Comments by Jasenn Zaejian, PhD

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  • From it’s evolution from “behaviorism”, having trained in CBT {and “behaviorism}, I’ve always suspected CBT to be based on a fraudulent sales gimmick asserting high effectness when little if any effectiveness existed, especially noted when strong reactions to criticism of CBT have been verbalized. Years ago, when Pres. of the NYS Division of Public Sector psychologists I posted a copy of a paper of a study of thousands of Ss in Thought Field Therapy completed in South and Central America, for information only. The toxic reactions from those identifying themselves as CBT or “behaviorists” was incredibly overwhelming.

    In one major study of CBT I was professionally associated with as department chair but had nothing to do with the study, it was discovered by a staff psychologist who expressed concern to me as her supervisor, that the psychologist running the study faked the results. He was later dismissed. Thank you for your affirmation of my suspicions.

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  • Just as many politicians recently demonstrated, that their word is not to be trusted, as do right wing psychiatrists and psychologists, e.g., psychologist/politician Tim Murphy for one, the just resigned congressperson from Ct who has letters and complaints filed with the Penn. State office that he was unethical in his false statement of facts conflating “mental illness” with violence to promote the bill he was involved in authoring, calling for more oppression in the mental health system. His days in Congress is over. If he continues practice in psychology, will he be called to task? I doubt it.

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  • Arn’t you ignoring the fact that numerous research has shown that Black and Latino people are some of the most discriminated people in the “mental health” system, not by poverty but by their racial characteristics. The bias is mainly from white professionals, many of whom never experienced an impoverished existence, mainly from subtle racial agendas that prevented their progress in society. I once worked in a unit whose chief psychiatrist, in a candid moment, told me he had never met a black person and is therefore puzzled by their behavior.

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  • I was actively opposing the Murphy bill and his right wing deceptions. I agree with your thesis of capitalism. But a Representative writes a bill to promote his or her own beliefs and enhance his or her own ability to generate campaign contributions to get reelected..whether they are grounded in reality or research, or merely a figment of ones imagination. That’s what makes this so political. If you trace Murphy’s support you will see he is associated with E. Fuller Torrey who has expressed fondness for Murphy and who has been at the center of calling for involuntary hospitalization and psychiatric oppression when he first started in NYS about 30 or so years ago. Torrey originally was one of the creators of NAMI, first a front organization for the pharmaceutical company until exposed by (Rep) Congress person Grassley. Torrey then cleverly started promoting the “Treatment Advocacy Center” to promote the same repressive policies across the US. Psychiatric oppression and oppression of anyone who acts differently than the fiction of what psychologists and psychiatrists defined as “normal” is a function of the distortions of human existence, i.e., deceptions, that are endemic in capitalism. Now, in recent press we see reports of the manipulation of perception by Russia and the US, something that the NAZI party was so good at. This manipulation of perception is likely why the state of “mental illness” is in such a regressive position with repression of those defined within the category.

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  • Please get your facts straight. Murphy is listed as a coauthor of HR 6. He manipulated the extremist faction and the democrats of the GOP to vote for this by conflating mental illness with violence and the problem with homelessness, when in fact it is the conservative fiscal policies that create homelessness and the failure to solve it, in spite of a plethora of research indicating viable solutions, the most effective, given world wide research, is provision of housing and contingency management, not coercive treatment as called for in the bill. In recent years, Murphy has made numerous public appearances conflating mental illness with violence to sell his original bill and this one. It is unethical for a psychologist to distort research facts to achieve an agenda. This is a radical GOP fear tactic used to manipulate agreement with number of coercive government and legal interventions.

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  • This bill was authored by. among others, a Penn. psychologist and identified Republican congress person of the radical right wing. A number of people have told me they have previously filed an ethics complaint with the Penn psych board in response to his conflating mental illness with violence and distorting relevant research to sell his previous bill to the House. Given the results of the recent national election, we can only expect more of these repressive, deceitful tactics over the next 4 years. What is necessary is to organize as MAD professionals and submit letters, emails, and newspaper articles and letters-to-the editor to clarify these distortions and present a truthful picture of the state of so called “mental illness” treatment, and the devastation that ignorant psychologists and psychiatrists will cause for already hurting people

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  • Sandra Steingard, M.D.
    3-4 years ago, after working with many people who claimed “depression,” I had developed and used many effective strategies that enabled people to become “undepressed.” I wrote these down in Healing Personal Depression For Good and published it as an ebook. A review of the book is at http://www.relatedness.org/Anxiety_Depresion_ebook_Review.html
    If interested in a coupon for the book, please let me know at [email protected]

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  • When I kill a bug like a mosquito or these large flying cockroaches that somehow find their way in my clean house, I verbalize a Buddhist chant to relieve the soul of the bug from being reincarnated as a bug.

