More Or Less Biology In Psychiatry–That Is The Question

Much newsprint has been wasted recently on the split between the APA (American Psychiatric Association) and the NIMH over the revision of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)  that is going to be called the DSM-5. In my view, letting the 100,000 manuals bloom is not going to be any better of a solution than letting the 100,000 diagnoses bloom in the long run. If we are going to treat every patient as an individual, for the sake of the individuality of his or her condition (and genetic makeup), that’s going to make for a whole lot of variation in disorder (and/or order) expression.

The New York Times covers the story, regarding the NIMH APA divide, in a story with the heading, Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out Of Touch With Science, Experts Say. Of course, it always depends on which experts you ask. The experts the mass media is still slow to consult, and the New York Times is no exception in this regard, are those experts with lived experience on the receiving end of mental health treatment.

While typically critics of the DSM have tackled the subject from one side of the political psychiatric spectrum, here comes mob boss Thomas Insel, godfather of the NIMH, attacking from the other. In the first instance, you have people who object to the biology in biological psychiatric theory, (Theory, now there’s as important a word as any.) in the second, you have a group that doesn’t think the APA is biologically grounded enough.

The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

The DSM focuses on symptoms precisely because we don’t know the causes. Dr. Thomas R. Insel, apparently, thinks otherwise.

Precision seems to be a big part of the problem. In psychiatric diagnosis, theoretical speculations aside, there are no precision tools.

The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”

Or, a possibility not considered here, we’ve got five misdiagnoses floating around for which there was no underlying condition in the first place.

Solution. The NIMH is developing it’s own manual, Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC.

About two years ago, to spur a move in that direction, Dr. Insel started a federal project called Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC, which he highlighted in a blog post last week. Dr. Insel said in the blog that the National Institute of Mental Health would be “reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories” because “patients with mental disorders deserve better.” His commentary has created ripples throughout the mental health community.

Consider, ripples sent throughout the mental health community, ripple throughout the “mental illness” community (i.e. the mental health ghetto). Now whether “patients with mental disorders” are going to get “better” treatment thereby is a big leap. Too big a leap in fact to make. So sorry, my poor victims of standard psychiatric malpractice!

Whatever you call it, my guess is that this switch still represents a way of billing insurance companies, the most important role for patient consumers a psychiatrist assumes. Of course, given that this paradigm change is all about biological explanations, I expect the treatment the insurance companies will be paying for is a chemical fix. Given this situation, the extent to which pharmaceuticals damage patients is still the great unasked question biological psychiatrists do their best to avoid asking.

Ending Discrimination By Ending Forced Mental Health Mistreatment

A view point peddled in the “mental health” literature current today states that often people who are thought to need mental health treatment are reluctant to seek mental health treatment because of some “stigma” or other attached to that treatment. This view neglects to consider that many people, regardless of need, who don’t want any mental health treatment whatsoever are being treated by force and entirely against their will and wishes. In fact, before voluntary treatment became as acceptable and popular as it is today, most people who received mental health treatment received that mental health treatment against their will and wishes.

Now any reasonable adult should realize why receiving unwanted medical treatment would be a problem for anybody receiving that unwanted medical treatment. What’s more, any reasonable adult should realize why a person receiving unwanted treatment should be outraged at receiving a bill for that unsought and unwelcome treatment. When the treatment received was also restrictive, harmful, and fundamentally unhelpful, all the more so. There is certainly more than “stigma”, whatever that word could be eluding to, involved in this process of imposing treatment on people who have no desire to be treated whatsoever.

Much of the mental health treatment regime confronting the unwilling participant is directed at convincing the prisoner that he or she is “sick” and, therefore, in need of confinement, and whatever excuse for “treatment” comes with that confinement. The prisoner who doesn’t admit to being “sick” is seen as “sicker” than the prisoner who confesses a “sickness”. Such a prisoner would be considered by staff then further from discharge than the prisoner who confessed to having an “illness”.  Given intimidation, the prisoner learns to do what the warders expect of him or her, or the prisoner doesn’t leave his or her prison called a hospital.

I think we have to think long and hard before depriving people of those rights said to belong to them by virtue of their species. The bill of rights to the US constitution, contains legal protections based on natural rights, and the derivation of human rights from those rights thought natural. Deprivation of the rights protected by the bill of rights is the hall mark of a lower class of citizenship than that of the average citizen. It is, in fact, the license for a more bestial type of arrangement. This bestial relationship is not a relationship of equals. It is the relationship of a group of people who have been granted more rights to a group of people who have been granted fewer rights.

