Mental Health Awareness Month Mayhem

The “mental illness” industry propaganda machine is running full throttle this month, especially in my neck of the swamp. All sorts of events have been planned, here in Gainesville Florida,   for May, Mental Health Awareness Month, a 60 something designation originated by  Mental Health America, at one point almost the lone voice for the mental health movement, a movement to get government to foot the bill for “mental illness”.

A local movie theater is showing Call Me Crazy, one of Hollywood’s most recent excursions into the area of “mental illness” propagandizing. There is also going to be a panel discussion, and a Mental Health Fair (sic), Apparently, given “campaigns against stigma”, there is no way in hell that “mental illness” can be allowed to keep a low profile. This is about selling nonsense, folks, and as it is being done all over the country, it is about selling nonsense big time.

Did I say big? “Mental illness” is big business. This is how it works. You’ve got a tin cup pitch being offered in unison for more funds to pay for it. It is psychiatric labeling, drugs, “mental health” workers and facilities. Education is particularly important. Education is corporate propaganda, in other words, advertising. The more educating you do, the more “mental illness” you get. The more “mental illness” you get, the better your chances of swindling the public into giving you more money.

Prevention is a joke at this point. Prevention is usually a matter of labeling and drugging children. Not getting ‘em early on is seen as “causative” because it is thought that delayed diagnosis increases severity. Problem. The kid who is not got is not “ill”. The severity of the label starts with the label itself. Not that long ago, in fact, childhood wasn’t a bona fide “mental illness”. Actual people, baby sitters and parents, tended the fledgling flock of humanity,. Now, more and more often, the child rearing task is being relegated to stimulants, sedatives, and happy pills, and I can’t say that they’ve been doing a terrific job of it.

We’ve got a “mental illness” epidemic raging throughout much of the world today, and no wonder. If gun violence erupts, “mental illness” did it. If people are poor and without permanent shelter, they must be “mentally ill”. “Mental illness” is our answer to social issues. It’s not a matter of flawed groups, it is a matter of flawed individuals. All we need to do is segregate, label, drug, and treat the offending parties responsible for any disagreement in groups, and voila, everything is hunky dory again.

Not so fast. The perfect son or daughter, who received the perfect grade, got the perfect job, and now runs the perfect major corporation are becoming more of a liability than our “diseased” failures ever were. Life on the planet earth is now threatened by our idea of wellness and success. Maybe we need to take a harder look at the potential in our throwaway populations of people. Perhaps there is something we missed, Perhaps they are not so totally tainted and ruined by “brain disease” after all.

You will never find a “mental illness” under a microscope lens. This is because “mental illness” is not a legitimate medical condition. There is nothing to find when what passes for symptoms are merely a checklist of aberrant behaviors. Although some psychiatrists would resolve the Cartesian mind body duality by declaring mind brain, I challenge anybody to find an identifiable thought or feeling in a synaptic cleft or a neural circuit. It will always elude them. Mental and physical are simply not synonymous.

The dilemma confronting us today is that  standard psychiatric practice invariably involves  physically damaging the patient.  The propaganda is not propaganda favoring “mental health”. What is that?  The propaganda is actually propaganda favoring physical injury. The way out of the psych-ward should not be through another department in the hospital, or the mortuary, but this is increasingly becoming the case. The only ‘other way’ involves seriously butting heads with the mental health establishment as “stigma” has been redefined to mean any disagreement with the propaganda.

Education On, And Alternatives To, Psychiatric Drug Abuse

If anything I think the potential harm occurring with psychiatric drug use has been underplayed rather than overplayed. This is to say that I have every reason to believe psychiatric drugs are much more dangerous and damaging than they are credited with being. Desperate people though are often more apt to listen to their desperation than they are to listen to the more cautious voice of reason and health.

Education is key when it comes to changing this situation. First people must be educated about the ills that come of taking neuroleptic and other psychiatric drugs. They need to know the conditions caused by the extended use of psychiatric drugs, and they need to be aware of how it raises the mortality rate dramatically. They must come to see that true recovery is attained through tapering off psychiatric drugs rather than dependently over relying upon them, and that over relying upon such chemicals is worse than risky, in actual fact it is rank folly.