    On another note, having worked with and for psychopaths and sociopaths for a career, teaching a psychopath or sociopath a technique to eliminate guilt or shame may be unproductive as it removes the singular thing that discourages them from committing an antisocial act.

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  • This represents my attempt at opposing outpatient commitment laws in California. I presented research before the Orange County Board of Supervisors when they were considering adopting the California ‘Laura’s Law’ a few years ago. They delayed adoption for a year, were beset by letters and comments from parents, the Treatment Advocacy Center of E. Fuller Torrey, and others who were ginning up fear, and eventually succumbed to pass it. This paper represents essentially what was in my testimony: http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/02/current-research-outpatient-commitment-laws-lauras-law-california%E2%80%8E/

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  • Follow the Money? Right on. Here goes: Mark Covall is the CEO of the lobbying firm National Association of Psychiatric Health systems (NAPHS) whose primary lobbying interests are to promote government policies favoring the profit motives of inpatient psychiatric facilities. His lobbying firm is one of the leading campaign contributor to Congressman Tim Murphy’s election and pac committees. He has recently been promoting Murphy’s ammended bill, HR2646 and related legislation as a source for increased medicare payments to private and public psychiatric hospitals. The pharmaceutical industry and psychiatric healthcare systems are some of the largest contributors to Congressman Tim Murphy campaign committee and related superpac. This begs the question, is Murphy’s false conflation of mental illness with violence motivated by the funds he receives from his favored lobbying firm, NAPHS, the public and private psychiatric health industry, and the pharmaceutical industry? What else can a citizen expect from a Congressman who has been embroiled in alleged violation of campaign funding sources leading towards investigations by the Department of Justice?

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  • Pat,
    A few weeks ago, I emailed the Penn. psych board and asked them to conduct an ethics investigation of Murphy as a result of his false public statements of conflation of “mental illness” with violence, made on many occasions in video, audio, and print media. I laid out the details in that email, citing specific ethics codes I believe he violated. One psychiatrist told me he had a conversation with Murphy and asked him why he did that. He said, Murphy said while he knows there is even a negative correlation between mi and violence, he was promoting the false notion that there is to promote his bill because if he were not falsly claiming that, there would be little chance to pass the bill. This is a direct violation of the APA ethics which the State of Penn licensing board uses as their guidelines. I am hoping I’m not the only one to file a complaint. Any citizen can do so and reference mine. email me at [email protected] and I’ll send you a copy of the email sent to the board.

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  • At 19-20, following years of psychological and physical abuse from dear father, I had a psychotic break studying for my first community college exam, after having such low self esteem I never believed I could ever make it through college ( a few years ago when he came to visit he admitted to me he “never thought you’d (I would) amount to anything”). When the sun rose that morning, after my break immersed in a delusion all night without sleep, I recovered, went on to pass the exam that day, then continued on to be a clinical psychologist, retired, and thus far wrote and published 4 non-fiction books and the latest, a sci fi novel (http://jasenn.org).

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  • Sadly, while well written, this is nothing new. People have been castigating Torrey, et al since the 1970’s, yet he continues to gain credence. All the issues raised by the author have been raised numerous times, here and in other forums, yet nothing seems to change. While working in the same state as the author I once, informally, ran the racial differences in stats on schizophrenic diagnosis, finding that African American’s had something like an 80% chance of being dx’d as schizophrenic, Latino’s a 60% chance, and Asians a little more than 50% chance, while white’s were in the 40% range, when they walked in the door. I told my supervisor who shrugged his shoulders, as his only response. A friend who was pushed out of his job at a major California institution after he published an article on racial disparity in discharge planning (it was his job to publish research) found the state discharge planning discriminated against African-Americans and Latino’s identifying with their own culture. New York law school professor Michael Perlin writes about “sanism” in the courts, the tendency of professionals, attorneys and clinicians, to accept that a person is “mentally ill” just because he has been hospitalized or in court contesting his or her status.
    Yes, the system is controlled by corporate interests from psychiatry, psychology, and the pharmaceutical industry, all who are well aware that if rational thought prevailed, they’d all be out of their lucrative incomes. They all continue to promote the delusion of “mental illness” when we all know there is no scientific basis for that construct.

