-------------------------------------------------------- Part 2 of the essay "Death of a Psychiatrist" I am going to amend what I wrote as an introduction to the series today only by saying that I am truly gratified to see how many people shared the first installment of this essay. Again, it was only the first of 8 parts, and I will publish one each day. It is meant to be the most comprehensive yet concise attack on the system of "mental illness" created by psychiatry and now profited from by Big Pharma. Here's how I introduced it yesterday: About a year ago I was asked to write a featured blog for the website MadInAmerica.org , which is probably the most important and wide-ranging website in the world on issues of psychiatry and Big Pharma and so on and so forth. I took a few months to consider as carefully as possible what I wanted to do with my blog. After all, I'm a book writer, and at the same time I had become somewhat fixated on all the different perspectives there are out there on psychological issues, and how to bring them together and resolve them. Unfortunately, Robert Whitaker, the editor of the site and an author for whose work I have immense respect, decided that after I submitted my third essay, which was basically the singlemost important thing I have ever written on the subject, was simply too long, or at least that's what I was told, and so I removed all my work from his site, thinking that I would find another way to publish. I have come to believe, however, that I am now able to reach enough people in the community that I can actually publish the entire essay, as long as it might be, on my Facebook page. I would prefer to get the ideas out there to whomever might need them, and I would encourage anyone who wants to to share these posts or even to take the whole thing and give it away to whoever might benefit from it. For the next 8 days, I will publish one section of the essay, and I will publish nothing else that might get in its way. I feel it's simply too important to keep it under wraps because some editor — Robert Whitaker — decided it was too big for his site, even though I was told they were thinking about redesigning the site to feature it properly. I would also like to say that I owe an immense debt to the writing of Dr. Bonnie Burstow, of Ontario, Canada, who is leading a courageous fight against psychiatry, and that she deeply influenced my work in this essay in ways that will become clear in a later section. I dedicate this entire work to her. ___ Here is Part 2. Look through my feed for other days' entries. ___ 2. It’s strange to me that some people are perfectly aware of racist or sexist or homophobic language, but have no idea how important it is when they use the term “mentally ill” or when they talk about “psychiatric medications” or about “psychiatric treatment” or even, the most seemingly harmless of them all, use the term “mental health” as if they knew what this meant. Certainly this has to do with the success of modern medicine, a totally unrelated field, but one which is crucial in making life as good as it is for most of us today, and so I think the mistake is a natural one. The success of modern medicine cannot be denied. Beginning in the Renaissance, when doctors first had the opportunity to begin to dissect bodies and learn about them, things changed from how they had been before, when countless people died of easily fixed problems. This is not the place, and I am not the person, to go into a history of all that, but when doctors began to be able to examine actual human tissues and to determine what was a disease, what was an injury, and what was simply a parasite living inside the body or was simply a deformity or the damage left behind from some kind of injury, and then had enough time to learn from it all, everything changed. With the ability to compare human tissues and to learn about the changes in them, it became possible to genuinely treat disorders and injuries and diseases, and then, in the late 19th and early 20th century, with the invention of sufficiently powerful microscopes and the discovery of bacteria and sterilization, it became possible to really deal with things like syphilis, dysentery, and botulism. Suddenly, whole classes of what had formerly been progressively fatal conditions began to be ameliorated, and then, with the widespread use of the vaccine (it had been discovered long before, but not used), things really took off. People forget that only a hundred years ago, in the flu pandemic of 1918, somewhere between 50 and 100 million people died from the lack of the right vaccine. If the same thing were to happen today, that number would be in the hundreds of millions of people — all of them dead. Billions more would be dangerously sick. (Please think about that before you tell me that vaccines haven’t changed things, regardless of whatever problems we might be having with them now.) But easily the most important event in modern medicine was the discovery of penicillin in the early part of the 20th century, which made it possible to cure things that had been killing people off by the millions before, and ever since that time (together with the slightly earlier invention of aspirin, the first really effective pain killer that wasn’t some form of opioid), the big companies that produce drugs — Big Pharma — have been one of the most dominant factors in most people’s lives. Yet with medicine’s success have come some significant failures. Although we can now treat heart disease and cancer with amazing success, it is a simple fact that the number three killer today is (1) infections caught while in the hospital or (2) some form of harm done by a doctor or medical professional (http://www.yourmedicaldetective.com/public/335.cfm). To some degree, you have to say, “Well, if people are sick and going to a hospital, it’s only natural that a few will catch some new disease, since the place is full of sick people,” and I am sympathetic to that claim. But it’s also a fact that the overuse of antibiotics, sterilizing soaps, and a lot of simple sloppiness on the part of doctors is also driving a huge part of that number (http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed/deaths.htm). The simple fact that far, far more people die from prescription drugs — not just from opioids, but from all drugs — than from all illegal drugs combined should be a sobering fact (http://articles.mercola.com/…/prescription-drugs-number-one…). My own gastroenterologist told me that the worst thing for my liver, besides people drinking too much, was all the drugs that doctors were doling out; he advised me to get off as many as possible, and I did. So medicine may be good as a whole, but some of the details are horrifying, and the rise of the term “iatrogenic,” a Latin term invented in order to disguise and confuse people about what it really means (“harm caused by the treatment”), should be a warning to all of us about what is going on. My own personal motto has become “fix the system, not the symptom.” When “antipsychotic” drugs like Zyprexa and Saphris gave me high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure, I fixed them by getting off the drugs and hitting the gym. When my liver had trouble, I fixed it by getting off the drugs and hitting the gym. When my pancreas had trouble, I fixed it by getting off the drugs, including alcohol, and hitting the gym. When I needed to lose weight because of all the years on the “antipsychotic” drugs, I fixed it by eating healthier foods and hitting the gym. Basically, I have embraced “functional medicine”, which deals with the body and mind as a whole system rather than as a collection of different organs, each of which is addressed by a different specialty that might not understand how the drug you are taking for one set of problems (i.e., “psychiatric issues” — the brain, in other words) might be causing a whole other set of problems (such as all the issues with your metabolism, such as high cholesterol and diabetes — in other words, with your digestive tract and your liver). Now, I am uncomfortable with citing any particular specialist or institution, because to do so would be to endorse them, but I have now adopted functional medicine in my own life so entirely that I now envision the creation of something that might even be called “functional psychology” and, yes, even such a strange beast as “functional psychiatry”, which might deal with actual brain problems caused by things like the destruction of our gut flora causing inflammation, which might be related to depression. Although I have significant troubles with these two fields of practice and study in general and have little if any hope for their reform — I will, in fact, be coming out in this essay and saying that we should entirely banish psychiatry as it is currently practiced — I don’t consider the fundamental aims of these fields of study to be useless by nature; I just think that they need to be brought into line with what they can really do for people functionally, if circumstances made that possible, by helping people fix their own lives through counseling, meditation, stress reduction, diet, supplements, spiritual counseling, supportive and respectful work and living environments, political action, the elimination of environmental toxins, and, if absolutely necessary, some of the safer drug interventions, such as the drugs used to treat Alzheimer’s or dementia — and not by pushing psychiatric drugs in a fire-sale bonanza for the pharmaceutical companies. The bottom line is that the success of actual physical medicine has led us into a trap when it comes to mental issues. There is a demonstrated record of success for physical medicine, but there is almost none for the “medical specialty” called psychiatry (see Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets…/…/0307452425 and Mad In America http://www.amazon.com/Mad-America-Medici…/…/ref=pd_sim_14_2…), which relies on what it pretends are the same methods that actual medicine uses (medical degrees, “drugs”, “medications”, “interventions”, “treatments”) but which has none of the same record of success to support its claims of success in “treating” people. When we talk about “mental illness,” most of us don’t realize that we are talking about something that doesn’t actually exist — something that is, in fact, a myth — but one that is so very profitable for drug companies and their psychiatric shills to sell us that we can’t get it off our backs. As Dr. Thomas Szasz pointed out in The Myth of Mental Illness (http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Mental-Illness-Fou…/…/ref=sr_1_1…), the whole idea of a “mental illness” is an error of logic and — naturally enough in the context of this essay — of how words are used. First of all, an “illness” is, by definition, physical; it’s something wrong with a human being’s body. Second, anything at all that is discovered to be a genuine illness, however it may affect the mind, is automatically reclassified from a “mental illness” to a plain old physical “illness”. An example would be Alzheimers, or epilepsy, or senile dementia. As soon as a physical basis is found, a “mental illness” becomes simply an “illness”, no matter what its effects on the mind might be. There are, therefore, no “mental illnesses”, just as there are really no “empty” barrels of gasoline. What there are that are called “mental illnesses” are just behaviors and thoughts and feelings — in other words, just ways that people act or talk or feel in ways that might seem strange or abnormal or disturbing to someone else. To sum it all up very briefly, what we find classified as “mental illnesses” are simply ways of acting and talking and feeling that (1) other people don’t like, or that (2) other people are troubled by, or that (3) other people don’t understand, or that (4) other people have managed to scare you about. And that’s it. That’s all there is to it, and there is nothing more to be said on the topic. You can think about it all you want, and you won’t be able to reach any other conclusion, because there isn’t one, unless you just make one up, something like saying “it’s really (5), which would be something like ‘it makes me feel threatened when you talk about your sad feelings that way’”, which is really just the same as saying (1) and (2), but it’s repackaged to look like it’s new. And the bottom line for this is that no “mental illness” you’ve ever been told about has been proven to have a biological basis. I can’t cite the proof for you that mental illness doesn’t exist because it isn’t out there (you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist), and this is the case in spite of the countless billions that have spent on all the studies that were conducted to try to find them, and — to make the situation just a little bit worse — it would just be kind of boring to read any more than a couple dozen of the countless studies that have been done and find out at the end that they proved nothing. The only reasonable conclusion to come to is that we’re dealing with nothing but behaviors or the way that people express their thoughts and feelings, and that there is no physical pathology to any of it. So: Mental? Yes. Illness? No. “How could this be?” you might ask, naturally enough. Well, the sad fact is that not everyone is honest, either intellectually or financially, and that there is a whole world of shills and con men who have been at all of this for quite a long time now and exploiting people’s fears about the situation, and that they make a lot of money from convincing you that “mental illness” exists and that they are the ones who are able to “treat” it. These shills and con men are called by two different names, and it’s either the name “psychiatrist” or it’s the name “drug rep.” Drug reps also happen to sometimes be called “pharmacists”, “marketers”, “publicists”, or, occasionally, “drug company