Thomas Stephen Szasz, 1920 – 2012

“I am probably the only psychiatrist in the world whose hands are clean,” Szasz told the newspaper. “I have never committed anyone. I have never given electric shock. I have never, ever, given drugs to a mental patient.”

~Update: Thomas Szasz, Manlius psychiatrist who disputed existence of mental illness, dies at 92, John Mariani, Wednesday, September 12, 2012, The Post-Standard, Saracuse, New York.

Saturday Morning I saw the close of the historic 30th Anniversary Nation Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA) conference in Cincinnati. The grand finale of this event was a rousing and invigorating talk by Bruce Levine lambasting corruption in psychiatry, and in his own profession of psychology. He was, in fact, calling for the abolition of the profession of psychiatry on the grounds of the extent to which it was contaminated by that corruption.

Sometime during the evening of the same day, a giant among giants as far as critics of mainstream psychiatry go, Dr. Thomas Stephen Szasz, passed away.

I flew back to Florida from Ohio on Sunday, September the 9th.

On the afternoon of Monday September 10th, during a teleconference, on a facebook page I ran across a report of Dr. Szasz passing. I immediately made mention of this comment to the people who were taking part in this teleconference. We did a quick Google news search, and decided it was probably nothing more than an internet rumor. There was nothing in Google news to indicate that he had died. Dr. Szasz, although 92 years of age, had just last year presented to an enthusiastic crowd at the International Society for Ethical Psychology & Psychiatry (ISEPP) conference in Los Angeles.

Tuesday I had more than enough reliable reports to conclude that he had expired. First there was an announcement on the ISEPP facebook page, and a link was provided to the article that sparked that announcement.

The New York Times on Wednesday reported on his death with an article that quoted E. Fuller Torrey and Edward Shorter, by no means friends of, nor friendly to, Dr. Szasz and his ideas. Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Human Alliance For Human Research Protection, uses the occasion to voice his differences in opinion from those expressed by Dr. Szasz rather than emphasizing any places where they might have been in agreement.

Usually when you are remembering a person, you turn to his friends rather than his enemies. Although it is curious that the New York Times should turn to Dr. Szasz’s enemies when remembering him, certainly Dr. Szasz’s legacy neither begins nor ends with the New York Times.

I think it goes without saying that some segments of the mainstream mass media are as corrupt as the psychiatrists they quote. A much more just and balanced appreciation, The Passing of Thomas Szasz, can be found in The New American.

Dr. Szasz’s distinctive voice, and his singular presence, will be sorely missed by many.

Epiphany On The Threshold Of A Better World

We need to say, and in no uncertain terms, “NO to forced mental health treatment!” Forced treatment is always mistreatment. This totalitarian loophole in our democratic system of government should be closed, and closed for good. The problem is not, and never was, forced this therapy or that therapy. The problem is force in and of itself because force involves denying one of the values we hold most basic to the democratic process, namely individual liberty.

There are just so many ways in which people are made un-free through mental health maltreatment. They can be restrained by restraining devices, they can be subjected to solitary confinement, they can be electro-shocked against their wishes, and they can be drugged regardless of their own feelings on the subject, even when out of the so called mental hospital, more literally a psychiatric prison, and in the larger community.

A new law is not going to fix this old problem at all. A new law will merely add to the confusion. There are so many laws, and in few places is this more true than in the mental health system, that are not being enforced now. We certainly don’t need another silly law on the books. What we need is for the old law that allows this over extended exercise in tyranny to be repealed. When force is not the law, as far as mental health treatment is concerned, then force is a violation of the law the way it is everywhere else.

The mental health system in fact serves as the way in which mental health authorities get around the law. People are neglected, abused, violated, and die in these facilities, and the offenders are let off with little more than a knuckle rapping if that. The people confined to these facilities are not schizophrenics or manic depressives, and they didn’t come from another planet. They are human beings the same as you and me. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are lying words in a lying book used to make human beings out to be something other than what they are.

Violence is growing more and more common in contemporary society. Violence is growing more and more common because of the lack of a sense of community, and because of a breakdown in communications. Violence is not growing more common because of an epidemic of “mental illness”. That is the myth. “Mental illnesses” don’t kill people any more than guns kill people. When all is said and done, it is people who kill people, and it is people who should be held accountable.

