Poor and struggling people “mental disorder” prone. Duh!

The UK Daily Mail reports, The true cost of debt: People struggling to pay loans are ‘three times more likely to have mental health problems’, as if this were news. Why am I not at all surprised?

Among people with the most difficult debt challenges, including arrears on mortgage or rent payments, the rate of mental health problems rises to three times higher than in the general population, scientist said.

People with money problems have “mental” problems. Any excuse will do. Maybe you can get the government (i.e. taxpayers) to pay your way if you, personally, cannot afford to pay your own way.

He [University of Nottingham Dr. John Gathergood] said: ‘One striking finding of my research is that many people with debt problems describe feelings of being unable to concentrate on day-to-day activities or make normal decisions. This has wider effects on their attitudes and general health.”

Uh, right. My debt threw me. Anybody else wanna take it on? I just love those challenges other people face. Particularly when they are insurmountable.

Remember the great depression of 1929? Me neither. I’m just not that old, but we’ve had these things called economic recessions ever since that are essentially the same thing. We call them recessions so people won’t get upset, and because we know there is going to be an readjustment made to fix the thing. On the other hand, nobody has an emotional “recession” because it would mean a diminishment of the seriousness of “the problem” when “the problem” is conceived of as primarily “mental”.

I wouldn’t think that many people, as a rule, want to waste their lives working on seeking a solution to an insoluble problem. “The problem” in your head is insoluble. “The problem” with the economy will eventually give way to a solution for some bodies if not for others.

Just consider, what if the “mental” problem were not all that “mental”? What then? Maybe, just maybe, that would make “the problem” in your head soluble.

The point I would like to make is that a revolution for a more equitable redistribution of wealth may result in an improvement of both conditions. This is particularly true if we are in reality talking one condition here, and that one condition is the economic condition.

Professional Zombie Psychiatry Not Invinceable…Yet

Straight off the bat I’m insulted. I’m not “mentally ill”. “Mental illness” is psychiatry-speak. Listen and you’re damned. Flip ‘em the finger, and you’re saved.

Speaking in more general terms, if you were to draw a circle, and title the circle “psychiatry”, you want to stand outside of that circle in the broader world where things are still possible.

What you don’t want to be is a victim of psychiatric predation. ‘Here’s a label, hang it around your neck for the duration of your days, and let’s play “psychiatry says”.’ You want to say “no” to that kind of psycho-tyrannical ego annihilation.

Don’t confess. Admit nothing. They want to hang you on your past. You don’t want to get caught in that kind of terminally lost and perpetually frozen time frame. Be forewarned, and dress accordingly. The coldest people on earth work in the mental health system.

Psychiatry says, “take a pill.” Psychiatry says, “fit into the square hole.” Psychiatry says, “once a loony always a loony.” Psychiatry says, “my voice is the only voice.” Psychiatry says, “I’m the authority.” Psychiatry says, “you’re not the authority.” Psychiatry says, “worship at the shrine of the prescription pad.”

Psychiatry is boorrinngg! Be wary though, psychiatry wants to bore you into a somnolent compliance. Psychiatry wants to hypnotize you into zombie-dom. Psychiatry is the new voodoo.

Grab an assault rifle. Park yourself by a window, and prepare for the new long night of the living dead.

Wait a minute! Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s no need to get yourself locked up in a maximum security forensic unit. You can fight this war on the street where 75 % of the population have nothing to do with “mental health” or “mental health” zombies. The mental health zombie authorities have still got a long ways to go before the DSM-XKM allows all citizens to be labeled “sick” by virtue of their citizenship.

It may be coming, but it’s still on a slow boat. However much psychiatry wants business to pick up, that much is too much. Too much for the moment anyway.

You have to understand that biopsychosocial rehabilitation isn’t just a nonsense term. Biopsychosocial rehabilitation is the new name for purgatory on earth. Biopsychosocial rehabilitation is rehabilitation that is expressly not rehabilitation. Biopsychosocial rehabilitation is the limbo of non-starters.