president/researcher.” There is even currently a danger that one of them could be called “FDA commissioner”. (http://www.madinamerica.com/…/nominee-for-fda-commissioner…/) But before we get into all of the ones who are called “drug rep” (it’s coming up in a few paragraphs), we should first talk about the ones who are called “psychiatrists”, because they’re the ones who have been doing the most damage and who have been doing it the longest. In the late 1700s, in France, to follow Dr. Szasz once again, the physician Charcot was placed in charge of France’s celebrated mental institution, the Salpêtrière Hospital. Now, I don’t want to run Charcot down completely; he “discovered” multiple sclerosis, after all, and he did other valuable work in neurology, for which he was both famous and celebrated in his own time and is still remembered now — and deservedly so. But he did it all, I believe, by taking charge of an institution he wasn’t really fit to run, and he ran that institution in a way that has not only laid the groundwork for but is powerfully reminiscent of modern psychiatry. Charcot liked to walk around and interview his “patients” in what he naively took to be their native milieu — the institution, of course — and to take his findings as (1) natural, despite the unnatural surroundings (and everyone knows nowadays that people act very differently in one environment than they do another, such as the Fortune 500 businessman who grew up in the ghetto and yet who acts and speaks very differently in the board room than he does at home) and as (2) the products of a brilliant and unquestioned intellect that had an insight far beyond what anyone could reasonably claim for themselves. He could, after only a few minutes, “diagnose” a “patient” in a way that would affect their lives for years, and he did this on the basis of nothing other than his intuition, which he should have known to be as faulty as any other human being’s, and he has laid the foundation for how the psychiatric profession has worked ever since. Among his many questionable intuitions was the idea that serious mental “illnesses” were caused by “lesions of the brain”, which led to the whole basis of the idea that a “mental illness” even exists. Never forget: the whole idea that “mental illness” has a physical basis is exactly what they mean, despite all the evidence that has been collected ever since to the contrary, and if you think that your psychiatrist means anything else by it than that “mental illness” is an actual physical illness, then you are badly mistaken. The whole idea of “mental illness” has become a rabbit hole that has been chased down by psychiatrists and other researchers looking for these “lesions”, or — as times and fashions change — for “swelling of the brain”, or for “distempers”, or — the latest and greatest of them all — for some sort of “chemical imbalance”, none of which has ever been found. (The latest is “genes associated with schizophrenia.” http://www.madinamerica.com/…/critique-genetic-research-sc…/) The one area that Charcot might have been right about, and about which I am being extremely generous, is that the neurological changes in the brain described by Dr. John Read in his “Traumagenic Neurodevelopmental Model of Psychosis” (http://www.madinamerica.com/…/traumagenic-neurodevelopment…/) might in fact have been mistaken for the effects of lesions when you consider that the changes that might have been caused to the developing brain by trauma (and which is not evidence of any illness, since plenty of perfectly normal people have these changes, and no one’s brain is the same), but again, I am merely speculating, since I am not a neurologist, nor a pathologist, nor a forensic scientist. After all, I cannot stand at Charcot’s elbow as he examines an autopsied brain, recording his thoughts and reflections, so I have no evidence for the idea that what he was seeing were in fact developmental changes, but the coincidence between the idea of developmental changes and actual injury-caused changes suggests it, and by that I am trying to do some sort of justice to Charcot, just to be fair (which I should try to be, after all, since I would like to earn your respect as a fair reporter on the situation). In other words, given the plain fact that “mental illness” does not exist, when your psychiatrist does declare that you have a “mental illness”, he or she is badly mistaken, and it therefore logically follows that when he/she does so, he/she is either (1) a con artist, (2) dangerously throwing around terms that he or she doesn’t understand, or (3) badly miseducated. Now, just to keep things simple, I am going to propose that the problem starts in reverse order with (3) miseducation, which then leads to (2) ignorance, and which then winds up for most psychiatrists at (1) con artistry, maybe because they have an expensive degree and they would be out of a job if they frankly admitted that they don’t know what they’re doing. Considering that it takes, on average, four years to get out of medical school and become a doctor (and you’d better hope they can do it in the average number of years, considering the sketchiness of the education), the fact that a psychiatrist is required to be conversant with all the major areas of medicine in two years; then with all other aspects of knowing the brain, just as a start, and then with everything related to “treatments”, interviewing “patients”, prescribing drugs, running an “in-patient facility” and drawing up “treatment plans” and giving testimony in court proceedings and a whole mess of other things in just another two years . . . in other words, with really getting to “know” their specialty — given all this, it would be amazing if the student involved actually had time to crack the cover of a book that was about the mind of the human being itself, which is to say, a book of actual human psychology . . . let alone know enough about human beings and the human mind to tell you whether someone is suffering from a “mental illness” or not, or is merely “strange” and “behaving oddly.” Let’s put it this way: I spent quite a while researching the program requirements of top psychiatric schools, and came up empty as to actual psychological study requirements. What I did find — the closest parallel — was that students in the clinical psychology department of the University of California at Berkeley, who typically study for five years, not four, and almost entirely in their own specialty (which means that it’s not with all the needs of an actual medical degree in addition), had a requirement of a mere six weeks on a psychiatric unit to learn how to recognize the “symptoms” of a “mental illness”, let alone anything like dedicated study and exposure to people with “disturbed” minds — and never mind the study of an unusually complex, “disturbed” mind, like one that you would typically encounter on a long-term psych unit. This leads for me to what is a fairly predictable situation, which I have good reason to recognize immediately when I see it, of a doctor who will (1) at first freely confess that “we don’t know enough about the mind yet” — the plural “we” hiding both themselves and the profession as a whole behind a single label — and then (2) throw around “diagnoses” which they are willing to change at the drop of a hat or disregard altogether when it comes to actual drug dosages, and then (3) stand up in court or other official venues and allow themselves to be presented as “experts”, all without either blushing or doing anything other than grin shamefacedly before launching into strangely well-practiced speeches at the merest suggestion of questions about their supposed “patients” — and let me tell you, if you’ve heard one psychiatrist give their “professional opinion” of a “patient”, then you’ve heard them all. It always comes close to being exactly the same thing, and you could sum it all up as: “he acted strangely” or “he didn’t feel well”. And so, in the end, all a psychiatrist ever does is the same thing, over and over: judge people on how they might talk or how they might feel or how they might behave differently from himself or herself and then, more or less arbitrarily, rule on their fate, based on nothing more than their intuitions of what you should be like. This power to control your fate includes vital decisions about (1) the freedoms you will have and (2) the chemicals you will be forced to put into your body (which, let me assure you, is not always a choice a person gets to make), and, believe me, the latter (the drugs you will be forced to take) is one of the deadliest and yet least understood problems of our time, although it has been very well documented in books, articles, and movies. This problem with the drugs, therefore, leads us directly to the other half of this problem, which is to say to the drug reps, who are the dispensers of all these chemicals, and whom I’ve previously referred to as “pharmacists”, “marketers”, “publicists”, or, occasionally, “drug company president/researcher” — and all without meaning to leave out, of course, the actual drug company sales representatives themselves. This is a whole field of study unto itself, and you will have to forgive me if I take a moment to compose myself, have a drink, and light a cigarette before moving on to the next part of my dreadfully sober essay, which will be numbered . . . -------------------------------------------------------- Part 3 of the essay "Death of a Psychiatrist" As I did yesterday, I'd like to thank the people who were kind enough to read yesterday's installment of the essay and who were kind enough to try to share it. Unfortunately, there were some links in the text, so what happened was that when people went to share the essay was that they shared the link all by itself. If you would like to share today's installment, you'll probably need to just cut and paste it into your message field. As I mentioned previously: About a year ago I was asked to write a featured blog for the website MadInAmerica.org , which is probably the most important and wide-ranging website in the world on issues of psychiatry and Big Pharma and so on and so forth. I took a few months to consider as carefully as possible what I wanted to do with my blog. After all, I'm a book writer, and at the same time I had become somewhat fixated on all the different perspectives there are out there on psychological issues, and how to bring them together and resolve them. Unfortunately, Robert Whitaker, the editor of the site and an author for whose work I have immense respect, decided that after I submitted my third essay, which was basically the singlemost important thing I have ever written on the subject, was simply too long, or at least that's what I was told, and so I removed all my work from his site, thinking that I would find another way to publish. I have come to believe, however, that I am now able to reach enough people in the community that I can actually publish the entire essay, as long as it might be, on my Facebook page. I would prefer to get the ideas out there to whomever might need them, and I would encourage anyone who wants to to share these posts or even to take the whole thing and give it away to whoever might benefit from it. For the next 8 days, I will publish one section of the essay, and I will publish nothing else that might get in its way. I feel it's simply too important to keep it under wraps because someone decided it was too big for his site, even though I was told they were thinking about redesigning the site to feature it properly. I would also like to say that I owe an immense debt to the writing of Dr. Bonnie Burstow, of Ontario, Canada, who is leading a courageous fight against psychiatry, and that she deeply influenced my work in this essay in ways that will become clear in a later section. I dedicate this entire work to her. ___ Here is Part 3. Look through my feed for other days' entries. ___ 3. Nothing is quite as despicable as someone who sells something that they know is harmful for money. Arms dealers, sellers of cut-rate insulation, dishonest car salesmen, and drug company representatives all fall into this category — and they all know it. They know it, yes, and they do it anyway, and they do it without giving a fig for the people they’re hurting. They know that, in the end, it’s not their problem if their product is safe or unsafe, and the truth is that they couldn’t care less how much it may end up hurting you. We all know examples of the type, from the guy who will sell you a car that virtually explodes once it rolls off the lot to the guy who will watch you choke as you try to explain what went wrong with his insulation or who will listen as you tell him how your arm was blown off when you fired his gun, and the rolls of drug company representatives are full of them (see here http://www.regenexx.com/…/avoid-drug-reps-office-like-plag…/ and here https://attorneypages.com/…/drug-companies-being-sued-off-l…). It’s natural enough to want to make a profit. It’s what drives commerce, and while I have the same socialistic leanings as just about every other American (for example, I believe in the 40-hour work week, Social Security and unemployment insurance, and using our taxes to pay for the roads and the police and the hospitals and the military, bloated as these may get, and all of which are the “social” costs of being a civil society), I don’t have a problem with people making money. I look forward to making more of it myself, in fact, once this series of essays is done, and which I am doing as a social good, not as a source of personal profit, because I believe that we have greater personal responsibilities to fulfill in order to balance out our personal freedoms than those simply mandated by the Constitution, and that we should do something good for others in return for the good we receive. This is how I am paying that debt. Nothing could be further from the mind of a drug company representative, who shows up at the doctor’s office with the intent of doing nothing more than selling his goods, regardless of who pays the price. This whole system started in 1951, when two obscure Congressman, both pharmacists (one of them was Hubert Humphrey, who would later become Vice President), managed to pass a bill which amended the U.S. Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (http://crywolfproject.org/taxonomy/term/52) in a way that required the reform of how drugs were sold, which, until that time, was completely unregulated. Until that time, any quack who wanted to take the trouble could show up at your door and sell you some form of snake oil with the promise that it would fix all your ills, regardless of whether what it contained was mostly alcohol, cannabis and opium, or, in some of the worst cases, strychnine and horse urine, could do so. The idea of the law was to reform the system so that only doctors — and only doctors, mind you — had the power to dispense the drugs that Americans took, so that they could ensure that the drugs were safe. Doctors were considered safe, conservative, and largely incorruptible by the public, in spite of the fact that they were no more honest than they are now and had frequently gone so far as to sponsor unsafe drugs, including cigarettes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI), in national ads. It was the perception that mattered: just as you had good reason to trust your own family doctor, so you had reason to trust the drugs he would prescribe for you (most doctors were then male, so I use the “he”). The problem is that the drug companies soon realized that their actual market, the gatekeepers to the sales of their drugs, were no longer the members of the wider public they were used to dealing with, who were rather easy to fool, but a group of much more highly educated and much more munificent doctors. No more cheap or at least obviously fraudulent drugs for these guys. This led to a whole new strategy on the part of the drug companies, henceforth to be called Big Pharma, which was to target doctors relentlessly (http://www.pewtrusts.org/…/persuading-the-prescribers-pharm…), and this has led to problems ever since. If you sense another one of my lists of (1), (2), (3) and so forth coming, well, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Basically, once doctors became the prescribers, they became the primary market for the drug companies — Big Pharma — all of which were and are, after all, huge conglomerates that do many billions of dollars in business each year, and this meant that Big Pharma turned the focus of its marketing departments and sales forces over to exploiting this new resource: the doctors and their control of drug sales (http://www.scu.edu/…/pub…/submitted/morreim/prescribing.html). I do not use the term “resource” lightly, because a drug is, in fact, a source of money, which makes it a resource, and it is one that needs to be exploited with all possible haste. Because the profitability of a drug depends on how long its patent lasts, the best analogy for a drug company with a hot new drug on its hands is that of an oil company that has just discovered a field of gushers and that wants to bring in as many of those gushers as it can while the oil lasts, or, in other words, make as much profit from that drug as long as the patent lasts and as far as it can be exploited in all the different parts of a doctor’s practice (not an inconsiderable consideration, considering the power of hospitals to dispense drugs). Individual doctors, depending on whether they can be persuaded to prescribe the drug in high enough numbers, are, in this analogy, the individual oil wells themselves, and a really high prescriber would be a particularly lucrative gusher, and the drug company reps, naturally enough, would want to find — or create — as many gushers as they can. I hate to use the language of resource exploitation, but that’s what it all is, and like an oil company that wants to capture that oil field and all its gushers, drug companies — Big Pharma companies, in other words (for the current top contenders, see here (http://www.fiercepharma.com/…/top-15-pharma-companies-2014-…)) — are willing to spend whatever money it takes to make sure that they do. This takes place in many forms, not all of them strictly legal at different times, although it all keeps changing as oversight waxes and wanes. There are the simple drug company reps themselves, who used to be chosen for being highly attractive individuals — like former professional cheerleaders (http://www.exceptionalmediocrity.com/…/why-are-drug-reps-ho…) — who would come in, reeking of sex appeal, and make promises of lots of lucrative little things like free samples (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2563313/) or drug discounts or who would simply tempt doctors with offers of golfing trips, excursions on fishing yachts, and lots and lots of little dinners that were supposedly about discussing the drug company’s products and which were a chance for the doctor to feast on duck a l’orange and foie gras and hundred-dollar-a-glass scotch (http://www.propublica.org/…/doctors-dine-on-drug-companies-…) while possibly receiving promises of kickbacks — yes, direct cash payments, which are often dressed up as “fees” for various “services”, some of which never even need to be delivered (see here http://www.tampabay.com/…/lawsuit-pharmaceutical-co…/2119133 and here http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/is-your-doctor-gett…/) — all in exchange for the number of prescriptions they gave out of the drug company’s products (see here http://consumerist.com/…/pharma-biggie-hit-with-125m-penal…/), and particularly of the newer and more expensive drugs, all while contemplating the possibility of sex with the drug rep (http://articles.mercola.com/…/the-secret-weapon-drug-compan…). If that didn’t work, there were always junkets and conferences to offer, where the doctors could rub elbows with drug company representatives and hear talks by other doctors on all the wonderful new drugs, followed by a round of golf on the beach that very afternoon and a conga line with scantily clad girls that night and maybe some scuba diving the next day, all for nothing more than the promise of hearing a couple lectures about a new drug, whose makers, of course, sponsored the conference and paid for all the meals and the hotel rooms and the airfare. The lectures, of course, showed nothing more than the promise of some new drug in relieving some form of “distress” that was troubling some of the doctor’s patients, depending on what your specialty was (after all, you were sent to the appropriate conference, not some random one), and it ended with an offer of some sort of remuneration also, possibly in the form of being asked to make a speech about the drug to other medical professionals, for which they would be paid, and, if they did it more than once, might be paid many times. This sort of thing went on for a very long time, until it was brought to a halt by some reporting on the practice, and with it ended the free lunches and the little gifts that the drug reps always brought by the doctor’s office every day, to the point where the hospital staff rarely paid for their own lunch while at work, although the truth is that some doctors still miss all the little gifts, from the meals to the fishing trips to the sports tickets, and all the while actually seeming to believe that they weren’t in any way corrupted by them (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1824740/). What has come about since has been almost even more palpably corrupt, but it’s being done under the guise of more professional roles. Now, physicians become “consultants” and “trainers” and “researchers” and “thought leaders” and “key opinion leaders” (http://www.temple.edu/medicine/cme/documents/PHARMA.pdf), who go out with nary a bit of research being done beyond filling out the occasional form, and give speeches on the wonders of oil field X — I’m sorry, drug X — and try to convince other doctors, equally eager to get in on this field of bounty, to follow their lead (see here http://www.boiseweekly.com/…/a-pharma-payment-a-da…/Content… and here http://chronicle.com/article/The-Secret-Lives-of-Big/124335/). This leads to sitting on boards, lucrative research contracts (the research is most often written up by a Big Pharma marketing department functionary so that it says what they want it to while leaving out what they don’t want known about the drug, if that’s possible [see here http://www.activistpost.com/…/big-pharma-funding-antidepres… and here http://www.salon.com/…/how_big_pharma_influences_fda_tria…/…]), and which is then followed up by publication in the most prestigious journal they can find, a journal which is underwritten by ads from the same Big Pharma companies that are publishing the research and whose editorial board doesn’t vigorously pursue statements about conflicts of interest by the people submitting the research (for a really scary picture of the whole drug vetting scheme, see here http://www.boiseweekly.com/…/a-pharma-payment-a-da…/Content…, and for a broader view of how the advertising works, see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA61oh6UCas, especially at around 45 minutes into the video). All of this leads, of course, to the doctors getting appointments to new boards and then to getting new offices and to getting new titles and new salaries at their institutions, which is what such obviously “eminent physicians” deserve, after all. It’s a wonderful system, and no one seems to be really able to crack it, because the reporting measures are either (1) deliberately set up to confuse anyone who wants to find out what’s going on, (2) lag behind what’s really happening by many years, or (3) are so filled with misleading information and errors that no one can actually read the reports and find out what’s really going on (http://www.npr.org/…/database-flaws-cloud-sunshine-on-indus…). Welcome to the Era of Big Pharma Marketing, which is so successful that not even Congress, an old hand at covering up what’s really going on, can figure out what’s happening fast enough to keep pace with it all (http://www.fiercepharma.com/…/groups-lobby-white…/2013-01-25). What is worst of all about this picture, of course, is the intertwined financial interests of doctors and Big Pharma, which goes around actively recruiting the most eminent and promising bullshit artists of the lot and putting them on the boards of their organizations, placing them in charge of research committees, and giving them all sorts of financial incentives, including large blocks of stock options, all with the expectation that the doctors will then go around and advertise their approval of the latest resource that is being exploited for a thousand dollars per ghostwritten speech (http://www.truth-out.org/…/6200:patients-may-die-when-docto…). This is done so egregiously, in fact, that recently one of the members of Harvard Medical School, supposedly our finest institution, was found to have received Big Pharma remuneration after he went around and almost singlehandedly spread the notion of “childhood bipolar disorder” on the basis of small, virtually inconclusive studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Biederman), and for which he received what are still not completely disclosed amounts while he was at the same time receiving millions in research grants from the very same drug companies that he had financial ties to, and all of which went undisclosed to the institution that he taught at and represented, and at which he was the whole time receiving a salary, a title, and even grooming future generations of young doctors to follow in his footsteps. (http://ahrp.org/harvard-psychiatrists-disciplined-for-conf…/) To say that Big Pharma now runs the show is a dangerous understatement, and thinking about the very peril of the situation reminds me of a curious and strangely cautionary story in biology that I’d like to share with you. Not long ago, I learned about a very interesting insect called the green jewel wasp (http://www.realmonstrosities.com/…/emerald-cockroach-wasp.h…). What it does, apparently, is sting its victim, a cockroach, so that it first (1) paralyzes its front legs so that it can’t run away for a while, and then (2) stings it in a part of the head that immobilizes its escape reflex and causes it to passively accept whatever else is done to it after that. The wasp then (3) cuts off part of the cockroach’s antennae, and then, when the cockroach has recovered its mobility, (4) grabs onto what is left of the antennae and steers it around. The cockroach is now, in fact, called a “zombie cockroach”, and it behaves accordingly. Where the wasp steers, the cockroach goes. Eventually, of course, the cockroach becomes the wasp’s food, when (5) the wasp lays its egg on the cockroach before it (6) barricades the cockroach inside its nest and then flies off and leaves the cockroach to its fate, which is when (7) the egg hatches and the hungry larva inside emerges to consume its host, which it does by consuming the less-vital parts of the body first so as to keep the rest of the cockroach alive as long as possible. The truth is that I cannot think of a better analogy for the current relationship between a psychiatrist (or any doctor who falls into their trap) and Big Pharma, which, like a green jewel wasp, first immobilizes the flight response with an injection of money and then cuts off the antennae of its medical host before it leads it around until it chooses the right place to plant its egg. A zombie cockroach: that is what the medical profession has become, what the psychiatric profession has become, and if they don’t watch out, they will suffer the same sort of fate as the rest of us, when they too are