding this issue. In my daily job, unfortunately I see this “ugly phenomenon” occurring often, as a quick “solution” to parent’s complaints regarding their children’s odd behaviour. Parents complain that their 3 year old child asks many questions, or that they are running, jumping, laughing, talking all the time. I even had 1 parent that had put her child on a stimulant, diagnosed with ADHD because this 12 year old boy would touch himself in his sleep. ( I always thought that is a normal thing to happen for a boy that age, out of his control)
As a mother (of a 3 year old wonderful daughter) and healthcare professional, I always wondered…isn’t that though what a child does that brings joy into our boring trouble some adult life? – Asking a lot, talking, running, playing, jumping all over, never sitting still, expressing their boredom when put on a classroom with 50 other kids being asked to do and follow the exact same rules, learn exact same things as the others, like they are some kind of sheep…:( It saddens me to have to watch our children being labelled with a mental disorder, have them act and learn things we (adults) decide they should learn (not yet realising that the most de-humanizing mistakes are made by adults and not children) ultimately become the reason why our children are losing their individuality! And not to mention the children who have suffered trauma in their life, and instead of spending time in understanding their pain we have it easier to give them drugs.
I apologize if my comment has even the slightest meaning of insult to anyone. I only meant to thank you, especially Dr. Corrigan for this article and his work.
Thank you 🙂
http://www.laleva.org/eng/2015/02/big_pharma_is_americas_new_mafia.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of-attention-deficit-disorder.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Younger children in the classroom likely overdiagnosed with ADHD.
Immaturity may lead to diagnosis of disorder.
http://www.cmaj.ca/site/misc/pr/5mar12_pr.xhtml
Just to clarify again, “real experts” are just that in they act in a scientific, experimental manner seeking answers to important questions and are agnostic about the results.
Fake experts, on the other hand, are like the majority in biological psychiatry whose real agenda is to protect their own guild interests and ideology with no science or evidence whatever with Big Pharma’s regardless of the harm to their many victims they pretend to be helping when they are only harming in the guise of mental health to make billions for Big Pharma and cohorts, and aiding and abetting the increasing social control and theft of human freedoms and rights of our Therapeutic Fascist States pretending to be democracies.
So, there is a real difference between real and fake experts that can be life threatening if one doesn’t know the difference, which is why so many MIA members have done their homework for sure. Since you asked, I am happy to clarify just what I mean by “real experts” as opposed to those just pretending to be such like those doing the bulk of fraudulent biopsychiatry/Big Pharma ghost written, junk science, bought off “studies,” “drug trials,” and other tasks while hiding any negative or life threatening results that could threaten profits and Pharma payments, perks to psychiatrists, government and others involved. Big Pharma has had to pay billions in fines for such fakery of psychiatry when it creates new stigmas to push the latest toxic drugs, ECT and other brain damaging, useless “treatments” while doing all in their power to cover up those lethal effects and the fact the “treatments” don’t work, but make things much worse as exposed in Bob Whitaker’s books and articles. But, obviously, our government knows this, so they obviously have a different agenda than the health of the victims they prey on with biopsychiatry as those in Nazi Germany found out too late when psychiatry gassed to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill” as practice for their huge role in the Holocaust they instigated with their never ending bogus, cruel eugenics/euthanasia agenda in league with past and present robber barons to justify the theft of most global wealth while enslaving the majority or typical psychopathic agenda of the 1% versus the 99%.
Or perhaps they may not be fake experts after all since they are so successful at their role of wolves in sheep’s clothing plotting others’ destruction for greed, power and sadism typical of psychopaths per world authority/expert Dr. Robert Hare who created the psychopathic test, the PCL-R and consults for the FBI. I guess it depends on how you look at it in that they are only fake experts when they speak of any real brain damage, disorder, disease or faked evidence regarding junk science stigmas like ADHD and bipolar while they are experts at Big Pharma/biopsychaitry spin to pull the wool over people’s eyes regarding psychiatric pseudoscience.
Are you saying that Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, was/is not a real expert when he exposed the DSM and with it ADHD and bipolar as lacking any validity or scientific, medical evidence whatsoever despite the fact that the NIMH and Surgeon Generals have been singing the opposite tune for decades and knowingly committing total fraud against the American public as Dr. Fred Baughman and others have rightly accused them of doing? Of course, Dr. Insel just wants to change the same old tired ideology to something new with the same pernicious purposes to attract Big Pharma back to psychiatry’s previous lucrative fold now that the drug pipeline is drying up as Big Pharma has been dumping psychiatry in droves due to its now tarnished image and its own admission that psychiatry lacks the science to pursue new, applicable treatments.
So, feel free to continue to try to obfuscate the above while your own ADHD and bipolar ideology with no evidence to back it up is all too clear.
Amen B!
I suppose the comment from “a Dad” was supposed to be scientific evidence of that poor kid being destroyed by the bogus bipolar stigma and toxic neuroleptic drugs getting great treatment. The “Dad” like the kid’s “doctors” should be in jail if we had a government and society with any conscience, but sadly psychopaths and their sycophants have hijacked the globe.
Again, Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist and author of ADHD FRAUD, has shone the light on this vile topic and exposed that not only is ADHD a total fraud, but also, every one of psychiatry’s voted in by consensus junk science DSM stigmas created in the 1980’s when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma as Dr. Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, describes in books like Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Talking Back to Ritalin, Reclaiming Our Children as well as Bob Whitaker’s books Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. Of course, there are now countless books and articles available exposing the junk science of the invented ADHD bogus stigma to push kiddie cocaine just like the child bipolar fad fraud was created to push more lethal neuroleptics on children.
And if you are not aware that studies have shown that ADHD drugs provide no real benefit and only make things much worse for those really suffering from life problems, abusive environments, bullying, poverty and other social stressors for the most part then it would seem that you have your own reasons for wanting to promote this ever increasing assault on our nation’s children and society in general.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
How about those like Rebecca Riley, a toddler, who died thanks to Biederman’s bogus single handed invention of the child ADHD and bipolar epidemics to push the latest drug cocktails of his real clients, Big Pharma. Biederman has already gone down in infamy for creating the bipolar fad fraud epidemic for children and toddlers no less, probably in many if not most cases the iatrogenic effects of the ADHD stigma and kiddie cocaine epidemic he created just about single handedly just as he did with child bipolar.
You must be aware that many think Biederman is very guilty of great crimes against humanity and its children especially since he sold them out for personal self aggrandizement and millions of drug company money to the point that reporters were shocked when he was on the stand in the courtroom and compared himself with God, typical of psychiatry. Even many drug pushing psychiatrists felt Biederman had gone too far with the child bipolar epidemic while many feel the same about the child ADHD epidemic. Isn’t it odd that with real medicine nobody has to argue whether or not real illnesses or diseases exist within their own profession? With no evidence other than being voted in by consensus and no tests to prove anyone has these voted in junk science DSM stigmas, psychiatrists can argue all day over their fictitious disorders they mostly inflict with their invalidation, disempowering lies about those suffering traumatic life events as being “mentally ill” due to their supposed bad genes or chemical imbalances rather than their toxic environments.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has been forced to admit that all DSM junk science stigmas are totally invalid because they lack any science or medical evidence behind them while their so called treatments leave much to be desired too.
If you don’t think poisoning children’s brains based on bogus, life destroying, voted in DSM stigmas to make billions from the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and others using children as fodder for greed, power and sadism, I guess there is not much else we can say here to convince you that these are horrific assaults against our nation’s children and society in general thanks to our increasingly fascist government using psychiatry to rob people of all their civil, democratic and human rights in the guise of “mental health.”
To put children on lethal neuroleptic drugs for misbehavior is so evil and criminal, it boggles my mind. And this is not medicine in any sense of the word or even antipsychotics. They are merely major, major tranquillizers intended to disable one’s brain, feelings, creativity, sex life, health and life in general to make them poisoned, obese zombies with miserable destroyed lives often with tardive dyskinesia and other horrific effects that cause early death by 25 years on average and that’s only in adults. Think what will happen to those children poisoned with psychiatric drugs and their life spans thanks to the likes of Joseph Biederman.
I can’t believe anyone could advocate perpetrating such crimes against children in the guise of mental health to maintain such a sordid “career.”
And though some abusive, criminal parent thought having their child a drugged zombie was an improvement while doing nothing to check out the toxic effects of these poison drugs says far more about the parent(s) than anything positive about the horrible neuroleptic drug poisons.
The inventor of the lobotomy was given a Nobel prize no less, but modern people see such barbaric butchery for the Dr. Mengele type of human experimentation that it is though psychiatry is doing all in its ongoing ill gotten power to bring back such barbaric practices in full force including ECT, lobotomy, magnetic “brain stimulation” and others in their arsenal to continue their chemical, electrical and surgical lobotomies that no decent, humane person could possibly condone if they fully understood the truth about such lethal treatments.
Thus, winning a Pulitzer or Nobel prize does not make one’s science correct. And Galileo is a great example of those with the real science behind them being silenced, shunned and even jailed though he history has more than vindicated him just like those like Dr. Peter Breggin and Dr. Fred Baughman are being vindicated for exposing the 100% fraud behind the junk science DSM paradigm psychiatry created when it sold out to Big Pharma with the bogus ADHD stigma one of its many billion dollar crimes against children no less.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
And by the way, the APA and CHADD, NAMI and many others are just drug company front groups.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
As far as the junk science, invented, voted in ADHD life destroying stigma to push the vile kiddie cocaine drugs to a make a literal killing by biopsychiatry when it sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s, I will trust Dr. Fred Baughman, lifelong Child Neurologist, and author of ADHD Fraud any day of the week when he speaks of such psychiatric fraud as the worst medical crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. We can thank Dr. Joseph Biederman for such crimes against children when he personally sold out the nation’s children to the drug companies he was truly serving when he almost single handedly created both the ADHD and bipolar epidemics in children just like DSM III and IV perpetrators created the adult bipolar epidemic in adults and now the DSM V perpetrators are pushing for adult ADHD. This Dr. Mengele like psychiatric monstrosity never ends. And ADHD drugs are now being promoted for the brand new DSM bogus stigma of “binge eating disorder” with an article about it posted in the news section of MIA with many upset because these toxic drugs put people at risk for heart attacks and other lethal effects with children far from immune as many children have died from these dangerous drugs.
And the real experts have exposed that any supposed differences in the brains of so called ADHD and normal kids are due to the toxic drugs given to those stuck with a junk science ADHD stigma due to abusive families, bullies and other social stressors and certainly not any faulty brains. Diet may be a factor especially today, but the current model is always blame the victims for any lethal effects inflicted by the current robber barons of our time, the real “patients” of psychiatry today as was the case with the robber barons of the 1930’s who along with psychiatry created the eugenics theories that led to the Nazi Holocaust after psychiatrists practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill.” Today, they just drug and shock children and adults to early death by about 25 years after torturing and profiting from them during their greatly shortened lives thanks to the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel.
And Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted recently that all DSM junk science stigmas that would include ADHD, bipolar and other recent voted in fad frauds of psychiatry are totally INVALID and lacking any science, medical or other evidence whatsoever.
Thus, I think that despite blakeacake’s attempts to “educate” MIA members about all the great science behind the bogus invented ADHD stigma created to push amphetamines on innocent children that have been proven to cause much harm and little help or positive results after about three years and often ending up with an even worse bipolar assault due to the lethal effects of the kiddie cocaine pretense of help, MIA members and many others are all too well informed about the total junk science behind ADHD, bipolar and any other life destroying degradation rituals perpetrated by psychiatry/Big Pharma to force their brain disabling treatments on a literally brain washed public. But, the cat is out of the bag and more and more people are catching on thanks to all the corruption exposed in both psychiatry and Big Pharma not to mention all the destroyed, disabled lives exposed by Robert Whitaker in his many articles and books like Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
Dr. Wallace,
I found your article to be very inspiring and it gives me a great deal of hope that someone like you being trained in traditional psychiatry could see through this corrupt paradigm and recognize that yours and your patients’ humanity are the same and equally important and valuable. I was especially impressed that you saw your “patients'” problems were much like your own as fellow human beings.
I hope you keep up the good work while continuing to spread the word to those in your profession at MIA and elsewhere until many more share your helpful, humane, compassionate, humble (in a very good way) and caring approach to those you encounter. Many of us at MIA went through the same type of journey to our “enlightenment” about mainstream psychiatry including finding Dr. Peter Breggin’s life saving books and others throwing us a lifesaver.
Sandy,
My last paragraph expressing my gratitude and admiration for you(despite our differences past and present we’ve agreed could exist while having some meeting of minds) was buried in my post, so I’m recopying it in the hopes you will see it and hang in there. I’m glad to see you still posting at MIA and I appreciate your long term efforts to learn about and fight against the worst of the Big Pharma/biopsychiatry APA/KOL/government industrial complex as you continue to share this process with us.
I now have a famous Dr. Steingard quote I use when I don’t think things easily fall into black and white categories: “I’m feeling “muddled” about this…though that wasn’t your exact quote I’m sure, but the idea sure works when one is honestly “muddled” when trying to make sense of the best choices in very complex, difficult situations that you obviously face daily with limited funds, resources and support.
Here’s my last paragraph in my above post that is a tribute to you though you might not think so reading the rest of my post:
“I’m glad and impressed that Dr. Sandy Steingard read Bob Whitaker’s book with an open mind and has gradually been changing her own views based on his work and her own related research and trials while being more upfront with her patients with informed consent while trying to wean people off toxic neuroleptics as much as possible. (I hope you hear me Sandy).”
I also miss your posts on 1boringoldman and hope you won’t allow the bullies to drive you away as others there expressed as well.
Sascha,
This is a fantastic, gripping and hard hitting story that does really connect the dots of the monstrous cannibalistic global Big Pharma/Corporate and political agendas using psychiatry as a means of brutal social control and enabling fascist totalitarian governments to rob people of all their civil, human, democratic rights in the guise of mental health especially against dissidents exposing or protesting these brutal government/corporate dictatorships as did Stalinist Russia emulated by the U.S., the UK and other so called democracies in modern times.
The great book and web site, Political Ponerology, explains this psychopathic micro and macro hijacking of decent people and governments/organizations via infiltration, manipulation and ultimate totalitarian control as with Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, etc. The author working under such a dictatorship himself while secretly writing this work and trying to get it to influential people to no avail ultimately got it published under great duress in the U.S. to warn others of this psychopathic menace to humanity unless they wake up to their nefarious goals and tactics. Unfortunately, he warns that psychopaths manage to infiltrate and hijack governments during good times when people get too lax until the guaranteed bad times come thanks to the ultimate cruel psychopathic inhumane agendas which require people to wake up and use their growing suffering to fight and take back their power and governments as with Nazi Germany, etc. Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths and consultant to the FBI, also exposes how much human evil and suffering is inflicted on humanity by these intraspecies predators in his books, Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits: When Pychopaths Go to Work based on the classic book, The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Dr. Hare created the PCL-R or test for identifying psychopaths, another name for evil, sadistic, predatory people well described in the works of major world religions.
Thanks for sharing this with us.
Soneone Else,
Thanks for your encouraging comment about my link to the great Dr. Loren Mosher and colleagues with an excerpt from a highly acclaimed book on “schizophrenia.”
This rather short excerpt does a superb job explaining the out and out evil corruption by Big Pharma of all those in power from government, medicine/psychiatry, academia, the supposed watchdogs like the FDA, NAMI and other drug company front groups, the media for the most part, advertising and promotion, schools, the courts, familes and society at large.
I hadn’t realized that Big Pharma was actually literally behind the forced treatment agenda to further expand their lethal neuroleptic drug markets while preying on children, the elderly, pregnant women and babies in utero and any other breathing (if only barely) human being who could be forced on these poisons for their insatiable greed, power hunger and sadism. Of course, this makes sense when one considers that Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths and consultant to the FBI, agreed with the author of the book and DVD, The Corporation, describing its evil agendas and “behaviors,” that many modern day “corporations” as well as those leading them could well be described as psychopathic (or just plain evil, intraspecies predators).