The psychiatry grimoire can’t work its magic when it’s closed or kept at a distance. You don’t need to have a “mental illness” if you don’t want to have one. What people don’t have is the classified information that the mental health zombie authorities like to keep from them. Anybody who gets with a “mental illness” can lose that “mental illness” whenever convenient. The technology of our mental health zombie authorities isn’t such that it can keep tabs on its victims everywhere they go. The zombie authorities, just like their labels, are very losable.

This thoroughly beatable non-threatening situation may not always be the situation, but it is the situation today. Biopsychobabble is very vulnerable to rational argument. The forces of psychiatry madness can be warded off by calling on alternate shamanistic powers when necessary. Be forewarned. This may not always be the case. Big pharma’s puppet doctor zombie wants you!

Dodging The Shit Treatment

I don’t like being treated like shit. I react when I’m treated like shit. The whole mental illness industry, misleadingly called the mental health field, is about treating people like shit. The first precondition to treating people like shit is endeavoring to persuade those people that they actually are shit, and therefore, there is nothing wrong with treating them like shit.

Shit must first know shit’s place in the world. Shit must be convinced of shit’s own unworthiness, shit’s burdensomeness, and shit’s status as a waste product. Shit is, in a nutshell, defined by the nature of its dysfunction, or by its brokenness. Warehouses and sewers have much in common. They contain toxic waste. Shit’s status is as unwanted material and as toxic waste.

We have another word for shit these days. We call shit chronic disease. Do nothings are do nothings because they do nothing. At the root of doing nothing, according to theory, is the messed up circuitry of broken brains. Our esteemed mental health professionals mind the warehouse/latrines where the do nothings are stored when their existence irritates the worthies, as opposed to worthless clods like do nothings and other ne’re do wells, in any community.

Much of this dysfunction is entirely psychological, or should I say, miseducational? Shit has been taught that shit is shit, and that if shit is a human being, shit is a human being in name only. Shit is more fundamentally shit. If human beings have rights, shit doesn’t have human rights per se, shit has shit rights. Shit rights are like patient rights. Those rights don’t include life, liberty, and property (or the pursuit of happiness). Shit knows shit’s place in the world.

Should shit object, then shit must be corrected. Shit is shit, and shit doesn’t do such things. Shit needs to know shit’s place. Shit’s place is out of sight and out of mind in the hospital/warehouse/septic tank/outpatient facility/mental health ghetto. Shit doesn’t do real work. Workers work. Shit stinks. Shit can’t produce fine art either. Artists do that. Yes, there is shit art, but then there is also shit work. Shit can’t achieve because achievement is the opposite of shit.

It’s okay to be little balls of turd, but a human being, that requires a little more wiggle space. Disabled isn’t enabled. This rubber stamped paper and institutional bureaucratic invalidation that one receives extends across ages and continents. Defective humans have defective genes and defective spirits. Gold is a good tan, but shit is to the bone. Unwanted is unwanted. One can’t change human nature despite the fact that we’re changing human nature all the time. Give up. Beyond one’s grasp, wealth and power are everything.

There is a world beyond shit, and by that I mean there is a world beyond mental health treatment. Beyond the distress role there is the stability role. Actors and actresses who are well enjoy playing people who are disturbed, or if you prefer, sick. Sick roles make fortunes. The unfortunate thing is that many people who are labeled sick don’t find much satisfaction in playing people who are well. Perhaps it is only because they haven’t tried. Perhaps it is only because they haven’t discovered acting.

Reality is an act. It is also an act that we don’t want to take too seriously. You could always wind up with the wrong role if you took life too seriously. The wrong role is the right role if you don’t take it too seriously. It is the right role because there is always another role at hand if it doesn’t work out. Any role that you can’t step into, and out of, with facility is a trap. I personally have got better things to do with my life than become a victim of the better mental patient trap.

The ‘Mental Illness’ Confidence Game

“Mental illness” per se is only gullibility. “Chronic mental illness” is chronic gullibility. “Serious mental illness” is serious gullibility. All sorts of people can be gulled, and some of them get gulled into believing that there is something seriously wrong with themselves.