barricaded inside one of their own psychiatric prisons, which are now starting to be run by actual prison-industry employees, and where they will become Big Pharma’s food in the form of a perpetual income stream for all the drugs they’ll be forced to take and where they will be left alive just long enough for Big Pharma to consume them totally. -------------------------------------------------------- Part 4 of the essay "Death of a Psychiatrist" I'm sharing this one a bit early today so that maybe my friends in the U.K. and Ireland will have something for their Sunday night reading. As I did yesterday, I'd like to thank the people who were kind enough to read yesterday's installment of the essay and who were kind enough to try to share it. Unfortunately, there were some links in the text, so what happened was that when people went to share the essay was that they shared the link all by itself. If you would like to share today's installment, you'll need to cut and paste it into your message field. As I mentioned previously, to introduce what I'm doing with this essay: About a year ago I was asked to write a featured blog for the website MadInAmerica.org , which is probably the most important and wide-ranging website in the world on issues of psychiatry and Big Pharma and so on and so forth. I took a few months to consider as carefully as possible what I wanted to do with my blog. After all, I'm a book writer, and at the same time I had become somewhat fixated on all the different perspectives there are out there on psychological issues, and how to bring them together and resolve them. Unfortunately, Robert Whitaker, the editor of the site and an author for whose work I have immense respect, decided that after I submitted my third essay, which was basically the singlemost important thing I have ever written on the subject, was simply too long, or at least that's what I was told, and so I removed all my work from his site, thinking that I would find another way to publish. I have come to believe, however, that I am now able to reach enough people in the community that I can actually publish the entire essay, as long as it might be, on my Facebook page. I would prefer to get the ideas out there to whomever might need them, and I would encourage anyone who wants to to share these posts or even to take the whole thing and give it away to whoever might benefit from it. For the next 8 days, I will publish one section of the essay, and I will publish nothing else that might get in its way. I feel it's simply too important to keep it under wraps because someone decided it was too big for his site, even though I was told they were thinking about redesigning the site to feature it properly. I would also like to say that I owe an immense debt to the writing of Dr. Bonnie Burstow, of Ontario, Canada, who is leading a courageous fight against psychiatry, and that she deeply influenced my work in this essay in ways that will become clear in a later section. I dedicate this entire work to her. ___ Here is Part 4. Look through my feed for other days' entries. ___ 4. What has become increasingly clear is that, from merely colonizing the medical profession alone, Big Pharma is now colonizing the entire social system, and it is bringing along a whole host of doctors, social workers, administrators, lawyers and other so-called “professionals” to do its work. In the end, most of the money flows back to the queen at the center of the nest — to Big Pharma and its corporate boards and investors — but there’s plenty more for the hospitals, “community mental health centers”, jails, schools, nursing homes and cheap housing projects that organize themselves around the central nest to share in the queen’s bounty in return for doing its work. The era of the social parasitism called “medicalization” has now begun. The situation is really too immense to do it justice in anything short of a whole shelf of books, but I’ll try to take a crack at summing it up by following the life of one child, born in the present era, through to the logical conclusion of what her life would look like if things were to stay on the course that they are on now. Just to start at a decent baseline, let’s assume the child is a “normal” child, although let’s also assume that she is like most of the population and comes from what is not quite a middle-class background in the old sense that we used to mean it: two parents, both with adequate incomes, living in middle-class developments with good schools and a safe environment. Instead, let’s modify that to fit modern circumstances. Let’s suppose she still has two parents (best not to start off too disadvantaged) and that both of them are employed most of the time. Unfortunately, one of them has rather hit-and-miss employment with an institution like WalMart, and the other is doing fine at an office job. Well, what with having three kids and the ups and downs of the job market, the mother can’t always get enough work at WalMart, even with their lucrative wages as an incentive, and eventually, through no fault of her own, the husband moves out and starts another family. Suddenly, our child, the oldest of three, finds herself in a dodgy situation where the family is living in a less-than-perfect neighborhood, the mother’s income is not always reliable, and the mother cannot always be around to look out for her. This leads to problems, including the fact that the mother is regularly treated poorly at work by an overworked, stressed-out boss who firmly believes in the old employment concept that shit should roll downhill and who takes out his frustrations on his employees, which then means that shit also rolls downhill at home, onto the oldest daughter, our object of study. In her struggle to make ends meet, the mother takes a second job that pays just as poorly as the first, and now she is rarely at home and has an undependable schedule. The daughter is now in a difficult situation. With no one to help with her homework (dad is too busy with the new family and his new job), her grades are doing poorly. With an inconstant supply of nutritious food, she isn’t always able to concentrate very well at school, and when she is sexually abused by a neighbor who volunteers to do a little “babysitting”, all of a sudden she is having some minor “behavioral problems”, like distraction in class and some mild bit of speaking back to the teacher. Suddenly, she is in front a guidance counselor, who recognizes the signs of “ADHD” immediately, and now she is on the way to the local psychiatrist, who puts her on Ritalin or whatever the latest fashion in “attention deficit medication” might be. The next thing you know, what with being on a constant diet of amphetamines, she’s begun developing more “behavioral problems,” and she starts to run with a rougher crowd, which is natural, since she lives in a rougher neighborhood. This leads to a small incident with the police, and maybe some more molestation at the hands of one of her older “friends”, at which point she is now a candidate for “PTSD”, and, of course, more counseling and more drugs. Eventually, just to chill out, she starts to smoke a little pot with some friends, and following what in the old days would have been a routine bit of adolescent acting out involving some shoplifting, she is now involved with the courts. Suddenly she is part of the juvenile system, and she has a record. Naturally enough her education is now thoroughly disrupted, despite some “special ed” classes that don’t seem to interest her, and she quits school after getting her GED. With only a GED to back her up, however, the world of business is not exactly her oyster, and she takes a job as a grocery store clerk. Well, next thing you know, she is following one of three fairly predictable life paths: (1) she is pregnant by some muscular-looking but equally challenged young roughneck who can’t support her or their child, and she is now heading down the trail blazed by her mother, or (2) she is convicted of some minor new crime, such as a little shoplifting or selling a little marijuana, and she is now part of the “justice system” once again, only this time for a little bit of serious time or for an extended period of probation, or (3) she is still having some mental issues, including recurring “PTSD” flashbacks, and becoming more and more dependent on prescription drugs (among others) and the “mental health system.” So the next part is easy to figure out. We’ll just follow her along one of two paths, either into the justice system or into the mental health system, but the dichotomy has now become largely false, since the largest de facto mental health system in this country is presently the Cook County Jail in Chicago, followed closely by the Los Angeles County Jail and by Riker’s Island in New York, all of which are basically prisons, and yet where “psychiatric drugs” — also called “chemical restraints” — are more and more the norm; or she has gone into a state hospital, which also resembles a prison, and where the drugs used to control the inmates are exactly the same drugs that are used in the prisons, which is where more and more of the “mentally ill” end up. In fact, the whole system has become a circle, with poverty leading to abuse and to crime and to “mental illness”, and crime and “mental illness” leading to each other and to poverty and abuse. Now leap ahead fifty years. Now we are looking at old age and retirement, and since our young girl is by now an old woman and has never put together any assets of her own beyond a modest two-bedroom house that she shares with her older but, through no fault of their own but their involvement in an economy where the vast majority of the gains go to the people on top, still-dependent children, now it is unfortunately time for her to find a nursing home, since she is, quite frankly, worn out by life and not faring well. The nursing home that takes her in is staffed by nurses and aides with no interest in dealing with another difficult inmate, which is what she is, especially since she continues to struggle conspicuously with her psychological issues, and in addition she is also now bored, confined, and unable to make her own decisions, which is unpleasantly reminiscent of most of her life in general and of her time in juvenile hall and the state hospital in particular, and although she has mostly adjusted well to the greater part of her life’s circumstances, she is now both angry and feeling powerless — never a good combination — and prone to act out on her own behalf. Suddenly, there is a doctor at hand, a “psychiatrist” in fact, who is only too happy to prescribe her some “antipsychotics”, which are in fact the same drugs that half the population is on now, and which act in the same way as the old “chemical restraints” did at the psych ward and the jail. There is a reason why, in a more plainspoken time, they were called “tranquilizers”. But now she has come full circle, and the only thing left is to strip her family of its assets, first by taking the money to keep her in the nursing home that, even with “assistance”, her family cannot afford, and then by taking the deed to her two-bedroom house when her family has nothing else left to offer, and by now the system is working exactly the same way it did when it prevented her from ever really getting ahead by requiring her participation as a youth in programs run by the probation departments and “community mental health centers” that inevitably, despite all the “assistance”, robbed her of every penny she managed to put together beyond a certain basic level. Big Pharma, having kept her on a lifetime of drugs, has now had its way with her, and now it is time for the other jackals and corpse rats to move in and pick the body clean. And who benefits? Well, there’s the doctors, that’s for sure. There’s the nurses, and the social workers, and the administrators, and there’s the probate lawyers and the probate judges, and there’s the cafeteria lady who ladles out our old lady’s soup and chops up her bowl of spaghetti and ham slices into little bites. But most of all, the ones making out on this are Big Pharma — the pharmaceutical company, and the board and the investors, — and that is exactly what makes up The Queen Bee, the great killer wasp at the center of the nest, the creature that has organized this whole system in order to reap a daily stream of profits from the dispensing of its drugs, and which will kill you if you dare disturb it as I am doing now, at least if you do it without any regard for the consequences, which is why I figure that the only way to avoid being killed by it is to make sure that we kill it first, and that is what this whole blog post of mine is about: first by recognizing what is going on, and then by removing the language of “mental illness” and “mental health” that they are hiding it all under, like the lid of a garbage can that is hiding a dangerous infestation — and it is about saying that we need to do it as quickly as possible. The zombie cockroaches, for all they might be annoying and even a little horrifying to watch, are not only what we need to be worried about. It’s the green jewel wasp, with its well-evolved habit of stinging you, chopping off your antennae and then leading you around and planting its egg on your body — that’s what you need to watch out for. You need to watch out for the great, killer queen bee at the center of the nest. It’s coming to get you, and at the current pace of things, it will be here to get you quite soon. -------------------------------------------------------- Part 5 of the essay "Death of a Psychiatrist" As always, thanks to those who are now sharing the parts of this essay in different forms. Besides Facebook shares, there are apparently some people getting it out by email as well. For this I am immensely appreciative. I'm going just come right out and say that this particular segment is a bit of a