Of course, Jim Gottstein, J.D. gives some involved the benefit of the doubt when he uses the terms duped or complicit describing this debacle, meaning that not all involved were aware of the predatory Big Pharma/biopsychiatry KOL/APA agenda behind the new “magic bullet” supposed wonder drugs or second generation neuroleptics with the best corporate spin money could buy. Even Bob Whitaker said he believed this great miracle story until David Oaks, former Director of Mindfreedom, encouraged Bob to investigate the history behind psychiatry’s great DSM and neuroleptic wonder drug “success” and the rest was history as Bob explains on a blog about Oaks being a great influence on him. And this excerpt doesn’t even touch on the next monstrous invention and expansion of the bipolar fad fraud described in Dr. David Healy’s MANIA: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, that demonstrates that the DSM III and IV addition and expansion of this latest garbage can “sacred symbol” of psychiatry could be used to prey on one and all including perpetrators and victims, Axis II and anyone but the “kitchen sink” to push the lethal neuroleptics and the bogus “mood stabilizers” or reinvented epileptic drugs for a bogus theory that bipolar and epileptic seizures have similar paths. This also coincided with the nefarious Texas Medical Algorithm scandals to push the toxic second generation neuroleptic drugs on Medicaid programs nationally that has led to a vast number of children in the state welfare and orphaned children programs being on these poisons. Fortunately, in recent years there has been a public and media outcry about this toxic over drugging of such vulnerable children thanks to Senator Grassley exposing the child bipolar overreach to justify toxic neuroleptics for children by Joseph Biederman actually working on behalf of Johnson & Johnson. Biederman was supposedly doing an NIMH government study while promising J&J positive study results of their neuroleptic drug before the study was even done, which is illegal especially with an NIMH grant, getting him the usual slap on the wrist despite being responsible for the death of toddler Rebecca Riley and similar victims thanks to his bipolar toxic drug cocktail protocols that single handedly caused the child bipolar epidemic. MIA recently posted an article about how this child bipolar epidemic came about mainly in the U.S.
I guess I was pretty naïve not to realize Big Pharma’s role in the forced treatment agenda, which makes the likes of Torrey, Jaffe, Murphy all the more dangerous.
You cited the quotes by Robert Whitaker as puzzling, but these are actually quotes by the perpetrators quoted by Whitaker in his great book, Mad in America, when Bob first came to realize these sordid truths about the great claims of progress with the treatment with neuroleptics or “magic bullets” of the so called mentally ill. Thus, those quotes are used by Bob to make his points about the bad treatment of those stigmatized as mentally ill and certainly not to condone it. It appears Bob had a pretty close relationship with Dr. Loren Mosher with videos of their talking together about the “mental health system” on the web including a great site called Yoism.
I’m glad and impressed that Dr. Sandy Steingard read Bob Whitaker’s book with an open mind and has gradually been changing her own views based on his work and her own related research and trials while being more upfront with her patients with informed consent while trying to wean people off toxic neuroleptics as much as possible. (I hope you hear me Sandy).
Warning: Reading the following article will probably make your blood boil.
Drug companies and Schizophrenia: Unbridled Capitalism meets Madness
Loren R. Mosher, Richard Gosden and Sharon Beder
http://herinst.org/sbeder/corppower/drugcompanies.html#.VMV3bId0yfA
Drug companies and Schizophrenia:
Unbridled Capitalism meets Madness
Loren R. Mosher, Richard Gosden and Sharon Beder
http://herinst.org/sbeder/corppower/drugcompanies.html#.VMV3bId0yfA
Sleves includes the life, memory destroying ECT as one of the supposed wonder treatments doled out by his group for the “mentally ill” supposedly so eager and willing to have these “treatments.” It is well known that so called patients must pretend to agree with psychiatrists and their enablers about their bogus stigma and the need for their toxic drugs or they risk forced treatment and being indefinitely committed if they don’t play their fascist, humiliating degradation rituals “game” like the current Hunger Games. Often, these victims are falsely accused of some bogus aggression by some family member, police or other fraud to put them in this Orwellian, Kafka like nightmare.
Here is a great article on ECT that exposes the horrors of this brain damaging torture treatment that is one of the most lucrative in psychiatry with all of the supposed “evidence base” invented by those with huge conflicts of interest with ECT machine makers like Harold Sackeim and Max Fink and the fact that they can make much more money by subjecting mainly helpless elderly women to this barbaric treatment to exploit their Medicare while subjecting them to heart attack risks, more memory loss and brain damage and a great increase risk of death that is often not honestly reported. This is monstrous and evil and in my opinion, there is nothing banal about it.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/health/lhs195.htm
Again, Linda Andre’s excellent book, Doctors of Deception, about ECT is considered one of the best if not the best on the topic.
Dr. Breggin writes about the shocking study that Sackeim finally produced after being paid by the government to do it as one of the greatest promoters of ECT that he avoided for years while making a fortune off ECT and shock machine conflicts of interest like his fellow ECT pushers. The study proves what ECT victims knew all along: it destroys memories, cognitive function, intelligence, creativity and human lives, which drove some of its more famous victims to suicide like Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Wolf:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/disturbing-news-for-patie_b_44734.html
Dr. Breggin also exposes that all of psychiatry’s so called “treatments” are brain damaging/disabling or chemical, electrical, surgical lobotomies with the latter two barbaric practices making a great comeback.
http://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2015/01/21/psychiatrys-defense-were-no-worse-than-general-medicine/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BehaviorismAndMentalHealth+%28Behaviorism+and+Mental+Health%29
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/u/uptonsincl138285.html#arFHaDWs0r50othz.99
Though I never knew Leonard Frank personally, I certainly felt and feel that I did. Anyone who has researched antipsychiatry and other criticisms of psychiatry for a long time like me became aware of Leonard Frank’s story and passion about the harms of the “mental health” system he wanted to help others avoid. I give him much credit for his works on ECT and quotations along with his video to educate others. He was obviously a very brilliant, dedicated man.
Like others here I am sad to learn that Leonard will no longer live among us, but he will always be with us in our hearts and minds.
Dr. Hickey,
Based on our past correspondence about the bipolar epidemic and Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s huge contribution to it, I am very pleased about your recent articles on SSRI induced mania now included in the DSM V as justified for a life destroying bogus bipolar stigma for all ages and this one about Dr. Ghaemi’s usual utilitarian approach especially when it comes to his addictive passion to stigmatize everyone on the planet with bipolar as well as the psychotherapy discussed here. To facilitate this goal he is constantly advocating for his version of “evidence based medicine” described by The Last Psychiatrist below with the top priority being to keep the bipolar/Big Pharma gravy train going and expanding exponentially as well as Ghaemi’s role as a supposed “mood disorders” expert. There is little doubt that any so called therapy provided by Ghaemi and his minions would revolve around doling out bipolar stigmas and forcing people to take their lethal drugs depending on what is on patent and making the most billions for the psychiatry/Big Pharma cartel. This is typical of much of what passes for “therapy” today in that it serves to brainwash people to accept their lifelong bipolar or “mental illness,” accept they will live a horrible, disabled life at the mercy of psychiatrist till death do they part (much earlier by about 25 years for the victims due to the toxic drugs) and they can never amount to anything other than being a psychiatric slave for life.
Here is The Last Psychiatrist about this approach by Ghaemi with bipolar:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/04/experts_weigh_in_on_bipolar_di.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/01/the_massacre_of_the_unicorns_i.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2006/11/massacre_of_the_unicorns.html
Thank you for your ongoing take no prisoners meticulous, honest, scientific “analysis” of biopsychiatry, contributions to the bipolar epidemic and certain enablers like Nassir Ghaemi that keep this predatory, destructive paradigm going at the cost of countless destroyed human lives.
Since bipolar disorder is the new “sacred symbol” to justify psychiatry’s existence, I would welcome any future insights you might be willing or able to share about the bogus bipolar epidemic destroying countless lives from in utero to grave.
Sleves,
I find it hard to believe that you are unaware of the fact that we now live in fascist, “therapeutic,” states with psychiatry serving as militant police as everyone, especially our children (just like Soviet Russia), is under constant surveillance at school, work, community, etc. Teachers are “taught” the junk science DSM to stigmatize any normal children misbehaving and collude with school “psychologists” (yes, the ones who developed literal torture treatment for the CIA for so called terrorists without due process) to send them to a psychiatrist to be officially stigmatized and drugged. Most school shooters were found to have experienced such stigma and “treatment” with many suffering rampant bullying, which likely drove them over the edge from the dangerous drug effects and the huge injustice that the bullies were validated at their horrific expense as happens in work places and communities at large, which is called mobbing. Of course, psychiatry does nothing to expose the deadly effect of bullying, mobbing, domestic violence, rampant psychopathy/malignant narcissism by the 1% and their minions or other atrocities that cause immense human suffering with their easy, lucrative “blame the victim” approach to cater to those in power. Even Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, past APA president and psychiatry cheerleader, recently admitted their absence in domestic violence after the NFL debacle. But, that’s not true: psychiatry blames and stigmatizes domestic violence victims including children for their very normal trauma reactions to put the nails in their coffins to aid and abet their fellow abusers with more power and manipulation skills. Thus, psychiatry serves as the chief bullies and mobbers too while destroying the victims with impunity.
And any parent(s) who dares object to such fraudulent, life destroying “treatment” for their children in custody battles, single parenthood or intact marriages face huge risk of having their children taken away, which is happening all too frequently despite what you claim. The fact that many cases like that of Justin Pelletier have made many headlines in all the media makes me greatly question your claims and/or awareness of what is going on. Many of these cases have been covered at MIA as well.
Thus, I stand by what I said in that just because you state or promote dangerous fallacies “nicely” does not make them any less dangerous. We now live in a situation similar to Stalinist Russia whereby anyone can be falsely accused of being “mentally ill” by their own families, coworkers, community and world at large since a third grader could use the DSM or “Book of Insults” (Jim Gottstein, J.D. of Psych Rights), which is just a more sneaky, immature way of insulting someone with name calling with the typical “You’re crazy” to hurt, negate and shut someone up. But, psychiatry’s use of this type of name calling is far more pernicious because this gives them literal license to lobotomize their victims after such psychological and verbal abuse. Mostly abusive men do this routinely to destroy their wives and even children psychologically and make them appear crazy from their abuse related trauma to destroy them in divorces to rob them of everything with help from the mental death profession of course.
Thus, it is not MIA members who are dangerous warning other would be victims against this web of deceit of “mental health,” but rather, those who continue to pretend it helps saves lives when the opposite is all too true.
Sleves,
I stongly urge you to read Dr. Philip Hickey’s posts here and more completely on his web site, Behaviorism and Mental Health, whereby he exposes what most MIA posters had to learn the hard way: that the entire foundation of psychiatry is spurious because it medicalizes typical human problems, suffering, grief, stress and other normal reactions to life itself. As you should know, all DSM life destroying stigmas were invented and voted in by consensus without a shred of science or medical evidence behind them to supposedly solve their “reliability” problem per Dr. Robert Spitzer, editor of the DSM III. Thus, psychiatry decided to pretend to be more medical and sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s that got us to the near totalitarian therapeutic state we have now due to the billions Big Pharma poured in to corrupt medicine, government and the media to make multibillions themselves at the horrific expense of more and more falsely medicalized victims. Dr. Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, warned that the most dangerous thing one could do was visit a psychiatrist under this new fraudulent paradigm since such a visit was guaranteed to result in a life destroying stigma and a prescription of dangerous, toxic psych drugs within a very short visit. The eminent Dr. Thomas Szasz warned about in his many books like The Therapeutic State, The Myth of Mental Illness, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies and many others. Even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has now admitted that the DSM and its voted in labels are totally lacking in any validity or evidence whatever and the NIMH is moving in a different direction.
And you don’t think stigmatizing people to force lethal drugs on them and subject them to gross human rights violations and deprivation of all civil and democratic rights is a problem?
I regret that you did not like my comments seeing them as negative, but no matter how nicely or pleasantly or persuasively you and others promoting psychiatry speak, the fact that you are spreading deadly, life destroying falsehoods based on a spurious, nonmedical area of medicine is far more cruel, offensive and dangerous than anything I or others at MIA could say. Perhaps you should read more at MIA and elsewhere in the books I cite here to start to learn what many here had to learn at horrific costs to their health, families, careers, financial security, children, human freedoms, civil rights, reputation and so many agonizing other tragic losses.
I suggest you read Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. Dr. Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Mediation Madness, The War on Children of Color, Dr. Grace Jackson, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs; Drs. Kirk, Gomory & Cohen, Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs, Dr. Grace Jackson, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs and Drug Induced Dementia: The Perfect Crime, Dr. Timothy Scott, American Fooled, Dr. David Healy, The Antidepressant Era, Pharmagddon, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, Dr. James Davis, Cracked, Drs. Stuart and Kirk, The Selling of the DSM and Making Us Crazy, Dr. Paula Caplan, They Say You’re Crazy, Dr. Gary Greenburgy, The Book of Woe, Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, The Bitterist Pill and The Myth of the Chemical Cure, Drs. Pam & Ross, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry, Dr. Daniel Carlott, Dr. Linda Andre, Doctors of Deception (about brain damaging ECT), Psychiatry Unhinged, and countless others you can find at Amazon or the web.
Thus, for you to keep extolling the usefulness supposed great benefits of biopsychiatry with its Book of Insults or DSM junk science to falsely stigmatize and ostracize those they target to make them permanent captives of what I call the “mental death profession,” to subject them to what Dr. Peter Breggin calls brain disabling/damaging drugs, ECT or chemical, electrical and surgical lobotomies is highly offensive for those who have not only done huge amounts of research to save our very lives or those of loved ones, but also to validate our reality after being subjected to psychiatry’s self serving brain washing for their guild interests alone.
http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/01/psychiatry-gone-astray/
I’ll let the great author of Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime speak for himself as he identifies all the lies promoted by biopsychiatry, the fact that they can’t be trusted with their toxic drugs, that they are the worst offenders of medical corruption and many other crimes against the most vulnerable in society.
It is very unfortunate when psychiatry’s minions and enablers pontificate and post their infomercials for biopsychiatry without doing the tons of research and homework by many MIA members of the real experts who have not been corrupted by Big Pharma or APA guild interests.
I also suspect that some supposed psychiatric “patients” extolling all the supposed life saving benefits of psychiatry while denying/ignoring the huge harms made clear in The Physicians Desk Reference, patient inserts, billion dollar law suits against Big Pharma and FDA black box warnings sadly after much harm has been done are really psychiatrists or other “mental health” experts and cheerleaders for the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma Mafioso cartel exposed in the great book, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
As some main stream psychiatrists have found, most MIA members are all too well informed to be so easily conned and manipulated by such guild cheerleading for a very broken, harmful paradigm that is biopsychiatry.
Stephen,
Thanks for your comment and validation of my post. I think the issue is that the whole idea of ethics, morality, conscience and their related positive and negative emotions is a very challenging, emotional topic. Thus, I think when we read an article like Dr. Breggin’s here on this sensitive issue, our brains can be hijacked with our own personal experiences and prejudices that make it difficult to give the article a fair assessment unless we are aware of such tendencies. Note the very different reactions to the same article by Dr. Breggin. Obviously, this is a volatile topic with which decent people are apt to struggle unlike the psychopaths/sociopaths/malignant narcissists or just plain evil people in our midst.
And if you reread the article it is obvious that Dr. Breggin is speaking of unwarranted, undeserved guilt children can experience in the beginning and not guilt that they should feel for doing real wrong like harming others.
I want to also thank you again for your many wise, insightful comments based on your own personal and work experience. They have helped to validate my own reality time after time, so I hope you keep sharing them.
Take care.
In my encounters with Dr. Peter Breggin via his books, web sites, media writings, appearances and other noble actions to fight against the harm done by biopyschiatry and warn the public as well at great cost to himself, he has impressed me as a very noble, ethical, honest person who advocates for human empathy, fulfilling one’s spiritual and other higher purposes and the greatest level of morality. Thus, I was initially confused myself as Dr. Breggin started this article explaining that more primitive societies needed more biological forms of shame, guilt and anxiety for “social control” to avoid excess violence, crimes and other serious infractions for the safety of families and their societies and then seemed to say that these emotions are not only useless, but harmful.
However, as I read further, I saw that Dr. Breggin was not saying such emotions are useless, but rather, that for them to be useful, one has to develop one’s ethics or morals in a conscious way with “good enough” parenting and other influences to seriously consider what is right and wrong rather than just acting on primitive biological or animal like instincts that can often lead us astray in human societies that are not the natural state that animals enjoy. At the same time, though our more aggressive behaviors can be harmful, they can also be very helpful as long as we harness them so they can work for productive, ethical purposes. Dr. George Simon addresses this issue in his great book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, which explains the difference between covert aggressives who manipulate their victims with the pretense of good motives to exploit and harm them and those who control their aggressive impulses to produce high quality work or goals without harming others.