Mental health treatment serves the status quo. Mental health is seen as a 9 -5 job performed by some sort of unthinking automaton. Mental health is also seen as the status of politicians and bankers who get us into all kinds of trouble. We say, in their case, that this trouble is not trouble because these fuck ups make megabucks fucking up.

Mental health treatment, given the ascendancy of biological medical model psychiatry, is a drug. Does it make the person dubbed “mentally ill” mentally healthy? No. It doesn’t, in other words, correct the mistake of “mental illness”. It does produce a subservient and obedient toady who has been sedated sans objection though.

The human being dubbed “mentally ill” who resists this social programming regime through chemistry is referred to as noncompliant. The aim of treatment is compliance. Compliance is a synonym for subservient and obedient. Non-compliance leads to mental health, or independence from insurance payments, and the mental health system, and as such it just doesn’t pay.

You have three, maybe four, different industries that need gullible people. These industries are the mental health industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, and the government, federal and state.

If we want to add a fifth, there is also the health care industry. The drugs that sedate mental patients subservient and obedient also ruin their physical health, and keep doctors and nurses in business. As long as they aren’t automatons, they are expendable. Money, in fact, is made on expending them.

The mental health system is where people are sent who don’t fit into the 9-5 automaton money grubbing scheme mold. Somebody has to make money off them, too, and therefore we’ve got mental health workers, insurance salespeople, drug company exes, and politicians.

The “sicker” people are, and the more “sick” people there are among them, the more money these people make off of this “sickness” industry. As this “sickness” is nothing more than a matter of susceptibility, that is, gullibility, the “sickness” is a matter for industry pitchmen to foster.

There are ways around the 9-5 world. It’s just that they aren’t found in the mental health system because the mental health system is built around that world. People spend their entire lives doing stupid little idiotic things because other people are doing the same. We call some of this idiocy mental health treatment.

Fifty Years Down And Maybe A Clockwork Brown Could Use A Little Touch Up

I have for awhile now been doing almost daily internet searches for the appearence of the term anti-psychiatry in the news. In most instances this word is used as an expression of disparagement, or as an example of a trend from which a journalist or a blogger wishes to disassociate him or herself. If trend it is, it isn’t a very popular trend. These are the primary instances in which the term makes an appearance. There is another instance, too, when the term puts in an appearance, and that is when psychiatrists use the term themselves. Here the term is being used to scapegoat critics of conventional psychiatry. Anti-psychiatry is the great bug-a-boo of mainstream psychiatry today. It doesn’t have much of a substantial existence, and yet psychiatry feels a need to defend itself from this amorphous and mysterious malevolent force it feels is being directed against itself. Anti-psychiatry Disorder is the great white whale of a ‘sickness’ the contemporary megalomaniacal mad Dr. Ahab feels most challenged by.

When it comes down to it, I think there is very little difference between anti-psychiatry and non-psychiatry. Non-psychiatry is basically indifferent to, and not in need of, psychiatry. I think non-psychiatry has a great future. Anti-psychiatry, on the other hand, is more dependent on psychiatry. Anti-psychiatry is antipathetic to psychiatry, and this creates no end of problems for psychiatrists. Its future is tied up with the future of psychiatry. I don’t think it very ironic at all that a psychiatrist came up with the term anti-psychiatry. Disciples of Christianity came up with the beast 666, the Anti-Christ, to describe the nemesis and antithesis of their own faith. Atheism is altogether another creature entirely. Faith is the key-word here, and faith is not a matter for scientific inquiry. Science itself demands a certain amount of healthy skepticism.

Recently Dr. Edward Shorter, a psychiatrist, a historian, and a critic of critics of contemporary psychiatric practice co-authored with Susan Belanger, another partisan of coercive treatment, an article for the Oxford University Press blog, Anti-psychiatry in A Clockwork Orange. A Clockwork Orange is turning 50. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, another classic, achieved 50 not so long ago as well, but these two experts were not so enthused about celebrating that momentous occasion.

