We don’t expect our institutions to be corrupt. We are not raised that way or educated that way. On the contrary from early in our lives we are told to respect these authority figures and experts; and it is an uncomfortable move to begin doubting. How can it be the case that the whole respectable world seems based on lies? That most wars were fought for reasons kept secret by those that arrange wars. Of course the average doctor or civil servant is also in the dark. Most psychiatrists probably think they are doing good work as they prescribe dangerous and useless drugs. The fact that 41 vaccinations by the age of two might be unwise treatment is too dangerous a thought for most doctors who wish to keep their licenses. So even when people do awaken to new facts they may find themselves trapped and unable to do anything at all but go along with the lies. Of course a person can give up on psychiatry without becoming a full scale rebel . . . but still one has to be careful to whom one reveals his or her story! And it is also the thoughts that have to be dismissed, the thoughts may even be the worst effect. I think so.
Fraud seems to be a very American thing. Unfortunately it is not a new thing but it does seem to be getting worse. Every day the media puts forth what generally amounts to misleading information if not outright lies. Politicians right to the very top make a career out of telling falsehoods about which they count on the public’s weak memory to preserve them from later embarrassment. On the one hand money can be made with drugs, lots of it. Any half awake psychiatrist can write a prescription but it takes a real person to engage with another real person. Your material catches my attention. Thanks.
I would assume naturally that rejecting one’s body would get one off to a bad start in life. What kinds of homes do these people come from? Without lots of details it is hard to know why someone would deny their biological sex? Personally I think attacking one’s body has a deeper root than what we are being told. There is a subterranean element being kept secret.
I have come across no trustworthy information suggesting that psychiatric drugs are anything but money makers for the pharmaceuticals and the psychiatrists. Given the home lives of many children and the over all conditions in which they grows up in this nation I am surprised there are not more “mentally deranged” persons. The food supply is getting worse. The environment continues to be poisoned. Medical care in the USA is often deplorable as is education. Mental patients are often people who can not tolerate the mess the nation is in. These mentally ill persons are symptoms of conditions the corporations and gov create in their pursuits of power and wealth. Since the Powers do not wish to change thelr course of action we have the mentally ill to dispose of somehow. Drugging them seems simplest and cheapest. It is a challenge for everyone to stay healthy in a bad society. We have to get the point where we can accept the fact that the USA is a bad society and getting worse. Until then we will try to solve the wrong problems.
It is all about the money the facility receives. It has nothing to do with her mental health or the likelihood of her committing suicide later on. She is clearly expendable. Just the money. Dr L may even get paid by the number of patients he can keep incarcerated in his hospital. Serafina is simply a number. The world is full of numbers. The USA regularly kills the numbers or erases them as just recently 17 civilians killed in Afghanistan by a drone. No tears for those who are simply numbers.
Once science was seen as a viable source of money and power, governments and corporations stepped in and began funding science. Over time both began to dominate that area and determine the sorts of projects they would fund. Gradually academic institutions became subservient to these demands and their proffer of riches. It is not a question of whether psychiatry has a hold on some truth but that it is viewed as a scientific endeavor that is all important. As we should know by now both gov and corporations can be very cruel in their pursuit of various goals. Giving dangerous drugs to unsuspecting people or doing enhanced interrogation is largely viewed in the same way. The gov of the USA is largely indifferent to the welfare of its citizens: nuclear waste here and there, GMO’s, herbicides, insecticides, various drugs, wars, etc. When psychiatry is criticized money is at stake–not truth or the welfare of persons. If the Elite cared about people the USA would not have killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million innocent citizens of foreign nations since WWII.
I have a rather low opinion of American universities, especially of the prestigious ones. I went to Stanford many years ago. At least the environment was beautiful. Yes, if you want to think something into existence like a nuclear power plant or some other highly technical device universities are where you must go. On the other hand if you want to feel something into existence like a decent life the universities are more like cemeteries. A healthy response to a typical university environment is probably depression, despair, rage, etc.
Going to a prestige university is presented to young inexperienced persons in high school as something like Sangri La. So if you are not overjoyed most of the time it must indicate that there is some flaw in your makeup. After all you are young and inexperienced and surrounded by brilliant other students and the almost godlike professors. You assume, fatally, that you are being told the truth when often it is just an opinion shared by powerful people. How much of all this wonderment can you take in and digest?
The mental health people who claim to help you bring forth all sorts of labels which another generation will laugh at. They might just as well chain you to a wall in a mad house. Or put you on a ship of fools. Keep in mind it is all a magic trick, a juggler’s act. To the extent that one feels special at say Yale or Harvard, to that extent when you fall you will fall further, and it will hurt more. The thing to do then is get up and learn to smile at yourself for being tricked.
ECT strikes me as a fairly barbaric treatment. I wonder if persons struck by lightening spontaneously recover from any mental afflictions? Some years ago in a journal created by Dr. Peter Breggin I read an article wherein I learned that the two leading advocates of ECT no longer supported that treatment. I can not remember their names. Another article in the same issue I believe talked about a psychiatric nurse who after the treatment forgot all her education and experience — a rather heavy price. A comparable treatment for an automobile would probably leave it totaled!
Any yet the insurance money is there for any of us if we can work up the symptoms. The great German poet Holderlin slide off the deep end in his late 20’s? and lived the rest of a rather long life on a farm being taken care of by a friend. He was quite manageable and even wrote some poems but was no longer able to care for himself on his own. Depending on when we chose in the 20th century he might have received a lobotomy, insulin shock, a cocktail of drugs, or ECT. And the result? I personally think he was happier in the early 19th century living on that farm–but I have nothing to gain from these rather primitive solutions to everyday problems. For a little more insight into psychiatry you might want to watch Side Effects on Netflix.
Psychiatry is a technical occupation. The best psychiatrist is the one that choses the “right” drug and dosage and does so quickly. He need not be particularly compassionate. The best auto mechanic may be rather a grumpy man but he does keep your vehicle running smoothly. Neither the psychiatrist nor the car mechanic need to be alturistic; both may claim they are in it for the money and that is okay as long as they have the necessary expertise. Most psychiatrists bereft of the drugs would flounder; they might give talk therapy a go but then compassion and other feely things would become essential. And they are schooled to view human beings as machines with chemical imbalances, with misguided neurons, etc. Even regular medicine has gone too far into medication as the universal panacea. And again all the tests and drugs cost money and more money; this is what the scientific age has to offer. It is hard not to reach out and take it.
If I steal a cookie and then feel guilty it would never occur to me that I need psychiatric medication! And yet for some people this connection between actions and feelings must be very obscure. The idea that a state of mind is best resolved by a drug is behind excessive alcohol use, illegal drug use and other powerful agencies like pornography. Probably regarding the human body as a vast and intricate chemical activity leads nicely to the conclusion that emotions are simply chemicals and neurons. For those who go to medical school what could be more transparent than that a chemical from without will do the job and mend the pattern. This begins metaphysically or philosophically with empiricism and ultimately with materialism–you and I are composed of matter and nothing more. All conditions are material conditions. Someone with a different metaphysics would never rest with a merely chemical solution to a mental problem. They would want to know the why, the origin of the problem, and view it in terms of consciousness. However, there is so much money to made by the material solution and much less with a more human approach. It is of the same ilk as war to solve a problem between nations rather than diplomacy.
Remember these massacres occur in gun free zones. The law abidding citizen leaves his gun at home. Or, why then are the important persons always accompanied by gun totting security personnel? If having someone present with a gun is of no use why pay money for nothing?
The Wild West according to researchers was less wild than now partly because the people were generally more well behaved but also because almost everyone was armed. Maybe we should also ban automobiles because they kill people.
” in the wake of horrifying mass killings, many in our public schools” and all of them in gun free zones or soft targets. But we do need a convenient scapegoat. The mentally ill will serve that purpose until enough Muslim with heated blood can take their places. The American public gets so easily manipulated. Kill a few people somewhere and beat the drum for one thing or another. Does it ever occur to serious people that there might be something psychopathic about America’s leadership?
It is hard even to imagine Federal Agencies taking their job seriously–like the FDA. We are constantly subjected to experimentation with GMO’s, fluoride, vaccinations containing aluminum, etc. Little surprise some people flip. We are constantly inundated with false stories by the MSM. I am not sure that the current President has on any serious occasion told the truth. And we have a number of billionaires who sport humanitarian values and also want the population down to half a billion. Who experiment on poor kids in India and put sterilization drugs in Kenyan vaccinations for women. Etc.
No, so called mental illness may be a very healthy response to a very nasty immoral society!
I almost never come across anyone who is worked about the 20 to 30 million persons killed by the USA since the end of WWII. Only about 1 out every 10 was a soldier. We are responsible for many dead Syrians but only get bothered by the idea of a temporary ban on their migration to this nation.
This strikes me as very irrational. I think guns have been a great red herring for people to hate and wish to ban instead of really important issues. The same goes for the whole LGBT issue. Is everyone simply a neophyte narcissist?
We as a nation like to believe we are wonderful folk, but that is simply not the case and never was. We are as wicked a people as have ever lived on this planet. Of course not everyone but certainly the glorious leaders and their minions.
The NYT has always been the creature of the Elite. And the Elite have always been fairly vile as a group.
There is not a very strong connection between mass shootings and any form of feasible gun control and that should be obvious. If all guns were confiscated the bad guys would still manage to get guns as there would be a thriving black market quite soon. How successful has the war on drugs been? Well, more drugs at a more affordable price than before the war! Otherwise, if several persons in San Bernardino had been well trained gun owners the massacre might never have gone very far.
Then we have to ask ourselves how real these events really are. The eye witnesses say there were three big athletic white men who did the shooting–as opposed to two rather small middle easterners. What did happen? The same sort of contradictory information has come out of most of these mass shootings. Something is wrong. According to the couples’ attorney who had spent three hours with the FBI the couple was found dead and bound in the back of the vehicle. Until or unless we begin to get trustworthy information on these events we can not talk about prevention.
Finally these all take place in GUN FREE ZONES. Apparently the perpetrators do not abide by the law.
Is there a single film made in recent times that has an actually good person as the psychiatrist? Or are they all like the one in Girl With A Dragon Tattoo? If I were a psychiatrist I would find this book an embarrassment. I would also find a better use for my medical degree — Doctors Without Borders perhaps.
Although the bad doctor actually comes across as comic, he is also a criminal. ECT is cruel and unusual treatment clearly. The drugs are basically poison. This is all quackery. But then so much in America is fake, deceptive, dishonest and criminal that these men and women pass almost unnoticed unless one has a friend or relative who has had the bad luck to fall into their clutches.
Well Hannibal Lecter was a psychiatrist. The author might have chosen the law or politics for his character but chose psychiatry! Hmmm.
As Americans we need to develop a more balanced perspective. Each week hundreds die in Iraq and often thousands in a month; and the USA can take most of the blame for these deaths. A vast number of Iraqis have died since Desert Storm. Under Saddam Husein this would not have happened. Since Obama’s famous “Assad Must Go” in 2011 over 200,000 Syrians have died and 12 million have become refugees. Again the USA must bear most of the blame. So just how much concern ought we to take for the occasional school shooting? How much drama is a shooting in Paris worth? Are Iraqis worth significantly less than Parisians or Americans? Middle Easterners, excepting Israelis, are mere statistics, numbers without meaning. And they are also the gateway to big profits for the military industrial complex which seems to dominate along with banks the American way of life. And who now is the current Enemy of Choice? Why Russia of course. After a barrage of distorted news from Ukraine, etc. Russia is the obvious choice. No wonder someone came up with the term Sheeple for the American citizen. The uninformed man and woman of no critical thought capacity. Now of course there is nothing wrong with hoping to find a way to stop school shootings, but we need to keep it in proportion. We may need to toss out the term democracy which seems to be the justification for destroying other nations like Libya. How many deaths are the so called free elections worth? Ones where a dictator our leaders like gets elected? The best way to eliminate shooting is for everyone who is able to get a concealed carry permit so that any time some one starts shooting there will always be someone present with training to stop it. Eliminate all gun free zones that do not have armed guards; no more soft targets. You go into a school with a gun to shoot it up and the teachers and principal stop you immediately. Same at concerts, restaurants and homes. The Wild West was not all that wild.
Gun violence is really a very minor concern for this nation. Radiation which will only keep increasing as other nuclear reactors melt down in the future, as nuclear waste accumulates, etc. GMO products and herbicides like Roundup will eventually have devastating effects on the health of people. It seems obvious to me that if you can keep people focused on minor issues like gun control, gender identity, offensive words and phrases and so forth, then the big issues can slide along without resistance. The media always hypes what is of lesser importance. What about Turkey and its solid support for ISIS? what about the US military pretending to fight ISIS but not really doing anything at all? So I think gun control needs to be shelved and these more important issues addressed. Even on this site. How much longer will doctors give out drugs far more dangerous than the psychedelics?
Progress is mostly a Christian idea or ideal. Somewhat muddled. While some things get better, others get worse. Essentially people look outwardly for happiness and salvation. To look in is to encounter darkness inhabited by the bad past and who knows what else. Some demonic version of oneself. Who might I actually be? And all of this has gotten tangled up with consumerism and industrial psychology to the point where people’s minds are inhabited by a multitude of confusing suggestions which each year multiply. Presently we have a global conference in Paris, site of a recent terrorist attack? where the big people are discussing the phantom of climate change. Turkey has unwisely shot down a Russian plane and Russia has brought in what they call the “Monster” which has effectively created a no fly space over Syria. And is now telling the world frankly the role Turkey has played in helping ISIS. Alas. With no doubt a nod from the USA, that is, the USA has allowed Turkey this strangely destructive role without interfering. It is not easy in this malestrom of lies to stay mentally healthy. When the world leaders are probably some of the best instances of psychopathy, sociopathy, bi-polar, and what have you. But we have the three smilers: Obama, Hilary and Pope Francis. All must be well. Agreed? Do you suppose they all had the same smile coach?
Assuming very tight gun control in the USA it would probably proceed just a successfully as the prohibition of alcohol and later on of drugs. Do we want to look forward to a thriving black market of guns? Should the US embark on another large social experiment costing a fortune to see if the result is what we would like; or should we leave well enough alone? I think gun control is a red herring like Climate Change. Meanwhile we have the popular herbicide Roundup with glyphosate, GM corn, soy, etc. nuclear power plants which are aging and in bad locations, nuclear waste turning up all over the place as in St. Louis. We have a very questionable medical world which is highly drug oriented. Oh, not to forget we may have an extinction level event in the Pacific due to Daiichi Fukushima about which MSM hardly ever makes a mention. And so on. Gradually one comes to the conclusion that neither the gov nor the corporations really have our best interests at heart or even our second or third best interests!
There are a number of academic studies–I believe one by a professor at Brown and one from the U of Chicago, as well as numberous articles available on line. You need to just look around and do some research on how gun control has worked in the UK and Austrailia. When you enter Mexico you are alerted to the prohibition of guns and ammunition, and yet Mexico has about 20, 000 murders by gun annually. The other troubling thing is that it is usually one of the first things a tyrannt does — confiscate guns. And finally death by guns has been in decline for about two decades now. You have to ask yourself why it is such a big item in a nation that has killed between 20 and 30 million people since WWII? and whose President has a kill list that he reviews every Tuesday. He really likes the drones which kill about 10 civilians for every so called terrorist.
Stricter gun laws have been shown to not work. Probably the psychology/psychiatry professions have a much greater responsibility here than the gun enterprises. The medications do not really work and cause people to feel crazy and sometimes act that way as well. How many of the sensational shootings really took place and how many were hoaxes is a subject worth researching. Better homes, better food, saner schools, good jobs, less emphasis on the oddities of human nature in the media, etc. would help greatly. Keep in mind that pharmaceuticals and corporations like Monsanto with their herbicides and GM’s are big money compared to the gun business. Given the number of persons killed by cars no one ever suggests stricter auto rules. Again money dictates what we go after. Americans are very shy of the truth.
Interestingly films often do a rather good job of telling the truth, that is, in fiction. “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” shows a psychiatrist that must touch the heart of many. In fact I am not sure I have even seen a film with what might be considered a good psychiatrist. I also think of Doris Lessing and her literary portrayals of psychiatry in England. And there are many tales of really heinous actions on the part of psychiatrists which are not fiction. Liars, thieves, mountebanks, I would say witch doctors but I suspect they are better men. No, on the whole the world would be a much better place without them and without many psychologists as well such as helped with “enhanced interrogation” some years back. Like politicians all we can mean by a good psychiatrist is an oxymoron.
It is all about control. All our institutions are now corrupt. What a marvelous way to eliminate trouble makers and to take guns from Vets! The Soviets used this method with great results. WE need a new Fourth of July. I am afraid the American people have forgotten what Freedom is. They have been so frequently reminded of their need for Safety that poor old Liberty has been reduced to sitting alone in an empty room of history. Psychiatric servitude has replaced the Still Voice and Peace of Mind. What children know adults have cast aside and live in a greater poverty than any other peoples on the planet. Life is meant to be lived joyously–but it takes some courage. Good luck people and be yourself as much as you can.
Compassion is what is needed. Without it nothing good will come. It is not something a person learns in a school. In fact university training is apt to discourage compassion by replacing it with thoughts. However, a great deal of mental health is about money and not about healing. Thus the more “education” the better the pay. Unfortunately the men and women who are in positions of power often are unfamiliar with compassion and therefore attempt to substitute something more appropriate for a machine. In this respect unfortunately science often comes to their aid.
Friedrich Holderlin, one of the great German poets, was a close friend of Hegel. He slipped into madness while still young and lived many years on a farm where he was taken care of by a kindly man. Whether Hegel ever visited him I do not know. Arthur Schopenhauer, who thought rather ill of Hegel, spent a great deal of time visiting asylums in Germany and getting to know the patients. Schopenhauer writes very lucidly and well and knew seven foreign languages but was not good at marketing himself — something Hegel was good at doing. I am not sure whether Schopenhauer ever formulated a theory of madness. He had various interesting ideas about mad persons. It would be worth someone’s time to research what he found out as he was a very brilliant philosopher and thinker and ahead of his time. He loved the Upanishads and the German mystics though he thought of himself as an atheist. His writing was much appreciated by persons such as Tolstoy, Proust, etc. And of course Nietzsche.
Of our several senses the most externalizing is sight. A very fine presentation of blindness is found in And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran. Also Lawrence Durrell presents some interesting aspects of blindness in his Alexandrian Quartet–one of his characters (Pursewarden’s blind sister, Liza) is a blind woman. Myself I tend to associate blindness with inner-ness. Yogis tend to meditate with their eyes closed. In sleep we find Peace. The eyes are very connected with the ego, the I-thought and the world. Hearing is more personal. People tell us a great deal with their voices. And as we know appearances (sight) can be deceiving. Consider Tiresias the blind prophet of Apollo. I think blindness has always been associated with special knowledge and wisdom. But not for example deafness. I believe sight may be the first sense to go at the time of death.
Excellent work. The trouble with truth in medicine is that the money stream dries up. Unfortunately, as I am sure you know, the whole world now functions around finance. Still it is a shock to see men and women who are respected as doctors deliberately making their patients sick in order to have a good income. A bad dream for me; a nightmare for those on these drugs and I suppose for those who have quit but have a history of their usage. The latter group worry me as this is very bad news indeed. On the other hand good nutrition and meditation may undo the negative consequences.
Unfortunately as we are finding out almost daily, the criminal element has taken over most of our institutions. This is such a shocking situation that it simply can not be handled by most persons and so these nefarious people are safe to continue their destruction of societies!
If instead of drug technicians we had genuine doctors, but then beggars would be driving Mercedes. If the FDA were really what it claims to be, these pharmaceuticals would all be Schedule 1: “Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.”
Imagine if we had medical schools where persons could learn about human bodies and what to do if they became ill . . . but then we would be imagining a world without corporations. The world is currently set up to ensure the health and well being of corporations. Just look how big and strong they are.
You would have been far better off talking LSD a few times. Or eating magic mushrooms.
At one time explanations of human nature in the West had to be filtered through religion. Even going back to the Greeks and Romans. However, in the art and literature of the various times the artist or writer could transcend these constraints and restrictions. Something like that still holds. A very fine novel by Max Sebold, Austerlizt, portrays a man without a childhood–or one he can not remember. When he begins to find that childhood through a childhood woman friend in Prague he also begins to have all sorts of symptoms from insomnia to panic attacks. He walks all night through the streets of London. Later after a fall during the time of paralyzing panic attacks he spends a year in a hospital. But the novel is beautifully written without relying on psychological jargon. And reader may see the subtle interconnections of times and places.
So I do not see any real advance in the study of human psychology. New jargon, a new paradigm (science?) but many entangling theories. What was once common sense now translated into almost unintelligible gibberish. Certainly very bad experiences will lodge in the memory bank and begin to function like magnets drawing similar experience whether the memories are accessible or not. It makes very good sense that bad experiences will hinder future behavior. A terrible childhood will be like fetters. War experiences can feel like a noose around the neck. Rape. Assault, a car accident, divorce . . . these change a person. Our pasts count for much in our lives. Part of a causal chain. In a very extroverted society like America people are not encouraged to know themselves much. Science sneers at anything that can not be quantified. It equates mind with brain. That is an unprovable assumption. Many scientists state hypotheses as matters of fact. There is a certain arrogance in that area. Intuition once represented by women is still treated much like women are treated as not quite equal and inclined to superstition.
The best novelists and poets are still the best sources of wisdom about people. As music can be and paintings. The real truth is everywhere spread for the observing and patient eye and ear. Without the philosopher Schopenhauer (who knew many languages and loved and valued the classics) there would have been no Freud. That might actually have been better? In any case Schopenhauer writes beautifully and was appreciated by Tolstoy, Conrad, Proust, Beckett, Hardy . . . and of course Wagner and Nietzsche.
Artists tend to be introverts and solitary. Not very American. Imagine spending a day with Shakespeare talking about people. A day with Thomas Mann. A day with Rilke. Or would you rather spend it with Freud? Or Jung? What about Dante? Or Rumi. My own preference would be the great writers. Poetry conveys a deeper level of life. Those moments of glimpse into a deeper truth. Eternities of the moment.
Thich Nhat Hanh spent a week with Vietnam vets. They sat silently with the last one for three hours before he could tell his story. And then over time with a bit of advise from Thich Nhat Hanh he completely recovered. Oh, and then there is the doctor who wrote Achilles In Vietnam and Odysseus In America. He was something of a Greek scholar as well and found a great deal of help in Homer. Best of luck!
Thanks for the additional information. Still pretty strong remark to appear in a national newspaper.
Gaza and Hamas only make sense if one remembers that in 1916 Britain finding itself in a tight spot purchased help from the Jews by promising what they could not honourably do–namely, give away someone else’s property. After the war the British wiggled out of this. But after WWII Truman also in a tight spot recognized Israel despite opposition from just about everyone including the new UN. Thus Israel was the thief’s land. Hamas’ rockets are a reminder. The thief obviously is unwilling to give up his booty. And must put a good face on self defence. No amount of questionable history or mythology can make the land belong to a people’s most of whom did not even exist ancestrally until the 8th or 9th century. But even if they were descendants of the original inhabitants almost two thousand years has eroded their claims which probably the Palestinians really have anyway as descendants of the original peoples. Hence, make sure the title is clear before purchasing. The solution is for Israel to shrink back to land it has a clear title to. That would make Israel about the size of Lichtenstein or Monaco. That would be in line with International Law; and I am sure there would be no more Hamas rockets to deal with!