Though I loathe the junk science DSM claims in the following article, it does address the work of psychologists in dealing with very damaging excess or undeserved guilt, anxiety and shame that can come from families, schools, societies and one’s self for many reasons that can be intentional or simply unconscious intergenerational carryovers. I think this is what Dr. Breggin is addressing in this article rather than advocating for such a lack of guilt or shame, we would all act like psychopaths or sociopaths with no conscience or empathy:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/childhood-guilt-adult-depression/384176/
Here is a great article about theories of moral development in children that shows that there is much more to developing a good conscience, ethics and morality than relying on one’s base animal instincts or abusive, controlling people or systems:
http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/earlychildhood/article_view.aspx?ArticleID=118
Even in trying to write this post, I am finding this issue difficult to convey, so I will recommend the reviewers at Amazon who give Dr. Breggin’s new book very high praise:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1616141492/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=64060528093&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=662841306962661546&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_7wttlnanvf_b
Since I was brought up Catholic in their most rigid, guilt tripping times with an over zealous family and community, I can truly appreciate the need for a book like the above because some guilt and shame is imposed or inflicted due to ignorance or less than noble motives by the guilt trippers, which causes more harm than good as Dr. Breggin explains. I can see where I and others with similar backgrounds could greatly benefit from this book and intend to buy it myself.
C.S. Lewis has lamented that in modern times many people have mistaken “niceness” for ethics and goodness, which are far from the same thing. We now have the tyranny of “political correctness” as well. Lewis also demonstrated that ethics and morality can be twisted to meet the eyes of the beholder with the following famous quotation:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
Doesn’t the above quotation remind you of the very abuses perpetrated by main stream biopsychiatry like brain damaging drugs and ECT that Dr. Breggin has bravely fought to expose and change as the “conscience of psychiatry?” In my opinion, it fits perfectly in that biopsychiatry sure tries to cure people against their will of states we may not regard as diseases, which compares to being treated like infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals, which comprises an intolerable insult. The fact that biopsychiatry has engaged in such immoral behavior while hijacking the world to impose their own version of morality and ethics around the globe is one of the greatest outrages and crimes against humanity ever. This is all too clear when one considers that psychiatry’s eugenics theories invented to aid and abet the robber barons of their times past and present were used by them to instigate the Nazi Holocaust and many other past and recent ethnic cleansings that have expanded to target anyone who can be exploited by the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma/Business/Government cartel including children and toddlers no less. Dr. Breggin has written a superb article exposing psychiatry’s contribution to the Nazi Holocaust with the article quoting those who presided over the Nuremburg Trials who acknowledged that without psychiatry, the Nazi Holocaust would probably never have happened.
Finally, I think if one reads Dr. Breggin’s article carefully, it makes a great deal of sense that in our complicated human society, we cannot just rely on our initial animal type instincts, but rather, we must work our whole lives to develop our own value system of ethics, morality, spirituality and other higher purposes to develop our full human potential.
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
Hi Steve,
Great comment. Right on target!
Donna
Fiachra,
Absolutely!
Thanks for commenting on my response.
Bob Whitaker does a great job exposing Dr. Thomas Insel’s ongoing futile, but very costly never ending latest eugenics agenda in psychiatry that continues to harm countless lives in the guise of “mental health.”
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/01/the-taint-of-eugenics-in-nimh-funded-research-today/
Dr. Jay Joseph, Psychologist, MIA author and author of The Missing Gene, The Gene Illusion and
most recently The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, along with many articles once again debunks the predatory eugenics agenda of biopsychiatry with the goal of blaming the victims for the gross injustice, oppression, increasing inequality, poor schools, poverty, racism, sexism, robbery of global and local resources at the expense of the majority, pollution and other evils inflicted by the latest robber barons whom biopsychiatry has always served via a predatory eugenics/euthanasia agenda as it continues to do today. The only difference today is that the psychopaths in power have learned to torture and poison their victims gradually via toxic food, drugs, pollution, lies, injustice, creating the junk science “mental death” agenda to rob an increasing majority of all their democratic, civil, human rights directly and indirectly with an increasing Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship pretending to be a democracy as exposed the book, Political Ponerology and its related web site and many others. Dr. Joseph lefts the veil of psychiatry’s attempts to cover up their crimes against humanity by demonstrating over and over that their never ending bogus claims of inferior genes, brain circuits and other ideology disguised as science become obvious and irrelevant once the true causes are recognized:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/12/biology-genetics-irrelevant-true-causes-recognized/
What I found really great about this publication is that rather than just blaming the victims for their so called depression, it addresses the many growing social problems that are causing it as well as the importance of a good relationship between therapist and client that addresses individual needs.
I have copied the editor’s introductory article because he exposes the well known problem of the so called mental health system blaming the victims for their socially/environmental induced stress or “depression:” (Donna)
“Editor’s Note By Rich Simon”
“More than two decades ago, on the opening page of the book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse, psychologist James Hillman told his coauthor, writer Michael Ventura, why he thought psychotherapy was—already, back then!—at a dead end. “We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that . . . a deteriorating world. . . . By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job any more. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system is sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.”
I’m half-inclined to stop right there, since what Hillman was saying is still true today— except that it’s so much truer now than it was even then. If the world’s mental health was “getting worse” in 1992, it’s gone catastrophically downhill since. The numbers cited in Jonathan Rottenberg’s cover article in this issue are stunning. The suicide rate for adults is up 25 percent since 1999. Depression is expected to produce more death and disability by 2030 than war, accidents, cancer, stroke, and heart disease. This is in spite of the fact that antidepressant use has increased 400 percent since 1988—not to mention the vast industry of self-help books published since then! Depression is becoming the most important public health issue in the world.
Furthermore, as Hillman suggested way back then, depression doesn’t happen in a social vacuum. It may be our civilization itself, our high living standards, but also the stresses and strains of modern life and our relentless competition and unflagging desire for more—more money, more status, more power, more stuff, more happiness—that create the conditions for chronic low mood.
And yet, in spite of profound historical changes that make us more vulnerable to depression, the entire mental health establishment still regards the condition much as it did more than two decades ago—as an individual problem, confined within an individual skull, best approached with individual therapies or nostrums. In the face of massive evidence that “individual” depression is really a vast social and cultural problem inextricably linked to the habits, mores, and expectations of our era, our tunnel vision is remarkably unchanged. So why do we continue to use a relentlessly individualized remedy to fight a socially mediated disorder?
Therapy’s individual focus can be a weakness, certainly, but that focus is also its glory. A particular kind of personal, individual (to use those “bad” words) relationship is what makes it work, what helps people, including depressed people, get better. And it hardly needs mentioning that people experiencing suicidal despair won’t be helped much by getting a lecture on the downsides of 21st-century civilization.
Still, it seems reasonable to ask whether as therapists we don’t have a public health responsibility to educate people about the role played by our society in generating unprecedented levels of depression. We should be aware—and make our clients aware—that they’re not in some way abnormal or deficient because they’re depressed. Just the opposite. If we accept Rottenberg’s persuasive account of the evolutionary impulses of our brains—that depression and anxiety are built into our genome—and we live in a time that specifically evokes them, being depressed is, sadly, a pretty normal way to be!
While this issue of the Networker offers no Big Answers to what we can do as a field to address the growing problem of depression, at the very least it proposes that we begin to bring a broader social consciousness into our work than simply assigning DSM-5 labels to the clients who pass through our offices.”
http://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/magazine/currentissue/item/2571-editors-note-by-rich-simon
Perhaps this publication and its articles might provide some people with some real help rather than just conning and stigmatizing them with bogus DSM labels per the article above. (Donna)
Read 460 times
Published in 2014 November/December
Great Washington Post article that backs up the above post on the many problems and challenges of “legal” and “illegal” “painkillers, addiction, medical pain management and modern drug cocktails prescribed regularly or obtained via friends and family leading to 100 deaths per day. Keith Humphreys, one of the nation’s leading addiction researchers who teaches psychiatry at Stanford and is a scientist in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System is interviewed about the many challenges surrounding the current overdose and death epidemic among such legal and illegal drug users. He cites the tragedy of the death of the great actor, Philip Seymour, and how lack of one’s usual tolerance after abstinence can play a great role due to lack of information provided to those at risk coming out of jail, rehab and other risky times. Humphreys also points out that making opioids prescription only from licensed medical professionals has not solved the problem of massive harm caused by these drugs. Further, since heroin is cheaper, many users are driven back to the streets and violence that legal prescriptions are meant to avoid. This can easily happen when the many people suffering great pain get addicted to legally prescribed opioids, lose their health insurance and can no longer afford the drugs. Humphreys also laments that the current prescribing of benzos and psychiatric drug cocktails that get mixed with heroin, which was previously uncommon, has greatly increased the death rate in this at risk group. Humphrey describes many other challenges that contribute to this human holocaust that might be changed or avoided. The greed of both criminal minded or lax doctors and Big Pharma have also played a huge role in this tragic drug cocktail epidemic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/02/07/100-americans-die-of-drug-overdoses-each-day-how-do-we-stop-that/
Here is a link to Dr. Datta’s great web site:
http://canardtheduck.blogspot.com/2014/11/science-and-pseudoscience-in.html
I think this post is great and I’m glad you are back at MIA. I also love your blog with your very hard hitting honest articles exposing many inconvenient truths about biopsychiatry.
I hope to see more of your posts at MIA. Perhaps you might be willing to post your blog posts here too?
Like others commenting above, Dr. Peter Breggin is one of my greatest heroes and saviors thanks to his ground breaking, life saving books like Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Reclaiming Our Children, his fact books on drugs and so many others that were crucial to my being literally able to save the very lives of loved ones.
I will always be very grateful and indebted to Dr. Breggin for having the courage and conscience to speak out when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s when he warned that the most dangerous thing one could do was visit a psychiatrist because one would leave with a life destroying stigma and a prescription for toxic, life threatening drugs within minutes of such a visit.
Of course, the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel struck back against Dr. Breggin with a vengeance in an attempt to destroy him, but he was too qualified, honest, brave and ethical to allow them to win. Having the truth on his side and a much better proposal for dealing with “problems of living” with empathy and common sense rather than stigma, lies and violence was crucial for Dr. Breggin’s not only surviving but thriving to this day. Though the KOL’s and others in the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel may not be so thrilled with him, Dr. Breggin has far more admiring, fiercely loyal, very grateful fans like me than he can ever imagine thanks to the many lives he has saved and continues to do so.
I am absolutely thrilled to see Dr. Breggin posting at MIA and I greatly hope he will continue sharing with us here.
THANK YOU Dr. Breggin from the bottom of my heart!
I would say that the “party line” for biopsychiatry has been eugenics, eugenics, eugenics shoved down everybody’s throats for the most nefarious reasons with no evidence whatsoever. It is simply an ideology used to justify psychiatry’s brain disabling/damaging “treatments” that are really human rights abuses with the pretense that those falsely accused of having bogus DSM stigmas are an inferior race deserving of such horrific rights violations for power, greed, status and wealth for the 1% at the expense of the 99% since anyone can become a victim of the over 300 so called “disorders” in the DSM. Even grieving for a loved one can get one falsely accused of being “mentally ill” and with forced drugging and ECT no less probably based on their faulty genes for not being a perfect robot.
As Dr. Jay Joseph and other gene experts point out, we have had tons of so called studies with genetic claims for voted in junk science DSM stigmas, but they have not been replicated. So, as it stands now there are no proven genes for autism or other so called DSM labels as Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the National Institute for Mental Health, and the author of the article of this post and many others have exposed.
http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2013/03/genetics-as-political-ideology.html
http://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/biology-as-ideology-the-doctrine-of-dna/
There are tons of THEORIES about autism, but one thing is for certain. Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, recently admitted that the DSM and ALL of its so called disorders are totally invalid because there is not a shred of scientific, medical, physical or any other evidence to back them up. There is not one gene proven to cause ANY so called “mental illness” or APA voted in DSM label.
So, anyone claiming various genes for this or that so called DSM disorder is a part of the ongoing bogus eugenics movement that psychiatry started in the 1930’s that resulted in the so called mentally ill being gassed to death as “useless eaters” by psychiatry that led to psychiatry instigating the Holocaust and moving their gassing units from the mental death wards to the concentration camps. Sadly, these horrible theories started in the U.S. with calls from psychiatry for sterilization, ostracism and institutionalization, and calls for euthanasia with the latter two atrocities passed into law in the U.S. The Germans put the last euthanasia agenda into action, which won them an award from the U.S. Thus, the U.S. can hang its head in shame for this evil contribution to the horrific treatment of the most vulnerable and others in the Nazi Holocaust.
Anyway, here’s another idea about autism that many have found very compelling including me.
http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/09/autism-deficit-super-sensitivity/
Also, I find it great news when a study announces evidence that a so called disorder isn’t genetic because very few are per real gene experts not prostituting themselves for Big Pharma/Business because there is hope that new remedies can be found.
See Dr. Jay Joseph’s The Gene Illusion and The Missing Gene and other ethical genetic experts exposing the real nefarious reason the 1% wants all these bogus gene studies and claims made. Answer: it allows them to prey on people and destroy them with impunity while blaming the victims’ supposed faulty genes for their deadly products, destruction of the environment and other destructive actions. The tobacco companies sought the lung cancer gene for decades with “doubt as their product” as they denied the harmful impact of smoking, but eventually they were exposed just like Big Pharma today. Of course, I realize the billions in fines are just the cost of making far more billions, but at least it exposes the truth. Psychiatry wants to work with the 1% power elite to blame the victims’ supposed faulty genes for the same reasons and to also deny the real traumatic consequences of growing inequality, poverty, abuse, trauma, stress, oppression, sexism, racism, their excess greed and theft at others’ expense and to make billions from their useless, toxic drugs pushed for the bogus DSM stigmas created by their henchmen in psychiatry.
I just read in the New York Times that the former eugenics office in the U.S. closed recently, but certain people want all to focus on it to remember the horrors of Nazi Germany caused by eugenics theories while being gravely concerned about the many bogus gene claims made in the present mostly for the same reasons and the horrific consequences that can result from such “research.”
Actually, it appears that none of the links I copied from my post at AlterNet are working at MIA, so they can be found by titles or authors at Amazon or accessing the article at AlterNet.
Sorry.
For some reason the link to Dr. Mosher’s famous resignation letter from the APA above doesn’t work at MIA, but works at AlterNet.
http://www.moshersoteria.com/articles/resignation-from-apa/
I agree. But, whether “schizophrenic symptoms” or toxic neuroleptics cause the lower, inadequate Vitamin D levels, it seems that encouraging such people to take Vitamin D supplements would be of great benefit until the cause of their deficit is sorted out since this can happen with anyone and not just those stigmatized by psychiatry.
It would be great to find out that “schizophrenic symptoms” could be improved, healed or eliminated just by increasing one’s Vitamin D levels, but healthy habits apply to all whether one is stigmatized with bogus DSM labels or not. Vitamin D is crucial for everyone’s health and well being, so it is good to see that certain researchers are focusing on this health threat.
Great article as usual Rob. It was very frustrating to read many of the comments expressing either complicity or ignorance, which you handled well. Perhaps some articles and quotes by experts might help too. I regret I missed this article until I saw it on MIA today.