Time in a psychiatric institute, following recent violence blamed on people with troubled lives, more and more, is likely to get a person on a criminal background check list.  This listing means two things. The person on this list is outlawed from purchasing a firearm legally, and the person’s name will come up as a potential suspect any time a violent crime is committed in his or her area. This list, in itself, is prejudicial and completely uncalled for. People who have done time in psychiatric institutes are, by and large, innocent, not only of violent crime, but of any crime. Criminalizing people in mental institutions is not likely to lessen the violent crime rate one iota. If anything, it might actually raise that violent crime rate substantially.

The way to eliminate so many negative associations connected with mental health treatment is to abolish forced mental health treatment. Force in mental health is the thing that permits the rationalization of all sorts of negative responses to people because of the psychiatric labels that they have received. The only way to abolish forced mental health treatment is to repeal mental health laws. When all mental health treatment is voluntary mental health treatment, prejudicial and discriminatory practices will be reduced correspondingly. Forced treatment is the biggest discriminatory and prejudicial obstacle to compassionate and caring understanding of these, no, not mental patients, but human beings that we presently have. It’s time we owned up to the challenge. End forced mental health treatment, and we also restore to them many of the civil rights that we just took away from them.

Obviously a long and hard civil rights struggle is ahead for people who have experienced the mental health system. This struggle is a struggle to be treated as an equal among equals. No self-serving leadership elite can win that struggle for everybody impacted by oppression within the mental health system. Self-serving leadership elites are exclusive clubs like, to give a parallel example, officers’ clubs. In this sense the mental health system itself must do it’s own part, at least as far as a good part of it is concerned, to self-destruct. If it is to do this, it will need the help of newly emergent leaders rising out of the rank and file at the grassroots level. We know what happens where elites develop. The next thing you know you have an establishment, and an establishment that is most intent on tending it’s own.  What amounts to a “mental illness” system actually needs a self-destructive element within it if we are ever to arrive at the goal of maximizing mental health for all.

On Restricting The Citizenship Rights Of People With ‘Mental Illness’ Labels

Lawmakers, politicians, and some mental health professionals complain that our jails and prisons are  becoming holding cells for people labeled with “mental illness”. They call this detainment criminalization, and they look to jail diversion, mental health courts, and other such  methods to minimize the problem. There is another type of criminalization. This is the matter of adding every patient who has been hospitalized involuntarily, and even some that have been hospitalized voluntarily, onto a national criminal background check system. If that isn’t criminalization, tell me what is? Every time a violent crime is committed the name of anybody in this database is going to come up as a potential suspect.

There is much talk in certain quarters about some “stigma” or other attached to “mental illness”.  This “stigma” is thought to be whatever prevents a person labeled “mentally ill” from receiving the special treatment he or she thinks he or she needs or deserves on account of his or her conjectured “disease”. Countering “stigma” has become any man or woman’s excuse to convalesce for a lifetime. Anti-”stigma” campaigns accompany the biological medical model theory of psychiatry.  The biological medical model theory of psychiatry has a profoundly cynical attitude towards people’s natural ability to recover from the downturns and pitfalls of everyday living. These anti-”stigma” campaigners are fine with fighting the insults and abuses that occur on a mostly surface level, but when it comes to such matters as adding names to a criminal background check database, these campaigners grow curiously silent.

Opposition to “stigma” has essentially become a two faced lie supporting the prejudice and discrimination directed against people who have known imprisonment in this nation’s psychiatric institutions. People recover from the major upsets and defeats they’ve encountered in day to day living and they get on with their lives. There is no “stigma” attached to mental and emotional stability. There is a great deal of prejudice and discrimination directed against those people who have had their lives disrupted by medical model psychiatry. While prejudice and discrimination are real, “stigma” is a ruse.  “Stigma’ is the flip side of the psychiatric label. You don’t have one without the other. All the damage that takes place in the psychiatric system starts with a diagnostic tag. Become more lax about applying the label, and you save a lot of people from the damage that accompanies treatment, including “stigma”.