Clearly all this violence and dishonesty wears on the mind and is factor in people’s mental health. But is rarely addressed in therapy as being too irrelevant or worldly?
When Milton Erickson was doing his internship as a young psychiatrist he worked in a mental hospital back East somewhere. There was one patient who never spoke to anyone but would simply sit and say odd things (I believe that is what he did.). So Milton sat each day with him and after quite a time he began doing the same things the patient was doing; at that point the patient asked him what he thought he was doing. He acted like a normal person. Milton was an extremely successful psychiatrist who did lots of crazy things one can not do anymore like set ups in restaurants and having one man live in his backyard for a while. Now days even MD’s are very constrained. So if Milton were the model the problem would be solved. But most psychiatrists lack the self knowledge of Dr Erickson and probably avoid getting it. So the real problem is human nature. Too few humans stay alive and vibrant after childhood. Too few take the good type of risk. Too many lack integrity. Like the American politician it is just easier to ride and ask polite questions and go along with the crowd. And tragically? we can do absolutely nothing about it. We are stuck with the human condition. I know this is sour news for reformers but there is a place for them so that things do not get even worse. But no utopias on this planet. It would nice if only men and women who had awakened minds could qualify for the medical profession. The same for all the professions; but then what would those souls do who need the experiences that come with corruption? Tossed by the way side?
In the meantime if I were a psychiatrist I would follow the advise of Peter Breggin regarding drugs. I would not have the many years to repeat his work. I would try various things especially those that worked for the very best therapists. And I would keep an eye cocked on world events. When Israel talks about “permissible genocide” which they are applying to Gaza I would consider how people will be effected by this and their country even supplying the means! We can not escape the world’s evil doings even in our own hidden rooms under the bed. It pervades all human space. So this would be an important part of my therapy. I would probably recommend certain novels and films. Actually as a therapist I have done this. And then finally I would stay detached and count myself for little in the whole process going on with each person. Watching and listening and wondering.
Regarding the journeys into madness: quite a number of persons have spoken about the brain as a filter. William James and Aldous Huxley for example. All radios are designed so that only one channel at a time comes through; were this not the case one might get two or three stations at once and a cacophony of voices and music. So one might conclude that these powerful drugs temporarily inhibit the filters–there are no doubt many. Once the filters are gone the normal world experience is penetrated by stuff normally automatically filtered out. Obviously the person like yourself is aghast at all this craziness coming in. And yet if you had mind reading ability which some people claim they have you would find all sorts of strange thoughts and ideas floating around in a city. Sort of like a private NSA going. And visual phenomenon as well. Each sense has a set of filters; and then the mind itself has them so that you do not find yourself reading other people’s thoughts. There may be times when you had wished you could but unless it can be turned off it can be a nightmare.
So you can call it schizophrenia or split mind or whatever you will but the labels are rather useless and even sound frightening. I think it is best to simply see that the drugs clogged the filters up; and you began getting what anyone would get if their filter system was failing. This is the paragon case of the cure worse than the ailment. It is irresponsible medicine for money. The symptoms are similar to what happens with poison and severe head injury . . . and keep in mind the food supply in America is doing something slowly and similar. And the water and the air. When the limits are reached the body goes into emergency behaviour, and the mind has its share of ordeal.
So without this drug experience you would never have discovered other aspects of the world. In this case frightening but then mystics tell of beautiful and ecstatic experiences which are likewise outside the filter though in their case the filters are removed as part of natural development and not as part of a drug experience.
You have provided very valuable material.
Yoga, the whole practice of postures, breathing and diet, as well as ethical considerations, will cure anything. Given the brains plasticity even changes in it and the nervous system can be healed. Personally I find meditation of inestimable value. Find a really good teacher though. Avoid cult type guru teachers. I know Alice Christensen is excellent. http://www.americanyogaassociation.org/contents.html
What we call corruption is flourishing for sure. Not a profession or business that has not been given an opportunity to host this condition, and all the important ones have signed on. No place for the innocent to run to and hide. You have penned an excellent article that I will be sending on to several.
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
David Hume
Hence, all warnings ought to be removed from all currently regarded dangerous substances as well as other sorts of dangers . . . they just induce the behavior one wished to prevent. I wonder how many people put flammable substances near a hot stove after reading they are highly flammable? The temptation must be greatly increased by the challenge. Or people that overdose on over the counter drugs like Advil? Etc. The discovery here will revolutionize labeling.
Or, ought we to conclude something else? Perhaps we ought to.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts” – Richard Feynman
Many years ago as a student at Stanford University I was very dissatisfied with my study of philosophy and psychology. It was not until I had spent seven years seriously studying Yoga that I got what I wanted. Philosophy at the time was ordinary language philosophy and psychology was simply depressing! Now I am sure Zen Buddhism would have done what Yoga did for me only as it turned out I found a Yoga teacher first.
The fact that people who take up one of these discipline tend to be both healthy and content or at least feel positive about their lives has not as far as I can see made much of an impression on academic psychology or medicine–just a little. Whereas fifty years ago meditation was consider the occupation of wackos, now it is respected. And Hatha Yoga has become very popular. But it has hardly been integrated into the world of mental health and illness.
Even diet is still somewhat obscure. National habits change slowly. In the meantime have a diet soda and some crackers with plenty of high fructose sugar. Given today’s homes and schools only very clever children stand a chance.
What is it about drugs that they have such an allure? Remember Tristan and Isolde and the love potion? Elixirs. If people are going to take something why not the psychedelics which are virtually non-toxic and do produce good results.
Well, as a society we are locked in a prison that only a few dare even try and escape. It is Plato’s cave. Many love their chains. And fear the light. Psychiatrists for the most part go about and oil the chains so they do not squeak so much.
Recently the well known journalist Amber Lyon in an interview told how taking psilosybin mushrooms had rescued her from trauma. She says they saved her life in fact. This feature of the drug is not new. But apparently the VA is not authorized to use it? Why pursue methods of a dubious nature if there is something likely to work? Psilosybin is a virtually non toxic substance though listed as a Schedule I drug. Government is not particularly bright? And there are several other substances that also might be effective. Surely giving these is preferable to suicide which is a common outcome for vets.
“In my view, there is a role for medical expertise in helping people with mental health problems, but that does not mean we have to call those problems illnesses. ” It is not clear what that role might be. I suppose determining that the condition is not due to a tumor or a serious concussion or the like. But after that medical training would seem to be a disqualification as the medical training would continue to see illnesses. Psychiatry is awkwardly positioned to do much more than extend medicine, hence illness and drugs. How long does the average persons spend with a psychiatrist before he or she is given a prescription? If I invite a carpenter to my house for a meal surely he will begin automatically to see things that might need repair or remolding. Giving an auto mechanic a ride in my car would lead to similar noticings. And so on.
So, we might need a few psychiatrists to check on brain disease or damage but that is done by neurologists. So really psychiatry is without a real job. I suppose he or she could simply be a referral point. You go to a neurologist and you go to a psycho-therapist. The pay would be bad though. And the pharmaceuticals would be disappointed.
So it is really mostly a money making scheme which it is now time to end.
Also since psychiatric medications are such a problem I have trouble coming up with a situation where they might be used. I tend to side with Dr. Peter Breggin and say never.
Why take such a big risk? After all some people have recovered from severe depression after a life threatening event. But we had best no recommend that to anyone. We can not say: Go now and jump off a cliff; if it does not kill you it may bring about a recovery.
P.S. I want to mention that your article is very well written and even reminds me of Bolano’s novel The Savage Detectives which is about a group of teenage poets living in Mexico City. Your English teacher has probably read this amazing novel.
Another good resource is Peter Breggin, MD and his book Your Drug May Be Your Problem. He also has a web site and created a fine journal called “Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry” wherein you will find many allies. Probably a local university will have this journal in a data bank–maybe even a large public library. You may even find like minded professionals in Mexico City who will help you. Yours is a noble cause–of that there can be no doubt. But money or pesos have embodied themselves in all kinds of peoples: bankers of course and the usual suspects like psychiatrists and professors and teachers and all those who love the status quo. What is scary is these people even have children that get drugged as well. Where I live they put fluoride in the drinking water though it is a neuro-toxin. I have tried to get some attention on this in my town which a few years ago was designated the best place in America to raise children! Ha. And I am sure the drugs flow freely here as well. It is always puzzling how people immediately think you are a crank or a crazy person to imagine the good gov would poison people or start a pointless war based on lies. Too fantastic they say and walk quickly away!! Ha. Best of luck and keep us informed here of your trial, tribulations and successes.
“Demasiada cordura puede ser la peor de las locuras, ver la vida como es y no como debería de ser.
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Your project strikes me as very creative. I have known only one person who seems to benefit from psychiatric drugs . . . but I fear for her brain and nervous system. Already her hands shake from the lithium. At least her psychiatrist wants to get her off the drugs as soon as feasible. Hopefully some of these doctors are simply misled and like Don Quixote are seeing mental illness everywhere even usually when it is not there at all. And without a Sancho Panza for assistance they may destroy themselves in the process. How painful to believe you are helping people when actually you are doing opposite.
But money, money and more money. In 1960 when I was 18 I lived for a while in Mexico City. It was really a beautiful place then and not particularly dangerous. The food was wonderful and the warm autumn sun. But now having read some of Roberto Bolano’s novels I can see how much things have changed.
Your group is in the position of Sancho Panza as outlined here: ““Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” Asked Sancho Panza.
“The ones you can see over there,” answered his master, “with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.”
“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
“Obviously,” replied Don Quijote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
“There are so many things in human living that we should regard not as traumatic learning but as incomplete learning, unfinished learning.” –Milton Erickson
So, what remains to be learned? I suppose one resort would be to learn martial arts. Maybe someone working in a setting like yours needs to be prepared for someone suddenly experiencing a trauma thaw out that transports them to another time and place. I think this would be a wise course of action. It is also likely that some education and training would give you the skill to recognize someone with a history of violent behavior. Some people have this ability naturally. I can usually sense when someone is like a strung bow or a cocked pistol. So there now are two positive and constructive things you might do.
Maybe Dr. Torrey had a large mortgage to pay or children to educate and found himself without any clients of course since he had essentially dumped his profession. I doubt the change was due to illumination. He starts out rather idealistically and then runs out of cash. And runs to where the money is. It is hard to figure the cause any other way. Usually people go from a bias to a more enlightened point of view.
Bad memories will manifest as what people call mental illness. Nothing like a congested subconscious to bring on a range of irrational behavior and strange thoughts and emotions. Call it what you will the solution is to deal with the dragons. And it may help to have an experienced dragon hunter and guide along. How many people though would call up someone who listed himself as a dragon hunter or guide? Still it might be a more honest presentation. What do you think?
“I have a lot of sources in regards to as to what’s going on with the president and the administration and so on, and every one of my sources said it was a false flag”–Paul Preston
Of course this sounds like conspiracy theory, doesn’t it? And no one likes to be labelled a conspiracy theorist, but not infrequently the truth is unavailable in MSM.
A dab more: “Sofia Smallstorm, who produced and directed the documentary, “Unraveling Sandy Hook”, which many regard as the best video study of the Sandy Hook event, recently interviewed a Los Angeles school expert, Paul Preston, about Sandy Hook and his knowledge of what had transpired.
Governor Malloy had held a press conference that day, explaining that he and the Lt. Governor had been “spoken to” that something like this might happen, which raised the question, what “something like this” did he mean? Had he been told a school shooting massacre would take place? or a drill that would be presented as a real event, which appears to be what took place?
Remarkably, we now have confirmation from an unexpected source. Paul Preston had obtained information from officials in the U.S. Department of Education of the Barack Obama administration, who confirmed to him on the basis of their own personal knowledge that:
(1) it had been a drill;
(2) no children had been killed; and,
(3) it had been done to promote an anti-gun agenda.
Given his background of 41 years in the California public school system (from custodian to district superintendent) and having served as a teacher, coach, vice-principal and principal before retiring in 2012 as the superintendent of two charter schools, I thought what he had to say about Sandy Hook deserved widespread dissemination.”
Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? Hope you read this and make your own decision.
There are few persons in the world who no longer look outside themselves for fulfillment. Most people want something from someone else. Your first psychiatrist wanted you to have serious mental illness though he probably could not have adequately defined what that was or even if it existed. It was not as though he had diagnosed you with TB or anemia. No, he was working within an imaginary realm where mental illnesses existed and needed no defining other than his pronouncements. And yet this person had attended medical school and was obviously not of low intelligence. He had done an internship. He ought to have been responsible. He could have said, You seem to be unhappy. What is your life like? Please tell me. Maybe I can help you find some happiness and joy in your life. I will try my best.
But rather, he said, You have a serious mental illness. Don’t you think that strange coming form a well educated and intelligent man/woman? I do. I think this was not just arrogance. He was a part of a system and a society of many such persons who gave and were expected to give diagnoses and get paid handsomely. So in a way he was not well educated and not using his intelligence. He was behaving almost like a robot. How did he get that way? What happened to him when he was in the 9th grade and later on? It is not easy to become a doctor. Lots of work. And not a lot of fun. Why would someone go through that to end up making this frightening pronouncements to some one too young and sensitive to grasp the significance of what he said. It was in some respects like a sexual assault though one authorized by society. Honored even.
14 years of age is very young to be confronted by a subtle form of intellectual dishonesty which had become habitual with this psychiatrist. He or she had learned it from professors here and there and in medical school. Perhaps also at home from a parent. Once lying becomes a practice it goes on without one even knowing it.
In essence you were lied to at 14 by someone who ought not to have been telling lies but was. Out of fear perhaps. He or she had a family. Bills, a mortgage, etc.
A lie told by an authority has a lot of power in it. No wonder lies have always been considered dangerous and evil. Look what they can do to others. Well, I imagine your parents and insurance companies ended up paying a lot of money to that profession and the pharmacies. And you were lucky to have escaped their clutches.
But on the whole this is what one should expect in a nation like America where money is king and a god to boot. And finding a new and better king to take its place may be the hardest task a nation ever had.
There were no problems in the schools I went to for primary and secondary levels of education. Most of the students were healthy; and no one on drugs. Virtually no bullying or after school fighting of any severity. There were 60 students in my high school graduating class. I was a guy. None of the girls got pregnant. There may have been a few drinking problems among the older students–but not many. I found school fun and enjoyable. Also sports. University was not nearly so good a place to learn. I went to Stanford.
Of course this was rural America between 1947 and 1960. Juvenile delinquents were a city problem. But what has changed in America since that time. Well, hundreds of military adventures. Almost all were done to serve the military industrial complex. None were perpetrated for national defense. A president was assassinated followed by a white wash investigation. Etc. Many men with severe consequences as a result came home and begot children. For a starter that seems pretty good. Harsh home environments especially in suburbs and cities. The rural areas depopulated. Consumerism took over.
No school can compensate for all of this. As Dante mentions: No man can be a good citizen in a bad society. Probably no one can be mentally and physically healthy leading a conventional life in a bad society either!
If teachers were well trained and armed that would be the end of school shootings. The same goes for many other areas. The wild west was less wild than Hollywood films would lead one to believe because carrying a gun had a very decided effect on one’s behavior. I think we know now that schools push psychiatric drugs. And who knows what the person on that drug will do. Again how trust worthy are the news stories about the mass shootings?
A very straight forward and honest curriculum for schools determined locally would be best. The Federal Government rarely produces outstanding results. Children know when they are lied to but are usually disciplined out of saying so. If teachers lie as they do they lose the respect of the children. The same for all educators. But lying is the American Way.
We have to rebuild the nations after it collapses. It will take several generations. But first the country must hit the bottom of the barrel. I do not know when that will occur.
When truth once again is highly regarded we will have a new dawn. When kids are taught about freedom as opposed to various sexual positions in primary school that will be a good sign. Social engineering by idiots produces crazy societies. People though need to wake up to the world they find themselves in and do some reflecting. It is good for their health even.
While I agree with Dr. Breggin that psych meds should never be given to anyone, yet I can see how that might work in spite of their effects. Here is how. Someone can be so locked into a state of mind that anything that changes that can give hope. The illusion that this drug will help also has a placebo possibility. Change alone can inspire an improved mood. But the risks are terrible.
Almost every film in which a psychiatrist appears he is presented as an evil doer! And not by some accident or misperception on the part of the script writer or novelist. For example, the Millennium Trilogy–Girl With Dragon Tattoo. What sort of person typically becomes a psychiatrist? Similarly one might ask about attorneys. Professions offer a path to power over people. They can easily become corrupted as has our legal system. And of course the medical system. In fact in America corruption has become all the rage. America is now a corrupt society. Starting with that fact which is painful but the case, we have a big job ahead of us in order for America to even survive. We are like a house that termites have taken control of and are in great danger of collapsing. Lies will not work anymore. Like the VA hospitals the truth starts spilling out into the public. Time to clean up America and to leave to other nations their own destines. We can start in our own homes in our own lives.
You might notice that it is the English speaking nations (except Canada) where this inequality is greatest. Germany which is the richest nation in Europe is almost like Japan in terms of mental illness. A different ethos. Nations with a higher Catholic populations are less likely to revile the poor.
But in America money is king. People have an exaggerated idea of what money can do.
And they fear the reproaches they will receive if they get low on money. No sympathy for those out of work. Calvinism is a big factor. Are you of the Elect?
Money creates a false sense of independence and of detachment. What people really want can never be gotten through money which is self assurance and genuine security; but those valuable conditions are a matter of character and experience.
This approach almost seems like a comedy routine. How much money did it cost to make this all but unintelligible discovery? “psychosis susceptibility (and resilience) involves the independent and synergistic confluence of (temporally-sensitive) biological and environmental factors across development” = hence, try to get born into a happy family in the extended sense. A smart person could conclude this without the need to present it in such intimidating terms. This is more wasted research to conclude what has always been known by the wise. The materialistic approach is itself part of what is driving society into a kind of collective madness. Harvard gets large donations to perpetuate things which are harmful to people. And not alone in medicine and psychology. Law, political science, philosophy, etc. At some point one might awaken to the travesty of modern American education.
I know quite a few mental health professionals . . . a few well. I do not think the training they get in a university is particularly good. I am not sure a person can be trained for this profession intellectually. Sure a few pointers of a practical nature. But on the whole I sense that the training becomes a barrier to deep listening. How many think drugs are good idea? A bit of research would show they were not. However, in most circles a person needs to appear to believe that sometimes . . . occasionally . . . some persons. And then the unnatural 50 minute hour, plus a bunch of state rules . . . the sterile offices. The labels. The argot. No, it seems very impersonal and almost designed to create a mental illness whatever that is. Well, we know what an infected wound is. Do we have anything thing comparable for the mind? Should life be easy and comfortable? Religion as superstituti0n replaced by mental health the new superstition? Prayer by drugs. God by scientific knowledge? Etc. The whole approach is wrong yet unlikely to be replaced.
Dr. Stephen Olson should work for the VA hospitals where they do a more thorough job of covering things up. Personally I think we are seeing the post-modern attitude towards humans which is that they are organic machines of no appreciable value–in most cases. This is all slightly psychopathic. On the other hand I believe these types have always been around. The sluggishness with which this sort of behavior is investigated is also remarkable unless one is in one of these vast entities. Of course the University of Minnesota does not wish to scare off any rich source of income like the corporations.
You know back in the ’60’s it only took rumors to get the psychedelics banned; and even research was prohibited. And yet it has been determined they are barely toxic. Safer than an Advil. There was no money to be made with these drugs. Same goes for most of the illegal drugs. But illegal they do make money and lots of it. Banks have been saved with drug money!
Thus we have legal crime which you are pointing out; and illegal crime. Both pay. Money is king in the West. A psychiatrist giving a patient LSD would be arrested, tried and sent to jail. Justice. A doctor in effect murdering a mentally ill person goes on to the next experimental subject. Don’t rock the boat. Ethics are a nuisance.
Yes, we have all these investigative agencies but they are on a leash. Looking into this stuff one can become jaded.
This doctor should lose his license and then go on to jail. But he probably won’t. How much money does he bring in for the University? There are always persons in the shadows that know the DA’s . . . it is a case of insufficient evidence. Lack of proof. Surely he is good sincere doctor. And like the head of the VA working hard . . . Well, those are the stories. The tales. The good lies.
Did you ever consider Yoga? I went through about five very very difficult years. Certainly suicide was my companion often though I never quite gave it a try. Finally I learned to meditate. I dedicated myself to the practice. During this dark time I had two distinct breaks or psychotic episodes though I was able to keep them to myself mostly. I was never hospitalized nor did I see a psychiatrist or psychotherapist after the first initial phase of about six or so months. I could see they could not help me. And the psychotic episodes came towards the end of that five years. Then in two years time I was fortunately able to go through all the fear. I would sit for long periods of time watching this darkness but with increasing concentration. And then one day it came to an end. Like a prison term. Or an illness. Since then which has been over forty years I have had no serious threat of depression . . . I found that the dark emotions were simply energy or fuel for some project or other. They were not me at all. No more so than a slum I might drive through. Or an area ravaged by fire or earthquake. Of course Yoga or Buddhism is not for everyone. But it does help to have some sort of transcendental assistance. Your story is quite impressive. And powerful. I have a friend who has been saved by lithium. A woman doctor from Russia. But her hands shake. I would like to find something better for her–but it is risky as she goes into manic episodes easily. We live in a very primitive society. And getting more so. Native Americans would have had a better solution through a medicine man. We are ignorant of the most important realities. Good luck.
I have gotten the impression from very reliable sources that Adam Lanza never existed; that the school where the massacre took place was no longer used due to asbestos, etc. and had been converted to a store place for unused school furniture, etc. In other words Sandy Hook was a hoax or a trial run that was taken as real to the public. It looks like Dr. Fox may be paying for his sins by helping out. The evidence for this is really overwhelming.
“Jeffrey Lieberman, president of the American Psychiatric Association: “We need a public-health initiative for mental health care that moves out of clinical settings into the community, whether it’s in primary care, education, the workplace, or faith-based organizations.”
Meaning: tons of new propaganda about the need for psychiatric treatment; the building of community psychiatric centers all across the country; pressure to submit to treatment applied in ordinary doctors’ offices, in schools, in private companies, in churches.”
Short but excellent treatment of a diabolical bit of legislation. $$ for the pharmaceuticals though.
Two German films set in East Germany prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union give one a preview of life in America given the nation’s current drift. The Lives Of Others and Barbara. The latter is the story of a doctor send to a country side hospital as punishment. Both seem to resonate with this nation’s current oligarchic direction. Psychiatry is being seen as a useful tool for dealing with dissonant types. Mandatory treatment will be most important. I believe after 9/11 that George W. hired the former top head of the Stasi to help out in the USA. Have not heard much about him since.
Non-Conformity & Creativity Now Listed As A Mental Illness By Psychiatrists
“The manual is used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illnesses, and it seems that with each new issue a new, made up mental illness is added to the list. This isn’t something new, in the Soviet Union, a systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place and was based on the interpretation of political dissent as a psychiatric problem. Mental illness has been used for political repression, those who were/are non-conformant and do/did not accept the beliefs of authority figures (like government agencies) face labels that do not represent them at all, and have no scientific backing what so ever. (1)
“On the first glance, political abuse of psychiatry appears to represent a straightforward and uncomplicated story: the deployment of medicine as an instrument of repression. Psychiatric incarceration of mentally healthy people is uniformly understood to be a particularly pernicious form of repression, because it uses the powerful modalities of medicine as tools of punishment, and it compounds a deep affront to human rights with deception and fraud. Doctors who allow themselves to be used in this way betray the trust of society and breach their most basic ethical obligations as professionals.”