I spent quite some time posting a response to your article to provide some of the evidence base that exposes biopsychiatry as scientifically, morally and medically bankrupt. I have copied it here because my comment may mysteriously disappear as has happened when I have challenged the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel at AlterNet before despite their claim of being an alternative:
My comment on Rob’s article at AlterNet:
The ignorance about the “mental death profession” here is appalling. Here is the famous letter of long term, highly renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Loren Mosher, whereby he resigns from the American Psychiatric Association protesting the complete sellout of psychiatry to Big Pharma in the 1980’s that has only grown worse with more time. Dr. Mosher was famous for his highly successful Soteria project much like the great Open Dialogue approach today to treat those with so called “schizophrenia” often with little or no toxic drugs with complete recovery for many. The best the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel can offer today is to force life destroying bogus stigmas with the latest fraud fad bipolar and toxic drug cocktails on their victims that will destroy their lives completely in a majority of cases. For those who don’t opt out via suicide due to psychiatry’s abusive, cruel, fraudulent “treatments” or aren’t driven to suicide by the useless, deadly drugs with suicide as a “side effect,” they can live in near poverty, isolation and stigma on SSI disability at the huge expense of tax payers or burden relatives in many cases. Today, SSI is also the alternative welfare whereby children must be given bogus psychiatric stigmas with forced drugging so families can quality for survival money in our horrible economy. The 1% who are the real “patients” of biopsychiatry continue to profit from the billions in profits in the “mental illness”/prison industrial complex while enslaving the rest of humanity with their increasing Orwellian fascist psychiatric agenda. This is because such crony capitalists have no conscience or ethics as shown in the book and DVD, The Corporation, and books like Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits by Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths. These people now running the globe are what Dr. Hare identifies as intraspecies predators who have been corrupting society and causing untold human misery since human beginnings.
http://www.moshersoteria.com/a…
For those not just pandering here because they are part of this oppressive system, there are tons of books, web sites and other resources for society to educate itself against modern psychiatric oppression and their ever growing threat to basic human, civil, democratic rights. Here are some samples of some of the best ones while many others are available at Amazon and elsewhere:
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America Paperback – August 2, 2011, by Robert Whitaker
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ…
Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs Hardcover – April 4, 2013
by Dr. Stuart A. Kirk, Dr. Tomi Gomory and Dr. David Cohen
http://www.amazon.com/Mad-Scie…
Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare Paperback – August 31, 2013 by Peter C. Gotzsche (Author), Richard Smith (Foreword), Drummond Rennie (Foreword)
http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-M…
The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs Paperback – September 15, 2013 by Joanna Moncrieff
http://www.amazon.com/The-Bitt…
Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry” Paperback – August 15, 1994 by Dr. Peter R. Breggin (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Ps…
Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications Paperback – July 10, 2007 by Peter Breggin, M.D. (Author), David Cohen, Ph.D. (Author)
Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications Paperback – July 10, 2007 by Peter Breggin, M.D. (Author), David Cohen, Ph.D. (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Dru…
Pharmageddon by Dr. David Healy
http://www.amazon.com/Pharmage…
Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent Paperback – July 28, 2005 by MD Grace E. Jackson (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Rethinki…
Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex Hardcover – December 17, 2007 by Peter R. Breggin MD (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Di…
America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics And How We’ve Been Deceived Hardcover – April 26, 2006 by Timothy Scott (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/America-…
Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry: Blaming the Body Hardcover – January 1, 1995 by by Colin A. Ross (Author), Alvin Pam (Author)
Great review of this book by psychiatrist:
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/…
http://www.amazon.com/Pseudosc…
There are now tons of books, articles and web sites exposing the fraud and menace of biopsychiatry, so anyone who is not just looking to profit from others’ suffering like some of the so called commenters below or those who have not done the extensive research required, I urge you to check out the above books that will lead to the many other sources exposing the truth. And nothing like the truth to set us free from the fascist, coercive agenda of biopsychiatry that exists only for the purpose of coercion and social control as exposed in the great book, Mad Science, above.
The above article by Rob Wipond exposes just the tip of the iceberg of the many suicides and deaths caused by the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel, so those who think ignorance is bliss, never forget what happened in Nazi Germany. Psychiatry came up with the horrific bogus eugenics theories that instigated the Nazi Holocaust after they practiced by gassing to death those they stigmatized as mentally ill. Psychiatry had passed many shocking eugenics laws in the U.S. that led to forced incarceration, sterilization and euthanasia recommended by psychiatry in the 1930’s, but Americans were decent enough to feel ashamed by the Nazi’s use of such theories so they closed their eugenics office. Eugenics remains alive and “well” today as psychiatry promulgates bogus gene and other so called biological theories of so called “mental illness” exposed by many real gene experts like Dr. Jay Joseph in books like The Missing Gene and The Gene Illusion and by ethical psychiatrists like Dr. Peter Breggin.
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ar…
Needless to say, this took a lot of time, but I think it’s important to spread the word wherever and whenever possible.
It would be great if others at MIA could support Rob’s great article by helping to promote the message of MIA and the truth about the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel that could include personal harm to many of the survivors here and/or their loved ones.
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John,
In a study on the same topic of the connection between “schizophrenia” and Vitamin D posted at MIA in August 2014, the authors admitted they didn’t distinguish between those on or off psychiatric drugs. The authors also point out that the lack of Vitamin D is being recognized as a contributing factor to many diseases/illnesses including diabetes and heart disease while it is even being linked to Alzheimer’s by others, so it wouldn’t be surprising if it also contributes to so called “schizophrenia” and other symptoms.
Here is a link to the previous article on this topic posted at MIA discussing the issue you cited:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/08/vitamin-d-deficiency-linked-schizophrenia-diagnosis/
Brent and Jacqueline,
Great enlightening, validating post exposing one of many or all bogus psychiatric stigmas/degradation rituals. I appreciate the exposure that this insult stigma mainly applied to women to abuse and denigrate them all the more has to do with the victim’s trauma than any of the fraudulent eugenic theories of “mental illness” still perpetrated as if we still lived in fascist, Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia!! What can one expect when their great mentor, Krapelin was the ultimate eugenicist predator himself?! Psychiatry can be really proud of this “accomplishment” and hopefully some day they will get their own “Nuremburg Trials” if not literally at least in terms of getting their proper place in history and public opinion once exposed as psychopathic enemies of mankind or intraspecies predators per Dr. Robert Hare, world authority on psychopaths. See great books, Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits. Of course, the term “psychopath” simply describes the traits of evil, vicious, abusive, traumatizing, sadistic people who prey on others with impunity with their phony charm, mirroring, lies, manipulation, smear campaigns and other nasty tricks like phony charm, the ability to mimic normal humans to hide their total lack of empathy, conscience, etc. Many of them are clearly described in the Bible and similar works. Though I’m not into labels, I think the perps doling out the labels should get a taste of their own “medicine.”
Though I realize there have been and remain some people within psychiatry who fight the main stream paradigm and try to really help people, they are in the great minority and can’t even begin to challenge the huge deadly psychiatry/Big Pharma/corrupt government hacks cartel that keeps the death trap of biological psychiatry churning.
Another useful book and web site is Political Ponerology for a great understanding of our global suffering.
Great quotation, Stephen! Very “enlightening!” Thank you.
Comments on this article from the borderline article by Brent Potter et al on MIA:
John Hoggett on October 23, 2014 at 1:27 pm said:
clearest thing I’ve read all week.
The only thing I’d add is that Lucy Johnstone’s article on alternatives to diagnosis, on this website, proposes Formulation, which simply involves asking people what thier problems are, what caused them and what might help. This is then agreed between the patient and the professional. It highlights and puts at the core of any professional work the person who is distressed voice and is no more than what anyone should do when trying to help someone who is distessed.
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Brent Potter (MIA Author)on October 23, 2014 at 2:56 pm said:
Glad you liked it, John. I appreciate too your mention of Lucy’s piece. That is the way to go, at least in my opinion. There’s absolutely no reason to have labels whatsoever. It is entirely possible to simply stick with someone’s own description of where he or she is ‘at’ and what he or she is asking for. This and similar avenues are what I try to present towards the end of the book. I am grateful to a number of different non-psychiatric organizations for allowing me to publish them as resources. Anyway, thanks again!
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Another great media article about the MIA Film Festival:
http://www.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/10/western_mass_filmmaker_to_scre.html
fluffybunny,
I totally agree with you and there are other decent experts out there providing the same message that one can change one’s mind/brain without drugs including bad habits, OCD and other problems like Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz in his great program and book, You Are Not Your Brain: The Four Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits.
http://www.slideshare.net/mattrule/the-4-steps-slides?related=2
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Your-Brain/dp/1583334831
Since our entire society and most of the world has been “brainwashed” by the mental death profession to believe their never ending blaming the victims evil eugenics lies, we do need to be unbrainwashed and realize that the lies inflicted on us by verbal and psychological abusers are projections of their own narcissism and lack of empathy/humanity/conscience.
So, I agree that this article is a very positive one and it sure is a welcome antidote against psychiatry’s never ending assaults on humanity and children especially that they have defective brains, will be “mentally ill” for life and need to under psychiatric/police surveillance for life while robbed of all human/civil rights and take their toxic drugs, ECT and/or the latest brain disabling/damaging “treatment” du jour that lines their pockets with the current 1% robber barons they truly serve.
It’s great to see someone as honest, compassionate and decent as Pediatric psychiatrist Sujartha Ramakrishna, a rarity it seems in pediatric psychiatry. This is a very moving, impressive article and gives me some hope to the end of the evil psychiatric assault against children and humanity in general as some younger people in the profession are speaking out against this ongoing murderous eugenics enterprise.
Fiachra,
Thanks for a great informative post! I’ve posted many items about the fact that abuse/trauma victims are routinely misdiagnosed as bipolar, delusional, ADHD and other life destroying, bogus stigmas, so I appreciate your adding to the greatly necessary exposure of this monstrous evil!
This Dr. Ivor Browne seems like a very kind, decent, honest person and I plan to check him out more.
It is my impression that anesthesia can always pose a danger to people, so using it for PTSD sure seems like literal overkill to me.
And as you and others have noted here, brain disabling and brain damage are part and parcel of psychiatry’s so called “treatments” in keeping with their eugenics genocide they practiced when they instigated the Nazi Holocaust and other ethnic/racist “cleansings.”
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Vegwellian,
I suggest you google SSRI’s and school shootings. As I said above, I think you know alot of this because you are trying to promote your agenda here. Many of the legal cases won when the drugged victim committed murder of family, fellow employees or students also died by suicide or cop. Your claim that there is no connection between psych drugs and violence is quite false to say the least when all you have to do is google it or check out SSRIstories.
Any so called relief from psych meds is spurious and maybe a placebo effect but evidence shows they cause far more harm in the long run than the minor short term relief they might provide short term in the beginning. They are also very dangerous for suicide, violence, illness and early death by about 25 years on average.
Thus, I find it odd that you are here touting main stream psychiatry as if you were/are a Big Pharma sales rep! Maybe you are!
Yes like the woman played by Ingrid Bergman in the movie Gas Light when her new psychoapthic husband was out to make her appear crazy so he could find/steal the jewels her aunt left behind when this monster played by Charles Boyer killer the aunt.
Sadly, psychiatry continues this evil, sick game by colluding with their fellow abusers to torture their victims with crazy making gas lighting and toxic drugs so both can profit at the victims’ expense.
Sounds to me that Vegwellian is making quite a sales pitch for main stream psychiatry and the neoliberal agenda of GMO’s, toxic vaccines and all the other schemes of the current robber barons or 1% at the cost of countless lives that are not so privileged.
At the same time, anyone not willing to be cheerleaders for this predatory agenda is vilified including those doctors seeking alternate means to avoid toxic main stream medicine with its selling sickness agenda to push statins, diabetes and other drugs.
Vegwellian could even be a psychiatrist in disguise since the mantra pushed by her/him is the typical shallow kool-aid touted by psychiatry while smear campaigning anyone who differs from them.
Agree 100%~
Vegwellian,
This is the pot calling the kettle black. I lost track of the many bogus claims you made about psychiatry and its bogus theories. Rather than showing a little humility when you were exposed, each time you just proceeded to a new version of the same lies and fraud.
I have read many articles by Dr. Mercola and think he has a great deal of excellent health information on his site. But, he does expose junk science like the mental death profession stigmatizing children with bogus bipolar as the new targets for lethal neuroleptics in their never ending predation with Big Pharma on one and all.
I really find it quite amazing how you can attack everyone else while totally lacking any recognition or admission of your total inconsistency, lack of any solid evidence for what you say and your demeans and demands for everyone else.
I suggest you read Dr. Marcia Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies to learn about all the corruption in so called evidence based medicine due to huge conflicts of interest.
Also, see book, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, showing how medicine has gotten so corrupted by Big Pharma, it is even worse than the Mafia with psychiatry being the most corrupt due to lack of any real evidence for their DSM stigmas or bogus treatments. Much of their “evidence” is bogus studies with ghost written articles in journals while covering up all the life threatening side effects of their toxic treatments and refusing to publish negative studies. See the Paxil 329 study debacle.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the so called evidence base of psychiatry is total fraud, Big Pharma junk science!
Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, a mainstream psychiatrist who has a current article on this site, has exposed the great social control aspect of psychiatry in that it medicalizes normal human problems, crises and reactions so they can rob people of all human/civil rights in the guise of mental health. She wrote about this in an article, “Psychiatric Imperialism.”
Szasz was 100% correct!
Sad. Those familiar with their crimes against humanity can no longer wear blinders like some people here!
You have yet to cite any credible evidence of your own spurious and questionable claims, so when you provide evidence maybe we will provide more than all the evidence cited already.
And the bogus gene theories of bogus DSM stigmas came about because parents didn’t want to be blamed for their bad parenting, so you have that wrong too, but you are trying to vilify anyone who disagrees with your eugenics claims even if you have to invent a “theory.”
Again, Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has had to admit that the voted in stigmas like schizophrenia and bipolar are INVALID since there is no evidence behind them. And you keep citing your junk science pretense of proof about family genetics, etc. There is the book, Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion? by Dr. Mary Boyle you may wish to check out since there are tons of so called symptoms for this garbage can stigma like bipolar with many variations since they are so lacking in science or medicine.
And Dr. Insel has also admitted that treatment with psychiatric drugs leaves much to be desired based on studies Bob Whitaker and Dr. Sandy Steingard posted on this web site. In many cases people do much worse in the long run on psych drugs which is why it was found that people in third world countries with similar symptoms tended to fully recover and lead full, productive lives unlike those preyed on with stigma and drugs by mainstream psychiatry in the U.S. who tended to become permanently disabled and unable to work/function normally. You might try reading Bob Whitaker’s books, Mad in America, Anatomy of an Epidemic among many others cited on this site.
To pretend anyone who disagrees with you is an outlier, conspiracy theorist or whatever other insult you throw out is not conducive to an intelligent conversation. It’s obvious you have not done the research on many of your bogus claims like mental illness genes, but rather, you are merely reciting the kool-aid doled out to you by mainstream psychiatry continuing to profit from this horror show while destroying countless lives. I have no doubt psychiatry will keep making its bogus gene and other claims that you can mimic, but kindly don’t turn the tables on us and pretend we are the ones lacking science or knowledge about the topic because it is very clear that any member of MIA having read lots of the articles here could easily challenge your spurious claims. Your claims sound like they just came off a Big Pharma funded web site and I resent your trying to mislead people here with such gross misinformation.
You just cited the supposed evidence for the bogus mental illness genes and now when challenged, you invent another story or position about these false claims.
I think you should follow your own advice about not pushing junk science and make sure the evidence is there before you try to force your opinions on others.
There is every reason to throw out the evil eugenics theories that have allowed psychopathic predators to prey on others who are less powerful and wealthy with the pretense that they have inferior genes or biology.
This is exactly what the robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller did with psychiatry to prey on less fortunate people and condone the Nazi Holocaust. Many similar prejudiced people have tried to do the same with black people to justify racism.
So, I find it odd that you would wish to uphold this monstrous agenda of the never ending waste of billions of dollars to keep searching for the nonexistent genes when it is well known that oppression, abuse of power, poverty, abuse, bullying, trauma and other negative social/environmental conditions cause great psychological distress.
AA,
What has happened in many cases is when so called experts claimed those stigmatized with schizophrenia or ADHD claimed MRI’s found shrunken, faulty brains, it became apparent that the differences/changes were a result of the toxic drugs forced on the unfortunate victims and had nothing to do with any faulty brains. Again, like the bogus genes claims I cited above, psychiatry is so vicious it longs for the day it can prove their neverending predatory eugenics claims to justify their assaults on their many victims that often destroy their brains and lives.
Dr. Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, and called “the conscience of psychiatry” along with others like Dr. Fred Baughman exposed this heinous assault on humanity and on children in particular.
Vegwellian,
Thanks for posting the total junk science of the fraudulent genes claims by psychiatry or AKA, the mental death profession with the pretense they are FACT. This is the type of thing posted on NAMI and other BIG PHARMA funded webs sites or parroted by others under their control. These bogus genes claims have been debunked as have the absurd gene studies supposedly proving genes for invented, voted in bogus stigmas like the latest bipolar fad fraud created to push the latest lethal drugs on patent. The twin and other studies used were laughable. See Dr. Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Jay Joseph’s The Gene Illusion and The Missing Gene, Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of NIMH, blog, “Transforming Diagnosis,” whereby he admits this past year there are no genes or any other evidence for DSM voted in stigmas forcing him to admit they are INVALID!! But, bogus genes claims for bogus, voted in DSM stigmas keep coming with no letup!