Tolerance is the answer. Tolerance and an end to these arbitrary and discriminatory laws. Intolerance breeds intolerance. We see the results of this intolerance in the multiple murders that take place on an almost daily basis here and there. These acts of violence weren’t perpetuated by people with “mental illnesses”. They are intolerant acts perpetuated by frustrated individuals reacting to other acts of intolerance. Build a more livable world, for everybody not just for some monied elite, and such acts of violence should subside to the degree that such a world is actually achieved. There is often a reason, you see, to unreason, and it’s not the sort of reason that should be ignored.

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.

Pre-packaged Excuses For A New Millenium

When I wrote “mad people are everywhere” I didn’t mean “schizophrenics”. “Schizophrenics” are an entirely theoretical construct. No one has yet supplied any convincing proof of their existence. They’re like the sasquatches of the post-modern era–all unicorn.

This brings me to a post in the National Post, written a few days later, We’re all schizophrenics now: Jonathan Kay on James Holmes, Sam Harris, and the morally terrifying case against free will.

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist. I find it no surprise at all that a neuroscientist, blood brother in research terms to your bio-medical psychiatrist, would be disputing the existence of free will. Funny thing though, I understand he wrote a short book on determinism that he called Free Will. The book isn’t about free will at all, it’s about his belief that free will is an illusion. I’m wondering if it would be feasible to write a book called “Determinism” all about free will.

I have no desire to read the book Sam Harris authored. I am free not to read his book, and so there. He can’t make me read his book either.

Not surprisingly, again, the author of this piece on that piece is indulging in what seems to be fast becoming a national pastime, namely, the pathologizing of criminality, or pin the “mental disorder” on James Holmes.

But a new book raises a question that puts the very existence of that continuum into doubt: What if none of us are truly “responsible” for our actions?

I’m also a firm believer in responsibility and accountability. I don’t see a lot a movement taking place in the human world that isn’t guided by some semblance of consciousness. Yes, let’s say that this person or that person acted this way or that way because he or she made the conscious decision to do so.

By way of example, Harris provides a list of five hypothetical killers — (1) a four-year-old who accidentally shoots someone while playing with his father’s gun; (2) a severely abused 12-year-old who kills a tormentor; (3) a child-abuse victim who, as an adult, shoots his ex-girlfriend after she leaves him; (4) a 25-year-with a solid upbringing, who kills a young woman “just for the fun of it”; and (5) a seemingly heartless murderer who later is discovered to have a large tumor that is short-circuiting his prefrontal cortex.

I feel like we’ve entered the lair of the forensic shrink. Could you please make it five hypothetical lovers instead? Oh, Okay. I guess not.

By conventional analysis, #3 and #4 would be branded evildoers; #1 and #5 would be given a free pass on grounds of age and biology, respectively; and #2 would lie somewhere in between. But Harris’ point is that, once you put aside our mythical religious baggage about good and evil (as he sees it), all of these cases are motivated by the same amoral whirling of a human brain’s synaptic gears. But not for the luck of the biological draw, any one of us — in another life — could be #1, #2, #3, #4 or #5: There is no magical, spiritual, free-willed force within our minds that will allow us to overcome the fate that is wired into the physical universe.

I’m not sure anyone should be given a free pass, especially when that free pass is a pass to murder. I also think at least one of the hypothetic killers should have been a police officer. Police officers, you might have noticed, kill a lot of people.

I’m still awfully curious about those hypothetical lovers. I wonder, do lovers choose their victims?

Actually I think the people who come up with these unlucky schemes for other people find a loophole that allows them to count themselves among the lucky ones. How convenient! I, on the other hand, think there is something to planning that can potentially avert disaster in the long run. When disaster can be diverted, it isn’t determined. Free will, in other words, for me, is no illusion.

Harmful practices, ‘the golden rule’, and a better world

I’m not a religious person; in fact, I’m an out and out atheist. All the same, the one piece of scripture that has had a great influence on me is that concerning what has been termed ‘the golden rule’. ‘The golden rule’ goes like this, “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself”.

I remember going to a book signing event featuring Patch Adams, M.D. once, and if I recall correctly, during the course of this event Patch said something to the effect of, “I would never give psychiatric ‘medications’ to a person I liked.” This is not the case with most psychiatrists. Many psychiatrists dish powerful neuroleptic drugs out like they thought they were some kindly old lady with a candy jar. Physicians who have any regard for their patient’s health should show a little more reserve and caution.