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  • As was Dr. Breeding, I was influenced and guided by Szasz, first being exposed to his work in graduate school in the early 70’s. I then worked in the NY state mental health system where Szasz first was oppressed, castigated, and threatened with termination for his correct ideas that differed from the main stream authoritarians, psychologists and psychiatrists. I saw, first hand, how the state operation demands adherence to medical authoritarianism, if you want to work there. Only in one of many facilities where I was employed, was I fortunate enough to have a compassionate psychoanalyst who also appreciated Szasz, as a supervisor for 8 years. Career experience led me to believe that most administrators and supervisors in the massive public “mental health” system are immersed in a morass of ignorance and what I would refer to as sychophanticy where only main stream thinking and the pleasing of supervisors bears any meaning. The “patients” are tools to be manipulated, controlled, and chemically destroyed if they don’t meet the criteria of the mainstream. Attempt any creative and proven approach to healing and one is immediately castigated and shunned.

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  • When I was a young student in graduate school, studying with Viktor Frankl, he assigned us a paper and said we can write about anything, in any way, as long as it has to do with logotherapy…and be as creative as we can be. I was certainly anti-authoritarian and often questioned my professors. I wrote a short story entitled A logo fiction fantasy. The next week in class, he said he wanted to see me in his office. I had no idea why. With anxiety, I went to his office after class. His wife/partner was present with him. He proceeded to conduct a clinical interview of me. After he was finished I asked him why. He said, from my writing, using words for sounds, he thought I might be “schizophrenic” and wanted to check that out. Well, I passed the “schizophrenic” test, fortunately, or my graduate career would have ended there. But I felt honored, at the time, as one of the few students who had an hour long private contact with him. Yet did not yet recognize, at the time, how authoritarian most “mental health” professionals are. Over 30+ years, I learned that lesson.

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  • Excellent exposure of NAMI/TAC’s and other organization’s deceitful manipulation of the public and “mental health” officials. Every state “mental health” system I worked for had NAMI as a partner. I complained to administrators, on a number of occasions, and was basically told to keep my mouth shut as the partnership was sanctioned by the State mental health executives. Your article needs to be seen by all State and local “mental health” officials.

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  • Hopefully, your excellent, poignant, fact based writing can find a mainstream publication so that the public is more informed. Psychiatry and clinical psychology, in the US, are economic institutions making a massive amount of money for their practitioners. Therein lies the resistance to your reasonable assessment, and the acquiescence and/or aggressive promotion of the DSM of many of the main stream to this ongoing human scourge of ruining individual lives with a diagnosis. I have attempted, for years, well nigh unsuccessfully, to argue for the delusional basis of main stream psychiatry and clinical psychology, relying on false beliefs to promote their business and apparent need to control.

    There needs to be a major revolution in the US to reject pseudoscience and return to what I learned in graduate school psychology was supposed to be, a healing profession, not an economic engine.
    Jasenn Zaejian
    http://relatedness.org

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  • You might also consider a large Scandinavian study of some years ago that found the only statistically significant variable that differentiated those with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia” from those without that dx, was poverty— Consistent with your existential crisis hypothesis. Also the fact that cultures other than white European or American cultures find recovery rates without medication, far greater and of lesser duration than US & Europe with medication. The concept of “schizophrenia” as a disease is a fiction created by big pharma, the APA’s, and governments to justify repressive and injurious treatment of individuals who are different than, or appear threatening to the mainstream, because of their differences.
    Jasenn Zaejian
    http://relatedness.org

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  • Here’s the data that supports racial bias in application of Kendra’s law:

    Contrary to what the NYS 2009 Program Evaluation Report of ‎Kendra’s law cites, a look at 10 years of statistics of racial ‎characteristics,taken directly from the Prog Eval report, clearly indicate racial bias in application of the ‎law. This will likely be the subject for constitutional challenges ‎in the Federal Courts, representing an additional, unanticipated ‎cost to the counties who choose to adopt Laura’s law or Article 9 ‎of WIC.‎

    NYC Census proportions relative to ethnicity:‎
    ‎ African-Americans = 15.9% r. White = 1::4‎
    Latino(a) = 17.6% r. White = 1::3.7‎
    Asian = 12.7 % r. White =1::5‎
    White =65.7%‎

    NYC AOT Commitments 1999-2010‎
    White: 23%‎
    African American 36%‎
    Latino(a): 38%‎
    Asian: 3%‎

    Racial ‎Characteristics Current NYC ‎Census Data Kendra NYC ‎Commitments
    Racial ‎Characteristics Current Census Kendra NYC ‎Commitments
    African Americans ‎ ‎ 15.9%‎ 36%‎
    Latino (a)‎ ‎17.6%‎ ‎38%‎
    Asian ‎ 12.7%‎ ‎3%‎
    White ‎65.7%‎ ‎23%‎

    This represents a complex racial inequality in application of Kendra commitments.

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