Thus, I find your posting such garbage as the bogus gene claims of biopschiatry while trying to intimidate others based on their supposed pseudoscience or “conspiracy theories” (typical attack used by main stream psychiatry; when will you call us Scientologists, psychiatry’s greatest smear campaign for any real experts that dare challenge/expose them).
Thank you for showing the quality of your own great expertise by repeating the fraudulent gene claims of biopsychiatry they have been making for the last hundred years with no results.
AMEN! See below.
Vegwellian,
I’ve been reading some of your comments and I’m reminded of a bully on the playground bossing everyone around as to the proper way to think and play.
What you are pushing is the mainstream junk science of the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma/bought out NAMI, corrupt government hacks psychopathic cartel that has been debunked a zillion times in a zillion sources including this web site and the books by the creator of this web site, Robert Whitaker.
There are also a ton of so called “survivors” of this evil, intraspecies psychopathic predation on humanity using the same old bogus eugenics theories used to create the Nazi Holocaust by the robber barons of that time; now, the only difference is that everyone but the 1% psychopathic malignant narcissists and their enablers/henchmen like psychiatry at the top are targets.
I suggest you read the great book, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry, by Dr. Alvin Pam and Dr. Colin Ross that expose the many, many false claims you are making about the latest bogus, evil eugenics claims of psychiatry for their junk science voted in DSM stigmas that even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has declared invalid since they lack any science or medical evidence whatever.
You’ve attacked everybody and everything on this post and elsewhere as if you are some great expert when you are merely parroting mainstream psychobabble used to stigmatize and destroy people to push the latest lethal drugs on patent and target the less powerful for pernicious social control.
So, though you are right that everyone has been pretty tolerant of your pretending you know better than anyone else here, I have to tell you that you don’t know what you are talking about in much of what you say. Therefore, it may prove helpful if you read a great deal on MIA and many expert books like Mad Science, Toxic Psychiatry, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, 2nd ed., Pharmageddon, Rethinking Psychiatry, The Myth of the Chemical Cure and countless others exposing the deadly fraud and menace of biopsychiatry. You don’t even seem to be aware of all the controversy surrounding neuroleptics, SSRI’s and other toxic psych drugs. Did you know that many school/public shooters have been on these toxic drugs?
I’m just posting this for any poor person that visits this web site and happens upon this post and thinks that your views represent the views of MIA or those posting here when the opposite is true for the most part.
And where is your credible evidence? Many of us have been researching this topic for many years that had to be done outside the mainstream because psychiatry is so corrupt with its selling out to Big Pharma, participating in ghost written, fraudulent studies, promoting heinous lies about the useless, toxic drugs they dole out, its pretense of fraudulent chemical imbalances and bad genes to justify their life destroying stigmas and lethal “treatments,” having huge conflicts of interest and on and on. Yet, it would take tons of space and time to produce all of this information that is all over MIA when just calling your bluff of pretending to have the most expertise here is all that is necessary, so I call your bluff. Those at MIA are sadder but wiser, so most of us are not too impressed with Big Pharma funded NAMI/biopsychiatry diatribes that you have inflicted on us while attacking everyone else’s opinions here including the authors of this post.
I’ll take the advice of the experts who wrote this post before your NAMI agenda any day of the week.
Just for the record, I greatly disagree with just about everything you have written!
Darby,
If you check out the beginning of the article, it goes on to say that they have used both drugs and different “behavioral interventions” to minimize or destroy certain painful, stressful memories in trauma survivors. What raises a red flag to me is their vagueness about their methods, which worked very well because you interpreted it as quite benign as a savvy long term survivor no less.
But, those of us who know about main stream psychiatry know is it anything but benign and one can count on its so called “treatments” to be “brain disabling” and harmful for the most part as Dr. Peter Breggin exposed long ago.
As you probably know, ECT is alive and well and growing by leaps and bounds now that SSRI antidepressants have been exposed as harmful and mostly worthless. Be careful what you wish for as the saying goes. And now there are the deep brain stimulation and transcranium magnetic brain stimulation, which are new forms of electroshock that can cause seizures, hearing loss and many other negative effects that are lied and denied by their pushers just like ECT and neuroleptics. Dr. Phillip Hickey did an extensive article on DBS at MIA and it was not very positive just like honest articles written about ECT show that it is worthless while causing brain damage, permanent loss of memory, career and other skills and other crucial assets for functioning often leading to suicide once the victims learn the truth like Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath. The book, Doctors of Deception, exposes all the lies and fraud associated with ECT since a small group of ECT shock doctors headed by Max Fink have a monopoly on it and push their lies on either duped or complicit safety agencies like the FDA and so called patients.
Also, you may know that lobotomy and similar horrors have been making a great comeback though called by other sneaky, more innocent sounding names like cingulotomy and other very dangerous brain operations that often leave the victims’ brains seriously damaged so they lose control of their ability to think/function, become incontinent, etc. Many of these “brain operations” are admitted failures or just plain butchery!
I have long admired you as a very tough survivor with much to share with other survivors. I just thought I would suggest that you might want to consider psychiatry’s sordid history before assuming these wolves and sheep’s clothing are adopting nice safe new methods like EMDR that will solve all our problems.
Toward the end of the article, the new mantra of blaming the victims for their trauma is included by perpetrating the BIG LIE that some people are more susceptible to trauma due to their bad genes, bad brains and the usual litany of lies of the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel that have been disproven time after time. Most recently Dr. Joanna Moncrieff’s current blog on the front page of MIA now debunks the latest scam pretense about great genetic discoveries for “schizophrenia” that even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, has admitted has no reliability or validity because there is no scientific, medical or other evidence behind this bogus, voted in stigma. Moreover, as Dr. Mary Boyle shows in her great book, Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?, there are many different hodgepodges of a wide variety of disparate symptoms among those so labeled, so the pretense of finding the “missing genes” for their “gene illusion” per Dr. Jay Joseph is totally bogus ideology and not science to justify the greed and theft of all global resources by the current robber barons or 1%.
If you think about it, how could they possibly say that some are more prone to trauma since some people don’t get it when exposed to the exact same experience when no unique individual person could possibly be exposed to the exact same experience(s) past or present as another individual, so this claim is just a way to destroy the credibility of PTSD or the only DSM diagnosis that didn’t use to blame the victims for their symptoms from combat, abuse, rape in wars, homes, work places, society and other war fronts where people have “normal responses to abnormal events.” That’s because war veterans and abuse/rape survivors under the leadership of trauma experts like Dr. Judith Herman, author of the classic, Trauma and Recovery, helped fight the battle to include PTSD in the DSM with Dr. Herman insisting that Complex PTSD should be added for long term traumatic exposure.
Finally, I think it’s important to bear in mind that Francine Shapiro, Ph.D. was/is not a psychiatrist, but rather a psychologist. She discovered EMDR when walking through a park one day and found it helped her with her own stressful memories per the following web site.
As you know, EMDR is a noninvasive therapy with no drugs, lobotomy, shock or other brain damaging treatments. And from what you say, EMDR does not wipe out important memories that may be crucial for one’s survival to avoid repetition, but rather, reduces their emotional impact and distress.
http://www.emdr.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=62
For all the reasons I’ve cited here and many more for anyone who knows the history of biopsychiatry even from just reading Bob Whitaker’s books, it is little wonder the author of this article questioned the ethics of such a goal of wiping out one’s memories after researching it with various psychiatrists.
I hope you don’t see this as a criticism, but rather, my concern that a very important survivor like you who is well aware of the problems with psychiatry does not get misled about psychiatry’s latest brain disabling “treatments.”
Caveat Emptor!
Lloyd I. Sederer, MD, Medical director, New York State Office of Mental Health has written a complimentary testimonial for Dr. Thomas Szasz after a service by him and colleagues to honor this great man. Although most of the article is positive, at times very mainstream Sederer damns Szasz with faint praise or tries to make his theories/ideas of making freedom the ultimate guide untenable while citing absurd examples like dealing with a mental case 250 pound gorilla of a man alone.
But, what I found most offensive is typical of Dr. Sederer’s posts and books; he spouts typical, decades old LIES like this gem:
“What’s more, we now have indisputable evidence of major mental illnesses having neurological (as well as genetic and molecular) pathologies — unlike 50 years ago. And with that proof, neurologists still aren’t rushing to fill the shoes of psychiatrists!”
I find such fraudulent claims from somebody in Dr. Sederer’s position despicable and outrageously dishonest/corrupt. Perhaps he is referring to the recent misrepresentation of the latest very expensive gene research results, which Dr. Moncrieff exposes above:
“In the light of the much trumpeted claims that recent research has identified genes for schizophrenia, it is important to review the track record of this type of endeavor.1 Despite thousands of studies costing millions of dollars, and endless predictions that the genetics of schizophrenia would shortly be revealed, the field has so far failed to identify any genes that substantially increase the risk of developing schizophrenia.”
Dr. Peter Breggin and Dr. Jay Joseph along with many others and several articles at MIA have debunked psychiatry’s bogus gene claims for what are now declared INVALID voted in stigmas in the junk science DSM even by Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of NIMH. Thus, how can genes be found for unreliable, invalid disorders voted in by consensus to push the latest most lucrative lethal drugs on patent, which are now the horrific neuroleptic drugs that Dr. Moncrieff has called The Bitterest Pill? Dr. Moncrieff has lamented the outrageous bogus explosion of bipolar “diagnoses” for minor problems that results in many more people taking lethal neuroleptic drugs that will cause many huge negative, toxic effects while reducing one’s life span an average 25 years while making them prone to early dementia per Dr. Grace Jackson!
And to add insult to injury, I just read that most people stigmatized with bipolar end up losing their jobs within about five years by being fired due to the despicable lies and disease mongering perpetrated by main stream psychiatry to make anyone given this bogus stigma appear to be a deranged, dangerous mental case without their toxic drugs with bogus claims they will never recover, etc. Considering rape, abuse trauma victims are stigmatized as bipolar, such “treatment” is malpractice at its worst. Dr. David Healy exposes the sordid reasons why bipolar became the latest fad fraud which had more to do with pushing the neuroleptic and so called mood stabilizer toxic drugs when others were going off patent for prior fads of anxiety and depression in his great book, MANIA.
Isn’t it time after about 100 years of lies and bogus claims of genetic causes for their invented, unproven “disorders” and especially their “sacred symbols” of bipolar and schizophrenia as their latest garbage can stigmas that these emperors wearing no clothes, wolves in sheep’s clothing and boys who cry wolf should be treated with the contempt they deserve and disciplined for committing fraud as well as the incompetent or dishonest publications that publish these never ending lies to keep the corrupt biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel making their billions by destroying countless lives?
Once again, ideology and neoliberal capitalism/oligarchy trumps citizens’ rights to the truth and protection of their health and even worse the health of their children being destroyed by psychiatry with impunity with the bipolar stigma and neuroleptic drugs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-i-sederer-md/thomas-szasz-md-radical-a_b_5744244.html?utm_hp_ref=health-news&ir=Health+News
Hey Boans,
I think you communicate just fine. In fact, I thought this post and others by your are very well written.
And thanks for the additional reference!
Looks like psychiatry helped add to this violence definition so that they could falsely accuse everyone they fraudulently stigmatized as “mentally ill,” the most vicious, vile, violent speech of all, as the violent ones! The pot calling the kettle black!
I think there comes a point when moral relativity goes too far. That is another problem with psychiatry in that supposedly no one has the right to judge whether things/people’s actions are good or evil, but rather, they are stigmatized as “mental illness.” And who is psychiatry kidding? They have vilified, stigmatized, tortured and falsely accused those they label as “mentally ill” on a par with Satan himself with all their vicious lies and false accusations of dangerousness, violence, psychotic and others against many trauma victims who are not any of these so they can profit from their suffering.
I guess this could be considered violent speech, but I think cloaking evil, cruel agendas of social control, intraspecies predation and profiting by destroying others’ lives is the worst form of violence even if bogus pseudoscience language like the DSM and other junk science is used as a veneer for such evil.
Hi Jim,
After reading your response, I felt somewhat bad in that it may have appeared that I was picking at straws, so I googled the term, “channeling” to see if I had overreacted when associating it with New Age people claiming to channel various wise gurus. Here is what my google search for “channeling” revealed:
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GUEA_enUS504US504&q=channeling
As you can see, most if not all the entries on the first page on channeling have to do with communicating with various spirits, interpreting them, etc. I recall feeling somewhat creepy about many of these so called spirit guides with tons of books on this topic being promoted by various authors given my Christian background.
I went back and re-read your article and checked your link to the Merriam-Webster definition and as you can see it is far different than google’s links to the term “channeling.”
I hope you realize I am not trying to nitpick here. This may be a matter of our age difference in that I am somewhat older than you and the New Age and channeling of various spirits was a huge phenomenon a while back, but it seems to be less so now unless I am just less aware of it and don’t notice so much due to lack of interest. For this reason, the term, “channeling” probably didn’t have the same impact on you as it did on me initially. Reading your definition of channeling was helpful in reminding me of this alternative interpretation and your article does an excellent job of explaining how one can use this latter interpretation of channeling or substituting good habits for bad ones or sublimation to enhance one’s life and make it better.
Actually, the term I have seen used a great deal lately is simply that of “habits” with a ton of books on that topic recently. In fact, I just bought another one that got great reviews called, Habits and Happiness by Braco Pobric, which promotes the idea that we are creatures of habit and quotes many highly regarded people, past and present:
http://www.amazon.com/Habits-Happiness-Happier-Wellbeing-Changing/dp/1493662457
“Everything you want to achieve in life–from a successful career, thriving relationships, improved health, or simply to increase your happiness and wellbeing–everything starts with habits. Everything!
Habits and Happiness combines years of research by experts in the field of habits, neuroscience, traditional and positive psychology, and teaches you how to apply this new information in a very simple and practical way. This book will help you understand your habits: why you have them, why you can or cannot change them, and how they can work to help you live a great life.
Implementing habitual behavior in accordance with this book will help you become happier and more successful, will improve your wellbeing, and will assist you to live the life you’ve always wanted to live.
We can learn so much about ourselves by learning about our habits. Our wellbeing increases significantly when we understand the reasons we do certain things, when we learn how to change and introduce new habits if necessary, and when we apply that knowledge effectively in our lives. My goal is not to present a scientific research paper that few will understand, but rather to help you improve your wellbeing by introducing good new habits and changing bad old habits. At the same time I will provide the research supporting these ideas: ”
William James, the father of psychology, stressing that it is crucial for people to develop good habits:
“When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits.”
Or Aristotle:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Exellence then is not an act, but a habit.”
Or Benjamin Franklin:
“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.”
Or Psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz:
You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life:
Two neuroscience experts explain how their 4-Step Method can help identify negative thoughts and change bad habits for good.
A leading neuroplasticity researcher and the coauthor of the groundbreaking books Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from OCD, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions.
Schwartz works with psychiatrist Rebecca Gladding to refine a program that successfully explains how the brain works and why we often feel besieged by overactive brain circuits (i.e. bad habits, social anxieties, etc.) the key to making life changes that you want—to make your brain work for you—is to consciously choose to “starve” these circuits of focused attention, thereby decreasing their influence and strength.
You Are Not Your Brain carefully outlines their program, showing readers how to identify negative impulses, channel them through the power of focused attention, and ultimately lead more fulfilling and empowered lives.
I am happy to say that Dr. Schwarz recommends mindfulness and changing one’s brain by changing habits without the toxic drugs and other “treatments” of mainstream psychiatry.
Your habit reversal training sounds similar to this. You speak of the importance of self control, but from what I’ve read, our will power if that is the same thing can be very limited at certain times if our will power has been tested or strained too much per many books on the topic. Also, studies show that our will power can be more or less effective given the time of day, how much we’ve had to exercise our will power already that day, how tired we are and many other factors:
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Dr. Roy Baumeister:
http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human-Strength/dp/0143122231/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409368411&sr=1-1&keywords=baumeister+willpower
Dr. Baumeister sounds like you here:
“Pioneering research psychologist Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control. Drawing on cutting-edge research and the wisdom of real-life experts, Willpower shares lessons on how to focus our strength, resist temptation, and redirect our lives. It shows readers how to be realistic when setting goals, monitor their progress, and how to keep faith when they falter. By blending practical wisdom with the best of recent research science, Willpower makes it clear that whatever we seek—from happiness to good health to financial security—we won’t reach our goals without first learning to harness self-control.”