Mental health treatment has become an excuse for enacting laws violating the constitutional rights of certain citizens of the USA. According to medical model psychiatry these people have defective genes, and thus they must be somewhat less human than the rest of the population with their more capable genes.  This physical defect, in other words, prevents them from ever completely recovering their sanity, and behaving in a reasonable fashion. Given a less than fully capable  human population, our law makers feel obliged to restrict the freedoms of this population in the same way that they once restricted the freedoms of people owned by other people due to the color of their skin. As anybody and everybody is a potential candidate for the loony bin, this assault on the freedom of a minority is a threat to the freedoms that our forefathers were so intent on  preserving and defending for everybody.

When you  deprive people of the rights that our constitution grants them as citizens, you create a subordinate class of less than full citizens. You create a second, third, or even lower, class of citizenry. Doing so, you devalue the human beings who have had their freedoms so restricted to a place beneath that of other human beings who have not had their rights so restricted. If, as the Declaration of Independence states, we are all created equal, and endowed with inalienable rights, this would not be true if some of us were condemned by birth to a more restrictive existence on account of mutated and defective genes.  There is no more evidence that emotional distress and mental disturbances are due to defective genes than there is that racial distinctions are due to defective genes.  While we no longer keep slaves, once held to be a fraction of the value of a human being of European ancestry, we still keep people who have experienced the mental health system down by denying their basic humanity.

Many people who have known the abuses of the mental health system first hand realize the struggle ahead of them to achieve equality of rights will be a hard one. Freedom and equality will never come without  a ferocious struggle to attain them. People in power have a vested interested in keeping other people down. Institutionalization, labeling, drugging, screening, prejudicial legislation and intimidation are ways of keeping some people down and out. Keeping people down and out are the ways some people have of keeping themselves up and in. When people have been reduced to the state that some of these treatments and laws have reduced them to, there is only one direction to go in, and that direction is up. There is also only one way to achieve one’s personal aims and goals in this upward climb, and that is by attaching oneself in solidarity to the aims and aspirations of one’s fellows. So long as there is one person who is devalued as a human being, those aims for each and every one of us cannot be said to have been fully met.

Advocating For Human Rights and Against Mistreatment

I am not a mental health advocate. I have absolutely no interest in contributing to the current treatment crisis we’ve got going in this country. First, you’ve got the people doing the treatment. They call themselves mental health advocates. Then you’ve got the people they treat. Some of them call themselves mental health advocates, too. This breaks down into two groups of people, professionals or providers and patients or consumers. The providers are the people selling the treatment, and the consumers are the people buying the treatment.

You can’t sell the treatment without someone to sell the treatment to, and so, therefore, the providers must become sellers of the idea of consumption, or need. The mental health provider in essence is a seller of “mental illness”. Thus, if we read mental health advocacy as the advocating of mental health treatment, there is an unstated conflict of interest involved here. Your advocates must also be advocates of “mental illness” in order to have a large stock of people to treat.

If 1 in 5 people in the USA are consumers buying mental health treatment, people described as “mentally ill”, 4 in 5 people in the USA are not consuming mental health treatment. Problem. 1 in 5 is in danger of becoming 2 in 5 which could then become 3 in 5, etc. Then there’s the matter of how much of the population, given this increase, would need to be mental health workers, that is, providers. In that eventuality, given a nation in which the majority of the people within that nation are mental health consumers, perhaps we should add to an M to USA. This would make us the United Medical States of America.

Back to the statistic that presently applies. 4 in 5 people in the nation are not consuming mental health at this time. If we take mental health to mean mental health treatment,  4 in 5 people in this country have no need for mental health. Nobody has turned this statistic around to ask, well, how many people in the 20 % that we’re saying consume mental health treatment don’t really need to consume mental health treatment. This isn’t the kind of question people who advocate for mental health treatment ask. They don’t want fewer people in treatment, they want more. There is only one direction to go in for them, and that direction is upward in so far as numbers are concerned.

Should anyone have any hesitations about seeking treatment, these mental health advocates have this word “stigma” that they throw out with such abandon. Funny thing about “stigma”, the people selling this idea of “stigma” aren’t talking about how much of the treatment they are referring is unwanted treatment. There was a time, not that long ago, when the only mental health treatment people received was forced mental health treatment. So long as there are people being treated against their will and wishes, this lie about “stigma” is only a ruse. People aren’t reluctant to go into treatment because of any “stigma”, people are reluctant go into treatment because treatment always results in prejudice and discrimination.