It would appear that all of us here at Mad In America are suffering from UDD: “Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness? According to the latest addition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it looks that way. The manual identifies a mental illness labelled as “oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD. It’s defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior.” (0) It’s also included in the category of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).”
Is this the serious psychiatric world’s humor? A sick joke in the professional sense of sick? I suggest a category for the psychiatrists who believe this stuff. Something that involves delusion. Compulsive delusional diagnosing disorder. CDDD.
There are always an abundance of cruel and savage people willing to play these immoral games for the oligarchs. Behind all this there is always money and more money. Things never change. Technology makes the world look deceptively different but at its root it is the ever same place.
Yes, psychiatry is one piece of a diabolic puzzle. But there are many more. Presently the USA and EU are involved in the destruction of Ukraine. Just I might add as they were in the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria . . . the USA has a long history now of destroying nations and calling it bringing democracy. It would like to bring its democracy to Venezuela as well.
And then there is the world of nuclear power, of GMO’s, of herbicides like Roundup . . . It would seem that the list in endless.
This nation and obviously a number of others have fallen under the influence of a powerful wizard or something of that sort. They have become subhuman states that treat their citizens like animals in a lab experiment. You are lucky to have escaped.
Because it happened so slowly and almost naturally it seems most people do not realize what has occurred in this nation. And of course it was always a good distance from being perfect. But now it seems to be accelerating towards a very dark conclusion. What form that will take I do not know. But threatening Russia is a very bad omen. The USA is no longer the powerful nation it once was. Economically it is actually quite weak. I read just today that maternals deaths are so high here that the USA has fallen to number 60 among the nations. Marriage and family have a bad reputation, and there is little in the way of future for young people. This definitely means something but just what remains still half in darkness. I hope your efforts to dethrone psychiatry will succeed. I hope other similar efforts in other areas will also succeed. Otherwise, the future is extremely grim.
“Stalinist-style show-trial: Former top shrink for FBI to be involuntarily committed”
“In a shocking development, Alen J. Salerian, M.D., the former top psychiatrist for the FBI, is about to be involuntarily committed to a prison psychiatric facility for indefinite detention.”
I had two clients that went through this. A real nightmare. You can forget civil rights if the gov is after you. Above the law. Haven’t read the Constitution for years.
“Now we don’t protest in the streets against people being tortured and abused by psychiatry.”
I suppose we should refer to it as “enhanced therapy”– to be PC. As the study done by Princeton and Northwestern Universities pointed out the USA is an oligarchy, not a democracy. So the explanation behind all these things must be a financial or power explanation. Either the oligarchs are making money or they are not. In what you are writing about, they are. Or gaining power.
What this means is that Our opinion counts for very little. Theirs is crucial. I am not sure what we can do in our current situation with our current status as chattel. The courts are not our friends. We probably are inching towards some kind of revolution or revolt.
Psychiatry is a profession without a field in which to operate. It is a phantom profession. It is based on the assumption that if I have a condition which someone decides at some point in history is schizophrenia, then the obvious treatment will be gotten from a doctor, an MD, who has specialized in a fantastic area called psychiatry. With a nice glossary of technical and atrocious sounding terms some of which will be applied to me plus a certain studious, professional, scrutinizing look this man or woman will make certain unintelligible pronouncements which are really gibberish; and I might recover after some time or not. The addition of concoctions less likely to help than to harm will be administered and perhaps my blood will be examined at a later date to see if the dose is toxic. All this is expensive as well. The end product for the psychiatrist for this imaginary activity is a nice house, perhaps an expensive European car, and a fairly high status among the ignorant who are legion.
Whether he succeeds in driving out my devils will not matter as the way this racket is arranged he has succeeded even if he fails. And he fails and fails and fails. In a sense we should pity this man who does so much harm with his strange profession. He is really a failed wizard. He never attended wizard school. Poor deluded man or woman.
Good for you! Someone referred to these people as the city shadows. What the “normal” and “well behaved” people keep repressed pops up in these who must be hidden away on a low budget. As some one recently put it we are living now in post-legal American where if your social rank is high enough crime no longer exists. Bankers, high public officials, the very wealthy . . . But those in lower ranks must be the whipping boys. Punish them severely so that the amount of punishment will cover their betters. While Obama eats half his $300 sushi these must be put on half rations to make for justice. Temperance.
What these primitive types who legislate as well as the even more primitive types behind the scenes pulling the financial strings fail to realize is that this behavior is more than expensive. There is a very subtle accounting system that measures these things and the penalties for fraud are very high. If only they knew before they are given the task of undoing the harm they have brought about.
Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.
Anyone who read the Millennium Trilogy or watched the Swedish films knows that even in a rather more enlightened state like Sweden psychiatrists have way too much power. In fact while we ridiculed and criticized how psychiatry was used in the Soviet Union the same sort of thing was occurring and continues to occur in the USA and most places in the EU.
In Colorado the judiciary has a little trick it can use on prisoners awaiting trial who complain about their attorneys. They can have them examined by someone resembling a second rate vet who will pronounce them incompetent to stand trial; they then will be sent to the State Mental Hospital (for the criminally insane, etc.) in Pueblo where they will be drugged as a matter of course and kept confined until they become compliant to stand trial. A judge there will always give the doctor permission to drug against their will and never listens to the defendant. The machine rolls on.
As Princeton and Northwestern Universities informed us recently the USA is an oligarcy, not a democracy or some other benign form of government. So the question is which oligarchs see a profit in this legislation? That is the only relevant question. All the proof in the world will be nothing unless it shows clearly how the profit will not be forth coming. Or the power.
Of course it is barbaric or worse as the barbarians were not generally psychopaths or under their influence. What the term is I do not know. America has become increasingly primitive and violent. The Fed gov is so arrogant it is almost impossible to deal with it without having a gun shoved in one’s face. We are not far from a full scale tyranny which will be arranged for our safety. The world is too dangerous for freedom. Sorry.
Body-Mind Restoration: ‘Too Good To Be True’ for Addiction and Disease?
Excellent and valuable article. So the USA is a mess to put it mildly. The people of power and money have no interest in the nation being a decent place. Who will win? The good guys or the bad guys? Currently it looks like the bad guys have the edge. But a new balance is building. Some kind of revolution is inevitable. A civil war would imply two or more areas of opposition. I do not see that. I see the People and the Other People (corporations, oligarchs). So a revolution is the more likely. The oligarchs are greatly outnumbered. They can not count on the mercenaries for protection beyond a certain point. Nor could King George. I do not like the idea of a revolution–but is there a viable alternative?
Besides the preposition in as in Mad In America we have several other revealing ones. For example, mad with America; mad throughout America; mad with America. I see America’s political and social structure as quite ideal to drive people mad. The nation has not changed all that much since it accepted slavery as the status quo; since it accepted the saying: the only good Indian is a dead one. And of course other instances of savagery and bigotry. Presently “we” have the drones regularly killing people we do not know in Yemen. Suspected bad guys. children, old people, etc. Who among us is taking responsibility for those deaths? How does it feel to be an American? Glad they are killing people almost at random? Well, it is a step down from the hundreds of thousands in Iraq–whew! and the thousands in Afghanistan. All to make life better for the oligarchs!
So now let’s turn to mental health. Who is crazy today? Who took their pill this morning? Don’t forget. John McCain wants us to send weapons to Ukraine. Get a civil war going there. Maybe in the USA later. Won’t need to ship weapons to the USA fortunately. Save shipping costs. Could we pull off a preemptive strike on Russia? You know they are contemplating that back in D. C..
The truly crazy ones are convinced they are sane. The rest are just terrified. Someone has to play mentally ill so the nation can keep grinding the earth down into the abyss. Now we even have the schools really getting into it. Just pick out some students and tell the parents they are in need of a psychiatrist. One looked like he was using his finger like the barrel of a gun. My God, a potential terrorist in the 3rd grade!!!!
But the REAL will prevail. Soon.
Once we accept the fact that drugs are not a solution then we can put full energy into something that is. America presently as a society is a bad one. That is a fact. It’s depressing. If a pregnant woman is depressed that is a communal problem. Does she have friends? A husband? Etc. Prescribing a drug is farcical. A bad joke. No solution is preferable to a dangerous one.
They say she seemed to get better. We have no alternative. They saved my life. Etc. People also promote the drug. Henry gets out of bed now and does things. Maybe staying in bed was a better solution. I doubt he would spend the next fifty years there. No one can know if a drug saved someone’s life. There are alternatives. Seemed to get better is not got better. Prove she is really better now. You mean she is less of problem to you.
People are not machines. Would you put random stuff in a new BMW that was not working well? Psychiatrists are not nearly as observant as a good car mechanic. Even if we were machines a psychiatrist would be the wrong person to see. They hardly notice who you are. They are in a trance as far removed from sanity as you are.
To claim that science has betrayed humanity would be wrong. Not science but scientists. And not all scientists. Just those that have been bought. But from the look of it that amounts to quite a few scientists. Clearly the pharmaceuticals can not be trusted.
I am not sure psychiatrists should be called scientists. They may have gotten some of the training but in their practices they more resemble merchants wanting to move a lot of product. In this case drugs. They must also have muzzled their consciences. Think of all the damaged children.
Universities bear a great responsibility for much of this. After the 1960’s they too fell into the hands of the oligarchs and began working to please a group of people with little in the way of ethics or humanity.
“White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco gave a speech this week [at Harvard] in which she urged parents to watch their children for signs of “confrontational” behavior which could be an indication of them becoming terrorists.” Echos of Thomas Hobbes. The Sovereign is absolute.
Then we have Northwestern and Princeton Universities coming out with a study that concludes that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy. “The iron rule of oligarchy” –Robert Michels
Imagine trying to grow up now in this society. It would not be easy. Primary school children handcuffed by police for writing with a marker on a desk. Etc.
My conclusion is that just as individuals can experience psychotic episodes, or more simply go crazy, for a while, so can large social entities.
In the USA main stream journalism is really shameful. And I think most journalists have only a superficial education. Almost everything that goes on in this nation has history connected to it which if unknown makes the current happening unintelligible or improperly interpreted.
Finally in a recent interview Justice Scalia quoted Justice Ginsberg to the effect that our freedoms are not absolute–maybe a few are. Strictly speaking the statement does not really make sense. The Bill of Rights was his target. He wants us to understand that the gov may violate them–and that that is okay. He has interpreted the Bill of Rights as suggestions rather than prohibitions. Well, we already learned that with the NDA.
So I believe we now are living in a fairly totalitarian society. It has been gradual and is not yet complete. We may soon hear commentators telling us that oligarchy is actually a good system of government.
All this is not very good for a peoples mental health. I imagine the Civil War in the 19th century left many in very disturbed conditions. I wonder if a study has ever been done on those consequences. Women and children without the husband and father in their lives. Lost siblings and children. A terrible catastrophe. And our other wars since.
So drugs are an easy way to pacify a large population. The Bill is clearly designed to enable more control. Nothing to do with the individual or the family. And in the meantime in any case our water, air and food are more and more contaminated. Our schools are teaching lies. The media is polluted. Etc.
I agree that those that can see and who have vision need to be active. The first step is to be well informed. Probably step one is to throw out the TV. Turn off the radio. Stop reading the news papers and get news on the Internet. With some practice one can find a good deal of genuine news regarding current events. And all current events are re-plays. There are just so many stories. Ukraine is a re-play from the Cold War. Someone has even re-worked some Nazism to heat things up. Variations on old themes. You can find ancestors in the Peloponnese Wars. Plato for example laid all this out in the Republic and the Laws. If you know the classics you can see now as then or then as now.
The Soviet Union used the mental illness bit to deal with dissidents. Haldol was a favorite of theirs. The Nazis turned children on their parents and parents on their children. Clive Bundy is the native American being cheated out of his land and livelihood. America has a very dark past it has chosen to repress and the repression is now in control.
Obama is acting out the repressed history of styles of governing. He does not know this in my opinion as considerable drug usage has probably seriously undermined his cognitive abilities. Whereas Putin can talk well without a teleprompter, Obama can not. Putin acts like a real leader. Obama comes across as a golf pro at best. Of the top three in the USA gov only Boehner manages to look okay–which is not to say I approve of him. Reid looks and is a nasty man. Biden looks sort out of it and foolish and not keen minded.
I am really not sure at all that the Fed gov should be involved in mental health.
Personally I think the USA will have to completely collapse and then be reconstituted before these serious problems can be addressed in a mature way. We can lay the ground work now. But I see a disastrous collapse in the near future. It can be survived though.
Recently Northwestern and Princeton Universities released a study that concluded the USA was an oligarchy and not a democracy. The article said that this would be taught in classes at these two universities. So probably in others as well. Thus, the military has been making the world safe for oligarchy. That matches the facts.
My observation is the USA is making its citizens sick. It is impossible now to find anyone who is either not on a psychiatric medication or who does not have a friend or relative using them. My neighborhood could be viewed as an asylum were it not for the Hispanics who seem more immune to mental illness. Lots of bi-polar and alcoholism.
The Bundy Ranch is a good example of taking a stand against the oligarchy. When the whole nation decides to be a Bundy Ranch then the oligarchy will recede–though that element never entirely goes away.
Bringing down the psychiatrists is a good start . . . next the pharmaceuticals . . . then the medical world needs a real revolution . . . then the schools . . . our food supply . . . our water and air . . . the nuclear power plants need to go . . . the military budget needs a major cut . . . we need office holders who can make friends with other nations and not enemies . . . it can be done.
Where do people locate themselves? Where is the “me” located; and is the “me” any different than the “I”? Some people at least speak about their inner life. Or someone might say, what do you feel or see when you look within yourself? Where is that within? I am sure a person does not mean their liver or lungs or their brain. But there is a space, a private space occupied by the I or the me or the I-me.
Now the psychiatrist does not bother with these “metaphors”. Science dispenses with folk language. The psychiatrist has photos of the functioning brain in color. He hopes to prove something, but he is not a neurologist. Nor a pharmacist. But he uses pills.
Soon he will have a machine that he will hook you up to. The machine will have a program and stimulate various areas of the brain depending on the diagnosis which the machine will make first. Like the most modern vehicles that can be tested diagnostically with a computer. Eliminate human error.
Perhaps later the psychiatrist will be replaced with a very advanced robot. This robot will read brain scans and micro expressions. It will know you like you have never been known. It will read your body completely. Even your DNA.
It will have you implanted with a chip so that it can be with you always. It will be your secret second self. You will never be alone or inconsolable. It will be the God you never had.
This sounds like science fiction. Science has a realm. That which exits is the subject matter of science; that which is quantifiable. Souls can not be measured–so souls do not exist. Bodies can be quantified so they exist. Logical positivism. But it is not really logical as it is based on an assumption. The senses give us the only real knowledge. That can not be proved. Christians actually support empiricism. They are very attached to the body that will be resurrected. I am not sure what they need a soul for? They have the body.
Psychiatry belongs to this misguided confusion about what is real. What is real? What is the closest to you? Your body, your thoughts, your feelings, the part of you that witnesses you? If you are the witness then by scientific definition you are not real. Sorry. The Witness can not be perceived because that which sees can not be seen. You are not a thing. Even a soul would be a subtle thing.
So the psychiatrist stands on a position that denies you exist. He does not deny that there is an animated body across from him. But the real you is non existent for him. No wonder that he flounders around. He can only treat the real. That means the body. You have to be the body and nothing more. But you may not oblige him. And that is where the crux of the problem is. The psychiatrist thinks that you are a naturally occurring robot. He can not define or grasp the essence of Consciousness/Life.
The peculiar case of the Russian doctor
Although I do psychotherapy this person is a friend and not a client. She was given Prozac for depression in a rather casual way for depression. I am not sure how long she took it at that time. A couple of years later she was given it again for the same reason. When I met her she had decided to quit after about four months. About 6 weeks later she had a frightening psychotic episode. At the time she was 39. In the years that followed she was sometimes on and sometimes not on drugs. She went almost two years without them and then had another psychotic episode. Now for quite some time she has been taking a moderate to low dose of Seroquel at night and a moderate or low dose of lithium in the day. Any divergence from this and she goes into pretty bad episodes. Her hands shake some.
This might be okay as a solution if the drugs were without side effects and eventual dangers. But they are not. She does Yoga and Shamanism. Inner sound. Etc.
Fortunately her psychiatrist wants to get her off the drugs and spends quite a bit of time with her when they meet.
Withdrawal symptoms? Maybe but so violent she has been hospitalized numerous times and by now knows many psychiatrists in the region. At least a dozen. She is doing fine now and seems normal. She might easily have been a beautiful Russian film star; she has incredible vitality. Her memory is unimpaired. She is very manually dextrous. Etc.
Her one weakness is that she shies away from much processing. When her life goes off, like a relationship breaks down, she often runs to my place for a while. Usually after a spell in a hospital. Otherwise, she is too wild and destructive to have around.
Perhaps someone will have an intuition about her. I have exhausted mine. It superficially looks like the Prozac started it; but there must have been some underlying elements. She tells me she does not realize it when she becomes manic. I believe her. And she expands rapidly. She thinks there is a trauma in her very early life. But can not recall it. Thanks
This man has done an incredible job of capturing the essence of what these drugs do. They are both humorous and frightening by turns. Imagine them lining the walls of a medical school where psychiatry is taught or even better a pharmacy. While you wait in line you get a powerful candid portrait painted of a man on your drug!!!!
I hope these will circulate widely as they tell what is beyond words.
An intriguing question: if you were approached by someone who appeared to possess considerable power and given these choices which would you take?
Alternative One: you are depressed and miserable because you are a sinner and unreformed. God is now punishing you in hopes that you will see the light. Give up your errant ways and do His will. Etc. You are not alone: there is God, his angel and the demons.
Alternative Two: you are acutely depressed because you have a chemical imbalance. It may be genetic. We do not know. After all we are organic machines with lots of parts and perhaps some of yours are broken or badly formed. This drug may help. No guarantees of course, but we do have other drugs. And science is working away day and night to find others. Aside: yes, you are alone in the vastness of inner space.
Alternative Three: There is some connection between the way you feel now and your past. It is not likely that you were born feeling miserable and depressed. It is not the natural condition of a human being. If you do a few healthful things though you might wonder why and find a good mentor to tell your stories to, you will recover and find some contentment and happiness. In the meantime you might find it useful to think of yourself as a traveler on a journey. Try to enjoy the journey. You can imagine yourself years from now feeling happy enough and looking back on now and wondering why you did not enjoy the scenes out the window . . . you might as well. It is a real part of being human to feel down in the dumps. It does not make you a freak. Great men and women have gone through lots of despair at times. Perhaps it is your greatness as a human being that is trying to get born; and birth can be painful. Don’t be misled. Have some faith in a flower or a tree; walk in a park and breath deeply. You are fine.
‘Abandon all hope ye that take this pill.’ –not Dante or at the beginning of The Inferno.
Hope is probably the state of mind of the person who first ventures into the office of a psychiatrist. “The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1817).” Well, probably not that hope but a cousin of it. This definition could be modified to produce a secular virtue–desire for mental well being and placing our trust in a pill or two or more and relying not our own strength but on the help of the pharmaceutical company. Should I have put the psychiatrist in place of Christ? It’s an ambiguity.
In any case we might next turn to Dante. The Inferno has some wonderful poetical sketches of the various places of suffering in hell. These too could be secularized and made available to the mentally ill. The aforementioned pills could be Virgil who will guide one with safe passage through this place of damnation and into Purgatory, “death’s second Kingdom. And so to Paradiso.
Unfortunately for you whoever you are the Virgil of the drug story gives out before Purgatorio is reached–probably in the 9th Circle of betrayal. And how appropriately.
Herbs on the other hand make no grandiose promises. In Original Wisdom we are even told that they speak to one who is receptive and tell what they can do. They do not lie. They have no ambition but to be.
Interesting article. Actually religions have pretty much addressed the human condition and accurately proposed a number of ‘remedies’ for suffering. In some instances these religions have had hundreds of generations to work things out for the practitioner or devotee. A religious age is religious not because someone has found a proof for the existence of God. Likewise, an irreligious age is not irreligious because it has found a proof for the non-existence of God. Neither proof exists and neither is possible.
Our age claims to be scientific though it isn’t. In fact currently scientists can not even determine satisfactorily whether the planet is cooling or warming, whether ionizing radiation is harmful or whether GMO’s make good food. It has no real idea what mental illness is or whether psychiatric medications do any real good. Our science is sloppy. Soon we may expect an anti-science age. But at present it functions rather like religions did. But it has only a few generations of development. So it is rather shoddy in many respects. Amateur.
George Orwell would certainly like your “human experience specialist”. Instead of thinking of humans as hyper-animated lumps of matter we might consider them micro-corporations and mental illness as the micro-corporation in potential bankruptcy due to inefficient use of energy. Special MBA programs could be designed.
How much ignorance is feigned I do not know, but I suspect many psychiatrists realize they are phonies and that they are really no different from the witchdoctors their ancestor laughed about. Still there are bills to pay and miles in an expensive car to go. Without the drugs many of these men and women would be out of a job. So there you are.
In my opinion depression and mental illness in general are a matter of two things: identification and agency. If I do not know who I am how can I claim to be the negative emotions I experience? If I drive through a dark and dismal slum I do not immediately conclude I am a dark and dismal slum. Why not? If I see a cat, I do not conclude I am a cat. Again why not? When I perceive a negative emotion and a negative thought why must I conclude that is me? So the important thing is to get a self certifying answer to the question, who am I.
Secondly, who is the doer? Can anyone give a certain answer to that one? Clearly when a loud unexpected sound goes off nearby, and I jump, my agency is not apparent at all. At what stage do I become the genuine doer? The German philosopher Schopenhauer gave this answer regarding our actions: Doing comes from essence. That was a medieval answer to the question. Thus the thoughts and emotions that come into my mind are in some sense a reflection of who I am as a unique person. I have not simply been thrown into the environment. But almost all of the time thoughts and impulses simply arrive unannounced are acting upon or not. It is with great difficult that anyone can make any sense out of the notion of free will other than the legal definition–involving sanity and not being coerced at the time.
Depression is often a long journey through the subconscious slums like a journalist living for months or years in a war torn country. Destroyed edifices, smoke, hungry people, wounded and dead, torn trees and cloudy skies and the sounds of gun fire and motar shells.
Now in some areas what we call higher formal education is of course needed. Electrical engineering for example. You need to know what ohms are and differential equations and a lot more. But in the area of healing it is not so clear. A broken arm? Yes. A broken heart? Perhaps not. Higher formal education is not without its drawbacks. A lot of intellect but it can be almost all wrong. For example, does the soul exist or is there a soul? I am guessing this question is answered no by most persons with a PhD. Why? Because they know the soul does not exist? No, of course not. You can not prove the non-existence of the soul. But they think they know. The academic world is largely not into that folkloric stuff.
If there were no soul or higher aspect, then people would be, well, just physical things though very complicated. But eventually science might even find a way to make them from scratch. Now that perspective engenders a certain attitude subtly. Just how seriously are you going to take people in general? Those complicate and intricate physical things? What if we have to destroy some in order to discover something to greatly aid mankind (this has a nice idealistic ring, doesn’t it?). Or if one possessed of this perspective is feeling a little down they might think of themselves as a car that needs a tune up. Or maybe just a badly designed car. Too bad. This could be pretty depressing in itself. I am just a machine. I have a PhD and know that.