That’s why it is so important to establish those good habits that we can do almost mindlessly without inner argument like brushing our teeth even though tired at night, etc. I have also read that it takes about 30 days to establish a new habit, which I find to be pretty accurate.
If I sound like a fanatic on this topic, I have had the misfortune of struggling with weight control since childhood, quitting smoking and other gems due to various stressors in my life as well as being born in another generation when such things were viewed quite differently. These struggles also allowed me to work full time while earning all the money necessary to complete three college degrees with honors. Since my parents didn’t believe in girls going to college or having careers I got to be the lucky one to pave the way in my family. Psychiatry also created the junk science DSM and sold out to Big Pharma after I earned my third degree making me wish I had been born in an even earlier time when things were not in such chaos and uproar. Did you ever see the Aviance (perfume) commercial about how women could bring home the bacon, cook it too and be gorgeous goddesses all the time with no problem and have it all?! Boy, were we ever sold a bill of goods! Of course, my young adult son has certainly kept me on my toes and up to date on various issues and even music, so I’m not living in a cave. Ha Ha
Thus, I think all of these approaches using various words or definitions come down to pretty much the same thing: that changing self destructive habits or life styles is almost impossible unless we substitute uplifting, healthy, inspiring habits for positive change or channeling those negative energies into positive ones as you say. It’s like the parable in the N.T. whereby a man’s house is cleared of an evil spirit, but since it remains empty (i.e. he doesn’t fill it with good spirits, thoughts and actions), a more formidable group of nasty demons take over the house and the man is worse off than he was before. This can be applied in a metaphorical sense to our topic of changing bad habits into good ones.
I realize the information on forgiveness may have seemed out of sync with this post. I was going to post it at the end of the first part of this post on forgiveness, but since you said you were doing a two part post on forgiveness I decided to wait until this second part to share this information not realizing this one wouldn’t focus so much on forgiveness, so I regret if it seemed out of place. I just thought you might want to know about the Stanford “forgive for good” program since it seems to be a successful program.
Finally, once again, you’ve given me much food for thought and lots of inspiration and I thank you for that. As you can see, your two part post got me thinking about many different things for the better as usual.
Take care.
Hi Jim,
I was wondering if you had heard about the forgiveness program By Dr. Frederic Luskin of Stanford Univerity:
http://learningtoforgive.com/about/
http://learningtoforgive.com/9-steps/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006251721X?ie=UTF8&tag=currentlyinde-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=006251721X
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/fred_luskin_explains_how_to_forgive
Since I was familiar with the above work and your latest articles inspired me to continue the struggle against any lingering resentments or lack of forgiveness, I got a copy of this book for further inspiration and am trying to read it and take it in again. Dr. Luskin also has many YouTube videos about forgiveness available on the web and there are inexpensive copies of his books including the ones on forgiveness and stress at Amazon.
I know what you mean by channeling, but a problem with this term is that it is identified with a great deal of New Age type people who claimed to “channel” spirit or voices from other worlds that they reveal to us.
Am I right in thinking that your notion of channeling is along the lines of Dr. William Glasser’s Positive Addictions?
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/adhd/2010/06/is-there-such-a-thing-as-positive-addiction-dr-glasser-thinks-so-but-do-you/
(I am not recommending any of the bogus DSM stigmas in the above blog that contains the article).
http://www.amazon.com/Positive-Addiction-Harper-Colophon-Books/product-reviews/0060912499/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R3U12IQUZ9YB8
I am just sharing these sources with you in case you haven’t seen them.
Your second part of your forgiveness article is very good and I believe that you are saying that if one wants to turn a troubled life or poor lifestyle habits around one has to “channel this energy” into more positive, wholesome, healthy things as substitutes for the old bad habits/behaviors.
The book, The Pleasure Trap, does a good job showing how our old limbic brain hijacks us to make poor food choices rather than letting our more intelligent brains rule with healthy food choices.
Since I wrote so much on my struggle with forgiveness in your last post, I will end by saying I really appreciate your devoting these last two posts to the topic of forgiveness and how to carry it out. I am sure that I am not alone in continuing the struggle with forgiving, so your posts were an inspiration to me to reconsider the whole issue while inspiring me to look further.
And you had me when you quoted C.S. Lewis on the topic of forgiving because he always knows just the right and most convincing thing to say that is just about impossible to dispute or write off since he is such a spiritual giant. I also highly recommend his fantastic book, The Problem of Pain, which make me marvel at his pure genius while finding him so persuasive in just about everything he says. Unlike many priests and other supposed experts I’ve met, C.S. Lewis nails the “problem of pain” quite amazingly in my opinion.
I also appreciate your struggle to come up with posts that involve typical human struggles without resorting to the bogus DSM and its very annoying labels and fables with even Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, admitting their invalidity.
I hope to hear more from you soon along with your great adventures with C.S. Lewis.
Wileywitch,
You’re right that the article is difficult to read like that. I copied this from Psychiatric Times to make it more easily available for MIA people and in the process the paragraph divisions seem to have disappeared.
You can access the article via the link at the end of my post and if you aren’t registered for this magazine, you can sign up and access such articles free.
This is a great, inspiring article by a psychiatrist writing in 1996 who is horrified at the bogus biological paradigm hijacking psychiatry. He says it is/was psychiatry losing its mind and not the patients.
Take care.
Michael,
Perhaps if you read my post as I read yours you may see why I was/am offended by just about anything that smacks of defending the current bogus biopsychiatry paradigm that Szasz so brilliantly exposed in my opinion.
I would like to point out that Dr. Kaiser’s article was written in 1996 before the drugs he thinks work well were/are exposed to be useless but deadly like SSRI antidepressants as exposed in Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs and the horrific brain damaging/disabling neuroleptics that cause so much harm to the brain and body, those conned or forced to take them suffer many horrible physical ailments including obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart problems, eye damage, kidney damage and tons of others along with a chemically lobotomized brain resulting in early death by an average of 25 years after living a destroyed, miserable life. As Robert Whitaker shows in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, the very rare cases of so called manic depression and many with schizophrenia went on to recover after one episode to lead normal lives. But, now that the psychiatry/Big Pharma cartel has expanded these bogus stigmas to assault just about everyone on the planet from babies in utero to the elderly in nursing homes with women and children the main victims of these cowards, there is a growing epidemic of permanent disability and misery with SSI foisted on us tax payers so this oligarchy can continue to make its billions by destroying our lives and forcing us to pay for the damages as well in a true Orwellian Cowardly New World!
But, except for such dated drug information, Dr. Kaiser’s protest against the biological psychiatry eugenics ideology that persists with Dr. Thomas Insel, Head of the NIMH, and his cohorts, is right on the mark when he exposes that it’s all about money and power to keep this vile, self serving gravy train goind.
A superb critique of psychiatry’s Big Pharma/DSM sellout by another conscientious objector!
Commentary: Against Biologic Psychiatry December 01, 1996 | Bipolar Disorder, Cultural Psychiatry, Major Depressive Disorder
By David Kaiser, MD
As a practicing psychiatrist, I have watched with growing dismay and outrage the rise and triumph of the hegemony known as biologic psychiatry. Within the general field of modern psychiatry, biologism now completely dominates the discourse on the causes and treatment of mental illness, and in my view this has been a catastrophe with far-reaching effects on individual patients and the cultural psyche at large. It has occurred to me with forcible irony that psychiatry has quite literally lost its mind, and along with it the minds of the patients they are presumably supposed to care for. Even a cursory glance at any major psychiatric journal is enough to convince me that the field has gone far down the road into a kind of delusion, whose main tenets consist of a particularly pernicious biologic determinism and a pseudo-scientific understanding of human nature and mental illness. The purpose of this piece is not to attempt a full critique or history of this occurrence, but to merely present some of the glaring problems of this movement, as I believe significant harm is being done to patients under the guise of modern psychiatric treatment. I am a psychiatrist trained in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I use both psychotherapy and medications in my approach to patients. I state these facts to make it clear that this is not an antipsychiatry tract, and I am speaking from within the field of psychiatry, although I find it increasingly impossible to identify with this profession, for reasons which will become clear below. Biologic psychiatrists as a whole are unapologetic in their view that they have found the road to the truth, namely that mental illnesses for the most part are genetic in origin and should be treated with biologic manipulations, i.e., psychoactive medications, electroconvulsive treatment (which has made an astounding comeback), and in some cases psychosurgery. Although they admit a role for environmental and social factors, these are usually relegated to a secondary status. Their unquestioning confidence in their biologic paradigms of mental illness is truly staggering. In my opinion, this modern version of the ideology of biologic/genetic determinism is a powerful force that demands a response. And when I use the word ideology here, I mean it in it’s most pernicious form, i.e., as a discourse and practice of power whose true motivations and sources are hidden to the public and even to the practitioners themselves, and which causes real harm to the patients at the receiving end. Biologic psychiatry as it exists today is a dogma that urgently needs to be unmasked. One of the surest signs that dogmatists are at work here is that they rarely question or attempt to problemitize their basic assumptions. In fact, they seem blissfully unaware that there is a problem here. They act in seeming unawareness that they are caught up in larger historical and cultural forces that underwrite their entire “scientific” edifice. These forces include the medicalization of all public discourse on how to live our lives, a growing cultural denial of psychic pain as inherent in living as human beings, the well-known American mixture of ahistoricism and belief in limitless scientific progress, and the growing power of the pharmaceutical and managed care industries. These self-proclaimed visionaries, oblivious to all of this, boast of real scientific progress over what they consider to be the dogma of psychoanalysis, which had up until recently reigned as psychiatry’s premier paradigm. Now, it is not my intention to defend psychoanalysis, which had its own unfortunate excesses, although I do use psychoanalytic principles in the kind of psychotherapy I do. However, it is quite clear to me that the grandiose claims of biologic psychiatry are wildly overstated, unproved and essentially self-serving. Biologic psychiatry has had its successes, particularly with recent antidepressants like Prozac and newer antipsychotic medications such as Clozaril. Medications can effectively improve depression, relieve severe anxiety, stabilize serious mood swings and lessen psychotic symptoms. These successes are real in that they improve the quality of life of patients who are genuinely suffering. But in reality, i.e., the reality of treating patients, medications have profound limitations. I know that if the only tool I had in treatment was a prescription pad, I would be a poor psychiatrist. The center of treatment will always need to be listening to and speaking with the patients coming to me. This means listening seriously to what they say about their lives and history as a whole, not merely listening for which symptoms might respond to medications. Although it seems astounding that I would have to state this, biologic psychiatrists as a whole really only listen to that portion of the patient’s discourse that corresponds to their biologic paradigms of mental illness. It is the nature of dogma that its practitioners hear only what they want to hear. So what are the limitations of biologic psychiatry? First of all, medications lessen symptoms, they do not treat mental illness per se. This distinction is crucial. Symptoms by definition are the surface presentation of a deeper process. This is self-evident. However, there has been a vast and largely unacknowledged effort on the part of modern (i.e., biologic) psychiatry to equate symptoms with mental illness. For example the “illness” major depression is defined by its set of specific symptoms. The underlying “cause” is presumed to be a biologic/genetic disturbance, even though this has never been proven in the case of depression. The errors in logic here are clear. A set of symptoms is given a name such as “major depression,” which defines it as an “illness,” which is then “treated” with a medication, despite the fact that the underlying cause of the symptoms remains completely unknown and essentially untreated. I have seen repeatedly that, for example, in the case of depression, once medications lessen the symptoms, I am still sitting across from a suffering patient who wants to talk about his unhappiness. This process of equating symptoms with illnesses has been repeated with every diagnostic category, culminating in perhaps one of the greatest sophistries psychiatry has pulled off in its illustrious history of sophistries, namely the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (currently in its fourth incarnation under the name DSM-IV), the bible of modern psychiatry. In it are listed all known “mental disorders,” defined individually by their respective symptom lists. Thus mental illnesses are equated with symptoms. The surface is all there is. The perverse beauty of this scheme is that if you take away a patient’s symptoms, the disorder is gone. For those who do serious work with patients, this manual is useless, because for me it is simply irrelevant what name you give to a particular set of symptoms. It is an absolute myth created by modern psychiatry that these “disorders” actually exist as discrete entities that have a cause and treatment. This is essentially a pseudo-scientific enterprise that grew out of modern psychiatry’s desire to emulate modern medical science, despite the very real possibility that psychic pain, because of its existential nature, may always elude the capture of modern medical discourse and practice. Despite its obvious limitations, the DSM-IV has become the basis for psychiatric training and research. Its proponents claim it is a purely phenomenological document stripped of judgments and prejudices about the causes of mental illness. What in fact it has done is the defining and shaping of a vast industry of research designed to validate the existing diagnostic categories and to find ways to lessen symptoms, which basically has meant biologic research. Virtually all of the major psychiatric journals are now about this, and as such I find them useless to help me deal with real patients. Patients are suffering from far more than symptoms. Symptoms are the signs and clues to direct us to the real issues. If you take away the symptoms too quickly with medications or suggestion, you lose the opportunity to help a patient in a more profound way. As an aside, modern psychiatrists, because they have forgotten or dismissed the real power of transference, vastly underestimate the extent to which symptom reduction is caused by mere suggestion. Not that patients should be left to suffer needlessly from what are often crippling symptoms. Relief from symptoms is a part of treatment. Modern psychiatry would have us believe that this is all treatment should be. Meaning, desire, loss and death are no longer the province of the psychiatrist. In this process patients are reduced to something less than fully human, as they become an abstract collection of symptoms without meaning to be “managed” by technicians called psychiatrists. This is in the service of medical progress and enlightened scientific thought. The biologic psychiatrist will not make the mistake of imposing their value systems on patients like in the bad old psychoanalytic days. This is, of course, a sham. Modern psychiatry now foists on patients the view that their deepest and most private ills are now medical problems to be managed by physician-psychiatrists who will take away their symptoms and return them to “normal functioning.” This is more than a bit malignant. One of the dominant discourses that runs through the DSM-IV and modern psychiatry in general is the equating of mental health with “normal” functioning and adaptation. There is a barely concealed strain of a specific form of Utopianism here which blithely announces that our psychic ills are primarily biologic and can be removed from our lives without difficulty, leaving us better adapted and more productive. What is left completely out, of course, are any notions that our psychic ills are a reflection of cultural pathology. In fact, this new biologic psychiatry can only exist to the extent it can deny not only the truths of psychoanalysis, but also the truths of any serious cultural criticism. It is then no surprise that this psychiatry thrives in this country presently, where such denials are rampant and deeply embedded. I am constantly amazed by how many patients who come to see me believe or want to believe that their difficulties are biologic and can be relieved by a pill. This is despite the fact that modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. However, this does not stop psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin, and that it is only a matter of time until all this is proven. This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naive and perhaps delusional. As in any dogma, there is no perspective within biologic psychiatry that can effectively question its own motives, basic beliefs and potential blind spots. And thus, as in any dogma, there is no way for the field to curb its own excesses, or to see how it might be acting out certain specific cultural fantasies and wishes. The rise and fall of biologic determinism in a culture likely has complicated and interesting causes, which are beyond the scope of this paper. A few comments will have to suffice. This is a culture increasingly obsessed with medical science and medical health as a sign of virtue. It is not surprising that our psychic ills would be pulled into this dominant medical discourse, essentially medicalizing our specific forms of psychic pain. It seems to me that modern psychiatry, in step with a culture which created it, assumes any suffering to be unequivocally bad, an impediment to the “good life” of progress, productivity and progress. It is now almost heresy in psychiatry to say that perhaps suffering can teach us something, deepen our experience, or point us to different possibilities. Now, if you are depressed or anxious, it has no real meaning, because as a biologic illness similar to say diabetes, it is separate from the world of meaning and merely is. Now any thoughtful person knows that something as fundamental as depression has meanings such as loss, facing mortality, unlived desires, lack of power or control, etc., and that these meanings will continue to exist even if Prozac makes us feel better. There is much more to life than feeling better or living without pain, and only a superficial and pathologic culture would need to deny this. Yet conclusions such as “depression is a chemical imbalance” are created out of nothing more than semantics and the wishful thinking of scientist/psychiatrists and a public who will believe anything now that has the stamp of approval of medical science. It seems to me that modern psychiatry is acting out a cultural fantasy having to do with the wish for an omniscient authority who, armed with modern science, will magically take away the suffering and pain inherent in existing as human beings, and that rather than refusing this projection (which psychoanalysts were better able to do), modern psychiatry has embraced the role wholeheartedly, reveling in its new-found power and cultural legitimacy. I would be remiss if I left out the obvious economic factors in psychiatry’s movement toward the biologic. Pharmaceutical corporations now