whopper, but I do have a lot of ground to cover: showing exactly what psychiatry is and why it is not only invalid but dangerous. Along the way, I have to give you the basic qualities of psychiatry, explain what they mean, and then give the history of their little witches's manual (nothing against witches!), the DSM. I'll skip the usual introduction and just say that this started as a blog post/essay for the blog I was asked to write for the website Mad In America, and when they chose not to publish it for being too long that I decided to get it out here. I spent a very long time thinking about what I wanted to write for them, and I felt it was too important not to get it out there somehow. Thanks again to Dr. Bonnie Burstow, who influenced this work and whose influence probably shows most in this particular part of the essay. --- For other days' installments of the essay, please check my feed. --- 5. And now we return to psychiatry, because the zombie cockroach is the wasp’s most pliant and deadly tool, and, like a rat infected with the plague bacillus that is scattering fleas everywhere it goes and onto everything it touches, we now know that it is both clueless and without independent direction, having based all its assumptions about how things work on a system that is neither scientific nor based in reality. So let’s get started with the psychiatrists, and then what they’re like, as a whole — which is to say, what they’re like as a swarm, which is to put the whole question into my favorite biological terms. (You want biological psychiatry? I’ll give you biological psychiatry, by God.) The work of Dr. Bonnie Burstow was a bit of a revelation to me when I first read it. She is the one who got me started thinking about insects — the wasps, and the cockroaches, and the killer bees, and the ticks and the bedbugs and the little mosquitoes that infest and feast off this whole system — because she was the one who turned me on to the idea that psychiatry is a profession that is both expansionist and that colonizes the social body by grabbing onto power and imposing its will on other people. I don’t know if she is the one who originally came up with these ideas, or if she has simply seized on them so effectively that I was able to see in an instant from her writing what they meant, for which I owe her a debt. I can remember exactly which article it was that I read that in (see Mad In America, the article called "Antipsychiatry Revisited: Toward Greater Clarity"), and it stayed with me, and I want to give her credit for what she said. The words “expansionist” and “colonizes” went off in my head like a bomb. Since then, I have rather elaborated on the idea, so that now it contains a whole panoply of insects that I use to describe everyone involved in the system, as well as a whole range of concepts related to the role that psychiatry itself has chosen to play in our society. So let’s get started, with a nod (appropriately) in the direction of Dr. Bonnie Burstow, who has my deepest respect for her thoughts about how all of this works. As I think over what role psychiatry has carved out for itself, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that it can be characterized as having five chief qualities which can easily be summed up in five words (some of which I’ve borrowed). These words are: • expansionist • authoritarian • irresponsible • unaccountable • non-scientific The last one, non-scientific, I’ve already covered when I talked about the fact that “mental illness” is in fact a myth according to anyone who’s ever done any research on the topic, and that there is no scientific basis whatsoever for the idea that what is “wrong” with some people in the eyes of some observers is anything other than a raw and blatant judgment about those people formed by those observers and which, while it might be understandable at times, is purely arbitrary in the end and based only on their perception of what they think you should be like. But let’s go back and revisit the concept later, when we’ve reviewed everything else on my list. Just to get us started out on our journey, let’s outline what all this means. Psychiatry is: (1) Expansionist, which means that it always wants to expand what it’s in charge of, much like any business wants to grow (and psychiatry is a business) and become the dominant force in its industry (and psychiatry is, after all, part of three industries, called “psychology”, “medicine”, and “Big Pharma”), and . . . (2) Authoritarian, which means it wants to be respected and obeyed without any real question except insofar as how to carry out its instructions, regardless of whether it’s morally or scientifically right about what it’s requiring people to do, and . . . (3) Irresponsible, which means it does things like prescribe drugs whose effects it doesn’t understand in such massive quantities that they couldn’t help but be harmful, and that it does so regardless of the long-term outcomes, which its practitioners don’t have to deal with, but which its victims do have to deal with for the rest of their lives, and . . . (4) Unaccountable, which means that it never apologizes for the messes it makes and never pays any significant price for those messes, including, but not limited to, monetary damages and the loss of prestige that should follow, and . . . (5) Non-scientific, which means the entire philosophical and practical justification for its existence is invalid, which is shown most clearly of all in its main publication, the DSM, as it is popularly known (or, as it is properly known, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, put out by the American Psychiatric Association, which is not an official scientific or elected body of the government although it is deferred to as though it were one). That’s a whole lot to get started with, so let’s cut to the chase. We can start this time with both the beginning (expansionism) and the end (non-scientific), which means we need to start with the attempt to classify so-called “mental illnesses” in the DSM. You’ll have to forgive me if I have to do little more than sum it all up á la Wikipedia. Unfortunately, we have to follow two parallel tracks for a moment, because the efforts to classify different forms of “insanity” emerged both in Europe and in the United States at around the same time. First we will briefly outline the work of Emil Kraepelin in Europe, and then we will turn to the United States, which is, after all, the center of our discussion at the moment (especially since that is both where I myself live and am affected by it all, and because that is where modern “biological” psychiatry and Big Pharma are centered). To start first with Europe, there is Emil Kraepelin, the founder of what is now considered the modern school of “biological psychiatry”, by which we mean the idea that all mental disturbances are due to a diseased or damaged or disordered brain, and who classified only two distinct “mental disorders”: (1) manic depression (by which we would now mean everything from depression to mania to bipolar), and (2) dementia praecox (by which we would now mean schizophrenia, including the paranoid, catatonic and hebephrenic subtypes, as they used to be known, before the invention of the “not otherwise specified” and “residual” subtypes). Note that nowadays there would also be a blend of the two main classifications Kraepelin introduced, which we would call “schizoaffective disorder” and which would be where you have a blend of some degree of either mania or depression and of dementia praecox (schizophrenia). Kraepelin’s system was the beginning of the “real” (which is to say “vaguely credible and systematic”) psychiatric classification of “mental disorders”, which formed the basis of everything that came after it in the modern history of psychiatry. Classifying mental disturbances into these two basic types (“manic depression” and “dementia praecox”) was the position Kraepelin reached in 1899, with the sixth edition of his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (Textbook of Psychiatry), after classifying things somewhat differently in earlier editions of the book. (By the way, I am not in any way condoning the work of Emil Kraepelin. He was a serious proponent of eugenics — the belief that there is something inherently and genetically inferior about some people and that we should breed out their contribution to the species while promoting all the so-called “superior” genes, which is exactly what formed the basis of Nazi Germany’s destruction of the European Jews, Gypsies, and the “mentally ill”. Kraepelin was not only a racist but a social activist as well, and he believed that the “mentally ill” were “defectives” who should be winnowed out by allowing natural selection — in his view, the elimination of the modern welfare state — to simply kill off “mental defectives”, including criminals and the feebleminded and the homosexual, by simply letting them die off or by helping the process along with violence, such as sterilization. I am not in any way a fan of Emil Kraepelin. I simply repeat his list of “accomplishments”, with the caveat that they go to show my earlier point: that in the end, psychiatry basically just comes down to one person’s judgment of another. You may allow what follows to persuade you of whether this has changed or not.) To turn now to the United States, the impetus to collect data on the population of the country through the census was another reason — and a valid one — for a classification system, which in 1840 resulted in the sole and unfortunate special classification of “idiocy/insanity” for certain people, which, obviously enough, was inadequate, since it was used to include the blind and anyone who was born African American in some areas of the United States, evidence once again that all that is required for a “diagnosis” is a high sense of one’s own worth and the willingness to cast judgment. This classification was protested three years later by the American Statistical Association to the House of Representatives and subsequently altered. By the time of the 1880 census, there were in the United States seven different diagnoses used for classifying people, including: mania, melancholia, monomania, paresis, dementia, dipsomania, and epilepsy. Mania and melancholia (depression) we know about. Monomania is obsessive-compulsive behavior. Paresis we now know to mean that one suffers from a brain problem caused by syphilis, which results in paralysis, and which is what killed the philosopher Friedrich Nietzche, among many others. Dementia is dementia, an affliction of the aging brain. Dipsomania is alcoholism (the compulsion to drink) and epilepsy is epilepsy, another actual brain affliction involving seizures and blank spots in the memory. Note that fewer than half of these are still considered “mental illnesses”; the others (paresis, dementia, and epilepsy) have been classified where they belong, as actual diseases or disorders, or belong to a different category altogether (dipsomania/alcoholism). The only thing I would point out is that this was the beginning of a progression of two processes: the fragmentation, which is less important, and the expansion, which is very important, of what might now be called a “mental illness,” including, curiously enough, alcoholism, which is clearly just a behavior and not an illness at all in any way except in its latter stages, when actual damage to the body is taking place. Now for the history of the book called the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). • By 1917, what we would consider the forerunner of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was in place, and was produced by the American Psychiatric Association and the National Commission on Mental Hygiene as a joint work called Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane, and it contained 22 — note, just 22 — “mental disorders”. Note that this is around the same time Kraepelin and what we can call his “biological psychiatry” followers were becoming increasingly influential, and that — most important of all — the number of “mental illnesses” had started to expand from what Kraepelin had classified (just 2, in 1899) and what the census had classified (just 7, in 1880). • Only 35 years later, the first edition of the actual DSM (DSM-I) contained 106 “mental disorders” (an increase of 84 over what was previously just 22) and was 130 pages long. It was published in 1952, and it included homosexuality among the classification schemes of sociopathy, a clear and simple case of the blatant and biassed judgment of one group of people by another. But with 106 disorders, an increase of 84 (or a quadrupling) in just 35 years, things were starting to expand almost astronomically. • The DSM-II contained 182 disorders, and was 134 pages long. It was published in 1968, just 16 years after the previous edition. The book was heavily influenced by both Kraepelin’s biological psychiatry and Freud’s psychodynamic theory. The book was criticized as an unreliable tool, with no “symptoms” listed, with the further criticism that “practitioners” who used it were rarely in agreement with each other about “diagnoses.” With 182 disorders, which would be 76 more than just 16 years previously (an increase of almost 50%), things were expanding at an alarming pace. • The DSM-III contained 265 disorders, and was 494 pages long. It was published in 1980. The book attempted to impose a whole new system of diagnosis that brought “disorders” in line with international systems like the ICD-10 and attempted to make the language of the book more useful for bureaucrats (think government and insurance) and for the pharmaceutical companies (think Big Pharma research and marketing, among others). It was at this time that biological psychiatry, with its pharmaceutical agenda, took hold of the “mental health system”, which it largely created, in the United States. As