As I stated, I am not a mental health advocate. I am not a mental health advocate because I am a human rights advocate. I am opposed to forced mental health treatment on principle. Forced mental health treatment doesn’t take place without violating a person’s rights as a citizen and a human being. You can’t force treatment on a person without taking away that person’s liberty. I have nothing against treating people who want to be treated. I simply think all mental health treatment should be voluntary treatment.

This opposition to force means that I believe people should not be imprisoned, tortured, and poisoned in prisons called hospitals in the name of mental health. Doing so doesn’t result in good outcomes as a rule. Not only are the results poor, but you can only do so by violating the basic rights of the individuals being so mistreated. There are other ways of treating human beings. I advocate using some of those other ways.

My Rant Against The Mental Illness Labeling Industry

Fuck psychiatry! I’m sick of system shit. I’m so sick of system shit that I got out of the system. I don’t need to be a shrink, and I don’t need to be a patient. I don’t even need to be a patient shrink, or a shrink patient. I don’t need to be one or another specialist on a continuum in a rich variety of turncoat categories. I’m not overseeing adult children mental patients in one capacity or another. I guess that makes me irresponsible, but that’s not the way I see it. I’d say that makes me responsible. I’ve ousted myself from the 6 % category of people that need supervising, as well as from the glorified adult baby sitter category that does the supervising.

I now exist among the roughly 75 % of population who have no need for the mental health system whatsoever except perhaps in so far as it applies to other people. I will work with a portion of the 6 %, but that is only to dismantle this monstrosity we’ve created. It is a monstrosity that embodies and includes that 6 %. There is no us and them dichotomy here. There is only this monstrosity in the corner of the world that the rest of us do our best to ignore.  If you think about it, it’s not such a big snorting elephant of a monstrosity as some of us might imagine it to be, it’s really just a tiny pink one.

I cringe every time I hear people talk about educating people about “mental illness”. The only people talking about doing this educating are people with a personal stake in mental health treatment. Talking about “mental illness” has become a way of selling “mental illness”. “Mental illness” is not, and never has been, a fact, it’s an idea. The profession never had a real grip on what it was dealing with. The mental health professional has no interest in becoming alarmed at the rate of people labeled “mentally ill”. “Mental illness” labeling is his or her bread and butter. The more people receiving a “seriously mentally ill” label there are, the more secure his or her job status becomes.

This leads us naturally enough to the condemned by biology theory that is so readily adopted by our professionals. It’s a matter of convenience mostly. 6 % of the population have not become good automatons. They aren’t, and they never were, human beings, not fully functioning human beings anyway. Human beings can become good automatons, according to theory, and be content with a mindless 9 to 5 sort of thing. They are broken machines, and it’s the computing function of the machine that is most broken. So we’ve got our warehouses, and our ill equipped repair people, to deal with the matter. Given that the design was poor, they say, don’t blame the repair folk for not being able to fix the automaton.

There is not much point in going there if you’ve managed to get away from it. The people talking about the people who are defectively designed are, of course, not the people defectively designed themselves. No, they are the people who determine which people are defectively designed, and which people are effectively designed; they couldn’t do so, or so goes the theory, if they were defectively designed. Imagine the difficulties involved in becoming disentangled from that illusion. Illusion it is, but it isn’t the only thing going, so excuse me while I eject myself from the entire argument. Significance, as I see it, is sometimes a matter of rejecting insignificance. I feel much better knowing I’m not contributing to the problem, even if not contributing to the problem is not likely to win me any awards.

Developing a motto

Don’t go to the psychiatrist! Those five words are on their way to becoming my motto. Psychiatrists no longer do psychoanalysis. No, analysis is now counseling, and in the domain of psychologists and social workers. Psychiatrists work for insurance payments, and to get paid, they dole out psychiatric labels. Once a psychiatric label has been attached to the patient, they’re ready to get down to business, the real task of the psychiatrist, that of pill pusher. Psychiatrists these days are pitchmen and puppets of the pharmaceutical industry. Even most psychiatrists giving lip service to the mostly defunct practice of talk therapy have been transformed into de facto drug lords.