I wonder if part of the despair of modern life is education itself which turns out to be not so educational at all. But rather a vast opinion structure held by a large community of persons around the world. Not knowledge but gueses.
And not just things about a non-existent soul. But a fairly large collection of thoughts presented as facts but only guesses. Black holes? Red shift? Relativity? Consciousness is produced by the brain? Drugs? Diet? Global this or that? Evolution? Hypotheses that slip over into the fact lane.
No surprise that people end up in solitary drug confinement. Some apparently for life.
From my research it appears the child abuse was not just limited to celebrities with TV connections but to person in high government positions, wealthy people, even some say members of the Royal Family. In fact reading the reports it sounds as if pedophilia was an established and accepted English activity. A tradition one might say. But one like wiretapping, not to be shown the light of ordinary day.
No longer do we need to talk about the dark ages as they are with us now. Did they ever really leave? I have been told sexual abuse stories by a number of women. I have gotten used to the fact. I wonder if it ever happened in the rural American town I grew up in? I have never heard. But then would I have heard growing up there? Possibly. I was even a Catholic but never had any sort of interaction with a priest nor the hint of it. Does this signify a breakdown in societies at this time?
Of course such an event would be highly destructive for a child or even an adolescent. Sex is highly intimate and personal; and to have someone intrude rudely into that solitude would be terrifying and shattering. One would lose self trust. Never after that feel safe to be oneself. One would have to live at a remove and keep an eye out for danger. Could easily ruin a life. It would involve a kind of self abandonment.
Excuse me but I thought the Germans had a monopoly on this sort of thing. What happened? As I recall the Germans were accused of doing bad things medically to people, but this story you relate could be projected back to Nazi Germany and fit in just fine in someone’s Holocaust memoir. I guess it just goes to show that history does repeat itself and sometimes continually.
Once again we see the court stepping in because someone behind the scenes has power and perhaps money for the right court decision. Instead of attorneys struggling to bring forth justice, we just have a judiciary vending machine. Pick out what you want and insert lots of big bills–unmarked of course.
This is really sad and tragic. The girl was held as a prisoner in a pretty bad environment to what? keep her safe from bad parents? Was she suicidal? This is so extreme as to be hard to grasp. Really this should be America in at least the pre-WWII times. The 1930’s–two wealthy families fighting over a grandchild having eliminated the mother somehow after the father disappeared. The child now in the custody of a private hospital where a doctor who has been following developments in Europe decides to experiment and see what will happen. Etc. Too dreadful even for fiction.
I believe Alan Dershowiz has offered pro bono assistance. Hopefully the legal team will resolve this quickly. The judge needs to be incarcerated along with the doctor so that they can both experience the joys of enclosure. We have become a little too soft on these important types. Oh, and they should be sued for all they have. It won’t compensate for lost years but it might help a bit.
Knowing that it is important to use words correctly I recently looked up the word witch doctor. What a surprise to discover it precisely described the average psychiatrist: a magician in a savage tribe. Which then caused me to realize that these drugs are actually witches’ brew. Of course I should apologize to the witch doctors as they are generally sincere and often successful, and in many cases their witches brews are potent herbal concoctions. But these words came out of a particular white man’s burden view of so called primitive societies. But now it turns out that the superior societies were actually the primitive ones. Also I do not mean to call the contemporary patients of psychiatrists savages though they might feel that way after the drugs take hold or so I have been told and observed.
So arrogance has had its day. Hopefully the sun will set on it before too long. We can no longer count on professional scientists as they can not decide whether the earth is cooling or warming, whether radiation is good for the person or harmful, whether psychiatric medication is helpful or not, whether GMO seeds produce good food or not, and so on. With such impotence as these scientist display it is best to rely on intuition as people once did and go our own way. It is really too bad as vast fortunes were spent on these folks only to produce men and women with a tendency to be drawn powerfully to the money handed out by the oligarchs. And truth and money do not mix well like driving and alcohol.
In a way this is all a political problem. We have an agency, the FDA, whose job it is to ensure that medication is safe–but it does not do its job well. We have licensing of doctors who supposedly have ethical responsibilities to live up to but apparently don’t–with impunity. Both state and Federal Gov do not see to it that these things are carried out. This is not just sloppiness either.
Governments collaborate with pharmaceuticals and doctors to continue extremely negligent and dishonest treatment regimens. But since most people have some trust in gov and doctors when their spouse or child needs help they go along with a really malicious process until the child or spouse is imprison in a drug routine they can not break out of without heroic effort. Like the TV series “Prison Break” where one brother helps another innocently imprisoned it takes a bit genius and lots of effort.
What are we to make of this? There are no end of these sorts of betrayals occurring in the USA from food to cars to finances to wars to property . . . The alternative news is flooded with stories of police brutality, mean spirited treatment of the poor, the DOJ looking the other way when the bankers commit felonies . . . university professors on the take from corporations . . . sounds like the Soviet Union when it was breaking up and the Yeltsin years of the Russian oligarchs.
You do not need to be a conspiracy theorist. Just read the Drudge Report for a month. Or just read the articles here. One damn irresponsible thing after another reported. And the victims/prisoners are also here with their testimonies.
All this is not just some mistake, some innocent overlooking of details. It is not just three blind psychiatrists being chased by a psychotic patient with a butcher knife. Anyway they do not seem to have tails though it might add to a truer characterization.
Knowing what is going on is a good step to the remedy.
I spent about two years supporting a person coming off a number of psychiatric medications including oxicotin. She was in her 30’s and had a strong habit of processing her inner life. She did lots of research and used some of the blogs and chats. It was not easy but now a year free of these has transpired. So it can be done without much special in place. However, not everyone has the strength to go it almost alone. If one only heard about this without lots of details one would suspect a crime had been committed. This has the aura of a great injustice. Something does not fit like a valuable diamond in a cheap setting that leaves the ring finger with a black band around it.
Given the great number of people using these drugs don’t we have a national emergency of some sort? Doctors are handing out poison and the world seems oblivious.
I have reason to believe that ibogaine is a good method for withdrawal from hard drugs; I imagine that it would work with the psychiatric medications as well. However, and this is absolutely not a surprise, the stuff is illegal in America. One would have to go to Canada or Mexico or Europe. The cost is very high for the treatment though I imagine the drug is cheap enough being from an African root. The American oligarchs who run the nation see profit as the first and foremost consideration. We can nibble here and there but as long as this nation is dominated by money and power what is best for the the people is only occasionally in line with what is best for the People (corporations). In the meantime we are experimental animals.
For literature about what can be provided for vets the two books by Dr Jonathan Shay are wonderful: Achilles In Vietnam and Odysseus In America. But you know immediately that someone like Dr. Shay would never, never be seriously consulted and placed in a powerful position. It is clearly not about solving problems or doing good; that’s sissy stuff. It is about getting and getting and holding power. The Vets and most of us are Americans. But the last four or five administrations have been Globalists. For them America per se is not interesting. It is a failing nation and not worth saving. So they sow discord. At home and abroad and in the process make loads of money and gain more power. One nation down at a time. So it turns out that mental health is a political problem. James Hillman came to that conclusion. No point helping people get back into what made them sick to begin with. They need a new nation. I believe one poll found that 26% of the American public considered themselves mentally ill. That is impossible. They were thinking about something else. Feeling dis-empowered. Lacking community. Brain washed by TV and the nightly news. Assailed by ads designed to make them feel of little worth and without dignity. Worn down by their meager pay checks. Failing to look beautiful like the air brushed chicks. Lacking the erotic musculature of the right kind of man . . . If the Devil did not invent consumerism he must be so envious of the guy who did.
My inspiration is the Grand Boycott. Americans become minimalists. Buy only the necessities. Get clothing at thrift shops. Use cell phones for emergencies. Write letters. Throw the TV away. Read. Refuse to borrow money to buy more junk. Go a bit ascetic. Walk. When a politician comes through avoid him or her. No point voting so avoid that as well. They are all the same. Be like the turtle and draw in your limbs. Avoid Facebook and Twitter. Don’t be seen with a lap top unless really necessary. Be care of the Internet. Meet people in person. If Gov believed in democracy they would not have friends like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. Presently Russia is the good nation. They actually have a genuine leader. He actually cares about Russia unlike some people we know and their nation. Congress is largely soap opera. Etc.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. — Franz Kafka That could be our new Amerika.
I believe you are mistaken. Most of the data I have seen shows just the opposite to be the case. But it is what many would like to believe. If guns are made illegal, it will create a very lucrative black market just as illegal drugs have. By the way Mexico is an example of a state with extremely strict gun law making it almost impossible for the citizen to own a gun. Almost one hundred thousand deaths in the last few years. Another thing to consider is the several studies done by university professors showing that guns prevent crime more than they cause it.
In any case we have Ft. Hood a gun free zone with now two massacres and still the Pentagon is against arming the soldiers. Additionally if the Fed gov were really genuinely serious about violence in America they could begin by taking a lot more care of veterans; they could stop drugging these guys when they are in combat; they might even want to consider having a better foreign policy and try diplomacy rather than violence. In actual fact the murder rate in the USA has been declining for years. The violence problem is really not a gun problem. That is just a diversion.
Consider that right now the BLM has 200 armed men, some of whom are snipers, surrounding an older ranching couple in Nevada over their cows, some of which the BLM is now slaughtering and burying in the desert. The couple has 48 grandchildren. If they are killed by sniper bullets how will that effect those children? And for what? So some arrogant bureaucracy can prove how tough it is? We have had at least four presidents in a row who have been war criminals by even the strictest standards. It is now coming out that Clinton was a major factor in the Rwanda genocide. It was not just that he was busy and did not notice. And on and on.
There is nothing like good jobs to make for good families. But the corporation People do not want that; and since they are the important People, they get their way.
Trauma, violence, suffering . . . sounds like Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq or Ukraine now. What these places all have in common is the presence or recent presence of the USA which has greatly increased the levels of violence, suffering and trauma! So it should come as no surprise that when the Congress of the USA gets in proximity of mental health care the levels of coercion and force will be elevated. Today two old ranchers in Nevada with 48 grandchildren, a man and his wife, have snipers surrounding them over some land dispute that has been going on for 20 years. This is the way the USA behaves domestically and in foreign affairs–like a big bully. Living in the USA one is constantly subjected to a lack of respect. Just like when Uncle Joe Stalin was shaping up the Soviet Union in the 1930’s. All you need are some not very stupid tough guys with guns. With a scattering of psychopaths for managers.
So in my opinion about half the mental health problem in the nation stems from a gov leading the nation to ruin. Almost the other half comes from a very bad eating regimen. Subtract these two groups and the remainder is not so large. Less than one percent I would think. It’s hard for parents to do a good job on part time employment with little money plus schools now that arrest primary school kids for failure to follow minor rules. And all the other dumb things that gov finds to harass people. Clearly this contributes to a mood of violence. Plus the vets coming home in terrible shape and receiving the minimal help now that they have served their purpose. All this added together is the recipe for bad homes. Hence, trauma. Drugs and alcohol. And now Murphy?
And now Murphy. Where did he get all this wisdom?
“The government is right: children need love as much as they do vitamins – and a lack of it often leads to adult psychosis.” I wonder how many millions of pounds they spent to conclude that. “Emotional Child Abuse Has to be Banned – The Science Backs up our Instincts” And while the UK is at it let’s also ban wars, rape, theft by bankers, etc. Utopia lies just beyond the banning! I suppose only the corrupt UK could come out with this nonsense. Science backs instinct? People have for a long time been capable observers. They noticed that treating children, animals and other people well had good results. Even their religion mentioned this a couple of millennia ago. The real goal here is to justify stealing children from parents. We have scientific proof that you are a bad parent. We have scientific proof they we are gods and you are crummy humans, so off with the children to an institution where we will provide scientific love. How horrible the UK has become.
In actual fact the gov is driving many adults to suicide. Practice what you preach. The rich elite are gobbling up all the goodies there as well. This is hypocrisy; and The Guardian is the ideal bearer of this pluff science. Next they should do a scientific study that shows that corrupt political figures suffering stress and guilt may be miserable in their later years. Stuff like that where maybe our instincts fail.
In any case this is all about taking children away and who knows to where. UK has a very serious pedophile problem as does the Continent.
I agree, Copy_cat. When I consider the ruin towards which this nation is headed I have a good idea of where most of the mental illness is coming from. Here is an excerpt from a good article by Paul Craig Roberts:
“As I write I cannot think of one thing in the entire areas of foreign and domestic policy that the US government has told the truth about in the 21st century. Just as Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Iran has no nukes, Assad did not use chemical weapons, and Putin did not invade and annex Crimea, the jobs numbers are fraudulent, the unemployment rate is deceptive, the inflation measures are understated, and the GDP growth rate is overstated. Americans live in a matrix of total lies.
What can Americans do? Elections are pointless. Presidents, Senators, and US Representatives represent the interest groups that provide their campaign funds, not the voters. In two decisions, the Republican Supreme Court has made it legal for corporations to purchase the government. Those who own the government will decide what it does, not those who vote.
All Americans can do is to accept the serfdom imposed on them or take to the streets and stay in the streets despite being clubbed, tasered, arrested, and shot by the police, who protect the power structure, not the public.
In America, nothing is done for the public. But everything is done to the public.”
Now imagine for a moment an average American family. The parents have many things to be distressed about. Maybe the eight year old used his finger as a gun and was arrested by the police. Or maybe the thirteen year old daughter was watching porn at a friends house. Maybe neither has the job they had ten years ago and are doing part time. The food is bad or not so good as they once could buy. They love their kids but their emotional control is thin. There is screaming now. They all feel traumatized. They can not afford an evening out without feeling guilt. They are not sleeping so well either. Fortunately they may have a reluctance to get drugs–but for how long? The Affordable Health Care is costing them more than they were formerly paying. Thank God they have good health still.
All this is a mighty contributor to the mental heath situation. Murphy will get his campaign contributions and this family or that will bear the burden of his gross stupidity and avarice. I wonder who raised this man of no integrity? And what university gave him a degree in psychology? He learned nothing because it probably taught nothing.
The list is valuable. Much trauma relates to home life for children. Why are American families so violent? I can verify from people I know that the list is very accurate. I have often said that the health of a nation can be measured by the health of man woman relationships. Marriages and families receive little help in the USA. Is marriage almost despised by the media and leading lights? Americans also as a whole do not seem to care much for children. I know these are generalizations but I keep getting these impressions
from conversing with people.
Now when a nation goes somewhere and destroys the infra structure, kills hundreds of thousands of people, contaminates the land, wastes vast sums of money, neglects the affected Vets and sends them home addicted to drugs . . . can we really say this has no effect on the social life in that nation? Certainly not. And America has been into one war or another almost since WWII. And not a single one can be characterized as defense. They were all without exception wars of aggression. Even WWII is suspect; and certainly WWI was something the USA ought to have stayed out of. So lots of war. A bellicose nation.
Most Americans end up in families that have a Vet somewhere nearby–husband, wife, grandparent, uncle . . . This is one explanation. A society in which science is regarded as a religion such that religion is regarded as a fraud is also a problem source. We toss out the notion of soul and talk about love as chemical. I love you means that certain hormones, etc. are circulating in my brain. Nothing more. And when the chemicals stop–goodbye. And most scientist will lie to save their jobs, get a better one, or receive moneys from a corporation. As a result we have wonderful nuclear power; GMO’s; Ready
Roundup; fluoridated water; food additives. It is as if no one cares about people because People (corporations) have all the money and want more.
Guns are not the problem. When and where I grew up there were lots of guns and never anyone shot. No murders. No one wounded. I can only remember one accident and that was a kid pounding on a shell. But that was the society this society damned and threw away. It had religion and was decidedly more rural. Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country–Mason Cooley The Murphy’s of the world evidently can not read. The science behind psychiatric medications is what people used to consider that science behind witches’ brew. The modern psychiatrist is often the same dictionary’s definition of a witch doctor: “a magician in a savage tribe”. If Representatives and psychologists like Murphy are running things and they are, then we the people will need to avoid the gov as much as possible and go it alone. Most of these rascals are only good for bribing and blackmailing.
We need more doctors like Jonathan Shay. But these are rare persons. His two great books are of incalculable value. I wonder if Murphy could handle reading something so inspired? Anyway, glad you are on this. Thanks.
A final note: I hope you can imagine the conflict and heated discussion that followed the Civil War in American. This went on decade after decade. My grandmother’s mother lived in Missouri and mentioned it endlessly to her children, how the British betrayed the South, etc. Do you think anything ever written about the Civil War has not been misleading? I don’t. I am sure there were many fights and many murders connected with that endless dispute. The Jews and Germany are similar. It like civil wars will never end. They may cease on the physical plane, but they go on for centuries in the minds of people. A lot of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990″s was related to the conflict between the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches during WWII. Would you care to disentangle that? Of course not. T. S. Eliot maintained that the English Civil War of the 17th century was still a factor in English life 300 years later. And that is my whole point. The minute the Holocaust is brought up for any or no reason it is like dropping a smoke bomb or tear gas into the room. It gets used to justify anything and everything. Any one who questions it is attacked irrationally. All hell breaks loose. Thus, it is one of those things which in polite company should never be mentioned unless one knows in advance that everyone is on the same page. I am sure in Washington, D.C. even now that people are a little careful not to mention the Civil War. Some southern Congressmen or women might just fulminate and cause a scene. Thus again, nothing written about highly contentious subjects should be brought up in mixed company by which I mean where some present are very heated about the matter. It makes enemies quickly and dissolves friendships. I hope you can see my point. Least said, least mended! Why IT is such a big topic in America is not clear. The USA was not a participant in Jewish oppression. We are not good people when it comes to foreign affairs as should be obvious. Call it isolationism but for Americans it is the best solution. Jews have been very fortunate in the USA. They have no reason to attack Americans about something that totally involved Europe and centuries even before America existed as place on the map. I think you might want to address this from a professional point of view as a therapist and PhD in psychology. Great for another book since you write books. If I were a political writer I might write How Political Problems Belonging To Other Nations Were Given To The USA After WWII. Or philosophically, Plato Hit The Nail On The Head Over Two Thousand Years Ago And The USA Has Yet To Figure That Out. A shorter title might be Let The Dead Bury The Dead. Best of luck.
I have followed this, and I agree with you. The evidence against it being a real event are over whelming. The fact that a medical helicopter was waiting to fly there and never ordered to do so was extremely out of protocol as well as letting unqualified personnel determine that people were dead. The whole thing violated numerous state and federal laws.
Part of this is oddly enough a faith undeservedly placed in the educated intellect and especially the scientific one. Unfortunately the intellect deals in the past, information gathered here and there and put together in various ways. ‘Reason makes a good servant but a bad master’. When people were less well educated formally they relied on other modes of knowing. Intuition for example. Rural people had and still may have an advantage here over city folk. In rural Nebraska where I grew up in the 1940’s and 1950’s there was little to no mental illness. Very little crime and no murder. Lots of guns and only the rare accident. Surprisingly even the occasional homosexual was accepted. There was some prejudice against blacks but no blacks around! People worried about rain. If there was ever a shooting of anyone I never heard of it. One angry woman once sent a bullet to her lover by mail. She was not arrested or threatened with arrest. It became a local joke! People for the most part had common sense. The police were local guys and knew better than to abuse people. The main crime was getting drunk and causing a disturbance. It was not utopia but a good place and time to be a kid. And few of us were ever sick. We had good food. Good air. And good water. And jobs were plentiful for teenagers. I delivered papers and mowed lawns. I had dogs and a horse. I loved school. And reading. Already in the 1960’s the urban coasts were becoming nihilistic. Vietnam helped this destructive tendency really take off and fly. Now the nation is headed for ruin as nations do that put money in the place of honor.
As Americans I think we should dwell on the treatment the native Americans received. To the best of my knowledge they are the only people’s in recent history where the gov actually had the official policy of eliminating them. And they are still here. “The only good Indian is a dead one.” This came after the Civil War which was itself another great crime. As for the Jews, the Nazis, etc. that is really a European problem and best left to them to work out. Americans have a great difficulty with foreign affairs and are very much locked in their own language and culture or lack there of. So, then Seth. what about the native Americans? What is your thinking regarding the mining of uranium on their land and poisoning their wells and the air they breath? This is our problem now. We may be able to do something about it. We clearly can not do anything about Israel and the Palestinians. But as citizens the way the remnant of native Americans are treated is our responsibility. If we fail to act then we are complicit. Have you read Rolling Thunder? Mad Bear? Or any other books related to their situation? Do you know any native Americans? As far as I can determine the gov would still like to eliminate these people and take their land. In Brussels a trial is now in progress regarding the murder of 50,000 native children by the church schools in Canada. Have you been following that? America would rather fiddle with Ukraine or Syria than put its own house in order. No wonder so many Americans are suffering from mental illness. James Hillman had a lot to say about this. Best of luck.
I am not denying that Germany persecuted Jews or that that was an injustice. I did not write the article as you know. We will never know for certain what happened back then just as the pasts of our own lives live on as mysteries. It only takes one small turn of a kaleidoscope to change the whole pattern. So with history and our lives. In a sense everything is misleading. The world is an on going illusion. Remember we have to learn how to judge the size of things with experience. Without illusion there would be no possibility of a world. So who knows? Socrates was the wisest man according to the Oracle because he knew that he knew nothing.
“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” Helen Keller
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I think the wiser course of action is to provide better alternatives. Demonstrations do not work very well these days. They get sabotaged one way or another. Since the profits of large corporations are at stake the enemy is powerful. Another worth while tactic is bring suits. The pharmaceuticals generally prefer to make settlements and the experts get a look through discovery at the products and clinical trials. If hundreds of these are brought it makes for very bad publicity. There is no good science behind the whole adventure. Their greatest strength is in buying scientists to lie and having vast sums for advertising. It is a truly criminal and rotten business and must eventually implode. But the gov sees a way to benefit from drugging people so is on their side for now.
Here, Seth, it a well written article which I believe lays out the great complexities of dealing with oppression, and why I disincline to dwell on things like Holocaust and Nazis.
Fortunately in the world of mental health things are not quite so complex. But I think operating on a local level with people we know is best. The minute something becomes national the interests involved are innumerable.
As far as I can determine the Sandy Hook affair was a hoax. No children were killed. The school was inactive at the time. One hundred million dollars came into the lamenting parents . . . and the state of CT has acted very suspiciously by hiding all the records, even the death certificates. That the Federal Gov. would conceive and pull off this sort of thing tells me that at this time one wants to take care in one’s dealings. Trust is elusive. We live in a low dishonest time.
We don’t expect our institutions to be corrupt. We are not raised that way or educated that way. On the contrary from early in our lives we are told to respect these authority figures and experts; and it is an uncomfortable move to begin doubting. How can it be the case that the whole respectable world seems based on lies? That most wars were fought for reasons kept secret by those that arrange wars. Of course the average doctor or civil servant is also in the dark. Most psychiatrists probably think they are doing good work as they prescribe dangerous and useless drugs. The fact that 41 vaccinations by the age of two might be unwise treatment is too dangerous a thought for most doctors who wish to keep their licenses. So even when people do awaken to new facts they may find themselves trapped and unable to do anything at all but go along with the lies. Of course a person can give up on psychiatry without becoming a full scale rebel . . . but still one has to be careful to whom one reveals his or her story! And it is also the thoughts that have to be dismissed, the thoughts may even be the worst effect. I think so.