Electro-shock therapy involves sending electrical currents through the brain, the bodies central command unit, and the organ of thought, in order to induce a grand mal seizure. Grand mal seizures, ironically, in some quarters, are thought to be the antithesis of psychosis. Grand mal seizures are not good for the brain. Anesthesia may be able to keep the person from realizing he or she has just undergone a physically traumatizing procedure, but this is, in fact, the case,

Both psychiatric drugs and electro-convulsive shock therapy are procedures that reduce brain mass, or destroy brain cells. Put differently, and to be more exacting, they damage the brain. On top of damaging the brain, atypical neuroleptic drugs also produce a metabolic syndrome that affects adversely the overall health of the individual taking these drugs. This metabolic syndrome causes excessive weight gain, diabetes, heart conditions, and a number of other ill health conditions.

Biological psychiatric theory has it that the annoying behaviors associated with mental ill health are caused by some abnormality in the brain, and therefore, treatment needs to target areas of the brain. We destroy the offending behaviors by suppressing or eliminating activity the area of the brain causing the annoyances. Basically, while we may have outlawed radical brain surgery in mental health treatment, our psychiatrists are still very gung ho about procedures that arrive at the same result.

I personally think many of the psychiatric practices currently being engaged in run completely counter to ‘the golden rule’. I don’t think there are many psychiatrists who would approve of brain damage and physical harm being done to their own persons. This makes it all the more ironic that they are so very enthusiastic about doing damage to other people. I know there are other ways besides the way of biological medical model psychiatric treatment, and I feel like one of those other ways has got to be following ‘the golden rule’.

Through adherence to ‘the golden rule’ I think it may be possible to reach a better world than the one we have presently got at hand. There is one major snafu in ‘the golden rule’ though, and that snafu involves people who persistently violate this rule. People who put their own selfish and narrow minded interests above the interests of their fellows, these people put this better world in jeopardy.

Violators of “the golden rule”, such as medical model psychiatrists, Wall Street bankers, and other evil doers, have to be punished and contained if we are to hold onto to this vision of a better world for everyone in the future. “Doing unto others as you would not have them do unto yourself”, or, to put it another way, bigotry, is not the kind of behavior that we will be able to tolerate. We must, in other words, tolerate all behaviors except intolerance if we are ever to reach this better world.

We Need To Punish Psychiatrists With Head-In-The-Sand Syndrome

Head-in-the-sand syndrome is a “mental disorder” that has reached pandemic proportions among members of the psychiatric profession. Psychiatric drugs are known to cause a metabolic syndrome associated with a number of potentially lethal ill health conditions. Rather than accepting this fact, and dealing with it, the majority of psychiatrists have tended to minimize their own role in the development of these physical maladies. They have started to devise a number of disingenuous schemes and strategies for concealing their role in this injury altogether.

1. Blaming lifestyle factors (smoking, diet, etc.)
2. Blaming the impugned “mental disorder”
3. Turning a blind eye to the effects of the drugs they dole out

There is a sleight of hand at work here. While they are blaming “mental illness” and lifestyle factors on the rising mortality rate, they continue to over-diagnose and over-drug patients in their charge. Often this over-diagnosing and over-drugging involves the attaching of multiple psychiatric labels to individual patients, and then the maintaining of those individuals on a different drugs for each psychiatric label. These drug cocktails are notorious for being ineffective therapeutically, and for causing a great deal of physical damage to the person so sedated over the long term.

Damaging people through drug abuse is not the kind of behavior we want to see in our health care providers. Injuring people in treatment in this manner is at least as irresponsible as playing hooky from school is for the average adolescent, if not very much more severe. Doctors need to be held accountable. Continuing to allow them to lie, and to get away with murder, is not holding them accountable for the damage that they are causing, and that they have caused. As long as no one is held accountable, the blame is projected onto other causes, and the professional walks away with a smug sense of his or her own self-importance.

This sense self importance is achieved at the expense of the health and welfare of a great many people. Should remorse and regret be demanded of them by the general public, you would see remorse and regret. If the only way to retrieve a conscience for psychiatry is to prosecute a number of psychiatrists, then we need to get down to the business of prosecuting a few psychiatrists for their crimes. When we remind psychiatrists of the medical maxim, ‘first do no harm’, we don’t want them to get the conflicting message that they are beyond the law.