Now that talk therapy has taken a nose-dive and crash landed, pills are the panacea of psychiatry. Unfortunately, we’re talking about pills that mostly mean ‘bad medicine’ any way you cut it. You’ve got doctors, indirectly or directly, in the employ of unscrupulous profiteers who will stop at nothing to get and keep their product on the market. Chemical compounds are the new gold and, as such, research and development has spawned a new gold rush. You’ve also got them selling drugs that are essentially unhealthy as if they were the world’s answer to “ill” health. The result of all this unscrupulous wheeling and dealing is a population of people maintained on psycho-active brain-impairing substances whose “sickness” is actually their dependence on this ill-health-ware system.

Systemic and chemical dependence, in my book, is not well-fare. A government maintaining a population of state subsidized artificially manufactured “invalids” or, better, “in-valids”, is not my idea of a government managing a healthy economy. The news from the treatment front has not been good. People going through treatment for the most severe diagnostic labels are getting, of all things, worse. They are getting worse because of, rather than in spite of, the pills they are maintained on. The business is booming then of destroying the patient. This business wouldn’t be booming if you didn’t have a ready supply of suckers to succeed your growing casualty list. A list that is all too readily passed over and pitched into the waste basket.

There is no ‘three strikes you’re out’ law when it comes to pill pushing psychiatrists. These guys and gals have been getting away with murder since the development of this not such a wonder drug and that. Of course, should a psychiatrist blatantly step over certain bounds of reasonable self-restraint and discretion in prescribing practices, he or she can have his or her license to practice medicine taken away from him or her by the courts. As the medicine they practice is not really medicine at all but toxic drug pushing, this penalty can come none too soon when it can come at all. Were we to prosecute intransigent psychiatrists for the damage that they did cause, psychiatrists would be much more reluctant to poison people through chemistry.

I will admit that there are exceptions to the drug peddling psychiatrist rule. I will also admit that those exceptions are few and far between. This scarcity of health minded psychiatrists makes the profession as a whole more of a liability than an asset to the human race. If there is any important work to be performed in the mental health profession today, it can be done by people without a degree in psychiatry. Unfortunately, most of those other mental health workers tend to be underlings to psychiatrists. This makes the entire profession of mental health treatment subject to corruption of the worst sort across the board. The health of the patient has become the last concern of a mental health profession hung up on procedural matters.

There is little to no so called “mental illness” in the animal kingdom. What “mental illness” you do have in the animal kingdom is usually a matter of developing the laboratory specimens with which to devise new treatments for human beings. As with animals, there was much less “mental illness” in antiquity than there is today. The more primitive your culture gets, the less inclined it is to label its deviant members “mentally ill”. I’m for this more basic bare bones approach to the problem. When life is a matter of hunting and gathering, personal problems don’t prevent people from doing their part. I think the cave man or woman who figured he or she was born with the chemistry he or she needed had it right all along.  I personally feel that the damage perpetrated by the field of psychiatry is so devastating that it is a profession we should oppose at every turn.

Harmful Psychiatric Drug Use Highest In Southern States

The magazine is Health, and the article screams out, Psychiatric Drugs More Often Prescribed in the South.

Living in a southern state, and knowing what this part of the country is like, this somewhat disturbing finding is not all that surprising to me.

Although people living in the West are the least likely to use antipsychotics, antidepressants and stimulants, the Yale researchers found that the drugs’ use is 40 percent higher in a large section of the South than in other parts of the country. The study authors attributed this discrepancy to variations in local access to health care and marketing efforts within the pharmaceutical industry.

Uh, right. If you were wondering about the source of this statistical data, this is what the study results from a new Yale survey indicate.

The study, which included data on 60 percent of the prescriptions written in the United States in 2008, revealed that patients living in sections of the South were 77 percent more likely to fill a prescription for a stimulant. Southerners also were 46 percent more likely to fill a prescription for an antidepressant and 42 percent more likely to do so for an antipsychotic.

Let me add that it was a little encouraging to think that in other parts of the nation people know better.

…16 % of Cape Cod, Mass. residents on stimulants…national average at 2.6 %…

Meanwhile, about 40 percent of residents of Alexandria, Va., took antidepressants. In contrast, roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population used these drugs. Antipsychotics were most commonly used in Gainesville, Fla., where 4.6 percent of local residents took the drugs, compared with a national average of 0.8 percent.

 Emphasis added.