Living in an area where these connections are not being made makes public education that much more important. When the “trade off” for a modicum of emotional stability is a matter of 25 and more lost years of life, that’s not a fair trade in the slightest. Nobody needs to sacrifice a third of their lifetime to “medication maintenance”, and more when you consider the loss in terms of quality of life. What people do need to know is that their chances for making a complete recovery are much better if they are never exposed to psychiatric drugs in the first place. When they do make this connection, the need for alternatives to psychiatric drug treatment becomes apparent.

People who have been enduring the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs for years, under the misguided opinion that they can’t function without them, should become better informed. There should also be support groups to help people who wish to get off psychiatric drugs to do so. People need to know just what the dangers are of remaining on psychiatric drugs as well. The longer a person takes a psychiatric drug, the more likely it becomes that that person will suffer permanent physical damage. Outside chemicals are just not the best way to maintain emotional stability. Nature, the evolved nature one was born with, works much better.

Psychiatric drug dependence and “mental illness” are practically interchangeable terms now. What psychiatric drugs can’t provide is “mental health”. People who don’t use such chemicals are said to be “mentally healthy”, and one can’t be said to be “mentally healthy” so long as one uses a psychiatric drug. People who take psychiatric drugs, in so doing, often put their physical health at risk. There are other and better ways to deal with the stress and pressure that comes of modern living, and the idea is to help people deal with the stress and pressure in ways other than that of masking such with the effects of a thought distorting, brain disabling, psychiatric drug.

If chronicity in “mental illness” is actually the result of psychiatric drug dependence, as some of us maintain, then the way to restore people to capacity is through tapering them off chemicals. Psychiatry, blind to the excess embodied in its own practice, has disastrously failed to recover a large portion of people under its influence to functionality. We can do much about this shortcoming by educating people about psychiatric drugs, and by providing them with safe alternatives to treatments employing harmful psychiatric drugs. It is crucial that we do so before psychiatry, in combinations with rapacious drug companies, wreaks even more havoc on the world than it has done thus far.

At The APA Protest In New York City

Lester Cook, with bullhorn, and Celia Brown, director of MindFreedom International, in front of the Jacob K. Jarvits Convention Center in New York City.

Jim Gottstein, director of the Center for Psychiatric Rights, Gary Null,  author and radio show host,  and Harry Bentivegna Lichtenstein at the demonstration.

Vera H. Sherav, founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, speaks at the protest.

Laura Delano, psychiatric survivor and Mad In America blogger, speaks at the protest.

The APA, Big Pharma, and the Feds Get Cozy

The theme of the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association this year is Changing the Practice and Perception of Psychiatry.  In other words, whitewash, and therefore, actor Alan Alda, former Senator Patrick Kennedy, Vice President Joseph Biden, and actor Joey “Pants” Pantoliano are present at the event. This is PR, baby, and in a big way, too. The drug companies are also well represented. There is, in fact, a Disclosure Index in the downloadable program that shows the financial relationships between the speakers and Big Pharma. Most of the speakers have such ties.

As for Change in Practice, the APA began in Philadelphia in 1844 as the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, there were 13 members back then. Fast forward, there are 36,000 some members now. I was reading just the other day how someone didn’t think there were enough pediatric psychiatrists in the USA. The slant of this article then was that we need more child psychiatrists labeling and drugging more children, a situation sure to result in more maimed, wounded, and in some cases, dead children.

The fact that Vice President Joe Biden has been invited to give a lecture tomorrow should come as a surprise to no one. One of President Barrack Obama’s most insistent reelection campaign promises involved criminalizing mental patients. Why else would their names be put on a criminal background checklist while their second amendment constitutional rights were routinely violated? Vice President Biden was chosen to chair a task force making scapegoats of people in the mental health system for the violence of a very few individuals.