The law doesn’t exist for people with head-in-the-sand syndrome. The law doesn’t exist for them not because there is no law; the law doesn’t exist for them because they don’t think the law should be applied equally to them in the same way that it is applied to everybody else. Head-in-the-sand blindness can go on forever if it is not immediately caught and corrected. We need to help these arrogant erring doctors recover the social conscience that they have collectively lost. I submit that it is time we revealed to them the extent of the crimes that they are so intent on keeping the general public in the dark about.

Scumbag Awarded Grant By Corrupt Health Agency

You know that corruption is rampant in the health care industry when a psychiatrist who has been chastised repeatedly for failing to disclose drug company payoffs wins a National Institute of Health grant. What exactly were they thinking? I suppose that they were thinking they could pull a big one over on the American people. This is the first grant that the NIH has awarded in 3 years time, and it has to go to a total scuzzball! BUZZZ!!!

The doctor is Charles Nemeroff who I have written about previously. The story is in Science Insider, Sanctioned Psychiatrist Gets First NIH Grant in 3 Years.

Charles Nemeroff’s lax reporting of at least $1.2 million in drug company payments to his employer, Emory University, and similar payments to other academic psychiatrists prompted a 2007 Senate investigation. Nemeroff stepped down as chair of psychiatry at Emory, and NIH suspended a $9-million grant he held for a depression study. In December 2008, Emory barred him from applying for NIH funding for 2 years.

9, 10, 11, 12…BUZZZ!!!!

Enter the corrupt good old boy system.

A year later, Nemeroff moved to the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida. This prompted concerns because Emory’s ban on NIH grants did not move with him. (Fueling the flames was a phone call in which National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) Director Thomas Insel apparently assured the University of Miami medical school dean that Nemeroff could seek NIH funding if he moved.)

You don’t think the NIMH has too much clout in the NIH, do you? Well, given a maneuver like this one, I certainly do.

The 2-year ban by Emory would have expired anyway. But Paul Thacker, a former staffer for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) who led the Senate investigation, says NIH itself had the authority to impose a longer ban. “This shows they’re really not serious about the problem,” Thacker says.

When we are as corrupt as they come, I guess you could put it, we look after our own. I don’t know who else gets the wrong perpetuated by this gesture, but personally, I say, “shame on you NIH!” BUZZZ!

Did somebody say he withheld the reporting of 1.2 million dollars? This sleight gives new meaning to the expression, “that’s rich”. With that much of a kickback, there’s only one thing you can say, Dr. Nemeroff is solidly a one percenter. Again I say, “shame on you NIH!” That’s 99 % of the population you’ve passed over.

5/5/12 Philadelphia

Connecticut college student and monitor of the event, Caitlin Belforti, speaking at the Friends Center in Philadelphia.

New York activist Daniel Hazen speaking.

Aki Imai is from Ohio. He launched the Our Life After Labels submission-based blog.

Joe Rogers, a Philly local, is the director of the National Mental Health Self-help Clearinghouse.

Signs of the times.

John Judge read a statement of support from Paula J. Caplan who was unable to attend.

Long time San Francisco activist and retired attorney Ted Chabasinski.

The backdrop for the mornings events.

Godly Mathew once spent one hundred consecutive days protesting against psychiatric abuse outside Philadelphia’s Friends Hospital.

Down with psychiatric labels. Up with human beings.

Ted’s banner.

Inside the Friends Center events get underway.

Outside of the Friends Center where the rally took place.

Inside again.

The march to the Convention Center minutes away.

Director of the Anchorage Alaska based Center for Psychiatric Rights lawyer Jim Gottstein.

The demonstration outside of the Convention Center.

Pedestrians crossing the street.

Protesters outside of the Convention Center.

Demonstrators and pedestrians.

The Icarus Project well represented.

The shrinks label bible, in revision, and its discontents.

What’s that? Psychopharmacomania?

David Oaks, director of MindFreedom International, at the microphone beside Philadelphia native Susan Rogers.

Amid other not so spontaneous eruptions of Mad Pride!

Florida’s worst psychiatrists lose Medicaid patients

Florida has done a little to stem the tide of over diagnosing and over drugging that is plaguing that state. I imagine that it goes without saying that the state wouldn’t have done so without pressure from its concerned citizens. ProPublica, the psychiatric malpractice watchdog publication, has a story on this development, Florida Sanctions Top Medicaid Prescribers — But Only After A Shove.