Whoa! 40 % is 2/5ths, and that is approaching 1/2. What a coup for some drug company mogul, and if you think about it, the market isn’t nearly saturated if you can have that level of use in one single locality. I’m not a drug company mogul though, and I think the 10 % national average outrageously excessive.

Obviously, residing in Gainesville Florida, if it’s a matter of the greatest need I guess I’ve come to the right place. How do I explain this high level of neuroleptic use? Easy, four letters, NAMI, acronym for the National Alliance for Mental Illness. This organization, founded by relatives of people labeled “mentally ill”, the very people most often responsible for sending their kinfolk to the Loony Bin, with its conflicts of interest, and its misinformation campaigns, is deeply entrenched in this state, and in this town. If you ever have the misfortune of visiting the NAMI Florida website you will see that the organization is sponsored, for one thing, by 3 drug companies: Pfizer (the makers of Geodon), Janssen (the makers of Risperdal), and AstraZenica (the makers of Seroquel).  Any questions?

As an advocate of healthy non-compliance to brain-damaging health-destroying drug taking regimens, this is as gloomy a situation as I’ve ever seen. I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me.  I’d better get down to business pronto.

Day of Action to Stop Mental Health Profiling 1/21/13 MLK Day

*To protest the scapegoating of people labeled with mental illness by politicians, media, gun control advocates and the pro-gun lobby

:In particular to protest the “NY SAFE Act” pushed through NY’s legislature and signed by Gov Cuomo, which expands state and federal criminal databases of people labeled as mentally ill, unconnected to any actual crime or act of violence, and expanded outpatient commitment (forced drugging in the community)
:To protest any discriminatory proposals coming out of Vice President Biden’s Task Force

*To invoke our connection to Martin Luther King Jr. and the values and traditions of nonviolence:

:We are a nonviolent community
:Many of us have been traumatized by violence and do all we can to stop it
:We are being labeled and profiled wrongly as violent, because of the actions of a few individuals
:Forced psychiatry is violent
:The new laws being enacted – in NY and likely at the federal level and in other states – will further restrict our civil liberties and constitutional rights
:We are protesting nonviolently for our civil and human rights

*To affirm and celebrate our “creative maladjustment” to a society that pits neighbor against neighbor with a duty to report thoughtcrimes and eccentricities to the state

(“Creative Maladjustment” comes from several of King’s speeches, including a 1967 speech of King to the American Psychological Association where he called for an International Association to Advance Creative Maladjustment, see http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/53556. David Oaks and MindFreedom International have taken up this call as part of the Mad Pride movement, http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/mental-health-global/iaacm. We honor David and wish him well in his recovery from serious injuries and surgery.)

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On Martin Luther King Day, January 21, 2013, people everywhere are invited to hold demonstrations, vigils and any other nonviolent acts of expression and protest, to inform the public about our point of view and gather in solidarity.

Please take photos of your protest and post them.

You can use hashtags #OccupyPsychiatry #StopMHProfiling and #CreativeMaladjustment

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Join Us On Facebook At Day of Action to Stop Mental Health Profiling
Source: CHRUSP – Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry

Mental health profiling and the struggle for civil rights

The public mental health system serves as a second arm of police-force for the federal government. People who break the law are contained by the criminal justice and penal system. People who break rules not necessarily even written into law are contained by the mental health state hospital system. Our legislators have written this loophole into law, mental health law, that allows for exceptions to be made to the rule of law. Let’s call these unwritten rules, these exceptions, pseudo-law.

Pseudo-laws are laws pertaining to violent pre-crime, in other words, the threat of future violence. The legal definition of insanity invariably targets suspected potential dangers “to oneself or others.” No crime need be committed if one is deemed “mentally ill”, that is, of a violent pre-criminal disposition. People are not locked up because they have any illness, people are locked up because they are perceived of as threats to the public. There is an all too often ignored contradiction here as well in that members of the public are being detained, by a government agency that may be perceived as a threat to them, as a threat to the public.

You cannot separate a section of the population unfavorably from the population at large without resorting to alienation. The proper term for this alienation is dehumanization. This minority population, in other words, must be perceived as somehow different, and therefore, less worthy and deserving than the majority population. Difference is a matter of the degree of unfamiliarity, for this separation is a separation from the basic units of which the larger society is made. Those people are not our families. Those people are the shadows in the closets of our families.

