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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
. . .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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