Fraud seems to be a very American thing. Unfortunately it is not a new thing but it does seem to be getting worse. Every day the media puts forth what generally amounts to misleading information if not outright lies. Politicians right to the very top make a career out of telling falsehoods about which they count on the public’s weak memory to preserve them from later embarrassment. On the one hand money can be made with drugs, lots of it. Any half awake psychiatrist can write a prescription but it takes a real person to engage with another real person. Your material catches my attention. Thanks.
I would assume naturally that rejecting one’s body would get one off to a bad start in life. What kinds of homes do these people come from? Without lots of details it is hard to know why someone would deny their biological sex? Personally I think attacking one’s body has a deeper root than what we are being told. There is a subterranean element being kept secret.
I have come across no trustworthy information suggesting that psychiatric drugs are anything but money makers for the pharmaceuticals and the psychiatrists. Given the home lives of many children and the over all conditions in which they grows up in this nation I am surprised there are not more “mentally deranged” persons. The food supply is getting worse. The environment continues to be poisoned. Medical care in the USA is often deplorable as is education. Mental patients are often people who can not tolerate the mess the nation is in. These mentally ill persons are symptoms of conditions the corporations and gov create in their pursuits of power and wealth. Since the Powers do not wish to change thelr course of action we have the mentally ill to dispose of somehow. Drugging them seems simplest and cheapest. It is a challenge for everyone to stay healthy in a bad society. We have to get the point where we can accept the fact that the USA is a bad society and getting worse. Until then we will try to solve the wrong problems.
It is all about the money the facility receives. It has nothing to do with her mental health or the likelihood of her committing suicide later on. She is clearly expendable. Just the money. Dr L may even get paid by the number of patients he can keep incarcerated in his hospital. Serafina is simply a number. The world is full of numbers. The USA regularly kills the numbers or erases them as just recently 17 civilians killed in Afghanistan by a drone. No tears for those who are simply numbers.
Once science was seen as a viable source of money and power, governments and corporations stepped in and began funding science. Over time both began to dominate that area and determine the sorts of projects they would fund. Gradually academic institutions became subservient to these demands and their proffer of riches. It is not a question of whether psychiatry has a hold on some truth but that it is viewed as a scientific endeavor that is all important. As we should know by now both gov and corporations can be very cruel in their pursuit of various goals. Giving dangerous drugs to unsuspecting people or doing enhanced interrogation is largely viewed in the same way. The gov of the USA is largely indifferent to the welfare of its citizens: nuclear waste here and there, GMO’s, herbicides, insecticides, various drugs, wars, etc. When psychiatry is criticized money is at stake–not truth or the welfare of persons. If the Elite cared about people the USA would not have killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million innocent citizens of foreign nations since WWII.
I have a rather low opinion of American universities, especially of the prestigious ones. I went to Stanford many years ago. At least the environment was beautiful. Yes, if you want to think something into existence like a nuclear power plant or some other highly technical device universities are where you must go. On the other hand if you want to feel something into existence like a decent life the universities are more like cemeteries. A healthy response to a typical university environment is probably depression, despair, rage, etc.
Going to a prestige university is presented to young inexperienced persons in high school as something like Sangri La. So if you are not overjoyed most of the time it must indicate that there is some flaw in your makeup. After all you are young and inexperienced and surrounded by brilliant other students and the almost godlike professors. You assume, fatally, that you are being told the truth when often it is just an opinion shared by powerful people. How much of all this wonderment can you take in and digest?
The mental health people who claim to help you bring forth all sorts of labels which another generation will laugh at. They might just as well chain you to a wall in a mad house. Or put you on a ship of fools. Keep in mind it is all a magic trick, a juggler’s act. To the extent that one feels special at say Yale or Harvard, to that extent when you fall you will fall further, and it will hurt more. The thing to do then is get up and learn to smile at yourself for being tricked.
ECT strikes me as a fairly barbaric treatment. I wonder if persons struck by lightening spontaneously recover from any mental afflictions? Some years ago in a journal created by Dr. Peter Breggin I read an article wherein I learned that the two leading advocates of ECT no longer supported that treatment. I can not remember their names. Another article in the same issue I believe talked about a psychiatric nurse who after the treatment forgot all her education and experience — a rather heavy price. A comparable treatment for an automobile would probably leave it totaled!
Any yet the insurance money is there for any of us if we can work up the symptoms. The great German poet Holderlin slide off the deep end in his late 20’s? and lived the rest of a rather long life on a farm being taken care of by a friend. He was quite manageable and even wrote some poems but was no longer able to care for himself on his own. Depending on when we chose in the 20th century he might have received a lobotomy, insulin shock, a cocktail of drugs, or ECT. And the result? I personally think he was happier in the early 19th century living on that farm–but I have nothing to gain from these rather primitive solutions to everyday problems. For a little more insight into psychiatry you might want to watch Side Effects on Netflix.
Psychiatry is a technical occupation. The best psychiatrist is the one that choses the “right” drug and dosage and does so quickly. He need not be particularly compassionate. The best auto mechanic may be rather a grumpy man but he does keep your vehicle running smoothly. Neither the psychiatrist nor the car mechanic need to be alturistic; both may claim they are in it for the money and that is okay as long as they have the necessary expertise. Most psychiatrists bereft of the drugs would flounder; they might give talk therapy a go but then compassion and other feely things would become essential. And they are schooled to view human beings as machines with chemical imbalances, with misguided neurons, etc. Even regular medicine has gone too far into medication as the universal panacea. And again all the tests and drugs cost money and more money; this is what the scientific age has to offer. It is hard not to reach out and take it.
If I steal a cookie and then feel guilty it would never occur to me that I need psychiatric medication! And yet for some people this connection between actions and feelings must be very obscure. The idea that a state of mind is best resolved by a drug is behind excessive alcohol use, illegal drug use and other powerful agencies like pornography. Probably regarding the human body as a vast and intricate chemical activity leads nicely to the conclusion that emotions are simply chemicals and neurons. For those who go to medical school what could be more transparent than that a chemical from without will do the job and mend the pattern. This begins metaphysically or philosophically with empiricism and ultimately with materialism–you and I are composed of matter and nothing more. All conditions are material conditions. Someone with a different metaphysics would never rest with a merely chemical solution to a mental problem. They would want to know the why, the origin of the problem, and view it in terms of consciousness. However, there is so much money to made by the material solution and much less with a more human approach. It is of the same ilk as war to solve a problem between nations rather than diplomacy.
Remember these massacres occur in gun free zones. The law abidding citizen leaves his gun at home. Or, why then are the important persons always accompanied by gun totting security personnel? If having someone present with a gun is of no use why pay money for nothing?
The Wild West according to researchers was less wild than now partly because the people were generally more well behaved but also because almost everyone was armed. Maybe we should also ban automobiles because they kill people.
” in the wake of horrifying mass killings, many in our public schools” and all of them in gun free zones or soft targets. But we do need a convenient scapegoat. The mentally ill will serve that purpose until enough Muslim with heated blood can take their places. The American public gets so easily manipulated. Kill a few people somewhere and beat the drum for one thing or another. Does it ever occur to serious people that there might be something psychopathic about America’s leadership?
It is hard even to imagine Federal Agencies taking their job seriously–like the FDA. We are constantly subjected to experimentation with GMO’s, fluoride, vaccinations containing aluminum, etc. Little surprise some people flip. We are constantly inundated with false stories by the MSM. I am not sure that the current President has on any serious occasion told the truth. And we have a number of billionaires who sport humanitarian values and also want the population down to half a billion. Who experiment on poor kids in India and put sterilization drugs in Kenyan vaccinations for women. Etc.
No, so called mental illness may be a very healthy response to a very nasty immoral society!
I almost never come across anyone who is worked about the 20 to 30 million persons killed by the USA since the end of WWII. Only about 1 out every 10 was a soldier. We are responsible for many dead Syrians but only get bothered by the idea of a temporary ban on their migration to this nation.
This strikes me as very irrational. I think guns have been a great red herring for people to hate and wish to ban instead of really important issues. The same goes for the whole LGBT issue. Is everyone simply a neophyte narcissist?
We as a nation like to believe we are wonderful folk, but that is simply not the case and never was. We are as wicked a people as have ever lived on this planet. Of course not everyone but certainly the glorious leaders and their minions.
The NYT has always been the creature of the Elite. And the Elite have always been fairly vile as a group.
There is not a very strong connection between mass shootings and any form of feasible gun control and that should be obvious. If all guns were confiscated the bad guys would still manage to get guns as there would be a thriving black market quite soon. How successful has the war on drugs been? Well, more drugs at a more affordable price than before the war! Otherwise, if several persons in San Bernardino had been well trained gun owners the massacre might never have gone very far.
Then we have to ask ourselves how real these events really are. The eye witnesses say there were three big athletic white men who did the shooting–as opposed to two rather small middle easterners. What did happen? The same sort of contradictory information has come out of most of these mass shootings. Something is wrong. According to the couples’ attorney who had spent three hours with the FBI the couple was found dead and bound in the back of the vehicle. Until or unless we begin to get trustworthy information on these events we can not talk about prevention.
Finally these all take place in GUN FREE ZONES. Apparently the perpetrators do not abide by the law.
Is there a single film made in recent times that has an actually good person as the psychiatrist? Or are they all like the one in Girl With A Dragon Tattoo? If I were a psychiatrist I would find this book an embarrassment. I would also find a better use for my medical degree — Doctors Without Borders perhaps.
Although the bad doctor actually comes across as comic, he is also a criminal. ECT is cruel and unusual treatment clearly. The drugs are basically poison. This is all quackery. But then so much in America is fake, deceptive, dishonest and criminal that these men and women pass almost unnoticed unless one has a friend or relative who has had the bad luck to fall into their clutches.
Well Hannibal Lecter was a psychiatrist. The author might have chosen the law or politics for his character but chose psychiatry! Hmmm.
As Americans we need to develop a more balanced perspective. Each week hundreds die in Iraq and often thousands in a month; and the USA can take most of the blame for these deaths. A vast number of Iraqis have died since Desert Storm. Under Saddam Husein this would not have happened. Since Obama’s famous “Assad Must Go” in 2011 over 200,000 Syrians have died and 12 million have become refugees. Again the USA must bear most of the blame. So just how much concern ought we to take for the occasional school shooting? How much drama is a shooting in Paris worth? Are Iraqis worth significantly less than Parisians or Americans? Middle Easterners, excepting Israelis, are mere statistics, numbers without meaning. And they are also the gateway to big profits for the military industrial complex which seems to dominate along with banks the American way of life. And who now is the current Enemy of Choice? Why Russia of course. After a barrage of distorted news from Ukraine, etc. Russia is the obvious choice. No wonder someone came up with the term Sheeple for the American citizen. The uninformed man and woman of no critical thought capacity. Now of course there is nothing wrong with hoping to find a way to stop school shootings, but we need to keep it in proportion. We may need to toss out the term democracy which seems to be the justification for destroying other nations like Libya. How many deaths are the so called free elections worth? Ones where a dictator our leaders like gets elected? The best way to eliminate shooting is for everyone who is able to get a concealed carry permit so that any time some one starts shooting there will always be someone present with training to stop it. Eliminate all gun free zones that do not have armed guards; no more soft targets. You go into a school with a gun to shoot it up and the teachers and principal stop you immediately. Same at concerts, restaurants and homes. The Wild West was not all that wild.
Gun violence is really a very minor concern for this nation. Radiation which will only keep increasing as other nuclear reactors melt down in the future, as nuclear waste accumulates, etc. GMO products and herbicides like Roundup will eventually have devastating effects on the health of people. It seems obvious to me that if you can keep people focused on minor issues like gun control, gender identity, offensive words and phrases and so forth, then the big issues can slide along without resistance. The media always hypes what is of lesser importance. What about Turkey and its solid support for ISIS? what about the US military pretending to fight ISIS but not really doing anything at all? So I think gun control needs to be shelved and these more important issues addressed. Even on this site. How much longer will doctors give out drugs far more dangerous than the psychedelics?
Progress is mostly a Christian idea or ideal. Somewhat muddled. While some things get better, others get worse. Essentially people look outwardly for happiness and salvation. To look in is to encounter darkness inhabited by the bad past and who knows what else. Some demonic version of oneself. Who might I actually be? And all of this has gotten tangled up with consumerism and industrial psychology to the point where people’s minds are inhabited by a multitude of confusing suggestions which each year multiply. Presently we have a global conference in Paris, site of a recent terrorist attack? where the big people are discussing the phantom of climate change. Turkey has unwisely shot down a Russian plane and Russia has brought in what they call the “Monster” which has effectively created a no fly space over Syria. And is now telling the world frankly the role Turkey has played in helping ISIS. Alas. With no doubt a nod from the USA, that is, the USA has allowed Turkey this strangely destructive role without interfering. It is not easy in this malestrom of lies to stay mentally healthy. When the world leaders are probably some of the best instances of psychopathy, sociopathy, bi-polar, and what have you. But we have the three smilers: Obama, Hilary and Pope Francis. All must be well. Agreed? Do you suppose they all had the same smile coach?
Assuming very tight gun control in the USA it would probably proceed just a successfully as the prohibition of alcohol and later on of drugs. Do we want to look forward to a thriving black market of guns? Should the US embark on another large social experiment costing a fortune to see if the result is what we would like; or should we leave well enough alone? I think gun control is a red herring like Climate Change. Meanwhile we have the popular herbicide Roundup with glyphosate, GM corn, soy, etc. nuclear power plants which are aging and in bad locations, nuclear waste turning up all over the place as in St. Louis. We have a very questionable medical world which is highly drug oriented. Oh, not to forget we may have an extinction level event in the Pacific due to Daiichi Fukushima about which MSM hardly ever makes a mention. And so on. Gradually one comes to the conclusion that neither the gov nor the corporations really have our best interests at heart or even our second or third best interests!
There are a number of academic studies–I believe one by a professor at Brown and one from the U of Chicago, as well as numberous articles available on line. You need to just look around and do some research on how gun control has worked in the UK and Austrailia. When you enter Mexico you are alerted to the prohibition of guns and ammunition, and yet Mexico has about 20, 000 murders by gun annually. The other troubling thing is that it is usually one of the first things a tyrannt does — confiscate guns. And finally death by guns has been in decline for about two decades now. You have to ask yourself why it is such a big item in a nation that has killed between 20 and 30 million people since WWII? and whose President has a kill list that he reviews every Tuesday. He really likes the drones which kill about 10 civilians for every so called terrorist.
Stricter gun laws have been shown to not work. Probably the psychology/psychiatry professions have a much greater responsibility here than the gun enterprises. The medications do not really work and cause people to feel crazy and sometimes act that way as well. How many of the sensational shootings really took place and how many were hoaxes is a subject worth researching. Better homes, better food, saner schools, good jobs, less emphasis on the oddities of human nature in the media, etc. would help greatly. Keep in mind that pharmaceuticals and corporations like Monsanto with their herbicides and GM’s are big money compared to the gun business. Given the number of persons killed by cars no one ever suggests stricter auto rules. Again money dictates what we go after. Americans are very shy of the truth.
Interestingly films often do a rather good job of telling the truth, that is, in fiction. “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” shows a psychiatrist that must touch the heart of many. In fact I am not sure I have even seen a film with what might be considered a good psychiatrist. I also think of Doris Lessing and her literary portrayals of psychiatry in England. And there are many tales of really heinous actions on the part of psychiatrists which are not fiction. Liars, thieves, mountebanks, I would say witch doctors but I suspect they are better men. No, on the whole the world would be a much better place without them and without many psychologists as well such as helped with “enhanced interrogation” some years back. Like politicians all we can mean by a good psychiatrist is an oxymoron.
It is all about control. All our institutions are now corrupt. What a marvelous way to eliminate trouble makers and to take guns from Vets! The Soviets used this method with great results. WE need a new Fourth of July. I am afraid the American people have forgotten what Freedom is. They have been so frequently reminded of their need for Safety that poor old Liberty has been reduced to sitting alone in an empty room of history. Psychiatric servitude has replaced the Still Voice and Peace of Mind. What children know adults have cast aside and live in a greater poverty than any other peoples on the planet. Life is meant to be lived joyously–but it takes some courage. Good luck people and be yourself as much as you can.
Compassion is what is needed. Without it nothing good will come. It is not something a person learns in a school. In fact university training is apt to discourage compassion by replacing it with thoughts. However, a great deal of mental health is about money and not about healing. Thus the more “education” the better the pay. Unfortunately the men and women who are in positions of power often are unfamiliar with compassion and therefore attempt to substitute something more appropriate for a machine. In this respect unfortunately science often comes to their aid.
Friedrich Holderlin, one of the great German poets, was a close friend of Hegel. He slipped into madness while still young and lived many years on a farm where he was taken care of by a kindly man. Whether Hegel ever visited him I do not know. Arthur Schopenhauer, who thought rather ill of Hegel, spent a great deal of time visiting asylums in Germany and getting to know the patients. Schopenhauer writes very lucidly and well and knew seven foreign languages but was not good at marketing himself — something Hegel was good at doing. I am not sure whether Schopenhauer ever formulated a theory of madness. He had various interesting ideas about mad persons. It would be worth someone’s time to research what he found out as he was a very brilliant philosopher and thinker and ahead of his time. He loved the Upanishads and the German mystics though he thought of himself as an atheist. His writing was much appreciated by persons such as Tolstoy, Proust, etc. And of course Nietzsche.
Of our several senses the most externalizing is sight. A very fine presentation of blindness is found in And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran. Also Lawrence Durrell presents some interesting aspects of blindness in his Alexandrian Quartet–one of his characters (Pursewarden’s blind sister, Liza) is a blind woman. Myself I tend to associate blindness with inner-ness. Yogis tend to meditate with their eyes closed. In sleep we find Peace. The eyes are very connected with the ego, the I-thought and the world. Hearing is more personal. People tell us a great deal with their voices. And as we know appearances (sight) can be deceiving. Consider Tiresias the blind prophet of Apollo. I think blindness has always been associated with special knowledge and wisdom. But not for example deafness. I believe sight may be the first sense to go at the time of death.
Excellent work. The trouble with truth in medicine is that the money stream dries up. Unfortunately, as I am sure you know, the whole world now functions around finance. Still it is a shock to see men and women who are respected as doctors deliberately making their patients sick in order to have a good income. A bad dream for me; a nightmare for those on these drugs and I suppose for those who have quit but have a history of their usage. The latter group worry me as this is very bad news indeed. On the other hand good nutrition and meditation may undo the negative consequences.
Unfortunately as we are finding out almost daily, the criminal element has taken over most of our institutions. This is such a shocking situation that it simply can not be handled by most persons and so these nefarious people are safe to continue their destruction of societies!
If instead of drug technicians we had genuine doctors, but then beggars would be driving Mercedes. If the FDA were really what it claims to be, these pharmaceuticals would all be Schedule 1: “Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.”
Imagine if we had medical schools where persons could learn about human bodies and what to do if they became ill . . . but then we would be imagining a world without corporations. The world is currently set up to ensure the health and well being of corporations. Just look how big and strong they are.
You would have been far better off talking LSD a few times. Or eating magic mushrooms.
At one time explanations of human nature in the West had to be filtered through religion. Even going back to the Greeks and Romans. However, in the art and literature of the various times the artist or writer could transcend these constraints and restrictions. Something like that still holds. A very fine novel by Max Sebold, Austerlizt, portrays a man without a childhood–or one he can not remember. When he begins to find that childhood through a childhood woman friend in Prague he also begins to have all sorts of symptoms from insomnia to panic attacks. He walks all night through the streets of London. Later after a fall during the time of paralyzing panic attacks he spends a year in a hospital. But the novel is beautifully written without relying on psychological jargon. And reader may see the subtle interconnections of times and places.
So I do not see any real advance in the study of human psychology. New jargon, a new paradigm (science?) but many entangling theories. What was once common sense now translated into almost unintelligible gibberish. Certainly very bad experiences will lodge in the memory bank and begin to function like magnets drawing similar experience whether the memories are accessible or not. It makes very good sense that bad experiences will hinder future behavior. A terrible childhood will be like fetters. War experiences can feel like a noose around the neck. Rape. Assault, a car accident, divorce . . . these change a person. Our pasts count for much in our lives. Part of a causal chain. In a very extroverted society like America people are not encouraged to know themselves much. Science sneers at anything that can not be quantified. It equates mind with brain. That is an unprovable assumption. Many scientists state hypotheses as matters of fact. There is a certain arrogance in that area. Intuition once represented by women is still treated much like women are treated as not quite equal and inclined to superstition.
The best novelists and poets are still the best sources of wisdom about people. As music can be and paintings. The real truth is everywhere spread for the observing and patient eye and ear. Without the philosopher Schopenhauer (who knew many languages and loved and valued the classics) there would have been no Freud. That might actually have been better? In any case Schopenhauer writes beautifully and was appreciated by Tolstoy, Conrad, Proust, Beckett, Hardy . . . and of course Wagner and Nietzsche.
Artists tend to be introverts and solitary. Not very American. Imagine spending a day with Shakespeare talking about people. A day with Thomas Mann. A day with Rilke. Or would you rather spend it with Freud? Or Jung? What about Dante? Or Rumi. My own preference would be the great writers. Poetry conveys a deeper level of life. Those moments of glimpse into a deeper truth. Eternities of the moment.
Thich Nhat Hanh spent a week with Vietnam vets. They sat silently with the last one for three hours before he could tell his story. And then over time with a bit of advise from Thich Nhat Hanh he completely recovered. Oh, and then there is the doctor who wrote Achilles In Vietnam and Odysseus In America. He was something of a Greek scholar as well and found a great deal of help in Homer. Best of luck!
Thanks for the additional information. Still pretty strong remark to appear in a national newspaper.
Gaza and Hamas only make sense if one remembers that in 1916 Britain finding itself in a tight spot purchased help from the Jews by promising what they could not honourably do–namely, give away someone else’s property. After the war the British wiggled out of this. But after WWII Truman also in a tight spot recognized Israel despite opposition from just about everyone including the new UN. Thus Israel was the thief’s land. Hamas’ rockets are a reminder. The thief obviously is unwilling to give up his booty. And must put a good face on self defence. No amount of questionable history or mythology can make the land belong to a people’s most of whom did not even exist ancestrally until the 8th or 9th century. But even if they were descendants of the original inhabitants almost two thousand years has eroded their claims which probably the Palestinians really have anyway as descendants of the original peoples. Hence, make sure the title is clear before purchasing. The solution is for Israel to shrink back to land it has a clear title to. That would make Israel about the size of Lichtenstein or Monaco. That would be in line with International Law; and I am sure there would be no more Hamas rockets to deal with!
Clearly all this violence and dishonesty wears on the mind and is factor in people’s mental health. But is rarely addressed in therapy as being too irrelevant or worldly?