I mentioned previously, since Big Pharma is out to colonize the entire social body, when the DSM itself was reformed to make things easier for pharmaceutical companies and the billing departments of insurance companies, you can rest assured that the colonization process had by now largely succeeded in one of its most important first steps. With 265 “disorders”, which would be 83 more than just 12 years previously, the DSM and the range of “mental disorders” were still expanding at an almost inconceivable pace. The chairman of the committee that put it together, Robert Spitzer, later said that the book might have resulted in the medicalization of up to 20 or 30 percent of the human population that had not had shown any evidence of problems before. • The DSM-III-R, a simple revision, contained 292 disorders and was 567 pages long. It was published in 1987. In just seven years, the DSM-3-R managed to add 27 diagnoses to a work it had only slightly revised, — which, once again, shows the alarming rate at which psychiatric “diagnoses” were expanding. • The DSM-IV contained 297 disorders, and was 886 pages long. It was published in 1994. Considering the fact that it grew by only 32 diagnoses since the last major revision in 1980, the changes are relatively modest, at least until one considers the whole scope of the changes over time, where the DSM-I contained only 106 “diagnoses” in 1952 and the DSM-IV contained 297 in 1994, which makes the growth of 191 “diagnoses” in just 42 years nearly a tripling in size, a truly astronomical rate of growth and one which leads me to believe that (1) something fishy must have been going on, or (2) it must have been a particularly bad era for human suffering. • The DSM-IV-TR was simply a revision and reorganization of DSM-IV, meant to make it easier for people like administrators and insurance companies to use in billing — again, the reorganization of the book to match a reorganization of society itself in order to accommodate the colonization of psychiatry and Big Pharma. It was published in 2000. • The DSM-5: It is curiously difficult to determine through online sources exactly how many disorders are listed in the DSM-5, almost as though the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t want you to know, but I have read in one source that there are now 374 different diagnoses that you can be wedged into, but, again, I’m not positive about it for myself. In looking over the book, I found that diagnoses were numbered, mostly from one to three hundred plus, but that there could be more than one condition listed under a single number. Or, the numbering scheme would change, with a mysterious “V” appearing in front of a number, which, to be quite honest, I didn’t take the time to understand. It may simply be that there are simply so many possible “diagnoses” that no one has bothered to sort them all out properly, or maybe the methodology has once again changed sufficiently as to make comparison difficult. I have found different statements on the matter, but none that seems definitive, but I do consider it worthy of note that in a petition circulated to boycott the book, there was a line that read that “DSM-5 will drastically expand psychiatric diagnosis, mislabel millions of people as mentally ill, and cause unnecessary treatment with medication.” The DSM-5 was published in 2013. The DSM-5, to break out of the bullets format at last, makes for an interesting case. It has been plagued by controversy and criticism, including one contained in a full-length book called The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg (I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the title is certainly promising). As Dr. Allen Frances, who actually chaired the committee that put together an earlier version of DSM said, “[DSM-V] is a wholesale imperial medicalization of normality that will trivialize mental disorder and lead to a deluge of unneeded medication treatment — a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry but at a huge cost to the new false positive patients caught in the excessively wide DSM-V net.” Getting into the red meat of the book itself for just a moment, it is interesting to see that there is now a section devoted to “Medication Induced Movement Disorders”, which seems like a frank admission on the part of psychiatry that iatrogenic harm — “harm caused by the treatment”, which is to say all of the medication problems — and which is actually a real thing that is out there in the world, is now being admitted to by the psychiatric establishment, but the weird twist to it all is that there is still the pretense that these are now permanent “mental illnesses” that fall under the purview of the psychiatrist, when they are in fact caused by the condition of taking of a psychotropic drug. There is, for instance, “Medication Induced Parkinsonism”, which is basically just a description of the side effects of certain drugs that cause an expressionless face and a certain amount of shaking and some cognitive difficulties like remembering things, and which is classed as both “332.1 Neuroleptic Induced Parkinsonism” and as “321.1 Other Medication-Induced Parkinsonism.” There is also — my own personal favorite — “333.99 Medication-Induced Acute Akathisia”, which is something I have experienced more than once myself, and which comes complete with a sense of agitation, an inability to sit still combined with an intense desire to lie down, and a case of the shakes so powerful that it felt like my whole body would soon vibrate into pieces, and which left me with such a powerful sense of misery at still being alive that it made me, a person who has never felt suicidal due to life circumstances, want to take a handful of any kind of pills they would give me and get the whole experience of life over with. That psychiatry is now calling these drug-induced conditions “disorders” is a sort of wonderfully clever way of turning their own iatrogenic harm into merely more cases of the very same “mental illnesses” they are required to “treat”, which goes that much further to prescribing the use of even more drugs to treat them. The one legitimately permanent problem they mention is the case of tardive dyskinesia, where a “patient” is left with permanent and uncontrollable movements of the face, lips and tongue due to the effects of “medication”, which is clearly a form of neurological damage and which is almost too pitiable to get into considering all the damage to one’s self image and the overwhelming social stigma that is involved in having your lips and tongue move uncontrollably in social situations, and which is, by its simple inclusion in the book, another blatant example of all that is wrong with psychiatry and its irresponsible use of drugs. Merely as an aside, there is all the sexual stuff. The inclusion of such sexual “disorders” as “Sexual Masochism Disorder” and “Sexual Sadism Disorder” would seem bound to produce howls of outrage from people who engage in these practices, who know full well how to practice what they are doing safely, and which smacks of the old hobgoblin of homosexuality as a “mental disorder”, and which is something that I’m surprised hasn’t created protests outside the APA of its own. On a personal note, and I won’t go into it all too far here, but the one that amused me most in particular was “Fetishistic Disorder” and which I can only imagine that half the American public would fall under if it were measured by any conventional rubric. It lists in particular a sexual preoccupation with feet, toes and hair. Well, it sometimes seems that half the ads in women’s fashion magazines are about having sexy shoes, sexy toenail polish, sexy feet, and sexy legs, and that the other half of the ads mention the importance of maintaining bouncy-looking, shiny-looking hair, which leads me to apologize right here and now and say that I am in fact a victim of this exact sort of marketing and cultural practice. In fact, I will go so far as to say that a woman’s feet and ankles have often seemed to me a sign of exactly how the rest of a woman’s body will look — skinny ankles, skinny girl; athletic ankles, athletic girl; thick ankles, thick girl — and that the first thing I really notice about a woman is what her ankles look like, at least once I take note of her eyes and her face, because I am, believe it or not, one of those men who looks at a woman’s face before I look at the rest of her, which is unavoidable. So, when some men or women focus on ankles or hair for some reason? If you find it stimulating to focus on them? Bear in mind, I’m not a fetishist in any way — I consider every aspect of a woman’s body beautiful — but I’m sorry to say that a more ludicrous definition of a “mental illness” could not exist. The next thing you know, they will have subtypes of “fetishism” which are based on “feet”, “ankles”, “hips”, “abdomen”, “big butts”, “skinny butts”, “breasts” (not included yet because a lot of psychiatrists still like them), “shoulders”, “arms”, “hands” and “necks”. Well, at least I’m safe for now. It will only be when they get to a woman’s clavicles that I will personally be in trouble, because, along with the ankles, I happen to think that a woman’s clavicles are potentially the most beautiful parts of her body. But I’m sure that if we give it just a little bit longer, we’ll get there, and soon I’ll have a medication that I can take for “clavicle fixation disorder,” just like you will be taking one for your tattoo fixation and “tramp stamp disorder”. But to return to the general outlines of the DSM-5. Lacking a clear statement on how many diagnoses the new DSM contains, what I do have is a clear statement by the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry that roundly condemns the whole enterprise on the same grounds that I have issue with: that the whole enterprise is about one group of people simply judging another group of people, with no real empirical basis in fact and with a doubtful agenda (Big Pharma’s) as to why it needs to be done at all. Note that the process of creating the DSM-5 was plagued with ethical considerations about conflicts of interest, especially when the committee that put it together was required to sign non-disclosure agreements, which I find very odd for a process which one would suppose should have been transparent and yet one in which so many of the people involved had financial ties to Big Pharma, causing one to wonder what role the drug reps had in it all. The most powerful part of the statement for my present essay is the first two paragraphs, but I provide the entire statement of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry below. "ISEPP STATEMENT ON THE DSM-V "It is the position of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP) that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), a publication of the American Psychiatric Association, is a political rather than scientific document, one which damages human beings. Despite the position of its authors that it is primarily descriptive, the DSM supports the perpetuation of myths about mental, emotional, and behavioral disturbances in individuals which favor pseudoscientific, biological explanations and disregard their lived context. The evolving editions of the DSM have been remarkable in expanding psychiatric labels for alleged “mental illnesses” with no scientifically substantiated biological etiologies. "The forthcoming DSM-V edition continues this process while attempting to deepen indoctrination of mental health providers, consumers, and third-party payers into the fallacy that problems in living result from problems in biology. Adherents of biopsychiatric explanations and pharmaceutical manufacturers are the primary benefactors of public acceptance of this myth. Beyond research and technical studies which repeatedly demonstrate the inherent lack of validity and reliability of the DSM as a nosological system, psychiatric labeling has real consequences in discriminating against and oppressing the disadvantaged, creating unnecessary obstacles to employment, housing, and social acceptance, lending false credibility to the concept of psychiatric disability, assaulting self-worth and self-efficacy, and undermining reestablishment of positive life-striving by inducing “behaviors to label” among people who have been so labeled. "In ISEPP’s view, conscientious and ethical provision of services to those suffering from mental, behavioral, and emotional disturbances is primarily a moral, social, political, and philosophical enterprise. ISEPP supports helpers who wish to eschew use of the DSM-V and its prior systems. ISEPP recommends public scrutiny and skepticism regarding the DSM as well as a constructive dismantling of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex through which it is continually supported and redeployed. "We question the legitimacy of the DSM system in its entirety, support inquiry and research into the damage psychiatric labels do to human lives and encourage efforts to hold the American Psychiatric Association legally, ethically and morally accountable. We recommend development of consensual, supportive and effective methods for describing states of being which are currently characterized as “mental disorders.”" Basically, it’s all there. Since it’s worth reading twice, with special attention to certain passages, I’ll just go ahead and repeat them with my own italics and underlining as needed: “Despite the position of its authors that it is primarily descriptive, the DSM supports the perpetuation of myths about mental, emotional, and behavioral disturbances in individuals which favor pseudoscientific, biological explanations and disregard their lived context. The evolving editions of the DSM have been remarkable in expanding psychiatric labels for alleged “mental illnesses” with no scientifically substantiated biological etiologies.” And: “The forthcoming DSM-V