contribute heavily to psychiatric research and are increasingly present and a part of psychiatric academic conferences. There has been little resistance in the field to this, with the exception of occasional token protest, despite its obvious corrosive and corrupting effects. It is as if psychiatry, long marginalized by science and the rest of medicine because of its “soft” quality, is now rejoicing in its new found legitimacy, and thus does not have the will to resist its own degradation. The fact that drug companies embrace and fund this new psychiatry is cause enough for alarm. Equally telling is a similar embrace by the managed care industry, which obviously likes its quick-fix approach and simplistic approach to complicated clinical problems. When I talk to a managed care representative about the care of one of my patients, they invariably want to know what medications I am using and little else, and there is often an implication that I am not medicating aggressively enough. There is now a growing cottage industry within psychiatry in advocating ways to work with managed care, despite the obvious fact that managed care has little interest in quality care and realistic treatment approaches to real patients. This financial pressure by managed care contributes added pressure for psychiatry to go down a biologic road and to avoid more realistic treatment approaches. What this means in real terms is that psychotherapy is left out. There has thus been a triple partnership created between this new psychiatry, drug companies and managed care, each part supporting and reinforcing the other in the pursuit of profits and legitimacy. What this means to the patients caught in this squeeze is that they are increasingly overmedicated, denied access to psychotherapy and diagnosed with fictitious disorders, leaving them probably worse off in the long run. It is quite depressing to listen to the discourse of modern psychiatry. In fact, it has become embarrassing to me. One gets the strong impression that patients have become abstractions, black boxes of biologic symptoms, disconnected from the narratives of their current and past lives. This pseudo-scientific discourse is shot through with insecurity and pretension, creating the illusion of objectivity, an inevitable march of progress beyond the hopeless subjectivity of psychoanalysis. Psychotherapy is dismissed and relegated to nonmedical therapists. I actually have no objections to real science in the field, if, for example, it can help me make better medication decisions or develop newer and better medications. But in general biologic psychiatry has not delivered on its grandiose and utopian claims, as today’s collection of medications are woefully inadequate to address the complicated clinical issues that come before me every day. This is all not terribly surprising given what I have outlined in this piece. There will be no substitute for the difficult work of engaging with patients at the level of their lived experience, of helping patients piece together meaning and understanding in the place of their pain, fragmentation and confusion. Patients these days are not suffering from “biologic illnesses.” What I generally see is patients suffering from current or past violence, traumatic loss, loss of power or control over their lives and the effects of cultural fragmentation, isolation and impoverishment that are specific to this culture at this time. How this manifests in any individual is absolutely specific; therefore, one should resist any attempt to generalize or classify, as science forces us to do. Once you go down the route of generalization, you have ceased listening to the patient and the richness of their lived experience. Unfortunately what I also see these days are the casualties of this new biologic psychiatry, as patients often come to me with many years of past treatment. Patients having been diagnosed with “chemical imbalances” despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and that there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like. Patients with years of medication trials which have done nothing except reify in them an identity as a chronic patient with a bad brain. This identification as a biologically-impaired patient is one of the most destructive effects of biologic psychiatry. Modern psychiatrists seem unaware of what psychoanalysts know well, namely how powerful are the words that a patient hears from an authority figure like a psychiatrist. The opportunity here for suggestion, coercion and manipulation are quite real. Patients are often looking to psychiatrists for answers and definitions as they struggle with questions such as who am I or what is happening to me. Of course we all struggle with these questions, and the human condition is such that there are no definitive answers, and anyone who comes along claiming they have answers is essentially a fraud. Biologic psychiatry promises easy answers to a public hungry for them. To give a patient nothing but a diagnosis and a pill demonstrates arrogance, laziness and bad faith on the part of the psychiatrist. Any psychiatrist needs to be continually aware of the very real possibility that they are or can easily become agents of social control and coercion. The way to resist this is to refuse to take on the role assigned through cultural fantasy, namely the role of omniscient dispenser of magical potions. As a whole modern biologic psychiatry has enacted this role with particular vigor and enthusiasm. At the level of individual patients this means a growing number of overdiagnosed, overmedicated and disarticulated people less able to define and control their own identities and lives. At the level of our culture this has meant an impoverishment of the discourse around such questions as what is wrong with us, as “scientific” answers replace more potentially fruitful and truthful psychological and cultural questioning. If psychiatry is to regain any semblance of legitimacy and integrity, it must strip itself of false and hubristic scientific claims and humbly submit itself to the urgent task of listening to individual patients with patience and intelligence. Only then can we have any real sense of what to say back to them. The sole philosophic basis for this new psychiatry is the championing of empiricism above all other measures of truth. Something is valid only if it can be demonstrated through experimental method, otherwise it is disregarded or relegated to “subjective” experience, which is presumed to be inferior. Now, of course, this dominance of empiricism is not limited to psychiatry, and one can easily trace the invasion of the experimental method of the “hard” sciences into the “soft” or social sciences. On a larger cultural level this can be detected in the public’s infatuation with “studies,” statistics and so on. This hegemony of empiricism over other ways of thinking and knowing represents an unprecedented modern achievement which has thoroughly infiltrated the cultural psyche, to the point now where the average person believes easily the claims of the biologic psychiatrist. Now as is clear from my views already expressed, a social science dominated by empiricism is a vulgar science, and there is a vast tradition in philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche which in my view irrefutably demonstrates this. However this is well beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say that modern psychiatrists, like all “scientists” these days, have no time for the basic philosophic questions that have engaged the most brilliant minds of the past. Who needs questions about virtue when there is important data to collect? These biologic psychiatrists never think to ask themselves whether their own precious methods are perhaps standing on very shaky ground, say their own disavowed prejudices about what constitutes the good life. Empiricism is one way of knowing, but certainly not the only or best way. Biologic psychiatrists often use the standards of empiricism to answer their critics, in effect saying that their claims are scientifically “proven” and thus unassailable, clearly a tautological argument. I would further add that in my view many of the claims of biologic psychiatry do not even hold up to their own standards of empirical science, for example their claims about the biologic and genetic basis of many mental illnesses. In my view, the methods of experimental science are inappropriate and misplaced when it comes to understanding the complexity of the human psyche, as they can only objectify the mind and remove subjectivity from the heart of human experience, thus creating an abstract entity in place of a human mind. It is no wonder that psychiatry declared the 1980s the decade of the brain instead of the decade of the mind. In their pursuit of the human brain they have quite literally lost their minds. One way to unmask the dogma that is biologic psychiatry is to ask the question what kind of human being is being posited as desirable, “normal,” or not disordered. Judging by the DSM-IV, it would be a person not depressed or anxious, without perversions or sexual “dysfunction,” in touch with “reality,” not alienated from society, adapted to their work, not prone to excessive feeling states and generally productive in their life pursuits. This is, of course, the bourgeois ideal of modern culture. We will all fit in, produce and consume and be happy about it. Anyone who dissents by choice or nature slips into the realm of the disordered or pathologic, is then located as such by medical science and is then subject to social management and control. Now, psychiatry has always provided this social function, as admirably shown by Foucault and others. I would submit, however, that modern psychiatry, under the guise of medical and “scientific” authority and legitimacy, has surpassed all past attempts by psychiatry to identify and control dissent and individual difference. It has done this by infiltrating the cultural psyche, a psyche already vulnerable to any kind of medical discourse, to the point where it is a generally accepted cultural notion now that, say, depression is an illness caused by a chemical imbalance. Now when a person becomes depressed, for example, they are less able to read it or interpret it as a sign that there may be a problem in their life that needs to be looked at or addressed. They are less able to question their life choices, or question for example the institutions that surround them. They are less able to fashion their own personal or cultural critique which could potentially lead them to more fruitful directions. Instead they identify themselves as ill and submit to the correction of a psychiatrist, who promises to take away the depression so they can get back to their lives as they are. In short, the very meanings of unhappiness are being redefined as illness. In my view this is a dismaying cultural catastrophe. I do not mean to suggest that psychiatry is solely to blame for this, given how wide a cultural shift this is. However, I do think that psychiatry has not only not resisted its role here, but actually has fulfilled it with considerable hubris. Thus in my view the whole phenomenon of biologic psychiatry is itself a symptom or acting out of a larger, underlying cultural process. Unhappiness and suffering are not seen as resulting from real cultural conditions; for example, the collapse of traditional institutions and the ever increasing hegemony of rampant consumerism in American culture. Nor is suffering seen in the context of what it means to exist as a human being in any historical period. Historical and existential discourse about unhappiness is increasingly supplanted by medical discourse, and biologic psychiatry has served as one of the major mouthpieces for this kind of pseudo-scientific and frankly pathetic medical discourse about what ails us. I am increasingly astonished about how unable the average patient is now to articulate reasons for their unhappiness, and how readily they will accept a “medical” diagnosis and solution if given one by a narrow-minded psychiatrist. This is a cultural pathologic dependence on medical authority. Granted, there are patients who do fight this kind of definition and continue to search for better explanations for themselves which are less infantilizing, but in my experience this is not common. There is a frightening choking off of the possibility for dissent and creative questioning here, a silencing of very basic questions such as “what is this pain?” or “what is my purpose?” Modern psychiatry has unconscionably participated in this pathology for its own gain and power. It is a moral, not scientific issue at stake here, and in my view this is why many astute Americans rightfully distrust this new psychiatry and its Utopian claims about happiness through medical progress. So what kind of psychiatry am I advocating here? First of all, I think it is unclear whether the field can extricate itself from its current infatuation with technology and its own power to use it. When one reads psychiatric journals now, one senses a dangerous giddiness about the field’s “discoveries” and “progress,” which in my view are wildly and irresponsibly overstated. All the momentum, which is mainly economically driven, is pushing psychiatry toward further biologism. Having said this, what I am advocating is a psychiatry which devotes itself humbly to the task of listening to patients in a way that other medical practitioners cannot. This means paying close attention to a patient’s current and past narrative without attempting to control, manipulate or define it. From this position a psychiatrist can then assist the patient in raising relevant questions about their lives and pain. The temptation to provide answers or false solutions should be absolutely avoided here. Medications are used judiciously for lowering painful symptoms, with considerable attention paid to the psychological effects of medication treatment. Diagnosis should play a secondary and small role here, given that little is known about what these diagnoses actually mean. Above all suggestion, coercion, normalization and control need to be assiduously guarded against, as these are natural temptations that arise out of the dynamics of power that exist between psychiatrist and patient. A more humane psychiatry, if it is even possible in today’s cultural climate, must recognize the powerful potential of the uses and abuses of power if it is not to become a tool of social control and normalization. As I have outlined in this piece, these abuses of power are by no means always obvious and self-evident, and their recognition requires rigorous thought and self-examination. The psychiatrist plays a particular role in cultural and individual fantasies, and an intelligent psychiatrist must be aware of the complexity of these fantasies if he is to act in a position outside these projections and fantasies. This requires real moral awareness on the part of a psychiatrist who wishes to act intelligently. What I am advocating for in outline form as stated previously are the minimal requirements necessary for the field of psychiatry to reverse its current degradation. What is essential at this time is for psychiatrists and other clinicians to speak out against the ideology known as biologic psychiatry.
– See more at: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/commentary-against-biologic-psychiatry#sthash.c2hMQzJ7.dpuf
I must say that I found this post offensive because it seems that Michael was/is trying to be very provocative about Dr. Szasz in his presentation when he is writing for a critical or even antipsychiatry group who tend to admire those few heroes who exposed the truth about psychiatry and the so called mental “health” system at huge cost to themselves.
The following article shows that psychiatry has not survived due to its great helping/healing capacity, but rather, due to the fact they sold out to Big Pharma and together made billions that helped buy politicians, the legal system and all the power for themselves that money can buy based on lies and fraud. Thus, this fascist psychiatry industrial complex or the therapeutic state that Dr. Szasz so brilliantly defined and exposed has nothing to do with health and everything to do with supporting the current 1% robber barons at the horrific expense of the majority subjected to the worst kinds of social control, brain/body destruction in the guise of health/help and the violation/robbery of all human, civil and constitutional rights.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/05/how_a_scientifi071931.html
I don’t think it was necessary to make such a big deal of Dr. Szasz’ suicide for those of us who did not know because doing so creates the type of circus that has gone on with the death of Robin Williams while the decision to end one’s life can be based on very rational, well thought out reasons based on the pros and cons and not the so called “mental illness” the mental death profession pretends so they can impose their own form or torture/murder instead for profit and power with the pretense of concern and help. But, I think Szasz did pretty well in the media when he died and the fact his many books stay in print and keep selling shows that people brainwashed, deceived and horribly betrayed by modern biopsychiatry and its bogus, invalid stigmas and useless, poison drugs are grateful for support and validation from these noble old timers with a conscience like Dr. Szasz, Dr. Peter Breggin, Dr. Loren Mosher, Dr. Paula Caplan, Dr. Stuart Kirk, Dr. David Cohen and many others when they begin to see through this arrogant fraud. Dr. Fred Baughman, Neurologist, says all DSM stigmas voted in by consensus like ADHD and bipolar are 100% fraud to push the latest lethal, lucrative drugs and other forms of lobotomy on patent. Dr. Baughman claims that such actions by psychiatry constitute the worst medical crimes against humanity ever since children have become the major targets for this vile brain damage demolition enterprise. Psychiatry instigated the Nazi Holocaust with its horrific eugenics agenda they continue today in the guise of genetics research to blame the victims for social oppression, greed induced poverty, growing inequality, racism, sexism and many other environmental and social ills. As practice for the Holocaust psychiatry gassed to death those they stigmatized as “mentally ill” or otherwise useless eaters BEFORE Hitler came to power. In fact, Hitler praised psychiatry’s eugenics theories in his infamous book, Mein Kampf before he got involved in politics! It was psychiatry that persuaded Hitler to move the gassing apparatus from mental hospitals to the concentration camps with such “doctors” making selections for work or immediate death and even more horrific “scientific” experiments on twins like those of Mengele just as is done today in the guise of science and “mental health.” Also, psychiatry kept killing patients even after the war ended until they were forced to stop doing it openly by the Nuremburg Trials, Catholics and others opposing their psychopathy and malignant narcissism. Experts who conducted the Nuremburg Trials acknowledged that without psychiatry, the Holocaust would never have happened. So, obviously, people never learn when it comes to “snakes in suits” or demons tempting us in different guises/disguises.
So, when a dubious field like psychiatry has the whole power of a corrupt industry like Big Pharma with their billions and equally corrupt politicians and regulatory agencies with the foxes guarding the hen houses with revolving doors, I don’t think that psychiatry’s supposed success can be attributed to Szasz’ failure. Anyone challenging this Goliath is attacked and discredited viciously as a Scientologist and other garbage with tons of Big Pharma money to destroy careers and terrorize others into silence just as they do with their so called “patients” on behalf of their fellow abusers in power. Psychiatry also plays the role of enabling the outer pretense of a democracy while using the bogus DSM stigmas to attack, discredit, isolate, terrorize, institutionalize, lobotomize and all their other horrors in the guise of mental health just like Soviet Russia and other fascist states pretending to be democracies. So, when Dr. Szasz advocates for freedom while psychiatry’s role is to violate any citizen’s every individual, human, democratic civil right using their fraudulent biopsychiatry paradigm as a cover while also helping Big Pharma and others to make billions, it isn’t hard to see who would/will “win,” but I guess that depends on what one sees as “winning.” Though one may “win” in this rat race, the winner is still a rat. As Guns ‘n Roses sang, “welcome to the jungle….”
I think Dr. Szasz did win and succeed because he left his brilliant thoughts behind in his books and other work and all the lives he touched and saved like Dr. Peter Breggin, the conscience of psychiatry, with their great thoughts, compassion, wisdom and exposure of “psychiatry: the science of lies” and “toxic psychiatry” to help victims to unbrainwash themselves and become survivors/escapees of this horrific plague on humanity! Bob Whitaker’s books have been life savers for many as well as he exposed the truth about the epidemic psychiatry created rather than healing anything.
There is the story of a young boy throwing star fish back into the sea that he finds on the beach. An old man comes along and chastises him on such a futile enterprise since the boy can’t save the huge number of starfish there. The boy responds that it matters to the starfish he is able to save. The same mentality can be applied to those saved from the Holocaust or whenever a human being decides to do the decent thing rather than the evil or expedient thing. Sadly, with the decline of the best of religion, many people have never even learned the basic ethics of the golden rule and other necessities for a decent civilization. I agree with Seth Farber that there is the hijacked Constantinian Christianity and that of Jesus and his followers which is another version of the therapeutic state versus freedom, compassion, wisdom and enlightenment.