When Milton Erickson was doing his internship as a young psychiatrist he worked in a mental hospital back East somewhere. There was one patient who never spoke to anyone but would simply sit and say odd things (I believe that is what he did.). So Milton sat each day with him and after quite a time he began doing the same things the patient was doing; at that point the patient asked him what he thought he was doing. He acted like a normal person. Milton was an extremely successful psychiatrist who did lots of crazy things one can not do anymore like set ups in restaurants and having one man live in his backyard for a while. Now days even MD’s are very constrained. So if Milton were the model the problem would be solved. But most psychiatrists lack the self knowledge of Dr Erickson and probably avoid getting it. So the real problem is human nature. Too few humans stay alive and vibrant after childhood. Too few take the good type of risk. Too many lack integrity. Like the American politician it is just easier to ride and ask polite questions and go along with the crowd. And tragically? we can do absolutely nothing about it. We are stuck with the human condition. I know this is sour news for reformers but there is a place for them so that things do not get even worse. But no utopias on this planet. It would nice if only men and women who had awakened minds could qualify for the medical profession. The same for all the professions; but then what would those souls do who need the experiences that come with corruption? Tossed by the way side?
In the meantime if I were a psychiatrist I would follow the advise of Peter Breggin regarding drugs. I would not have the many years to repeat his work. I would try various things especially those that worked for the very best therapists. And I would keep an eye cocked on world events. When Israel talks about “permissible genocide” which they are applying to Gaza I would consider how people will be effected by this and their country even supplying the means! We can not escape the world’s evil doings even in our own hidden rooms under the bed. It pervades all human space. So this would be an important part of my therapy. I would probably recommend certain novels and films. Actually as a therapist I have done this. And then finally I would stay detached and count myself for little in the whole process going on with each person. Watching and listening and wondering.
Regarding the journeys into madness: quite a number of persons have spoken about the brain as a filter. William James and Aldous Huxley for example. All radios are designed so that only one channel at a time comes through; were this not the case one might get two or three stations at once and a cacophony of voices and music. So one might conclude that these powerful drugs temporarily inhibit the filters–there are no doubt many. Once the filters are gone the normal world experience is penetrated by stuff normally automatically filtered out. Obviously the person like yourself is aghast at all this craziness coming in. And yet if you had mind reading ability which some people claim they have you would find all sorts of strange thoughts and ideas floating around in a city. Sort of like a private NSA going. And visual phenomenon as well. Each sense has a set of filters; and then the mind itself has them so that you do not find yourself reading other people’s thoughts. There may be times when you had wished you could but unless it can be turned off it can be a nightmare.
So you can call it schizophrenia or split mind or whatever you will but the labels are rather useless and even sound frightening. I think it is best to simply see that the drugs clogged the filters up; and you began getting what anyone would get if their filter system was failing. This is the paragon case of the cure worse than the ailment. It is irresponsible medicine for money. The symptoms are similar to what happens with poison and severe head injury . . . and keep in mind the food supply in America is doing something slowly and similar. And the water and the air. When the limits are reached the body goes into emergency behaviour, and the mind has its share of ordeal.
So without this drug experience you would never have discovered other aspects of the world. In this case frightening but then mystics tell of beautiful and ecstatic experiences which are likewise outside the filter though in their case the filters are removed as part of natural development and not as part of a drug experience.
You have provided very valuable material.
Yoga, the whole practice of postures, breathing and diet, as well as ethical considerations, will cure anything. Given the brains plasticity even changes in it and the nervous system can be healed. Personally I find meditation of inestimable value. Find a really good teacher though. Avoid cult type guru teachers. I know Alice Christensen is excellent. http://www.americanyogaassociation.org/contents.html
What we call corruption is flourishing for sure. Not a profession or business that has not been given an opportunity to host this condition, and all the important ones have signed on. No place for the innocent to run to and hide. You have penned an excellent article that I will be sending on to several.
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
David Hume
Hence, all warnings ought to be removed from all currently regarded dangerous substances as well as other sorts of dangers . . . they just induce the behavior one wished to prevent. I wonder how many people put flammable substances near a hot stove after reading they are highly flammable? The temptation must be greatly increased by the challenge. Or people that overdose on over the counter drugs like Advil? Etc. The discovery here will revolutionize labeling.
Or, ought we to conclude something else? Perhaps we ought to.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts” – Richard Feynman
Many years ago as a student at Stanford University I was very dissatisfied with my study of philosophy and psychology. It was not until I had spent seven years seriously studying Yoga that I got what I wanted. Philosophy at the time was ordinary language philosophy and psychology was simply depressing! Now I am sure Zen Buddhism would have done what Yoga did for me only as it turned out I found a Yoga teacher first.
The fact that people who take up one of these discipline tend to be both healthy and content or at least feel positive about their lives has not as far as I can see made much of an impression on academic psychology or medicine–just a little. Whereas fifty years ago meditation was consider the occupation of wackos, now it is respected. And Hatha Yoga has become very popular. But it has hardly been integrated into the world of mental health and illness.
Even diet is still somewhat obscure. National habits change slowly. In the meantime have a diet soda and some crackers with plenty of high fructose sugar. Given today’s homes and schools only very clever children stand a chance.
What is it about drugs that they have such an allure? Remember Tristan and Isolde and the love potion? Elixirs. If people are going to take something why not the psychedelics which are virtually non-toxic and do produce good results.
Well, as a society we are locked in a prison that only a few dare even try and escape. It is Plato’s cave. Many love their chains. And fear the light. Psychiatrists for the most part go about and oil the chains so they do not squeak so much.
Recently the well known journalist Amber Lyon in an interview told how taking psilosybin mushrooms had rescued her from trauma. She says they saved her life in fact. This feature of the drug is not new. But apparently the VA is not authorized to use it? Why pursue methods of a dubious nature if there is something likely to work? Psilosybin is a virtually non toxic substance though listed as a Schedule I drug. Government is not particularly bright? And there are several other substances that also might be effective. Surely giving these is preferable to suicide which is a common outcome for vets.
“In my view, there is a role for medical expertise in helping people with mental health problems, but that does not mean we have to call those problems illnesses. ” It is not clear what that role might be. I suppose determining that the condition is not due to a tumor or a serious concussion or the like. But after that medical training would seem to be a disqualification as the medical training would continue to see illnesses. Psychiatry is awkwardly positioned to do much more than extend medicine, hence illness and drugs. How long does the average persons spend with a psychiatrist before he or she is given a prescription? If I invite a carpenter to my house for a meal surely he will begin automatically to see things that might need repair or remolding. Giving an auto mechanic a ride in my car would lead to similar noticings. And so on.
So, we might need a few psychiatrists to check on brain disease or damage but that is done by neurologists. So really psychiatry is without a real job. I suppose he or she could simply be a referral point. You go to a neurologist and you go to a psycho-therapist. The pay would be bad though. And the pharmaceuticals would be disappointed.
So it is really mostly a money making scheme which it is now time to end.
Also since psychiatric medications are such a problem I have trouble coming up with a situation where they might be used. I tend to side with Dr. Peter Breggin and say never.
Why take such a big risk? After all some people have recovered from severe depression after a life threatening event. But we had best no recommend that to anyone. We can not say: Go now and jump off a cliff; if it does not kill you it may bring about a recovery.
P.S. I want to mention that your article is very well written and even reminds me of Bolano’s novel The Savage Detectives which is about a group of teenage poets living in Mexico City. Your English teacher has probably read this amazing novel.
Another good resource is Peter Breggin, MD and his book Your Drug May Be Your Problem. He also has a web site and created a fine journal called “Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry” wherein you will find many allies. Probably a local university will have this journal in a data bank–maybe even a large public library. You may even find like minded professionals in Mexico City who will help you. Yours is a noble cause–of that there can be no doubt. But money or pesos have embodied themselves in all kinds of peoples: bankers of course and the usual suspects like psychiatrists and professors and teachers and all those who love the status quo. What is scary is these people even have children that get drugged as well. Where I live they put fluoride in the drinking water though it is a neuro-toxin. I have tried to get some attention on this in my town which a few years ago was designated the best place in America to raise children! Ha. And I am sure the drugs flow freely here as well. It is always puzzling how people immediately think you are a crank or a crazy person to imagine the good gov would poison people or start a pointless war based on lies. Too fantastic they say and walk quickly away!! Ha. Best of luck and keep us informed here of your trial, tribulations and successes.
“Demasiada cordura puede ser la peor de las locuras, ver la vida como es y no como debería de ser.
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Your project strikes me as very creative. I have known only one person who seems to benefit from psychiatric drugs . . . but I fear for her brain and nervous system. Already her hands shake from the lithium. At least her psychiatrist wants to get her off the drugs as soon as feasible. Hopefully some of these doctors are simply misled and like Don Quixote are seeing mental illness everywhere even usually when it is not there at all. And without a Sancho Panza for assistance they may destroy themselves in the process. How painful to believe you are helping people when actually you are doing opposite.
But money, money and more money. In 1960 when I was 18 I lived for a while in Mexico City. It was really a beautiful place then and not particularly dangerous. The food was wonderful and the warm autumn sun. But now having read some of Roberto Bolano’s novels I can see how much things have changed.
Your group is in the position of Sancho Panza as outlined here: ““Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” Asked Sancho Panza.
“The ones you can see over there,” answered his master, “with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.”
“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
“Obviously,” replied Don Quijote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
“There are so many things in human living that we should regard not as traumatic learning but as incomplete learning, unfinished learning.” –Milton Erickson
So, what remains to be learned? I suppose one resort would be to learn martial arts. Maybe someone working in a setting like yours needs to be prepared for someone suddenly experiencing a trauma thaw out that transports them to another time and place. I think this would be a wise course of action. It is also likely that some education and training would give you the skill to recognize someone with a history of violent behavior. Some people have this ability naturally. I can usually sense when someone is like a strung bow or a cocked pistol. So there now are two positive and constructive things you might do.
Maybe Dr. Torrey had a large mortgage to pay or children to educate and found himself without any clients of course since he had essentially dumped his profession. I doubt the change was due to illumination. He starts out rather idealistically and then runs out of cash. And runs to where the money is. It is hard to figure the cause any other way. Usually people go from a bias to a more enlightened point of view.
Bad memories will manifest as what people call mental illness. Nothing like a congested subconscious to bring on a range of irrational behavior and strange thoughts and emotions. Call it what you will the solution is to deal with the dragons. And it may help to have an experienced dragon hunter and guide along. How many people though would call up someone who listed himself as a dragon hunter or guide? Still it might be a more honest presentation. What do you think?
“Sandy Hook Redux: Obama officials confirm that it was a drill and no children died”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/06/13/sandy-hook-redux-obama-officials-confirm-that-it-was-a-drill-and-no-children-died/
“I have a lot of sources in regards to as to what’s going on with the president and the administration and so on, and every one of my sources said it was a false flag”–Paul Preston
Of course this sounds like conspiracy theory, doesn’t it? And no one likes to be labelled a conspiracy theorist, but not infrequently the truth is unavailable in MSM.
A dab more: “Sofia Smallstorm, who produced and directed the documentary, “Unraveling Sandy Hook”, which many regard as the best video study of the Sandy Hook event, recently interviewed a Los Angeles school expert, Paul Preston, about Sandy Hook and his knowledge of what had transpired.
Governor Malloy had held a press conference that day, explaining that he and the Lt. Governor had been “spoken to” that something like this might happen, which raised the question, what “something like this” did he mean? Had he been told a school shooting massacre would take place? or a drill that would be presented as a real event, which appears to be what took place?
Remarkably, we now have confirmation from an unexpected source. Paul Preston had obtained information from officials in the U.S. Department of Education of the Barack Obama administration, who confirmed to him on the basis of their own personal knowledge that:
(1) it had been a drill;
(2) no children had been killed; and,
(3) it had been done to promote an anti-gun agenda.
Given his background of 41 years in the California public school system (from custodian to district superintendent) and having served as a teacher, coach, vice-principal and principal before retiring in 2012 as the superintendent of two charter schools, I thought what he had to say about Sandy Hook deserved widespread dissemination.”
Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? Hope you read this and make your own decision.
There are few persons in the world who no longer look outside themselves for fulfillment. Most people want something from someone else. Your first psychiatrist wanted you to have serious mental illness though he probably could not have adequately defined what that was or even if it existed. It was not as though he had diagnosed you with TB or anemia. No, he was working within an imaginary realm where mental illnesses existed and needed no defining other than his pronouncements. And yet this person had attended medical school and was obviously not of low intelligence. He had done an internship. He ought to have been responsible. He could have said, You seem to be unhappy. What is your life like? Please tell me. Maybe I can help you find some happiness and joy in your life. I will try my best.
But rather, he said, You have a serious mental illness. Don’t you think that strange coming form a well educated and intelligent man/woman? I do. I think this was not just arrogance. He was a part of a system and a society of many such persons who gave and were expected to give diagnoses and get paid handsomely. So in a way he was not well educated and not using his intelligence. He was behaving almost like a robot. How did he get that way? What happened to him when he was in the 9th grade and later on? It is not easy to become a doctor. Lots of work. And not a lot of fun. Why would someone go through that to end up making this frightening pronouncements to some one too young and sensitive to grasp the significance of what he said. It was in some respects like a sexual assault though one authorized by society. Honored even.
14 years of age is very young to be confronted by a subtle form of intellectual dishonesty which had become habitual with this psychiatrist. He or she had learned it from professors here and there and in medical school. Perhaps also at home from a parent. Once lying becomes a practice it goes on without one even knowing it.
In essence you were lied to at 14 by someone who ought not to have been telling lies but was. Out of fear perhaps. He or she had a family. Bills, a mortgage, etc.
A lie told by an authority has a lot of power in it. No wonder lies have always been considered dangerous and evil. Look what they can do to others. Well, I imagine your parents and insurance companies ended up paying a lot of money to that profession and the pharmacies. And you were lucky to have escaped their clutches.
But on the whole this is what one should expect in a nation like America where money is king and a god to boot. And finding a new and better king to take its place may be the hardest task a nation ever had.
There were no problems in the schools I went to for primary and secondary levels of education. Most of the students were healthy; and no one on drugs. Virtually no bullying or after school fighting of any severity. There were 60 students in my high school graduating class. I was a guy. None of the girls got pregnant. There may have been a few drinking problems among the older students–but not many. I found school fun and enjoyable. Also sports. University was not nearly so good a place to learn. I went to Stanford.
Of course this was rural America between 1947 and 1960. Juvenile delinquents were a city problem. But what has changed in America since that time. Well, hundreds of military adventures. Almost all were done to serve the military industrial complex. None were perpetrated for national defense. A president was assassinated followed by a white wash investigation. Etc. Many men with severe consequences as a result came home and begot children. For a starter that seems pretty good. Harsh home environments especially in suburbs and cities. The rural areas depopulated. Consumerism took over.
No school can compensate for all of this. As Dante mentions: No man can be a good citizen in a bad society. Probably no one can be mentally and physically healthy leading a conventional life in a bad society either!
If teachers were well trained and armed that would be the end of school shootings. The same goes for many other areas. The wild west was less wild than Hollywood films would lead one to believe because carrying a gun had a very decided effect on one’s behavior. I think we know now that schools push psychiatric drugs. And who knows what the person on that drug will do. Again how trust worthy are the news stories about the mass shootings?
A very straight forward and honest curriculum for schools determined locally would be best. The Federal Government rarely produces outstanding results. Children know when they are lied to but are usually disciplined out of saying so. If teachers lie as they do they lose the respect of the children. The same for all educators. But lying is the American Way.
We have to rebuild the nations after it collapses. It will take several generations. But first the country must hit the bottom of the barrel. I do not know when that will occur.
When truth once again is highly regarded we will have a new dawn. When kids are taught about freedom as opposed to various sexual positions in primary school that will be a good sign. Social engineering by idiots produces crazy societies. People though need to wake up to the world they find themselves in and do some reflecting. It is good for their health even.
While I agree with Dr. Breggin that psych meds should never be given to anyone, yet I can see how that might work in spite of their effects. Here is how. Someone can be so locked into a state of mind that anything that changes that can give hope. The illusion that this drug will help also has a placebo possibility. Change alone can inspire an improved mood. But the risks are terrible.
Almost every film in which a psychiatrist appears he is presented as an evil doer! And not by some accident or misperception on the part of the script writer or novelist. For example, the Millennium Trilogy–Girl With Dragon Tattoo. What sort of person typically becomes a psychiatrist? Similarly one might ask about attorneys. Professions offer a path to power over people. They can easily become corrupted as has our legal system. And of course the medical system. In fact in America corruption has become all the rage. America is now a corrupt society. Starting with that fact which is painful but the case, we have a big job ahead of us in order for America to even survive. We are like a house that termites have taken control of and are in great danger of collapsing. Lies will not work anymore. Like the VA hospitals the truth starts spilling out into the public. Time to clean up America and to leave to other nations their own destines. We can start in our own homes in our own lives.
You might notice that it is the English speaking nations (except Canada) where this inequality is greatest. Germany which is the richest nation in Europe is almost like Japan in terms of mental illness. A different ethos. Nations with a higher Catholic populations are less likely to revile the poor.
But in America money is king. People have an exaggerated idea of what money can do.
And they fear the reproaches they will receive if they get low on money. No sympathy for those out of work. Calvinism is a big factor. Are you of the Elect?
Money creates a false sense of independence and of detachment. What people really want can never be gotten through money which is self assurance and genuine security; but those valuable conditions are a matter of character and experience.
This approach almost seems like a comedy routine. How much money did it cost to make this all but unintelligible discovery? “psychosis susceptibility (and resilience) involves the independent and synergistic confluence of (temporally-sensitive) biological and environmental factors across development” = hence, try to get born into a happy family in the extended sense. A smart person could conclude this without the need to present it in such intimidating terms. This is more wasted research to conclude what has always been known by the wise. The materialistic approach is itself part of what is driving society into a kind of collective madness. Harvard gets large donations to perpetuate things which are harmful to people. And not alone in medicine and psychology. Law, political science, philosophy, etc. At some point one might awaken to the travesty of modern American education.
I know quite a few mental health professionals . . . a few well. I do not think the training they get in a university is particularly good. I am not sure a person can be trained for this profession intellectually. Sure a few pointers of a practical nature. But on the whole I sense that the training becomes a barrier to deep listening. How many think drugs are good idea? A bit of research would show they were not. However, in most circles a person needs to appear to believe that sometimes . . . occasionally . . . some persons. And then the unnatural 50 minute hour, plus a bunch of state rules . . . the sterile offices. The labels. The argot. No, it seems very impersonal and almost designed to create a mental illness whatever that is. Well, we know what an infected wound is. Do we have anything thing comparable for the mind? Should life be easy and comfortable? Religion as superstituti0n replaced by mental health the new superstition? Prayer by drugs. God by scientific knowledge? Etc. The whole approach is wrong yet unlikely to be replaced.
Dr. Stephen Olson should work for the VA hospitals where they do a more thorough job of covering things up. Personally I think we are seeing the post-modern attitude towards humans which is that they are organic machines of no appreciable value–in most cases. This is all slightly psychopathic. On the other hand I believe these types have always been around. The sluggishness with which this sort of behavior is investigated is also remarkable unless one is in one of these vast entities. Of course the University of Minnesota does not wish to scare off any rich source of income like the corporations.
You know back in the ’60’s it only took rumors to get the psychedelics banned; and even research was prohibited. And yet it has been determined they are barely toxic. Safer than an Advil. There was no money to be made with these drugs. Same goes for most of the illegal drugs. But illegal they do make money and lots of it. Banks have been saved with drug money!
Thus we have legal crime which you are pointing out; and illegal crime. Both pay. Money is king in the West. A psychiatrist giving a patient LSD would be arrested, tried and sent to jail. Justice. A doctor in effect murdering a mentally ill person goes on to the next experimental subject. Don’t rock the boat. Ethics are a nuisance.
Yes, we have all these investigative agencies but they are on a leash. Looking into this stuff one can become jaded.
This doctor should lose his license and then go on to jail. But he probably won’t. How much money does he bring in for the University? There are always persons in the shadows that know the DA’s . . . it is a case of insufficient evidence. Lack of proof. Surely he is good sincere doctor. And like the head of the VA working hard . . . Well, those are the stories. The tales. The good lies.
Did you ever consider Yoga? I went through about five very very difficult years. Certainly suicide was my companion often though I never quite gave it a try. Finally I learned to meditate. I dedicated myself to the practice. During this dark time I had two distinct breaks or psychotic episodes though I was able to keep them to myself mostly. I was never hospitalized nor did I see a psychiatrist or psychotherapist after the first initial phase of about six or so months. I could see they could not help me. And the psychotic episodes came towards the end of that five years. Then in two years time I was fortunately able to go through all the fear. I would sit for long periods of time watching this darkness but with increasing concentration. And then one day it came to an end. Like a prison term. Or an illness. Since then which has been over forty years I have had no serious threat of depression . . . I found that the dark emotions were simply energy or fuel for some project or other. They were not me at all. No more so than a slum I might drive through. Or an area ravaged by fire or earthquake. Of course Yoga or Buddhism is not for everyone. But it does help to have some sort of transcendental assistance. Your story is quite impressive. And powerful. I have a friend who has been saved by lithium. A woman doctor from Russia. But her hands shake. I would like to find something better for her–but it is risky as she goes into manic episodes easily. We live in a very primitive society. And getting more so. Native Americans would have had a better solution through a medicine man. We are ignorant of the most important realities. Good luck.
I have gotten the impression from very reliable sources that Adam Lanza never existed; that the school where the massacre took place was no longer used due to asbestos, etc. and had been converted to a store place for unused school furniture, etc. In other words Sandy Hook was a hoax or a trial run that was taken as real to the public. It looks like Dr. Fox may be paying for his sins by helping out. The evidence for this is really overwhelming.
“Alert: imperial psychiatric empire is invading the mind”
Jon Rappoport http://www.prisonplanet.com/alert-imperial-psychiatric-empire-is-invading-the-mind.html
“Jeffrey Lieberman, president of the American Psychiatric Association: “We need a public-health initiative for mental health care that moves out of clinical settings into the community, whether it’s in primary care, education, the workplace, or faith-based organizations.”
Meaning: tons of new propaganda about the need for psychiatric treatment; the building of community psychiatric centers all across the country; pressure to submit to treatment applied in ordinary doctors’ offices, in schools, in private companies, in churches.”
Short but excellent treatment of a diabolical bit of legislation. $$ for the pharmaceuticals though.
Two German films set in East Germany prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union give one a preview of life in America given the nation’s current drift. The Lives Of Others and Barbara. The latter is the story of a doctor send to a country side hospital as punishment. Both seem to resonate with this nation’s current oligarchic direction. Psychiatry is being seen as a useful tool for dealing with dissonant types. Mandatory treatment will be most important. I believe after 9/11 that George W. hired the former top head of the Stasi to help out in the USA. Have not heard much about him since.
Non-Conformity & Creativity Now Listed As A Mental Illness By Psychiatrists
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/05/06/non-conformity-creativity-now-listed-mental-illness-psychiatrists/
“The manual is used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illnesses, and it seems that with each new issue a new, made up mental illness is added to the list. This isn’t something new, in the Soviet Union, a systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place and was based on the interpretation of political dissent as a psychiatric problem. Mental illness has been used for political repression, those who were/are non-conformant and do/did not accept the beliefs of authority figures (like government agencies) face labels that do not represent them at all, and have no scientific backing what so ever. (1)
“On the first glance, political abuse of psychiatry appears to represent a straightforward and uncomplicated story: the deployment of medicine as an instrument of repression. Psychiatric incarceration of mentally healthy people is uniformly understood to be a particularly pernicious form of repression, because it uses the powerful modalities of medicine as tools of punishment, and it compounds a deep affront to human rights with deception and fraud. Doctors who allow themselves to be used in this way betray the trust of society and breach their most basic ethical obligations as professionals.”