Political interest in behavioural programming is represented by the Minister of the Interior (whom Alex nicknames Minister of the Inferior, or — in a nod to the truncations of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 — Int Inf Min). The “Min” visits the prison to implement the treatment in order to fight crime “on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex.” He reappears as Alex’s “cure” is demonstrated and boasts to the media about government efforts to suppress “young hooligans and perverts and burglars.” In fact the police are now recruiting former hooligans to rough up whomever they choose and round up enemies of the Government, an agenda suggested by the Minister’s earlier comment about clearing the prisons for “political offenders.” This combination of political tyranny and abusive (Pavlovian!) conditioning in a future Britain where adolescent thugs speak a mixture of Cockney rhyming slang, archaisms, and anglicized Russian (“Propaganda. Subliminal penetration,” a doctor suggests) creates an additional sinister note that would have been especially potent in the Cold War era when A Clockwork Orange was published.

Now if we interpret this work in the way that Dr. Shorter and Ms. Belanger interpret this work it has something to do with the cold war era in which it came out. What neither of them are looking at is the way this work relates to the increasing medicalization of life taking place in our own time. After calling insulin shock, metrasol therapy, and ECT used extensively durring the 1930′s “highly effective”, a claim I find highly dubious. The authors point out ECT gained popularity in the 1950s. Then we get this paragraph.

Beginning in the 1950s, a series of revolutionary drug treatments arose: antipsychotics, antidepressants and anxiolytics. So widespread was their use that, by the time Burgess penned Clockwork, they had become the subjects of cocktail party chitchat. Medical psychotherapy, which had ruled the roost in previous decades, was wobbling (the Brits never had much interest in Freud’s psychoanalysis) and was about to be pushed out the door. All these innovations lent themselves marvelously to being parodied, sent up, and pulled down by scornful novelists.

This is hardly the end of the story. Those revolutionary treatments didn’t turn out to be so revolutionary after all. This psychiatric drug treatment revolution has lead, rather than to an end of “psychosis” in our lifetime as was hoped, to the favoring of drug maintenance over any approach emphasizing the possibility and hope of achieving complete recovery from, say, the youth, immaturity and thuggish nature exhibited by the chief protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, Alex. People in mental health treatment are also dying off at an earlier age than the rest of the population because of these drugs. Rather than eluding the “laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation”, those “laws and conditions” are incorporated into a lifetime prescription drug taking regimen.

I’d say the times haven’t changed so much as these mental health professionals would envision them to have changed, and maybe the Anthony Burgess classic novel, and the movie based on that novel, could use a serious update to illustrate how similar the treatments parodied in his book are to treatments still being practiced on a widescale and regular basis today.

Spring Cleaning With The Trash Can Labeled “Antipsychiatry”

My ten-cents on the DSM-5 debate debacle, part 2

I was going to drop the DSM-5 discussion last week, but another article came to light, and I just couldn’t do it. Sorry. This time its an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Not Diseases But Categories of Suffering.

It’s not the current A.P.A.’s fault. The fault lies with its predecessors. The D.S.M. is the offspring of odd bedfellows: the medical industry, with its focus on germs and other biochemical causes of disease, and psychoanalysis, the now-largely-discredited discipline that attributes our psychological suffering to our individual and collective history.

Actually the delusion of the APA is that the DSM will resolve this conflict, it’s revisionist editors from the very beginning have been the very people behind ‘the discrediting’, mentioned in the above paragraph, of psychoanalysis.

The American Psychiatric Association has been trying to do just that ever since, mostly by leaving behind ideas about the meaning of our suffering in favor of observation and treatment of its symptoms. In 1980, it hit on the strategy of adopting a medical rhetoric, organizing those symptoms into neat disease categories and checklists of precisely described criteria and publishing them in the hefty — and, according to its chief author, “very scientific-looking” — D.S.M.-III.

The pathologizing of human suffering, and not suffering symptomatic of any known physical disease, but rather that suffering which can be said to have arisen from emoting and thinking. Types of suffering are seen as disease manifested through a variety of symptoms.

Previously I stated that this process was a matter of normalizing medicalization, and this is so, what we’ve got here is medicine’s incursion into areas that, strictly speaking, are specifically not medical, and specifically not science.