Out of this task force, and other committee meetings, it has been proposed that school workers be trained as mental health cops. These mental health cops would target children for labeling and drugging, and they would bust them for “mental illness”. The idea is that if we catch them early enough, they won’t slip through the cracks in the system, and grow up to become multiple murderers. I have more of a worry, on the other hand, that they may be murdered instead, and by psychiatry.

I think we must be in the second century of the brain now, researchers are so intent on finding a biological basis for so called “mental illness”. They’ve got it all figured out. “Mental illness” is physical illness, black is white, war is peace, hate is love, and death is life. If there’s a third century of the brain, I’d wager they won’t find any biological basis for so called “mental illness” then either. What we will get out of the matter is more dead babies, more dead adults, and more dead senior citizens.

One cannot fail to see irony in the fact that the same government that would contain its mental patients through violence, attributes violence to mental patients. Labeling a person “mentally ill” sanctions  libel, abduction, assault, torture, imprisonment, neglect, brainwashing, poisoning and even murder of that person, all in the name of mental health. Psychiatry is voodoo science. In that profession, you’ve got phony doctors, using phony medicine (real poison), on phony patients, to treat phony diseases, with devastating results.

 

Protesting Psychiatric Oppression 2014

On May 3 through 7, 2014, the American Psychiatric Association will be holding its annual meeting in New York City. The theme of this years meeting is Changing the Practice and Perception of Psychiatry. This event is not likely to touch upon the issue of human rights violations by that profession as it’s primarily a public relations scheme and a defensive evasion of responsibility. Among the distinguished guests assisting the top dogs in the field of psychiatry in pulling off this professional whitewash extravaganza are Vice President Joe Biden, actor Alan Alda, and actor Joey “Pants” Pantoliano.

At present the rights and freedoms of citizens are being threatened on several fronts by this same profession that would be talking change. It is common knowledge among many people who deal with the mental health system on a daily basis that things within that system are getting worse, not better. There is repressive legislation being pushed by special interests groups, especially in the instance of H. R. 3717, a bill, deceptively called “the helping families in mental health crisis act”. H. R. 3717 would essentially deprive patients of a great deal of the hard won legal rights and protections that they had achieved over the years if it were passed into law. There is also the issue of forced treatment, made most acutely apparent with the recent abduction of Justina Pelletier by the state of Massachusetts.

On May 4th there will be a protest of the APA across the street from the Jacob Javitz Convention Center where the APA annual meeting is being held. This protest, themed Stop Psychiatric Assault, and orchestrated by psychiatric survivors, their friends, and allies is co-sponsored by the human rights organizations MindFreedom International and the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights. To my way thinking, this protest is much more important than the whitewashing ceremony the APA will be conducting. It is so important, in fact, that I am making the trip all the way from Florida to NYC to participate in this action.

Organized psychiatric crime may have a few Hollywood celebrities and politicians fooled, but the rest of us are more astute than that bunch of bozos about the situation. Oppressive maltreatment and abuse masquerading as “help” are commonplace in the mental health system. Psychiatry kills more often than it “helps”. As this is the case, any and all action that can be taken against the abuses conducted in the name of this profession are called for. Only by protesting oppression, and by educating the public, can we bring attention to the severity of the problem we face, and by bringing attention to it, change it.

I hope you will, if possible, join us on May 4th, 2014 in our protest across from the annual meeting of the APA. We need all the people we can get in this, our struggle, against forced treatment and for human rights. Freedom used to mean something in this country, and it still means something to those of us who have experienced its eclipse. People are being deprived of freedom, insidiously crushed, and slowly poisoned to death by psychiatry at this very moment. You can do your part to end this death and destruction by joining us on May 4th across from the Jacob Javitz Convention Center in New York City when we strike a blow for life and freedom.

Related story:

Join MindFreedom, Protest Psychiatric Brutality!

Ronald Pies In Psychiatryland

One of the biggest clown doctors going at the present moment has got to be Ronald Pies. It would be remiss of me to claim that in his latest post, Nuances, Narratives, and the ‘Chemical Imbalance’ Debate in Psychiatry, he has outdone himself. If there was anyone destined for a pie in the face that anyone has got to be Ronald Pies. I would be honored, in fact, to bestow upon Dr. Pies the moniker Ronald “Pie In The Face” Pies for all posterity. Ronald Pies is a marvel of nonsensical shrink think. In his latest escapade into the theory and practice of shrinkery, Pies, by some disingenuous twist of convoluted illogic, would blame “the chemical imbalance theory” on that bug-a-boo and will-o-the-wisp of modern psychiatry, antipsychiatry. Go figure.