It would appear that all of us here at Mad In America are suffering from UDD: “Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness? According to the latest addition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it looks that way. The manual identifies a mental illness labelled as “oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD. It’s defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior.” (0) It’s also included in the category of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).”
Is this the serious psychiatric world’s humor? A sick joke in the professional sense of sick? I suggest a category for the psychiatrists who believe this stuff. Something that involves delusion. Compulsive delusional diagnosing disorder. CDDD.
There are always an abundance of cruel and savage people willing to play these immoral games for the oligarchs. Behind all this there is always money and more money. Things never change. Technology makes the world look deceptively different but at its root it is the ever same place.
Yes, psychiatry is one piece of a diabolic puzzle. But there are many more. Presently the USA and EU are involved in the destruction of Ukraine. Just I might add as they were in the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria . . . the USA has a long history now of destroying nations and calling it bringing democracy. It would like to bring its democracy to Venezuela as well.
And then there is the world of nuclear power, of GMO’s, of herbicides like Roundup . . . It would seem that the list in endless.
This nation and obviously a number of others have fallen under the influence of a powerful wizard or something of that sort. They have become subhuman states that treat their citizens like animals in a lab experiment. You are lucky to have escaped.
Because it happened so slowly and almost naturally it seems most people do not realize what has occurred in this nation. And of course it was always a good distance from being perfect. But now it seems to be accelerating towards a very dark conclusion. What form that will take I do not know. But threatening Russia is a very bad omen. The USA is no longer the powerful nation it once was. Economically it is actually quite weak. I read just today that maternals deaths are so high here that the USA has fallen to number 60 among the nations. Marriage and family have a bad reputation, and there is little in the way of future for young people. This definitely means something but just what remains still half in darkness. I hope your efforts to dethrone psychiatry will succeed. I hope other similar efforts in other areas will also succeed. Otherwise, the future is extremely grim.
“Stalinist-style show-trial: Former top shrink for FBI to be involuntarily committed”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/04/28/stalinist-style-show-trial-former-top-shrink-for-fbi-to-be-involuntarily-committed/
“In a shocking development, Alen J. Salerian, M.D., the former top psychiatrist for the FBI, is about to be involuntarily committed to a prison psychiatric facility for indefinite detention.”
I had two clients that went through this. A real nightmare. You can forget civil rights if the gov is after you. Above the law. Haven’t read the Constitution for years.
“Now we don’t protest in the streets against people being tortured and abused by psychiatry.”
I suppose we should refer to it as “enhanced therapy”– to be PC. As the study done by Princeton and Northwestern Universities pointed out the USA is an oligarchy, not a democracy. So the explanation behind all these things must be a financial or power explanation. Either the oligarchs are making money or they are not. In what you are writing about, they are. Or gaining power.
What this means is that Our opinion counts for very little. Theirs is crucial. I am not sure what we can do in our current situation with our current status as chattel. The courts are not our friends. We probably are inching towards some kind of revolution or revolt.
Psychiatry is a profession without a field in which to operate. It is a phantom profession. It is based on the assumption that if I have a condition which someone decides at some point in history is schizophrenia, then the obvious treatment will be gotten from a doctor, an MD, who has specialized in a fantastic area called psychiatry. With a nice glossary of technical and atrocious sounding terms some of which will be applied to me plus a certain studious, professional, scrutinizing look this man or woman will make certain unintelligible pronouncements which are really gibberish; and I might recover after some time or not. The addition of concoctions less likely to help than to harm will be administered and perhaps my blood will be examined at a later date to see if the dose is toxic. All this is expensive as well. The end product for the psychiatrist for this imaginary activity is a nice house, perhaps an expensive European car, and a fairly high status among the ignorant who are legion.
Whether he succeeds in driving out my devils will not matter as the way this racket is arranged he has succeeded even if he fails. And he fails and fails and fails. In a sense we should pity this man who does so much harm with his strange profession. He is really a failed wizard. He never attended wizard school. Poor deluded man or woman.
Good for you! Someone referred to these people as the city shadows. What the “normal” and “well behaved” people keep repressed pops up in these who must be hidden away on a low budget. As some one recently put it we are living now in post-legal American where if your social rank is high enough crime no longer exists. Bankers, high public officials, the very wealthy . . . But those in lower ranks must be the whipping boys. Punish them severely so that the amount of punishment will cover their betters. While Obama eats half his $300 sushi these must be put on half rations to make for justice. Temperance.
What these primitive types who legislate as well as the even more primitive types behind the scenes pulling the financial strings fail to realize is that this behavior is more than expensive. There is a very subtle accounting system that measures these things and the penalties for fraud are very high. If only they knew before they are given the task of undoing the harm they have brought about.
Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.
Anyone who read the Millennium Trilogy or watched the Swedish films knows that even in a rather more enlightened state like Sweden psychiatrists have way too much power. In fact while we ridiculed and criticized how psychiatry was used in the Soviet Union the same sort of thing was occurring and continues to occur in the USA and most places in the EU.
In Colorado the judiciary has a little trick it can use on prisoners awaiting trial who complain about their attorneys. They can have them examined by someone resembling a second rate vet who will pronounce them incompetent to stand trial; they then will be sent to the State Mental Hospital (for the criminally insane, etc.) in Pueblo where they will be drugged as a matter of course and kept confined until they become compliant to stand trial. A judge there will always give the doctor permission to drug against their will and never listens to the defendant. The machine rolls on.
As Princeton and Northwestern Universities informed us recently the USA is an oligarcy, not a democracy or some other benign form of government. So the question is which oligarchs see a profit in this legislation? That is the only relevant question. All the proof in the world will be nothing unless it shows clearly how the profit will not be forth coming. Or the power.
Of course it is barbaric or worse as the barbarians were not generally psychopaths or under their influence. What the term is I do not know. America has become increasingly primitive and violent. The Fed gov is so arrogant it is almost impossible to deal with it without having a gun shoved in one’s face. We are not far from a full scale tyranny which will be arranged for our safety. The world is too dangerous for freedom. Sorry.
Body-Mind Restoration: ‘Too Good To Be True’ for Addiction and Disease?
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/04/22/body-mind-restoration-too-good-to-be-true-for-addiction-and-disease/
very intriguing alternative
This sounds worth following up!
Body-Mind Restoration: ‘Too Good To Be True’ for Addiction and Disease?
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/04/22/body-mind-restoration-too-good-to-be-true-for-addiction-and-disease/
Excellent and valuable article. So the USA is a mess to put it mildly. The people of power and money have no interest in the nation being a decent place. Who will win? The good guys or the bad guys? Currently it looks like the bad guys have the edge. But a new balance is building. Some kind of revolution is inevitable. A civil war would imply two or more areas of opposition. I do not see that. I see the People and the Other People (corporations, oligarchs). So a revolution is the more likely. The oligarchs are greatly outnumbered. They can not count on the mercenaries for protection beyond a certain point. Nor could King George. I do not like the idea of a revolution–but is there a viable alternative?
Besides the preposition in as in Mad In America we have several other revealing ones. For example, mad with America; mad throughout America; mad with America. I see America’s political and social structure as quite ideal to drive people mad. The nation has not changed all that much since it accepted slavery as the status quo; since it accepted the saying: the only good Indian is a dead one. And of course other instances of savagery and bigotry. Presently “we” have the drones regularly killing people we do not know in Yemen. Suspected bad guys. children, old people, etc. Who among us is taking responsibility for those deaths? How does it feel to be an American? Glad they are killing people almost at random? Well, it is a step down from the hundreds of thousands in Iraq–whew! and the thousands in Afghanistan. All to make life better for the oligarchs!
So now let’s turn to mental health. Who is crazy today? Who took their pill this morning? Don’t forget. John McCain wants us to send weapons to Ukraine. Get a civil war going there. Maybe in the USA later. Won’t need to ship weapons to the USA fortunately. Save shipping costs. Could we pull off a preemptive strike on Russia? You know they are contemplating that back in D. C..
The truly crazy ones are convinced they are sane. The rest are just terrified. Someone has to play mentally ill so the nation can keep grinding the earth down into the abyss. Now we even have the schools really getting into it. Just pick out some students and tell the parents they are in need of a psychiatrist. One looked like he was using his finger like the barrel of a gun. My God, a potential terrorist in the 3rd grade!!!!
But the REAL will prevail. Soon.
Once we accept the fact that drugs are not a solution then we can put full energy into something that is. America presently as a society is a bad one. That is a fact. It’s depressing. If a pregnant woman is depressed that is a communal problem. Does she have friends? A husband? Etc. Prescribing a drug is farcical. A bad joke. No solution is preferable to a dangerous one.
They say she seemed to get better. We have no alternative. They saved my life. Etc. People also promote the drug. Henry gets out of bed now and does things. Maybe staying in bed was a better solution. I doubt he would spend the next fifty years there. No one can know if a drug saved someone’s life. There are alternatives. Seemed to get better is not got better. Prove she is really better now. You mean she is less of problem to you.
People are not machines. Would you put random stuff in a new BMW that was not working well? Psychiatrists are not nearly as observant as a good car mechanic. Even if we were machines a psychiatrist would be the wrong person to see. They hardly notice who you are. They are in a trance as far removed from sanity as you are.
To claim that science has betrayed humanity would be wrong. Not science but scientists. And not all scientists. Just those that have been bought. But from the look of it that amounts to quite a few scientists. Clearly the pharmaceuticals can not be trusted.
I am not sure psychiatrists should be called scientists. They may have gotten some of the training but in their practices they more resemble merchants wanting to move a lot of product. In this case drugs. They must also have muzzled their consciences. Think of all the damaged children.
Universities bear a great responsibility for much of this. After the 1960’s they too fell into the hands of the oligarchs and began working to please a group of people with little in the way of ethics or humanity.
“White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco gave a speech this week [at Harvard] in which she urged parents to watch their children for signs of “confrontational” behavior which could be an indication of them becoming terrorists.” Echos of Thomas Hobbes. The Sovereign is absolute.
Then we have Northwestern and Princeton Universities coming out with a study that concludes that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy. “The iron rule of oligarchy” –Robert Michels
Imagine trying to grow up now in this society. It would not be easy. Primary school children handcuffed by police for writing with a marker on a desk. Etc.
My conclusion is that just as individuals can experience psychotic episodes, or more simply go crazy, for a while, so can large social entities.
In the USA main stream journalism is really shameful. And I think most journalists have only a superficial education. Almost everything that goes on in this nation has history connected to it which if unknown makes the current happening unintelligible or improperly interpreted.
Finally in a recent interview Justice Scalia quoted Justice Ginsberg to the effect that our freedoms are not absolute–maybe a few are. Strictly speaking the statement does not really make sense. The Bill of Rights was his target. He wants us to understand that the gov may violate them–and that that is okay. He has interpreted the Bill of Rights as suggestions rather than prohibitions. Well, we already learned that with the NDA.
So I believe we now are living in a fairly totalitarian society. It has been gradual and is not yet complete. We may soon hear commentators telling us that oligarchy is actually a good system of government.
All this is not very good for a peoples mental health. I imagine the Civil War in the 19th century left many in very disturbed conditions. I wonder if a study has ever been done on those consequences. Women and children without the husband and father in their lives. Lost siblings and children. A terrible catastrophe. And our other wars since.
So drugs are an easy way to pacify a large population. The Bill is clearly designed to enable more control. Nothing to do with the individual or the family. And in the meantime in any case our water, air and food are more and more contaminated. Our schools are teaching lies. The media is polluted. Etc.
I agree that those that can see and who have vision need to be active. The first step is to be well informed. Probably step one is to throw out the TV. Turn off the radio. Stop reading the news papers and get news on the Internet. With some practice one can find a good deal of genuine news regarding current events. And all current events are re-plays. There are just so many stories. Ukraine is a re-play from the Cold War. Someone has even re-worked some Nazism to heat things up. Variations on old themes. You can find ancestors in the Peloponnese Wars. Plato for example laid all this out in the Republic and the Laws. If you know the classics you can see now as then or then as now.
The Soviet Union used the mental illness bit to deal with dissidents. Haldol was a favorite of theirs. The Nazis turned children on their parents and parents on their children. Clive Bundy is the native American being cheated out of his land and livelihood. America has a very dark past it has chosen to repress and the repression is now in control.
Obama is acting out the repressed history of styles of governing. He does not know this in my opinion as considerable drug usage has probably seriously undermined his cognitive abilities. Whereas Putin can talk well without a teleprompter, Obama can not. Putin acts like a real leader. Obama comes across as a golf pro at best. Of the top three in the USA gov only Boehner manages to look okay–which is not to say I approve of him. Reid looks and is a nasty man. Biden looks sort out of it and foolish and not keen minded.
I am really not sure at all that the Fed gov should be involved in mental health.
Personally I think the USA will have to completely collapse and then be reconstituted before these serious problems can be addressed in a mature way. We can lay the ground work now. But I see a disastrous collapse in the near future. It can be survived though.
Recently Northwestern and Princeton Universities released a study that concluded the USA was an oligarchy and not a democracy. The article said that this would be taught in classes at these two universities. So probably in others as well. Thus, the military has been making the world safe for oligarchy. That matches the facts.
My observation is the USA is making its citizens sick. It is impossible now to find anyone who is either not on a psychiatric medication or who does not have a friend or relative using them. My neighborhood could be viewed as an asylum were it not for the Hispanics who seem more immune to mental illness. Lots of bi-polar and alcoholism.
The Bundy Ranch is a good example of taking a stand against the oligarchy. When the whole nation decides to be a Bundy Ranch then the oligarchy will recede–though that element never entirely goes away.
Bringing down the psychiatrists is a good start . . . next the pharmaceuticals . . . then the medical world needs a real revolution . . . then the schools . . . our food supply . . . our water and air . . . the nuclear power plants need to go . . . the military budget needs a major cut . . . we need office holders who can make friends with other nations and not enemies . . . it can be done.
Where do people locate themselves? Where is the “me” located; and is the “me” any different than the “I”? Some people at least speak about their inner life. Or someone might say, what do you feel or see when you look within yourself? Where is that within? I am sure a person does not mean their liver or lungs or their brain. But there is a space, a private space occupied by the I or the me or the I-me.
Now the psychiatrist does not bother with these “metaphors”. Science dispenses with folk language. The psychiatrist has photos of the functioning brain in color. He hopes to prove something, but he is not a neurologist. Nor a pharmacist. But he uses pills.
Soon he will have a machine that he will hook you up to. The machine will have a program and stimulate various areas of the brain depending on the diagnosis which the machine will make first. Like the most modern vehicles that can be tested diagnostically with a computer. Eliminate human error.
Perhaps later the psychiatrist will be replaced with a very advanced robot. This robot will read brain scans and micro expressions. It will know you like you have never been known. It will read your body completely. Even your DNA.
It will have you implanted with a chip so that it can be with you always. It will be your secret second self. You will never be alone or inconsolable. It will be the God you never had.
This sounds like science fiction. Science has a realm. That which exits is the subject matter of science; that which is quantifiable. Souls can not be measured–so souls do not exist. Bodies can be quantified so they exist. Logical positivism. But it is not really logical as it is based on an assumption. The senses give us the only real knowledge. That can not be proved. Christians actually support empiricism. They are very attached to the body that will be resurrected. I am not sure what they need a soul for? They have the body.
Psychiatry belongs to this misguided confusion about what is real. What is real? What is the closest to you? Your body, your thoughts, your feelings, the part of you that witnesses you? If you are the witness then by scientific definition you are not real. Sorry. The Witness can not be perceived because that which sees can not be seen. You are not a thing. Even a soul would be a subtle thing.
So the psychiatrist stands on a position that denies you exist. He does not deny that there is an animated body across from him. But the real you is non existent for him. No wonder that he flounders around. He can only treat the real. That means the body. You have to be the body and nothing more. But you may not oblige him. And that is where the crux of the problem is. The psychiatrist thinks that you are a naturally occurring robot. He can not define or grasp the essence of Consciousness/Life.
The peculiar case of the Russian doctor
Although I do psychotherapy this person is a friend and not a client. She was given Prozac for depression in a rather casual way for depression. I am not sure how long she took it at that time. A couple of years later she was given it again for the same reason. When I met her she had decided to quit after about four months. About 6 weeks later she had a frightening psychotic episode. At the time she was 39. In the years that followed she was sometimes on and sometimes not on drugs. She went almost two years without them and then had another psychotic episode. Now for quite some time she has been taking a moderate to low dose of Seroquel at night and a moderate or low dose of lithium in the day. Any divergence from this and she goes into pretty bad episodes. Her hands shake some.
This might be okay as a solution if the drugs were without side effects and eventual dangers. But they are not. She does Yoga and Shamanism. Inner sound. Etc.
Fortunately her psychiatrist wants to get her off the drugs and spends quite a bit of time with her when they meet.
Withdrawal symptoms? Maybe but so violent she has been hospitalized numerous times and by now knows many psychiatrists in the region. At least a dozen. She is doing fine now and seems normal. She might easily have been a beautiful Russian film star; she has incredible vitality. Her memory is unimpaired. She is very manually dextrous. Etc.
Her one weakness is that she shies away from much processing. When her life goes off, like a relationship breaks down, she often runs to my place for a while. Usually after a spell in a hospital. Otherwise, she is too wild and destructive to have around.
Perhaps someone will have an intuition about her. I have exhausted mine. It superficially looks like the Prozac started it; but there must have been some underlying elements. She tells me she does not realize it when she becomes manic. I believe her. And she expands rapidly. She thinks there is a trauma in her very early life. But can not recall it. Thanks
Artist Creates Self-Portraits On Different Drugs
http://elitedaily.com/envision/artist-creates-self-portraits-on-different-drugs-and-the-results-are-insane-photos/
This man has done an incredible job of capturing the essence of what these drugs do. They are both humorous and frightening by turns. Imagine them lining the walls of a medical school where psychiatry is taught or even better a pharmacy. While you wait in line you get a powerful candid portrait painted of a man on your drug!!!!
I hope these will circulate widely as they tell what is beyond words.
An intriguing question: if you were approached by someone who appeared to possess considerable power and given these choices which would you take?
Alternative One: you are depressed and miserable because you are a sinner and unreformed. God is now punishing you in hopes that you will see the light. Give up your errant ways and do His will. Etc. You are not alone: there is God, his angel and the demons.
Alternative Two: you are acutely depressed because you have a chemical imbalance. It may be genetic. We do not know. After all we are organic machines with lots of parts and perhaps some of yours are broken or badly formed. This drug may help. No guarantees of course, but we do have other drugs. And science is working away day and night to find others. Aside: yes, you are alone in the vastness of inner space.
Alternative Three: There is some connection between the way you feel now and your past. It is not likely that you were born feeling miserable and depressed. It is not the natural condition of a human being. If you do a few healthful things though you might wonder why and find a good mentor to tell your stories to, you will recover and find some contentment and happiness. In the meantime you might find it useful to think of yourself as a traveler on a journey. Try to enjoy the journey. You can imagine yourself years from now feeling happy enough and looking back on now and wondering why you did not enjoy the scenes out the window . . . you might as well. It is a real part of being human to feel down in the dumps. It does not make you a freak. Great men and women have gone through lots of despair at times. Perhaps it is your greatness as a human being that is trying to get born; and birth can be painful. Don’t be misled. Have some faith in a flower or a tree; walk in a park and breath deeply. You are fine.
‘Abandon all hope ye that take this pill.’ –not Dante or at the beginning of The Inferno.
Hope is probably the state of mind of the person who first ventures into the office of a psychiatrist. “The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1817).” Well, probably not that hope but a cousin of it. This definition could be modified to produce a secular virtue–desire for mental well being and placing our trust in a pill or two or more and relying not our own strength but on the help of the pharmaceutical company. Should I have put the psychiatrist in place of Christ? It’s an ambiguity.
In any case we might next turn to Dante. The Inferno has some wonderful poetical sketches of the various places of suffering in hell. These too could be secularized and made available to the mentally ill. The aforementioned pills could be Virgil who will guide one with safe passage through this place of damnation and into Purgatory, “death’s second Kingdom. And so to Paradiso.
Unfortunately for you whoever you are the Virgil of the drug story gives out before Purgatorio is reached–probably in the 9th Circle of betrayal. And how appropriately.
Herbs on the other hand make no grandiose promises. In Original Wisdom we are even told that they speak to one who is receptive and tell what they can do. They do not lie. They have no ambition but to be.
Interesting article. Actually religions have pretty much addressed the human condition and accurately proposed a number of ‘remedies’ for suffering. In some instances these religions have had hundreds of generations to work things out for the practitioner or devotee. A religious age is religious not because someone has found a proof for the existence of God. Likewise, an irreligious age is not irreligious because it has found a proof for the non-existence of God. Neither proof exists and neither is possible.
Our age claims to be scientific though it isn’t. In fact currently scientists can not even determine satisfactorily whether the planet is cooling or warming, whether ionizing radiation is harmful or whether GMO’s make good food. It has no real idea what mental illness is or whether psychiatric medications do any real good. Our science is sloppy. Soon we may expect an anti-science age. But at present it functions rather like religions did. But it has only a few generations of development. So it is rather shoddy in many respects. Amateur.
George Orwell would certainly like your “human experience specialist”. Instead of thinking of humans as hyper-animated lumps of matter we might consider them micro-corporations and mental illness as the micro-corporation in potential bankruptcy due to inefficient use of energy. Special MBA programs could be designed.
How much ignorance is feigned I do not know, but I suspect many psychiatrists realize they are phonies and that they are really no different from the witchdoctors their ancestor laughed about. Still there are bills to pay and miles in an expensive car to go. Without the drugs many of these men and women would be out of a job. So there you are.
In my opinion depression and mental illness in general are a matter of two things: identification and agency. If I do not know who I am how can I claim to be the negative emotions I experience? If I drive through a dark and dismal slum I do not immediately conclude I am a dark and dismal slum. Why not? If I see a cat, I do not conclude I am a cat. Again why not? When I perceive a negative emotion and a negative thought why must I conclude that is me? So the important thing is to get a self certifying answer to the question, who am I.
Secondly, who is the doer? Can anyone give a certain answer to that one? Clearly when a loud unexpected sound goes off nearby, and I jump, my agency is not apparent at all. At what stage do I become the genuine doer? The German philosopher Schopenhauer gave this answer regarding our actions: Doing comes from essence. That was a medieval answer to the question. Thus the thoughts and emotions that come into my mind are in some sense a reflection of who I am as a unique person. I have not simply been thrown into the environment. But almost all of the time thoughts and impulses simply arrive unannounced are acting upon or not. It is with great difficult that anyone can make any sense out of the notion of free will other than the legal definition–involving sanity and not being coerced at the time.
Depression is often a long journey through the subconscious slums like a journalist living for months or years in a war torn country. Destroyed edifices, smoke, hungry people, wounded and dead, torn trees and cloudy skies and the sounds of gun fire and motar shells.
Now in some areas what we call higher formal education is of course needed. Electrical engineering for example. You need to know what ohms are and differential equations and a lot more. But in the area of healing it is not so clear. A broken arm? Yes. A broken heart? Perhaps not. Higher formal education is not without its drawbacks. A lot of intellect but it can be almost all wrong. For example, does the soul exist or is there a soul? I am guessing this question is answered no by most persons with a PhD. Why? Because they know the soul does not exist? No, of course not. You can not prove the non-existence of the soul. But they think they know. The academic world is largely not into that folkloric stuff.