In this Op-Ed piece we read the following, “And as any psychiatrist involved in the making of the D.S.M. will freely tell you, the disorders listed in the book are not “real diseases,” at least not like measles or hepatitis. Instead, they are useful constructs that capture the ways that people commonly suffer.” I wonder why does so much of the mental health industry rhetoric and literature insist then on stating that “mental illnesses” are real, that they are real diseases, and not only that they are real diseases, but that they are diseases of the brain. We’re stuck with an either/or that would be a both/and, but…Hey, whatever stretch you can come up to resolve that one has got to break on close examination.

My feeling has always been that this clamor is going to fizzle to a uncomfortable grumble once the volume is released in 2013. If such is the case it will be unfortunate indeed. For years now we’ve been uncomfortably enduring the fruits of the DSM-IV. Those fruits are these growing epidemics of autism, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and depression. My feeling is that as the DSM usually works by division and addition rather than subtraction (starting with 28 mental disorders, now you’ve got something like 374) the 20 % USA labeled “mentally ill” rate is likely to go up rather than down.

The DSM has been referred to as the psychiatrists’ bible. The bible is the number 1 best selling book of all time. The DSM is doing none too poorly itself.

On the other hand, given that the current edition of the D.S.M. has earned the association — which holds and tightly guards its naming rights to our pain — more than $100 million, we might want to temper our sympathy. It may not be dancing at the ball, but once every mental health worker, psychology student and forensic lawyer in the country buys the new book, it will be laughing all the way to the bank.

‘Laughing all the way to the bank’ together with drug company executives riding piggyback on this volume of sheer non-sense. The mortality gap for people in treatment labeled with psychosis is widening, not narrowing. This mortality gap is the direct result of our societies over reliance on the quick and chemical fix. The quick and chemical fix is one of the results of using this balderdash to treat people who suffer. At one time we as a nation were a lot better off where our emotional stability was concerned, and at that time there was no DSM. We could be a lot better off again if we were to chuck the present volume into the trash heap now, and call off any future revisions. The internal national enemy of a rising “mental illness” rate is not going away anytime soon as long as this book is used to alienate, marginalize, and disempower an increasingly large segment of the American populace.

My ten-cents on the DSM-5 debate debacle, part 1

I happened to leave the following comment under the Miriam-Webster definition for normalize recently.

While psychiatrist Allen Frances is critical the DSM revising process for medicalizing normal, I’m more critical of the same process for normalizing medicalization.

I stand by those words.

Allen Frances is to be praised for the position he has taken toward the DSM-5, no three ways about it.

His position towards the great bug-a-boo of psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, is quite another matter. I imagine all shrinks should have an office trashcan with the label “anti-psychiatry” taped to it. Anti-psychiatry has been totally discredited in the eyes of mainstream psychiatry. This is something of a joke as there is no co-ordinated anti-psychiatry movement to speak of anywhere that I know of. There is this person and that, and there are a few people here and there. Anti-psychiatry has become the whopping lie of mainstream psychiatry. Anti-psychiatry is one of the ploys mainstream psychiatry would use to reinforce its claim to scientific legitimacy, to maintain its theoretical hegemony, to silence its critics, and to stifle dissent among the rank and file. Anti-psychiatry has become psychiatry’s strawman and scapegoat. The other scapegoat being its clientelle. The message given is something along the lines of, ‘Be a good little compliant poster-board mental health consumer or the anti-psychiatrist will get you if you don’t watch out’.

This brings me to Jon Ronson, the author of The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats. He was featured in a CBC News analysis recently, Are we over-diagnosing autism? The psychiatric debate.

Dr. Frances told Ronson that he and his associates had created three false “epidemics” — childhood bi-polar disorder, autism and ADHD.

I’d say there are at least 4 false epidemics at work here, to be more precise, and throw in depression. Let me mention a few of the obvious reasons for doing so. 11 % of the people in the USA, the world’s leader in “mental illness” labeling today, are on anti-depressant drugs. The World Health Organization predicts that depression will be the leading cause of disability in the world by the year 2020. Depression is often seen as the underlying basis for other “mental disorder” labels, from the minor “mental disorder” leagues to the majors.

I have little desire to read Jon Ronson’s book, and the following comment should suffice to help explain my reasoning.