edition continues this process while attempting to deepen indoctrination of mental health providers, consumers, and third-party payers into the fallacy that problems in living result from problems in biology. Adherents of biopsychiatric explanations and pharmaceutical manufacturers are the primary benefactors of public acceptance of this myth. Beyond research and technical studies which repeatedly demonstrate the inherent lack of validity and reliability of the DSM as a nosological [diagnostic] system, psychiatric labeling has real consequences in discriminating against and oppressing the disadvantaged, creating unnecessary obstacles to employment, housing, and social acceptance, lending false credibility to the concept of psychiatric disability, assaulting self-worth and self-efficacy, and undermining reestablishment of positive life-striving by inducing ‘behaviors to label’ among people who have been so labeled.” So: to finally get back to my list of the qualities of psychiatry (I promise I am going to wrap up this section of the essay quite soon), which included that it is (1) expansionist, (2) authoritarian, (3) irresponsible, (4) unaccountable, and (5) non-scientific, I think we have now established, by the evidence of the DSM itself, the American Psychiatric Association’s own primary publication, that the whole enterprise more than adequately demonstrates two of them, to wit, that it is both (1) expansionist and (5) non-scientific. With those two in hand, it is easy to see how rapidly the other three can be filled in. With no scientific basis for your thinking and practices (and thus no compulsion to act responsibly), and with an agenda to grow as much as possible until you have, knowingly or not, essentially medicalized the entire human experience (so that something as simple as grief for the loss of a loved one that is a little more severe than usual and that lasts longer than the conveniently brief period of time that someone else thinks it should last [two weeks is the figure given in the book] can now be pathologized and diagnosed as “major depressive disorder”) and with an unlimited supply of cash from the very people (drug companies) whose products you are selling to help you push your shared agenda into schools, hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, and, yes, even the halls of Congress, you now have what I would call a recipe for disaster. There has not, at least to my memory, been a single case in which anything like an apology was issued, let alone monetary damages given, for the entire class of victims of frontal lobotomies, just to pick one example. As far as I know, there has been an awful lot of whining, wailing and even some garment rending in the press about the brutal practices of the psychiatric past, and in addition some books written about the horrible results of using what was basically an ice pick, inserted through the eye socket to slash the nerves in the prefrontal cortex, to produce the kind of devastating results that were shown in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but there has been, at least so far as I know, no grand official statement from the American Psychiatric Association that the practice was harmful in any forum worthy of an event of such magnitude. Nor, as far as I know, have any of the states involved decided that they should pay monetary damages to the victims of lobotomies, who were frequently held at state hospitals for the duration of the procedure while a single doctor with no surgical training literally drove from hospital to hospital in his “lobotomobile” doing quickie lobotomies at the rate of up to 25 a day and turned the business of human devastation into something as casually accepted as a stage magician’s Las Vegas show or a visit to the drive-through window of a fast-food restaurant. Nor, as far as I know, have the heirs of António Egas Moniz yet returned the Nobel Prize he won for inventing the procedure (a “leucotomy”) on which the brutal process of wiping away a person’s personality and memories with a few swipes of an ice pick was based. When ISEPP issued its statement that it would “encourage efforts to hold the American Psychiatric Association legally, ethically and morally accountable”, I take that to mean that so far it hasn’t been held accountable in those ways, and although I will readily admit that I am neither a legal scholar nor a researcher, I have been unable to find any such apology on the Internet. The list could go on and on and on. Insulin shock, or electroshock, or cold baths, or being chained and confined to a bed, or any of a hundred other “treatments” . . . the list is probably endless, and limited only by the depths of the human imagination. The bottom line is that even now, the makers of certain classes of drugs use nursing homes, schools, prisons, and hospitals as the sites of their experiments on suffering humanity with impunity, and they make outrageous sums while they do it, sums which are hardly even dented when Elli Lilly, the makers of the drug Zyprexa, is sued for damages due to the diabetes caused by their drug, which they deliberately hid from their customers, or when Johnson and Johnson, one of the most respected and most powerful and most profitable corporations in the world, is found to be guilty of illegally marketing antipsychotics with what are known to be adverse effects to children. Big Pharma is not going to roll over, and psychiatry, which is now Big Pharma’s biggest partner in creating the most profitable drugs in the world (Abilify topped the charts in 2013 as the most profitable, with $6.5 billion in sales), is not exactly going to roll over either. It’s simple: these people have lawyers, and even if some random psychiatrist does have something left in his head that might be called a conscience, the first thing that a lawyer will tell him is that ever to even hint at culpability or responsibility is to open the floodgates of litigation wide and to set a tide of plaintiffs loose upon himself. I have seen patient after patient threaten lawsuits in a psych ward, only to have the psychiatrists and “mental health workers” shake their heads and walk away with impunity, because they know that the Legal Washing Machine that surrounds them, in which everything goes around and around and around and everything comes out looking spotless in the end, is going to protect them like the Biblical flaming sword at the east of the garden of Eden, which “turns this way and that” to protect the way back to the Tree of Life from which these miscreants so freely eat while their victims, the “patients” — the sinners who have sinned by deviating from the social contract and behaving oddly — are barred from eating from it as though by a punishing God. There is simply no way psychiatry is going to change, and it is free to exercise its reckless authoritarianism on victims who can’t fight back no matter what they might do, and psychiatry does it on a basis that is not only supported by reams of official-sounding paper and a history of prejudice that renders the lack of scientific evidence moot, but they do it knowing they will never be held accountable. There is simply no incentive for them to become responsible (a situation which economists call “moral hazard”: when there is no loss of profit from failing to reform your ways), and they would never be able to do it anyway as long as they continue to rely on their non-scientific “treatment plans” for baseless and prejudicial “diagnoses” of all these non-scientific “mental illnesses”. They can use the most dangerous methods — formerly, ice picks and insulin shock and chains, and, in these latter days of “reform”, restraint rooms and drugs and electroshock — with absolute impunity, and so there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to keep them from growing and expanding their increasingly powerful empire until it swallows and consumes us all. Remember: (1) expansionist, (2) authoritarian, (3) irresponsible, (4) unaccountable, and (5) non-scientific. That is psychiatry now, that was psychiatry in the past, and it is what psychiatry will be in the future. Like a swarm of termites that have somehow taken root in the cellar of your house, they want to spread out as much as possible, obeying only their own instincts to consume as much as they want to, and they chew through the supporting beams of the house without any regard for what will happen to you or even to themselves in the end, and they do it all while having no idea what the final result of their actions will be. That is what they are like as a swarm, as a host of insect-like beings who do not know how or even whether they should control themselves, which is a sad thing to say about a group of supposedly educated and intelligent individuals. It’s sad to admit, but that’s how masses of people behave when they have unlimited power but no factual accountability, and my conclusion at the present moment is that the whole profession needs, more or less, to be eliminated without any sort of reserve at all, while the “care” of those people who are mentally disturbed in any way needs to be turned back over to those people who do know how to go about it effectively, and who, despite whatever doubts there may be about it at this time among people of conscience, do still exist and whose methods I will get to (regrettably, later) in another post. -------------------------------------------------------- Part 6 of the essay "Death of a Psychiatrist" As always, thanks to those who are now sharing the parts of this essay in different forms. Besides Facebook shares, there are apparently some people getting it out by email as well. For this I am immensely appreciative. I'm also just going to come right out and say fuck you to Robert Whitaker, the editor of Mad In America and the person who is most personally profiting from complaining about the condition of people like me, because he's a profiteering fucking asshole. You, Bob, knew exactly how important this essay was to everyone, and you chose to squash it, because you're a jealous asshole who won't let anyone else compete with you for importance. You are a douchebag, as we all call it in New England, and everyone fucking knows it. My writing is at least ten times as good as yours, asshole, and I challenge you to a writing contest on any fucking subject you want, and at any time you dare to take the challenge. You're a douchebag, and I don't care if no one else has the guts to say it. Fuck you. Take thet challenge asshole. I will laugh as you lose, douchebag. And that's to you, Robert Whitaker, you fucking asshole. You are not one tenth of the writer that I am and Kermit Cole, your own bullshit editor, can tell you that. You, Robert, are a fucking has-been and a loser, and you need to go away now, because you're done. You used the the World Hearing Voices Conference as a stop on your book tour. I take that as a personal insult, asshole. Fuck. You. Asshole. Challenge me to a writing contest, fuckhead. You'll lose any day, asshole. Thanks again to Dr. Bonnie Burstow, who influenced this work. --- For other days' installments of the essay, please check my feed. --- 6 We are now in a situation where the entire population is in danger of being turned into what I call Pharmaceutical Dairy Cows. That is, between all the schools handing out psychoactive drugs, the “mental hospitals” handing out psychoactive drugs, the nursing homes and the prisons and, yes, even the legitimate actual medical hospitals handing out psychoactive drugs, the entire country is in danger of becoming nothing more than a perpetual income stream for Big Pharma and for its psychiatrists, who are their willing adherents to this deadly methodology. One in four American women aged forty to fifty years now takes an antidepressant, and in thirty years there has been an increase of twenty times for the use of “ADHD” drugs in children to highlight only two of the most dangerous situations, and the numbers for all the so-called “mental illnesses” are still exploding. I see a future, not too far down the road, where each of us will be like a cow: fed just enough to make sure we produce, kept in a dual cage of disability payments and subsidized housing, and dosed with just enough drugs to make sure that whatever milk we produce is theirs for the taking. When one dollar in every six now goes to the medical establishment, which largely means to Big Pharma and its adherents, and when the evening news has become a series of quick news blurbs interrupted by an endless series of ads, all of them extolling the virtues of yet another new diabetes drug (which you need because of the “antipsychotics”) or some solution to temporarily relieve your dry eyes (which you need because of some other drug), and when every new edition of the DSM increases the number of diagnoses you can be wedged into by a sufficiently willing psychiatrist, and when every new round of angel investing creates another slew of young, upstart pharmaceutical companies just waiting to find that new blockbuster drug and be bought out by Big Pharma, I don’t think the danger is that far around the corner. When a congressman puts forward a bill in Congress, requiring the forced “medicating” of whoever the “mentally ill” happen to be considered at the moment, and when more and more and more of us fit that description according to the appointed experts at the American Psychiatric Association, I feel confident that the world I envision can’t be that far away. The question now becomes what to do about it all, and that is where I have to go back to the original point of my essay: the need to clean up the language. We need to start calling things by their proper names, and that means when you talk to a hustler, you call him just that — a hustler — and at the same stop labelling people who have been having troubles with their lives the “mentally ill”, as though they had some permanent