If there were no soul or higher aspect, then people would be, well, just physical things though very complicated. But eventually science might even find a way to make them from scratch. Now that perspective engenders a certain attitude subtly. Just how seriously are you going to take people in general? Those complicate and intricate physical things? What if we have to destroy some in order to discover something to greatly aid mankind (this has a nice idealistic ring, doesn’t it?). Or if one possessed of this perspective is feeling a little down they might think of themselves as a car that needs a tune up. Or maybe just a badly designed car. Too bad. This could be pretty depressing in itself. I am just a machine. I have a PhD and know that.
I wonder if part of the despair of modern life is education itself which turns out to be not so educational at all. But rather a vast opinion structure held by a large community of persons around the world. Not knowledge but gueses.
And not just things about a non-existent soul. But a fairly large collection of thoughts presented as facts but only guesses. Black holes? Red shift? Relativity? Consciousness is produced by the brain? Drugs? Diet? Global this or that? Evolution? Hypotheses that slip over into the fact lane.
No surprise that people end up in solitary drug confinement. Some apparently for life.
From my research it appears the child abuse was not just limited to celebrities with TV connections but to person in high government positions, wealthy people, even some say members of the Royal Family. In fact reading the reports it sounds as if pedophilia was an established and accepted English activity. A tradition one might say. But one like wiretapping, not to be shown the light of ordinary day.
No longer do we need to talk about the dark ages as they are with us now. Did they ever really leave? I have been told sexual abuse stories by a number of women. I have gotten used to the fact. I wonder if it ever happened in the rural American town I grew up in? I have never heard. But then would I have heard growing up there? Possibly. I was even a Catholic but never had any sort of interaction with a priest nor the hint of it. Does this signify a breakdown in societies at this time?
Of course such an event would be highly destructive for a child or even an adolescent. Sex is highly intimate and personal; and to have someone intrude rudely into that solitude would be terrifying and shattering. One would lose self trust. Never after that feel safe to be oneself. One would have to live at a remove and keep an eye out for danger. Could easily ruin a life. It would involve a kind of self abandonment.
Excuse me but I thought the Germans had a monopoly on this sort of thing. What happened? As I recall the Germans were accused of doing bad things medically to people, but this story you relate could be projected back to Nazi Germany and fit in just fine in someone’s Holocaust memoir. I guess it just goes to show that history does repeat itself and sometimes continually.
Once again we see the court stepping in because someone behind the scenes has power and perhaps money for the right court decision. Instead of attorneys struggling to bring forth justice, we just have a judiciary vending machine. Pick out what you want and insert lots of big bills–unmarked of course.
This is really sad and tragic. The girl was held as a prisoner in a pretty bad environment to what? keep her safe from bad parents? Was she suicidal? This is so extreme as to be hard to grasp. Really this should be America in at least the pre-WWII times. The 1930’s–two wealthy families fighting over a grandchild having eliminated the mother somehow after the father disappeared. The child now in the custody of a private hospital where a doctor who has been following developments in Europe decides to experiment and see what will happen. Etc. Too dreadful even for fiction.
I believe Alan Dershowiz has offered pro bono assistance. Hopefully the legal team will resolve this quickly. The judge needs to be incarcerated along with the doctor so that they can both experience the joys of enclosure. We have become a little too soft on these important types. Oh, and they should be sued for all they have. It won’t compensate for lost years but it might help a bit.
Knowing that it is important to use words correctly I recently looked up the word witch doctor. What a surprise to discover it precisely described the average psychiatrist: a magician in a savage tribe. Which then caused me to realize that these drugs are actually witches’ brew. Of course I should apologize to the witch doctors as they are generally sincere and often successful, and in many cases their witches brews are potent herbal concoctions. But these words came out of a particular white man’s burden view of so called primitive societies. But now it turns out that the superior societies were actually the primitive ones. Also I do not mean to call the contemporary patients of psychiatrists savages though they might feel that way after the drugs take hold or so I have been told and observed.
So arrogance has had its day. Hopefully the sun will set on it before too long. We can no longer count on professional scientists as they can not decide whether the earth is cooling or warming, whether radiation is good for the person or harmful, whether psychiatric medication is helpful or not, whether GMO seeds produce good food or not, and so on. With such impotence as these scientist display it is best to rely on intuition as people once did and go our own way. It is really too bad as vast fortunes were spent on these folks only to produce men and women with a tendency to be drawn powerfully to the money handed out by the oligarchs. And truth and money do not mix well like driving and alcohol.
In a way this is all a political problem. We have an agency, the FDA, whose job it is to ensure that medication is safe–but it does not do its job well. We have licensing of doctors who supposedly have ethical responsibilities to live up to but apparently don’t–with impunity. Both state and Federal Gov do not see to it that these things are carried out. This is not just sloppiness either.
Governments collaborate with pharmaceuticals and doctors to continue extremely negligent and dishonest treatment regimens. But since most people have some trust in gov and doctors when their spouse or child needs help they go along with a really malicious process until the child or spouse is imprison in a drug routine they can not break out of without heroic effort. Like the TV series “Prison Break” where one brother helps another innocently imprisoned it takes a bit genius and lots of effort.
What are we to make of this? There are no end of these sorts of betrayals occurring in the USA from food to cars to finances to wars to property . . . The alternative news is flooded with stories of police brutality, mean spirited treatment of the poor, the DOJ looking the other way when the bankers commit felonies . . . university professors on the take from corporations . . . sounds like the Soviet Union when it was breaking up and the Yeltsin years of the Russian oligarchs.
You do not need to be a conspiracy theorist. Just read the Drudge Report for a month. Or just read the articles here. One damn irresponsible thing after another reported. And the victims/prisoners are also here with their testimonies.
All this is not just some mistake, some innocent overlooking of details. It is not just three blind psychiatrists being chased by a psychotic patient with a butcher knife. Anyway they do not seem to have tails though it might add to a truer characterization.
Knowing what is going on is a good step to the remedy.
I spent about two years supporting a person coming off a number of psychiatric medications including oxicotin. She was in her 30’s and had a strong habit of processing her inner life. She did lots of research and used some of the blogs and chats. It was not easy but now a year free of these has transpired. So it can be done without much special in place. However, not everyone has the strength to go it almost alone. If one only heard about this without lots of details one would suspect a crime had been committed. This has the aura of a great injustice. Something does not fit like a valuable diamond in a cheap setting that leaves the ring finger with a black band around it.
Given the great number of people using these drugs don’t we have a national emergency of some sort? Doctors are handing out poison and the world seems oblivious.
I have reason to believe that ibogaine is a good method for withdrawal from hard drugs; I imagine that it would work with the psychiatric medications as well. However, and this is absolutely not a surprise, the stuff is illegal in America. One would have to go to Canada or Mexico or Europe. The cost is very high for the treatment though I imagine the drug is cheap enough being from an African root. The American oligarchs who run the nation see profit as the first and foremost consideration. We can nibble here and there but as long as this nation is dominated by money and power what is best for the the people is only occasionally in line with what is best for the People (corporations). In the meantime we are experimental animals.
For literature about what can be provided for vets the two books by Dr Jonathan Shay are wonderful: Achilles In Vietnam and Odysseus In America. But you know immediately that someone like Dr. Shay would never, never be seriously consulted and placed in a powerful position. It is clearly not about solving problems or doing good; that’s sissy stuff. It is about getting and getting and holding power. The Vets and most of us are Americans. But the last four or five administrations have been Globalists. For them America per se is not interesting. It is a failing nation and not worth saving. So they sow discord. At home and abroad and in the process make loads of money and gain more power. One nation down at a time. So it turns out that mental health is a political problem. James Hillman came to that conclusion. No point helping people get back into what made them sick to begin with. They need a new nation. I believe one poll found that 26% of the American public considered themselves mentally ill. That is impossible. They were thinking about something else. Feeling dis-empowered. Lacking community. Brain washed by TV and the nightly news. Assailed by ads designed to make them feel of little worth and without dignity. Worn down by their meager pay checks. Failing to look beautiful like the air brushed chicks. Lacking the erotic musculature of the right kind of man . . . If the Devil did not invent consumerism he must be so envious of the guy who did.
My inspiration is the Grand Boycott. Americans become minimalists. Buy only the necessities. Get clothing at thrift shops. Use cell phones for emergencies. Write letters. Throw the TV away. Read. Refuse to borrow money to buy more junk. Go a bit ascetic. Walk. When a politician comes through avoid him or her. No point voting so avoid that as well. They are all the same. Be like the turtle and draw in your limbs. Avoid Facebook and Twitter. Don’t be seen with a lap top unless really necessary. Be care of the Internet. Meet people in person. If Gov believed in democracy they would not have friends like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. Presently Russia is the good nation. They actually have a genuine leader. He actually cares about Russia unlike some people we know and their nation. Congress is largely soap opera. Etc.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. — Franz Kafka That could be our new Amerika.
I believe you are mistaken. Most of the data I have seen shows just the opposite to be the case. But it is what many would like to believe. If guns are made illegal, it will create a very lucrative black market just as illegal drugs have. By the way Mexico is an example of a state with extremely strict gun law making it almost impossible for the citizen to own a gun. Almost one hundred thousand deaths in the last few years. Another thing to consider is the several studies done by university professors showing that guns prevent crime more than they cause it.
In any case we have Ft. Hood a gun free zone with now two massacres and still the Pentagon is against arming the soldiers. Additionally if the Fed gov were really genuinely serious about violence in America they could begin by taking a lot more care of veterans; they could stop drugging these guys when they are in combat; they might even want to consider having a better foreign policy and try diplomacy rather than violence. In actual fact the murder rate in the USA has been declining for years. The violence problem is really not a gun problem. That is just a diversion.
Consider that right now the BLM has 200 armed men, some of whom are snipers, surrounding an older ranching couple in Nevada over their cows, some of which the BLM is now slaughtering and burying in the desert. The couple has 48 grandchildren. If they are killed by sniper bullets how will that effect those children? And for what? So some arrogant bureaucracy can prove how tough it is? We have had at least four presidents in a row who have been war criminals by even the strictest standards. It is now coming out that Clinton was a major factor in the Rwanda genocide. It was not just that he was busy and did not notice. And on and on.
There is nothing like good jobs to make for good families. But the corporation People do not want that; and since they are the important People, they get their way.
Trauma, violence, suffering . . . sounds like Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq or Ukraine now. What these places all have in common is the presence or recent presence of the USA which has greatly increased the levels of violence, suffering and trauma! So it should come as no surprise that when the Congress of the USA gets in proximity of mental health care the levels of coercion and force will be elevated. Today two old ranchers in Nevada with 48 grandchildren, a man and his wife, have snipers surrounding them over some land dispute that has been going on for 20 years. This is the way the USA behaves domestically and in foreign affairs–like a big bully. Living in the USA one is constantly subjected to a lack of respect. Just like when Uncle Joe Stalin was shaping up the Soviet Union in the 1930’s. All you need are some not very stupid tough guys with guns. With a scattering of psychopaths for managers.
So in my opinion about half the mental health problem in the nation stems from a gov leading the nation to ruin. Almost the other half comes from a very bad eating regimen. Subtract these two groups and the remainder is not so large. Less than one percent I would think. It’s hard for parents to do a good job on part time employment with little money plus schools now that arrest primary school kids for failure to follow minor rules. And all the other dumb things that gov finds to harass people. Clearly this contributes to a mood of violence. Plus the vets coming home in terrible shape and receiving the minimal help now that they have served their purpose. All this added together is the recipe for bad homes. Hence, trauma. Drugs and alcohol. And now Murphy?
And now Murphy. Where did he get all this wisdom?
“The government is right: children need love as much as they do vitamins – and a lack of it often leads to adult psychosis.” I wonder how many millions of pounds they spent to conclude that. “Emotional Child Abuse Has to be Banned – The Science Backs up our Instincts” And while the UK is at it let’s also ban wars, rape, theft by bankers, etc. Utopia lies just beyond the banning! I suppose only the corrupt UK could come out with this nonsense. Science backs instinct? People have for a long time been capable observers. They noticed that treating children, animals and other people well had good results. Even their religion mentioned this a couple of millennia ago. The real goal here is to justify stealing children from parents. We have scientific proof that you are a bad parent. We have scientific proof they we are gods and you are crummy humans, so off with the children to an institution where we will provide scientific love. How horrible the UK has become.
In actual fact the gov is driving many adults to suicide. Practice what you preach. The rich elite are gobbling up all the goodies there as well. This is hypocrisy; and The Guardian is the ideal bearer of this pluff science. Next they should do a scientific study that shows that corrupt political figures suffering stress and guilt may be miserable in their later years. Stuff like that where maybe our instincts fail.
In any case this is all about taking children away and who knows to where. UK has a very serious pedophile problem as does the Continent.
I agree, Copy_cat. When I consider the ruin towards which this nation is headed I have a good idea of where most of the mental illness is coming from. Here is an excerpt from a good article by Paul Craig Roberts:
“As I write I cannot think of one thing in the entire areas of foreign and domestic policy that the US government has told the truth about in the 21st century. Just as Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Iran has no nukes, Assad did not use chemical weapons, and Putin did not invade and annex Crimea, the jobs numbers are fraudulent, the unemployment rate is deceptive, the inflation measures are understated, and the GDP growth rate is overstated. Americans live in a matrix of total lies.
What can Americans do? Elections are pointless. Presidents, Senators, and US Representatives represent the interest groups that provide their campaign funds, not the voters. In two decisions, the Republican Supreme Court has made it legal for corporations to purchase the government. Those who own the government will decide what it does, not those who vote.
All Americans can do is to accept the serfdom imposed on them or take to the streets and stay in the streets despite being clubbed, tasered, arrested, and shot by the police, who protect the power structure, not the public.
In America, nothing is done for the public. But everything is done to the public.”
Now imagine for a moment an average American family. The parents have many things to be distressed about. Maybe the eight year old used his finger as a gun and was arrested by the police. Or maybe the thirteen year old daughter was watching porn at a friends house. Maybe neither has the job they had ten years ago and are doing part time. The food is bad or not so good as they once could buy. They love their kids but their emotional control is thin. There is screaming now. They all feel traumatized. They can not afford an evening out without feeling guilt. They are not sleeping so well either. Fortunately they may have a reluctance to get drugs–but for how long? The Affordable Health Care is costing them more than they were formerly paying. Thank God they have good health still.
All this is a mighty contributor to the mental heath situation. Murphy will get his campaign contributions and this family or that will bear the burden of his gross stupidity and avarice. I wonder who raised this man of no integrity? And what university gave him a degree in psychology? He learned nothing because it probably taught nothing.
The list is valuable. Much trauma relates to home life for children. Why are American families so violent? I can verify from people I know that the list is very accurate. I have often said that the health of a nation can be measured by the health of man woman relationships. Marriages and families receive little help in the USA. Is marriage almost despised by the media and leading lights? Americans also as a whole do not seem to care much for children. I know these are generalizations but I keep getting these impressions
from conversing with people.
Now when a nation goes somewhere and destroys the infra structure, kills hundreds of thousands of people, contaminates the land, wastes vast sums of money, neglects the affected Vets and sends them home addicted to drugs . . . can we really say this has no effect on the social life in that nation? Certainly not. And America has been into one war or another almost since WWII. And not a single one can be characterized as defense. They were all without exception wars of aggression. Even WWII is suspect; and certainly WWI was something the USA ought to have stayed out of. So lots of war. A bellicose nation.
Most Americans end up in families that have a Vet somewhere nearby–husband, wife, grandparent, uncle . . . This is one explanation. A society in which science is regarded as a religion such that religion is regarded as a fraud is also a problem source. We toss out the notion of soul and talk about love as chemical. I love you means that certain hormones, etc. are circulating in my brain. Nothing more. And when the chemicals stop–goodbye. And most scientist will lie to save their jobs, get a better one, or receive moneys from a corporation. As a result we have wonderful nuclear power; GMO’s; Ready
Roundup; fluoridated water; food additives. It is as if no one cares about people because People (corporations) have all the money and want more.
Guns are not the problem. When and where I grew up there were lots of guns and never anyone shot. No murders. No one wounded. I can only remember one accident and that was a kid pounding on a shell. But that was the society this society damned and threw away. It had religion and was decidedly more rural. Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country–Mason Cooley The Murphy’s of the world evidently can not read. The science behind psychiatric medications is what people used to consider that science behind witches’ brew. The modern psychiatrist is often the same dictionary’s definition of a witch doctor: “a magician in a savage tribe”. If Representatives and psychologists like Murphy are running things and they are, then we the people will need to avoid the gov as much as possible and go it alone. Most of these rascals are only good for bribing and blackmailing.
We need more doctors like Jonathan Shay. But these are rare persons. His two great books are of incalculable value. I wonder if Murphy could handle reading something so inspired? Anyway, glad you are on this. Thanks.
A final note: I hope you can imagine the conflict and heated discussion that followed the Civil War in American. This went on decade after decade. My grandmother’s mother lived in Missouri and mentioned it endlessly to her children, how the British betrayed the South, etc. Do you think anything ever written about the Civil War has not been misleading? I don’t. I am sure there were many fights and many murders connected with that endless dispute. The Jews and Germany are similar. It like civil wars will never end. They may cease on the physical plane, but they go on for centuries in the minds of people. A lot of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990″s was related to the conflict between the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches during WWII. Would you care to disentangle that? Of course not. T. S. Eliot maintained that the English Civil War of the 17th century was still a factor in English life 300 years later. And that is my whole point. The minute the Holocaust is brought up for any or no reason it is like dropping a smoke bomb or tear gas into the room. It gets used to justify anything and everything. Any one who questions it is attacked irrationally. All hell breaks loose. Thus, it is one of those things which in polite company should never be mentioned unless one knows in advance that everyone is on the same page. I am sure in Washington, D.C. even now that people are a little careful not to mention the Civil War. Some southern Congressmen or women might just fulminate and cause a scene. Thus again, nothing written about highly contentious subjects should be brought up in mixed company by which I mean where some present are very heated about the matter. It makes enemies quickly and dissolves friendships. I hope you can see my point. Least said, least mended! Why IT is such a big topic in America is not clear. The USA was not a participant in Jewish oppression. We are not good people when it comes to foreign affairs as should be obvious. Call it isolationism but for Americans it is the best solution. Jews have been very fortunate in the USA. They have no reason to attack Americans about something that totally involved Europe and centuries even before America existed as place on the map. I think you might want to address this from a professional point of view as a therapist and PhD in psychology. Great for another book since you write books. If I were a political writer I might write How Political Problems Belonging To Other Nations Were Given To The USA After WWII. Or philosophically, Plato Hit The Nail On The Head Over Two Thousand Years Ago And The USA Has Yet To Figure That Out. A shorter title might be Let The Dead Bury The Dead. Best of luck.
I have followed this, and I agree with you. The evidence against it being a real event are over whelming. The fact that a medical helicopter was waiting to fly there and never ordered to do so was extremely out of protocol as well as letting unqualified personnel determine that people were dead. The whole thing violated numerous state and federal laws.
Part of this is oddly enough a faith undeservedly placed in the educated intellect and especially the scientific one. Unfortunately the intellect deals in the past, information gathered here and there and put together in various ways. ‘Reason makes a good servant but a bad master’. When people were less well educated formally they relied on other modes of knowing. Intuition for example. Rural people had and still may have an advantage here over city folk. In rural Nebraska where I grew up in the 1940’s and 1950’s there was little to no mental illness. Very little crime and no murder. Lots of guns and only the rare accident. Surprisingly even the occasional homosexual was accepted. There was some prejudice against blacks but no blacks around! People worried about rain. If there was ever a shooting of anyone I never heard of it. One angry woman once sent a bullet to her lover by mail. She was not arrested or threatened with arrest. It became a local joke! People for the most part had common sense. The police were local guys and knew better than to abuse people. The main crime was getting drunk and causing a disturbance. It was not utopia but a good place and time to be a kid. And few of us were ever sick. We had good food. Good air. And good water. And jobs were plentiful for teenagers. I delivered papers and mowed lawns. I had dogs and a horse. I loved school. And reading. Already in the 1960’s the urban coasts were becoming nihilistic. Vietnam helped this destructive tendency really take off and fly. Now the nation is headed for ruin as nations do that put money in the place of honor.
As Americans I think we should dwell on the treatment the native Americans received. To the best of my knowledge they are the only people’s in recent history where the gov actually had the official policy of eliminating them. And they are still here. “The only good Indian is a dead one.” This came after the Civil War which was itself another great crime. As for the Jews, the Nazis, etc. that is really a European problem and best left to them to work out. Americans have a great difficulty with foreign affairs and are very much locked in their own language and culture or lack there of. So, then Seth. what about the native Americans? What is your thinking regarding the mining of uranium on their land and poisoning their wells and the air they breath? This is our problem now. We may be able to do something about it. We clearly can not do anything about Israel and the Palestinians. But as citizens the way the remnant of native Americans are treated is our responsibility. If we fail to act then we are complicit. Have you read Rolling Thunder? Mad Bear? Or any other books related to their situation? Do you know any native Americans? As far as I can determine the gov would still like to eliminate these people and take their land. In Brussels a trial is now in progress regarding the murder of 50,000 native children by the church schools in Canada. Have you been following that? America would rather fiddle with Ukraine or Syria than put its own house in order. No wonder so many Americans are suffering from mental illness. James Hillman had a lot to say about this. Best of luck.
I am not denying that Germany persecuted Jews or that that was an injustice. I did not write the article as you know. We will never know for certain what happened back then just as the pasts of our own lives live on as mysteries. It only takes one small turn of a kaleidoscope to change the whole pattern. So with history and our lives. In a sense everything is misleading. The world is an on going illusion. Remember we have to learn how to judge the size of things with experience. Without illusion there would be no possibility of a world. So who knows? Socrates was the wisest man according to the Oracle because he knew that he knew nothing.
“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” Helen Keller
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I think the wiser course of action is to provide better alternatives. Demonstrations do not work very well these days. They get sabotaged one way or another. Since the profits of large corporations are at stake the enemy is powerful. Another worth while tactic is bring suits. The pharmaceuticals generally prefer to make settlements and the experts get a look through discovery at the products and clinical trials. If hundreds of these are brought it makes for very bad publicity. There is no good science behind the whole adventure. Their greatest strength is in buying scientists to lie and having vast sums for advertising. It is a truly criminal and rotten business and must eventually implode. But the gov sees a way to benefit from drugging people so is on their side for now.
Here, Seth, it a well written article which I believe lays out the great complexities of dealing with oppression, and why I disincline to dwell on things like Holocaust and Nazis.
A Century of Deceit: Iraq, the World Wars, Holocaust and Zionist Militarism
http://mycatbirdseat.com/2014/04/a-century-of-deceit-iraq-the-world-wars-holocaust-and-zionist-militarism
Fortunately in the world of mental health things are not quite so complex. But I think operating on a local level with people we know is best. The minute something becomes national the interests involved are innumerable.
As far as I can determine the Sandy Hook affair was a hoax. No children were killed. The school was inactive at the time. One hundred million dollars came into the lamenting parents . . . and the state of CT has acted very suspiciously by hiding all the records, even the death certificates. That the Federal Gov. would conceive and pull off this sort of thing tells me that at this time one wants to take care in one’s dealings. Trust is elusive. We live in a low dishonest time.