“I looked at all three and out of the three, the only one I felt comfortable about [excluding] was childhood bi-polar disorder. That seemed quite open and shut,” Ronson said. “Aspergers is a much more complicated thing.”

He likes those “mental illness” labels, doesn’t he?

I can picture members of the American Psychiatric Association clapping Mr. Ronson on his back, and inviting him onto their revision committee. From the look of recent revision efforts it would seem that most of the APA are in relative agreement with him about a number of matters. This man is not exactly a critic of psychiatry, quite the reverse. For an author, he’s been bought and sold. If the drug companies don’t have enough puppets working for them these days, I’m sure they would have no objections to welcoming another.

Although I can picture it, I really don’t see it happening any time soon. What if Mr. Ronson should dig just a little bit deeper? What if he should uncover some of the skeletons in psychiatry’s closet? What if he should reach the unbearable truth? What then? Nope, biological psychiatry has known enough turn coats and whistle blowers in its day. Freedom of speech is not, and never will be, the industry’s forte’. Freedom of speech will, in some instances, get you a psychiatric label. It could even get you thrown into the looney bin.

On finding another illness with little or no basis

One headline struck my consciousness as curious in recent weeks for exposing certain blatant weaknesses in current biological psychiatric theory. WebMD covered the story with an article titled, CDC: Morgellons Disease May Be Psychiatric Disorder. The truth of the matter is a little more profound than this headline suggests.

Extensive study of people suffering from Morgellons disease — including analysis of their mysterious “skin fibers” — finds no underlying cause of the illness.

If no physical cause to a disease can be found then it is deemed to be psychological in nature or, in other words, a “mental illness”. Now going from saying that it is “all in the head” to claiming it is a “disease of the brain”, and that it has a “genetic basis”, is quite some leap, but this is precisely the kind of leap, in presumption more than theory, that modern medical-model psychiatry is so adept at making. “Brain disease” being a physical cause, if “mental illness” were found to stem from a “brain disease”, psychiatrists would need to find another profession. Literally, a “mentally ill” person is a person who is suffering, or not functioning if you prefer, for a reason that has no known physical basis.

So just what the heck is Morgellons Disease?

Morgellons symptoms are as creepy as the name implies. Patients report slow-to-heal sores that often feel like bugs are crawling under their skin. They often scratch themselves raw. And they also report that mysterious colored fibers, granules, worms, eggs, fuzzballs, or other stuff comes out of their skin.

Somebody should make a list of dubious diseases someday, from fibromyalgia to restless leg syndrome, that give people with weak constitutions and temperaments an easy excuse for demanding special and specialized attention. I would wager it would become quite an extensive list in time if one looked long and hard enough into the matter.

Disease has not been ruled out in the case of Morgellons, but, and a long but it is…

They suggest that the patients’ symptoms and histories are similar to those of patients with a psychiatric condition called delusional infestation — the delusional belief that one is infested with parasites.

Now if these diseases, as there is no disease at all present, actually represent beliefs, it is actually this perceived need for a special or specialized attention that is the thing with which we must contend. I suggest that our society is not nearly as hearty as it once was due to the harboring of so many of these fallacious beliefs, and the humoring of so many people who have been so persuaded. When 1 in 5 people in the USA at the present date, according to recent reports, are said to be have contracted a “mental illness”, perhaps our efforts would be better directed at diverting a few more of this number from making such a radical conversion in faith.

In the been there, done that, department: The I don’t care whether we arrive at concensus or not form

Fill in the blank with one of the group of words from the right.

Mental Patients Liberation

Peer

Peer Support

Peer Specialist

Consumer

Consumer Empowerment

Psychiatric Survivor

Consumer/Survivor/Ex-patient

C/S/X

Ex-patient

User and Survivor

Anti-psychiatry

Anti-stigma

Peer Recovery

Recovery

Mad

Mad Pride

Mental Patients

Mental Health

Self-help

Disability

Ability

We are the __________ movement.

It’s Okay to be withdrawn, anti-social, socio or psychopathic, too.

There, I had my little transactional analyst moment. Thank you. Good night!