I have said elsewhere that I used to feel somewhat grateful that I wasn’t born during the Nazi Holocaust and other horrible times when in reality the fact that psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma in the 1980’s when they decided to “dance with the devil” as one APA president with lots of lucrative Big Pharma ties said to justify the destruction of so called patients makes me realize that psychiatry just continues its usual horrific crimes against humanity unabated in one guise or another whether it is state enforced witch hunts, Inquisitions and other fascist abuses just as Dr. Szasz wisely exposed, so he reminds us to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing and other Trojan horses pretending to help during all these “times that try our souls.”
Thank you for posting here, but again, I am offended by some of your post due to my great admiration and respect for Dr. Thomas Szasz. I think you could have been a bit more sensitive and respectful of your readers and I am still not sure I get your message or overall point other than to discredit Dr. Szasz, which I think failed miserably because you are comparing apples and oranges or using a rigged system with the so called “winner” already all too well established to tolerate any competitors or critics.
I appreciate your writing here because your piece gave me much food for thought. Based on what you have added in your comments, perhaps I have misunderstood your analysis of Szasz. I agree with much of what Seth Farber says in that the power elite get to create the accepted version of the so called “truth” or “reality” they wish to prevail just like the winners get to write the history books. It doesn’t make it so!
This article is superb in that it reports the very hard hitting truth about the abuse of children with bogus, INVALID psychiatric stigmas to push lethal, brain/body damaging drugs without mincing words or sugar coating it! It is encouraging that some of the psychiatrists and other mental health workers acknowledged that poisoning children/teens as a supposed remedy for heartbreak from huge losses of parents, family, homes and so much more is gruesome to say the least.
The fools that wax poetic about how helpful these toxic poison drugs are show their gross ignorance, lack of empathy/conscience and inability to deal with these kids in a humane, mature, intelligent way. And one must bare in mind that most if not all so called foster parents get money to do this job, so their forcing drugs on these kids to make them more easily controlled zombies as in nursing homes makes this blood money! Plus, the doctors in the article admit the drugs may work for two weeks to restrain some behaviors if they even do that, but are mostly useless for this purpose overall while causing huge harm to the brains/health of these children/teens.
And children already suffering such loss really need to be made obese, incontinent, shaky, manic, aggressive, suicidal, insomniacs and all the other horrible things that happed to those forced on toxic, useless psych drugs.
The original perpetrators creating the DSM III and selling out to Big Pharma like Robert Spitzer, ed., and his pals for greed, profit, power, status, malignant narcissism/psychopathy and their own obvious inhumanity should have their own Nuremburg Trials. Once this crime against humanity occurred, it was only a matter of time before the Joseph Biederman’s came along and created the child drugging epidemic by selling out to Johnson & Johnson and other Big Pharma greed by single handedly creating the bogus child ADHD and bipolar epidemics with the goal of pushing toxic neuroleptics.
This whole despicable enterprise shows that the U.S., its legal system, politicians, doctors and the medical profession and society as a whole have lost their moral compass if they ever had one.
I think the fact that such an article has been written and published shows that things may be looking up in terms of educating the pubic and would be victims about this evil death trap as more and more people see the truth about Toxic Psychiatry and Mad Science.
I look forward to seeing the second part of the article.
Correction:
Many have been inspired by The Paradoxical Commandments below. I like the ones associated with Mother Teresa that end with “In the final analysis it’s between you and God and them and God anyway.”
There are many versions of this with explanations on the web.
Many have been inspired by The Paradoxical Commandments below. I like the ones associated with Mother Teresa that end with it’s between you and God and them anyway.
The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
© Copyright Kent M. Keith 1968, renewed 2001
Version associated with Mother Teresa:
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true friends; succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world your best anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-bacteria-may-play-a-role-in-autism/?&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20140820
Exactly. Thanks for that astute observation!
CannotSay.
Excellent letter and very ambitious on your part. How did you know he is gay?
This is very sad and should come as no surprise given that minorities have been most adversely affected with the economic meltdown and growing outrageous inequality and poverty.
Hi James,
Great article and especially relevant for me at this time and always. I’ve struggled with the “forgiveness” issue many times due to great harm perpetrated by evil people against me and loved ones who could be “diagnosed” with malignant narcissism and/or psychopathy.
Here is another interesting view:
http://www.luke173ministries.org/
Another confusing issue is how evil, abusive, dishonest people and/or fools are treated in the Bible and other religious texts in that others are told to cut them off, avoid them, have nothing to do with them and many other negative actions against them. And the bottom line is that hypocritical society often shuns people who step out of line with drugs, alcohol, sex or other supposed taboos though they may be guilty themselves privately.
Moreover, Satan and his cohorts in crime are supposedly condemned to hell forever. At least metaphorically because as C.S. Lewis claims, people choose hell as he shows in his book, The Great Divorce, and other works. Lewis was a great admirer of George MacDonald, a preacher, who ran into trouble because he believed all people would ultimately be saved. Thus, there are many views about eternal punishment from one’s earthly enemies and God.
Another difficult issue is when evil or psychopathic people will not only refuse to acknowledge the harm they do, but given their sadistic nature, duping delight and lack of conscience, they gloat over the harm they’ve done. Thus, they certainly are not seeking forgiveness, but rather, express outrage that they’ve done nothing to forgive if offered forgiveness and/or even attempts to reconcile. They are excellent at turning the tables on their victims and blaming them as Dr. George Simon points out in books I cited on your other posts as well as his web site on manipulative, overly aggressive people.
Here is a question I have pondered when considering forgiving evil people with no conscience. Does God forgive Satan? Are we supposed to forgive Satan? How can you forgive someone or something that is considered totally evil to the point of being damned to hell forever? Did you ever see the great movie, The Exorcist? Should the demon(s) possessing the young girl and trying to kill the exorcists be forgiven? I know these may sound like stupid questions, but where is the dividing line if any in forgiveness? I do know that evil (psychopathic/narcissistic) people can destroy people almost completely psychologically via psychological abuse, violence, smear campaigns, gas lighting and other vicious mobbing/bullying tactics to the point the victims are mere shells of their former selves without any physical blood on their hands. Often, such victims are even driven to suicide. The great book, Stalking the Soul, and the movie, Gas light, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer are excellent examples of this. And another question is that if somebody is so deranged as to be capable of such evil to these extremes or like Ted Bundy, the serial killer, it seems that forgiveness is almost a moot issue though I did see somebody forgive the Green River serial killer on TV because he said God commanded him to do so. It almost seems that “forgiving” such unrepentant people is condoning evil.
Of course, there is the “hate the sin, not the sinner” command, but I find it a very difficult ethical struggle. And because Christian and other churches themselves have been the source of very unethical actions from their beginnings to the present including the recent pedophile scandals, I no longer blindly follow any supposed gurus. At the same time, C.S. Lewis made it clear that though one must forgive, that did not mean that the murderer should not be hung if that was the required punishment by law as would be the case with any crimes and their corresponding punishments. And the reason C.S. Lewis makes such a great spiritual guide is that he is very, very honest and humble about his own shortcomings and belief he fell very short of the mark quite often!
I continue to grapple with these issues as many others do and I can’t say I have any definitive answers. My current view is when one continues to hate an evil doer who has done them much harm, it causes the hater much harm in terms of ill health, bitterness, negative impact on other relationships and many other unintended consequences, so I think it is important to continue the struggle to forgive though one has to do it repeatedly when angry feelings rise up due to ongoing negative consequences and losses due to the perpetrator’s actions. I believe the Buddha said that hating another person is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Or, as Buddy Hackett said, “While your stewing in anger, they’re out dancing,” which can be all the more maddening to think about, but also motivating.
Despite the fact that I think the struggle to forgive is worth it, I do not believe reconciliation or contact with such evil people who are hardest to forgive or even be around once you see through them is possible or recommended since they are too harmful to their targets. Obviously, I am not talking about times when we inadvertently hurt each other due to inattention, selfishness, disagreements or anger periodically in an overall decent relationship because we are all in need of forgiveness for such human failings.
I like others have found it helpful to read some of the Holocaust literature and the works of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mendela as well as Viktor Frankl and Corrie Ten Bloom to learn how people in the worst of situations survived and decided that forgiveness was the only way forward for everyone involved and/or they had to do it to obey God, so they did it and helped others do it.
I was glad to see you quoted C.S. Lewis in your great article as well as others. You answered the question I posed on your last post about your progress with C.S. Lewis in this post. I’m very glad to see that you appreciate C.S. Lewis as I and so many others do. I will use your article as another great, inspiring source to continue my own rocky forgiveness path.
As you can see, I didn’t jump to respond to this post because I wasn’t sure I wanted to respond to this thorny issue and if I did, I wanted to give it a great deal of thought since I don’t see myself as a great model of virtue in this area though I continue to try very hard!
This article also criticizes the bogus chemical imbalance/brain disease theories for “depression:”
http://anh-europe.org/Depression_Mental_condition_or_gut_disorder?utm_source=The+Alliance+for+Natural+Health&utm_campaign=cbba711c5e-140820_ANH_Intl_e_Alert_No_1238_20_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_aea8a87544-cbba711c5e-84967745
Peter,
This is an excellent post and I greatly appreciate it. I feel increasingly demoralized to see new “studies” about the supposed 108 genes associated with schizophrenia or the supposed genes associated with all the 5 major “mental illnesses” like the latest fad fraud bipolar that is used for serial killers, domestic violence/rape victims and other absurdities. It was well known this was a garbage can stigma by the creators of DSM III led by the malignant narcissist Robert Spitzer when psychiatry sold out to Big Pharma because Freudian analysis was waning.
Thus, your latest post is very positive and hopeful. You talk about a growing revolution. I hope you write another post soon explaining any such gains in sanity despite the insanity of the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma/Government Industrial Complex. Yet, the NIMH in the U.S. under the ongoing ideology of Dr. Thomas Insel and his cohorts are much enthused about his big brain and other bogus blaming the brain projects. There was some hope when he admitted that DSM stigmas are invalid in the article, Transforming Diagnosis, on his NIMH blog, but it’s back to business as usual with the latest bogus gene claims for bipolar and schizophrenia touted by Insel and his cohorts. It doesn’t look too promising in the U.S. for sure given this agenda. One positive thing I’ve read is that many experts have been fighting the great brain project in Great Britain. Have you been part of that?
I look forward to reading more of your great, uplifting posts in the future.
Steve,
You nailed it! It is obvious this is a puff piece or infomercial for the usual bogus claims of the supposed great necessity of more psychiatry to deal with the increased huge global burden of “mental illness” they must fight just like cancer to save lives. As anyone who has had to fight for funding knows, the greater and more critical/important the need as well as having increased participants with special emphasis on children no less, the more funding is required goes the usual pitch and often granted. And the psychiatry/Big Pharma cartel are experts in promoting their life destroying agenda for greed, profit, power and status in the guise of health. The fact they prey on children the most in modern times with their latest eugenics agenda exposes them for their total lack of conscience, ethics, empathy, decency or anything else that makes one human.
However, they seem to ignore Dr. Thomas Insel’s blog, “Transforming Diagnosis,” when he acknowledged that “other” medical specialties were making huge progress in curing diseases and saving lives while psychiatry’s record of such success was dismal and sorely lacking for the last 100 years. This was when he acknowledged the DSM is a total INVALID fraud with no science, evidence or anything medical behind its voted in stigmas to collude with Big Pharma to push the latest lethal drugs on patent. Of course, anyone doing the least amount of research about psychiatry has been well aware of that for decades, so Insel had to come up with the new con of bad “brain circuits” to hoodwink the public. In the meantime, I’m seeing more and more “studies” claiming the schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, ADHD, autism and other supposed genes of these invented “disorders.” These are the same bogus claims made for the last hundred years debunked by those like Dr. Jay Joseph in books like The Missing Gene and The Gene Illusion, which shows they also have no shame and engage in constant pathological lying. It’s not hard to see that these are all traits of psychopaths.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
Here is an article on the progress in heart disease to back of Insel’s claims about progress in other specialties here:
http://www.livescience.com/47425-heart-disease-death-hospitalization-decline.html?cmpid=558191
Thus, though psychiatry likes to boast about its great importance to everyone’s health and survival and their great growing burden, as you say, Bob Whitaker nailed it when he exposed the real reason behind the huge budget busting growing epidemic of disability and death unleashed by the mental death profession!
Thus, they should not be bragging about the great increase in their numbers of so called patients because the number keeps growing as they con more so called patients into their death traps with life destroying stigmas, brain damaging/disabling “treatments,” and more forced treatment. It’s not like all their so called patients have sought them out, so they should be seen as more like jailers running prisons in the guise of “mental health” as many experts have pointed out. Those visiting them for life problems are routinely betrayed with a bogus bipolar stigma and a lethal cocktail of drugs as they blame their victims for any crisis, abuse, loss, bullying, mobbing, poverty, being the wrong sex or color and other traumatic experiences while lying and denying them at the same time by claiming they are brain diseases.
World citizens need to unite and fight the growing menace of the psychopathic 1% globally if they hope to avoid/change this growing path of destruction. This is especially true as the U.S. and other so called democracies become increasingly fascist, authoritarian, militant and power hungry with psychiatry serving as the current gestapo SS!
Per the link below, Robin Williams’ wife sent a news release that he was suffering the early stages of Parkinsons disease.
So much for all the mental death disease mongering “experts” trying to use this and other crises and tragedies to push for more money and forcing mental death stigmas and drugs in the guise of treatment for everyone on the planet except the 1% psychopaths hijacking the globe.
Another speculation is that given most if not all psych drugs cause brain damage and Parkinson type damage, it wound not be surprising to find that Williams took some or many of psychiatry’s toxic drugs for so called depression that brought or worsened many of his symptoms. Dr. Healy has shown that antidepressants (not to mention Xanax or booze in a pill) can easily drive people to drink and many have reported just that on his Risk.org web site).
When all is said and done, the mental death profession did Williams far more harm than good since they are the ones who demonized and tormented those with addictions to push their bogus multibillion drug/alcohol treatment industry while hijacking the free 12 step groups as their great program though results of such so called treatment are increasingly dubious. Many experts are going back to the common sense theories that people are driven to drink due to excess stress, trauma, unbearable powerlessness in horrible situations like work/domestic/school bullying and mobbing, etc. Dr. Lance Dodes, author of The Heart of Addiction and Breaking Addiction brings back common sense by showing how one can easily become addicted to drugs/alcohol when trapped in seemingly no win situations he helps people explore to escape such death traps.
So, not only was the mental death profession useless to Williams, but also, helped to drive him over the edge as he repeated AA slogans of self loathing, labeling, contempt and self blame enough to cause anyone to be depressed and wanting to self harm as those around the so called monster addict add fuel to the fire by blaming all their woes on the so called addict or new scapegoat.
There has been speculation that Williams was bipolar and it would be no surprise IF he had been so labeled since anyone with an addiction is now automatically given this bogus fad fraud stigma per Jill Litrell on another MIA post. Those with “depression” are converted by fiat or due to the toxic effects of useless but deadly SSRI’s, benzos and other psych drugs to push the latest lethal billion dollar drugs on patent: neuroleptics and epileptic drugs fraudulently misnamed mood stabilizers by drug companies “repurposing them” per Dr. David Healy in his great book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder.
I have been totally furious and disgusted to see all the mental death disease mongerers pretending to feel such loss and sadness about this tragic death and pushing for more of their evil, horrific life destroying stigma and poisoning in the guise of treatment. It is all the more vile and repulsive while they treat most they encounter like objects to be stigmatized and drugged within minutes for greed, power, profit and status and sent on their way without a shred of concern for their real problems, suffering or humanity. And any questions or resistance brings out the worst viciousness from these supposedly concerned, helpful mental death experts. I won’t deny I am very angry at all the suffering caused by the biopsychiatry/Big Pharma cartel created ONLY for profit and social control to create the current horrific fascist therapeutic state that has made life hell for so many including even wealthy, powerful people like Williams.
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/14/robin_williamss_wife_reveals_beloved_actor_had_parkinsons/?source=newsletter
Here’s a nice little historical review of how the horrific biopsychiatry/Big Pharma Therapeutic State came about to validate antipsychiatry:
http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/view/372/295