3 Florida psychiatrists are so far known to have been chastised by having their Medicaid contracts suspended for their over prescription habits.

Number 3.

In 2009 alone Dr. Huberto Merayo is credited with prescribing drugs to the tune of $2,000,000. Since 2009 the doctor has earned more than $111,000 giving promotional talks for AstraZenica, Eli Lily, and Pfizer.

In May, Florida summarily ended his contract with Medicaid. But the action, though decisive, followed years of high prescribing by Merayo, according Florida’s own statistics. And he was booted only after public questioning by U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who had asked states to investigate such cases.

Number 2.

In the Questionable Legality Department, Dr. Joseph N. Hernandez deserves and earns more than a mere dishonorable mention.

In another example, Florida allowed Dr. Joseph M. Hernandez of Lake City to continue prescribing narcotic pain pills to Medicaid patients for more than a year after he was arrested and charged in 2010 for trafficking in them.

Number 1.

The winner of our bad psychiatrist of the decade award goes out to Dr. Fernando Mendez-Villamil, Florida’s top pusher of neuroleptic drugs. Dr. Mendez-Villamil prescribed $4,700,000 worth of drugs in 2009.

Mendez-Villamil, who was officially terminated “without cause,” sued the state last year to have his Medicaid contract reinstated; the case is pending. His lawyer, Robert Pelier, said Mendez-Villamil was “collateral damage” in Grassley’s campaign.

Dr. Joseph Hermanez’s license to practice medicine was eventually taken away, but as we learn above not until a year after he was busted for drug trafficking, and in the Not Only Department, this suspension didn’t occur until 34 of his Medicaid patients had fatally over dosed. Hermanez was the states top prescriber of the pain killer oxycodone in 2009.

The tally thus far is 3 down, and many more to go, in Florida’s ongoing battle with psychiatric corruption and excess.

The Human Being As An Association of Genes

One article in Science Daily happened to catch my eye of late, Two Genes Do Not Make a Voter. The implication, apparently dispelled, was that a couple of genes, or four, or five, could determine a specific human behaviorial trait.

They use as an example a 2008 study by James H. Fowler and Christopher T. Dawes of the University of California, San Diego which claimed that two genes predict voter turnout. Charney and English demonstrate that when certain errors in the original study are corrected — errors common to many gene association studies — there is no longer any association between these genes and voter turnout.

Emphasis added.

If you keep reading you will find that these genes have been credited with having a great many unfounded attributes. Sloth on the part of citizens is not the only negative quality, vice is still too strong a word to use in this instance, some researchers would find inherited.

Charney and English also document how the same two genes that Fowler and Dawes claimed would predict voter turnout are also said to predict, according to other recently published studies, alcoholism, Alzheimer’s disease, anorexia nervosa, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression, epilepsy, extraversion, insomnia, migraines, narcolepsy, obesity, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, Parkinson’s disease, postpartum depression, restless legs syndrome, premature ejaculation, schizophrenia, smoking, success by professional Wall Street traders, sudden infant death syndrome, suicide, Tourette syndrome, and several hundred other behaviors. They point to a number of studies that attempted to confirm these findings and could not.

Hmmm, I wonder how “extraversion” and “success by” “Wall Street traders” got thrown in there? I think it amusing how these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Our researchers don’t tend to be searching for success genes, but rather they tend to be looking for failure genes instead. I wonder why this is? I don’t get the impression that they’ve managed to remove many of these failure genes from the human gene pool yet.

“There is a growing consensus that complex traits that are heritable are influenced by differences in thousands of genes interacting with each other, with the epigenome (which regulates gene expressivity), and with the environment in complex ways,” Charney said. “The idea that one or two genes could predict something like voting behavior or partisanship violates all that we now know about the complex relationship between genes and traits.”

So much for the hunt for the non-voter gene. I imagine that would be the first step in determining which genes vote republican, which genes vote democrat, and which maverick genes out there happen to vote independent. Now what arrangement of thousands of genes, plus interactions, cause people to avoid the voting booth, and what arrangement of thousands of genes cause certain people to receive a “mental illness” label.

This kind of senseless endeavor could go on for a spell. Do you have forever? If you don’t know, flip a coin, and call the side you favor forever. The other side of the coin, of course, you can call never.