affliction which we have proven over and over and over again doesn’t exist and never has. It is time to go back to the problem of language and to start looking at how it really works. Far and away the most important class I took in college was in the history and philosophy of science, taught by the great Dr. Peter Skiff, whom I corresponded with recently and was delighted to discover he was still at the institution, Bard College, from which I graduated in the early 1990s. This was not a nuts-and-bolts science class. It was actually just the opposite: Dr. Skiff said more than once, putting his hand up to the side of his mouth as though sharing with us a secret he didn’t want others to hear, that he wouldn’t let the kids doing real science down the hall take this particular class, because to make them question the ideas underlying what they were doing would be to turn them all into scientific revolutionaries, and that he would do his best to avoid that situation if at all possible. No, this wasn’t the study of physics or chemistry themselves, this was about the study of physics and chemistry as larger enterprises of science, and that is a whole different subject area from just a regular science class. We didn’t study atoms and particle waves; we studied the people who invented the ideas of atoms and particle waves, who came up with the whole shebang called science, and we rooted down into the shenanigans they played with each other during their intellectual contests for supremacy in that world. Now, I am willing to admit that most of us who took the class were non-scientific layabouts who were doing our best to fulfill our college’s science requirement by skating around it with a class on the history and philosophy of the subjects rather than by taking the subjects themselves, and that none of us would have dared take a real science class that actually involved anything as challenging as a math problem. But the class, it turned out, was not only intellectually stimulating and challenging; it was, in fact, the best class that I ever took, and it was even the best class I can even imagine taking. It was stimulating, it was historical, it was philosophical, and it was wide-ranging, and it introduced me to concepts that have been the very underpinning of how I have thought about the world ever since. I am extremely lucky to have ever met the illustrious and yet strangely humble Dr. Peter Skiff, whose erudition seemed to know no bounds and yet who never put on airs or treated us as anything less than his intellectual equals. He never talked down to us, and yet he never held back. He was — and, I imagine, is — the very image of the enlightened and generous professor of ideas. The area that he introduced us to and that I’d like to concentrate on now has to do with the work of the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn, who taught at MIT and who wrote the “paradigm-shifting” book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In fact, it was largely due to Kuhn’s writing that people starting talking about “paradigms” and “paradigm shifts” at all. A paradigm, quite simply, is a conceptual framework, such as, in science, the idea that electrons are like little billiard balls that zip around in predictable orbits around the nucleus of an atom, much like we imagine the planets do when they orbit the sun. This, of course, is nothing more than a way of imagining what’s happening, and the whole idea can be replaced at the drop of a hat. Previous to this conception of little balls zipping around, for instance, there had been another called the “plum pudding” model, which imagined the parts of atoms as being like different particles buried inside some other mass of material, much like the plums inside an English plum pudding, but which the idea of electrons zooming around the central nucleus replaced due to its better ability to explain things in chemistry and physics. Basically, as Kant pointed out, we don’t really know what an actual thing (the ding an sich, the “thing in itself”) really looks like. We have eyes and ears and a brain that all work a certain way, and we tend to imagine the world as working just like the way we think our own brains work, or the way we imagine it all works, just by how we see and hear things in our own minds. That’s natural, since, when you throw a ball in the air and you can then catch it, there must be something working right since you’re able to predict what’s about to happen, which makes you then assume that you know what’s really happening, but that is not in any way the whole picture of what’s really really really happening at the heart of it all. Needless to say, the “thing in itself”, as Kant put it, doesn’t really look the way we see it in our heads, just as the world around us doesn’t really work exactly the way we see it in our heads; after all, we don’t ever actually see infrared or ultraviolet light, even though we know it’s there, and we don’t ever see microwaves or gravity waves or sound waves or any of the other bizarre things that are out there that we only know about through science. But we do imagine them, and the way we imagine them — or conceptualize them — is the “paradigm”, and a paradigm can apply to anything from the right way to make a fishing lure to the right way to run the economy. To finally get back to T. S. Kuhn, what Dr. Skiff taught us was how Kuhn said that paradigms change. What Kuhn said was that, in essence, each paradigm brings with it certain preconceptions, and that when someone, such as a young psychiatrist, adopts a certain way of seeing things in his or her head, they basically become committed to seeing things that one way the rest of their lives. Their conception might be a good one and it might help them solve certain problems, just as a biological conception of psychiatry has helped us understand certain problems like Alzheimers, dementia, or epilepsy (yes, they actually have done some good), but Kuhn also said that in the long run such conceptions have a certain limited usefulness. In other words, that initial paradigm might help us solve certain problems, but in the end, what’s going to happen is you’re going to encounter things that your old paradigm, your old conception, doesn’t work with, and you’re going to need a new paradigm if you’re ever going to figure other things out. That’s the problem now with “mental illness”. We need a whole new paradigm, and with it, a whole new language, because the paradigm is simply not going to work until it is replaced and we come up with a new language that doesn’t talk about things that we know don’t exist. There is no such thing as a “mental illness”, and running around trying to “treat” something that doesn’t exist, and with drugs of all things, is only a recipe for disaster, despite whatever short-term gains we may think we’ve made, and in the end it’s going to be a major, major problem for us all if we don’t go back to the drawing board and come up with a new way of talking about things. We need a new paradigm and a new language that does work now and that hopefully will work for the future. Not to go too deeply into it at the moment (you can probably see a future post coming), but I would suggest that we start by recognizing that what we call “mental illness” or “mental distress” is largely composed of problems caused by living, and that trauma, stress, and the accumulated pains and aversions of a lifetime spent in less than optimal circumstances, if not in outright suffering, is what needs to lie at the heart of that new paradigm, and that we need to talk about it all in terms of evolution and adaptation: what humans really are, biopsychosocially, and how they got to be that way. I’ll get to that (regrettably, later) in another post. Now I’d like to indulge myself for a moment and switch gears to talk about one very interesting thing that happened in the 1960s and which may seem like a needless detour, but believe me, it isn’t. Basically, there was a survey of some sort done on the topic of suicide and the different professions, a survey where they wanted to find out what lines of work were mostly likely to lead to you committing suicide. It was a valid question: who was most likely to commit suicide, and what lines of work were they in? Interestingly enough, after they surveyed enough people and finished the study, they came to the conclusion that the people most likely to commit suicide were — believe it or not — psychiatrists. Lots of people then came up with various explanations for this phenomenon, but they basically all came down to saying that, “Well, if you had to sit around listening to that depressing shit all day, you’d kill yourself too.” This was a convenient explanation, and interestingly, the American Psychiatric Association immediately put in place a suicide prevention program, which is only natural when your organization has received the kind of black eye that theirs had, where the very people who are supposed to know the most about “distress” and who are supposed to know how to do something about it, turn out to be the very people least able to cope with it. After all, it has become very, very clear to me (and I hope to you by now) that psychiatrists don’t know nearly as much about things as they pretend to do when they’re walking around a psych ward and acting like the lords of creation, and the truth is that when you actually get one of them to talk about it, he or she will confess as much in a heartbeat. Anyway, the whole thing about psychiatrists killing themselves struck me as kind of funny, because they were, after all, the supposed experts on suffering, and they were suffering so much from a lack of knowledge about their own subject that they were killing themselves. This is the finest kind of irony. So this is where psychiatry and the paradigm-shifting ideas of T. S. Kuhn and the whole problem of the language of “mental illness” come together at last, because one of the things Kuhn said was that, eventually, what has to happen is that the old paradigm has to die if any new progress is going to be made, which means that the old scientists have to die off so that a bunch of new scientists with new paradigms in their heads can take over. I’m a little bit of an evolution buff, and recently I’ve come to the conclusion that old age and dying, which a lot of scientists say isn’t strictly necessary for human beings and that they, the scientists, don’t really understand why we even go through it, is, actually, an evolutionary necessity. The simple fact, I believe, is that we have to die off because, as T. S. Kuhn might have said, the old paradigms have to die off if the species as a whole is going to keep moving on into the future, and individual people are, after all, the ones carrying all the old paradigms around in their heads. In other words I have to come to the conclusion, to bring it back around to psychiatry, that the best thing for us all is for all the psychiatrists to go back to their old way of doing things and just to kill themselves off — that is to say, to just sweep themselves away in one mass extinction — if we’re ever going to get anywhere with the problem of “mental illness”. Unfortunately, the paradigm of “mental illness” is so profitable for Big Pharma that they’ve buried themselves like ticks in our necks and we just can’t get rid of them. We have no way to pull them out, because if we do then the infection of the rotting heads left behind will kill us, and yet we have no way to burn them out, because society’s will has not yet been sufficiently set afire to scorch out the little bastards the way they deserve, and so we are left with no recourse except to hope — and Lord forgive me for saying this — that all the psychiatrists will simply go into their offices, take a massive overdose of one of the poisons they have been so readily dispensing to everyone else, and by so doing quietly take themselves out of the picture. Quite frankly, I don’t see any other way that we’re ever going to get rid of them, because we can’t murder them, even if their expansionist, authoritarian, irresponsible, unaccountable, and non-scientific methods are resulting in the deaths of millions of people; I mean, you just can’t do things that way, even if they actually do do things that way, which is what you would have to call it when you force people to take drugs that result in their deaths 25 years earlier than they would otherwise happen, which is what happens with “antipsychotics”, or when you happily agree to exterminate all of the “mentally ill” as the psychiatric profession did so readily in Nazi Germany (http://www.schizophreniaforum.org/…/livedisc/PsychiatricGen…), which was an event that came out of a society that in its idea of itself as being culturally, scientifically, and militarily superior to everyone else on the planet resembles our own much more than you may realize. No, the psychiatrists who are holding onto the old paradigm have to go away, and until they do so they’re going to keep talking and talking and talking (and writing and writing and writing) about “mental illness” and “mental health” and “medication” and “treatment” and all the other bullshit to the point they call ad nauseam in Latin, which literally means until it makes us all sick, which is what is going to happen in both a literal and a figurative sense when they force us all onto their drugs, and, as they do so, line their own and Big Pharma’s pockets and by so doing gain ever more power until the point is reached where the rest of us are all either dead or locked in cages like a bunch of Pharmaceutical Dairy Cows which are milked on a daily basis in the form of Medicare and Medicaid payments. That’s the fate I see coming, to be honest, if we don’t do something about it all soon, and so we need to change how we talk, just for starters, if we’re ever going to solve this problem. --------------------------------------------------------