The mental health system is a social control system. The system ensures conformity with certain social rules and regulations by holding over people’s heads the threat of institutionalization if they misbehave. Violence is only the convenient excuse for locking people up. People are not locked up because they actually are violent. People are locked up for having behaved in ways that are deemed unacceptable. The mental health system constitutes a system of rewards and punishments used in order to get these errant individuals back into the conformingly acceptable fold.

Alienated dehumanized second class citizens do not have the same rights as full citizens because we have made laws bypassing constitutional protections with regard to people who fit that category. An obvious example of this demotion of rights can be seen in the case of the military service veteran who must petition the court for the right to own a gun due to a history of mental health treatment. Although our laws may have been envisioned as serving all citizens equally the reality is anything but equal treatment. This circumstance inevitably makes the struggle for equality under the law crucial in the redemption of people damned by professional opinion.

The government now states that it wants universal background checks on all people purchasing firearms. The problems this action is creating are twofold. The names of all people outlawed from gun ownership are to be listed in a federal database that contains the informational ruse used for depriving them of their second amendment citizenship rights. This breach of confidentiality is going to end up harming people in court cases. This also creates a situation where people with histories of one sort or another are literally being targeted for profiling by law enforcement.

Given all the talk about erasing “stigma”, here is another example of reinforcing negative stereotypes and, thereby, creating “stigma”. This is also a matter of prejudice, discrimination, and what both of those movements of mind and body entail, a denial of civil rights. Any denial of civil rights means a struggle to regain civil rights for the people who have had their rights denied. People who have been through the mental health system, and come out on the other side, know this intimately.  Their struggle for equality under the law, far from being over, is far from ending.

Living Without Psychiatry

Anyone who has read the typical mental health industry propaganda has read stories about people said to be ‘living with mental illness’. “Mental illness” is the imaginary bug that we just can’t seem to exterminate. Were there a real bug involved, maybe it would have earned it’s innoculation many years ago.

The first problem is linguistic. There is absolutely no way around the mind body duality we are confronted with here. The physical universe is real, the mental universe, not so much. We’ve just stumbled into the terrain of meta-physics, philosophical speculation. If you’re meta-physically ill, you’re literally not ill.

Psychiatry has managed to circumvent this dilemma with a convenient sleight by suggesting that “mental illness” actually is physical illness. Despite this suggestion, the rift remains impassable. More simply put, the message is not the messenger. It gets nowhere undelivered. You don’t arrive at consciousness by dissecting a brain.

So you can convince a person that he or she is “sick”. You can put a person on pills that will negatively affect his or her performance and health. You can tell him or her he or she will never be done with this imaginary illness he or she has, and that he or she will need to take those pills until the day he or she dies. What of it? Some people shovel shit for a living.

When living without “mental illness” is not presented as an option, you are going to get people saying they have a “mental illness”. In fact, there is little wonder you get people saying they have a “mental illness” when an entire medical profession encourages them to do so. Resisting the temptation to confess to an illness, there, as Hamlet might put it, is the rub.

I’ve read that ‘schizophrenics’ are illogical. I don’t see how this isn’t a shortcoming that a little bit of extra education couldn’t remedy. Logic itself is merely a method for arriving at the facts. An absence of logical deduction, and you’ve got someone who is at a remove from reality anyway. Why not provide them with the tools to help them determine what reality is, and what it is not?

We don’t call situations “sick”, we call them bad or good. When bad circumstances are a matter of drawing the short end of the stick, what can be done? Well, for one, there are two things I would suggest. Number one is to stop gambling, and number two is to change the situation. Bad circumstances need not repeat themselves ad nauseam.

Alright, I’ve tried to explain that what you are likely to get from a psychiatric examination is not a clean bill of good health, but rather a certificate of insanity. People who are not in need, the theory runs, don’t pay visits to the psychiatrist office. This is something to consider when making such visits a part of your regular regimen. If you’re ever going to get “well”, you have to stop doing so. You’re his or her bread and bacon. His or her addiction so to speak.

Not having a “mental illness” can be difficult for some people, all the same, I would encourage some of them to give it a whirl. There’s no reason in being stuck to a delimiting script like a fly to flypaper. If finding a ‘cure’ can be just as elusive as determining the ‘disease’, well, there you go. Perhaps it is just as simple as coming up with an opposing opinion, and learning to be politic (i.e. shrewd).