Now, if you were to give credence to a recent online polemic posing as investigative journalism, you would probably choose the first or second statement. In the narrative of the antipsychiatry movement, a monolithic entity called “Psychiatry” has deliberately misled the public as to the causes of mental illness, by failing to debunk the chemical imbalance hypothesis. Indeed, this narrative insists that, by promoting this little white lie, psychiatry betrayed the public trust and made it seem as if psychiatrists had magic bullets for psychiatric disorders. (Lurking in the back-story, of course, is Big Pharma, said to be in cahoots with Psychiatry so as to sell more drugs).

Those first two statements Pies alludes to here would be those that indicate either “mental illnesses” were caused by “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or merely that more “serious mental illnesses” were caused by “chemical imbalances” in the brain. What we don’t get out of this story is precisely who was responsible for promoting and spreading this “chemical imbalance theory” that these people in some antipsychiatry movement would be exposing. Where is psychiatry here? Defending itself from those who would be exposing a discredited theory. Certainly it is not defending itself from the ones who would be promulgating that theory. Curious indeed.

Among his more bizarre notions is the notion that this “chemical imbalance” theory has more to do with some catecholamine hypothesis from many years back than it does with the development, marketing and advertising of those trendy psychiatric drugs still surging strong on the market of today.

To the extent the “chemical imbalance” notion took hold in our popular culture, it was due mainly to distorted or oversimplified versions of the catecholamine hypothesis. These were often depicted in drug company ads; pop psychology magazines; and, in recent years, on misinformed Websites and blogs. In short, the “chemical imbalance theory” was never a real theory, nor was it widely propounded by responsible practitioners in the field of psychiatry.

Does Dr. Pies mean that psychiatrists don’t use, or shouldn’t use, those drugs that would be advertised as purporting to correct some kind of postulated and theoretical “chemical imbalance”?  I think not. This leads to another question. To what extent has psychiatry, or the majority of its practitioners, colluded with pharmaceutical companies in producing an atmosphere that now has commercial interests in the media peddling pills, not just to medical professionals, but to the entire buying public perceived and re-envisioned as consumers who will purchase anything at the provocation of the most mesmerizing sound bite?

Psychiatry’s critics also conveniently omit reference to what was arguably the most prevalent paradigm in academic psychiatry, during the 1980s and beyond: the biopsychosocial model (BPSM) of Dr. George Engel. The BPSM has been subjected to much criticism, and some would argue that few psychiatrists nowadays use the BPSM in a systematic, evidence-based manner. And in recent years, several prominent psychiatrists have warned that “…pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, the major treatment modalities in psychiatry, have become fragmented from one another, creating an artificial separation of the psychosocial and biological domains in psychiatry.”

In the latex gloved mitts of Dr. Pies, our babble here has degenerated into very nuanced babble indeed. If you will notice, despite the nip at bio babble unrefined, bio still has top billing in the theoretical credits. I don’t think this is entirely because of the order of words in the alphabet, or accidental. The mad doctor has shown himself sufficiently proficient in blurring the lines between disciplines to earn himself a rank of major distinction in the therapeutic circus. If criticism equals antipsychiatry, well, there you go. The message is coming in loud and clear. Don’t criticize psychiatry or you must be promoting the discredited “chemical imbalance theory”, too. Clown psychiatry rules!

The Adult Baby Sitting AKA Mental Health Treatment Business

Adult baby sitting is big business. It is a business that goes by the name of mental health treatment. For adult baby sitting to thrive there are  three requirements: 1. that some adults are assumed to be incapable of making decisions for themselves, 2. that this pseudo-child status is legislated into law, and 3. that other people are paid for assuming the role of responsible adult.

Oh, by the way, adult baby sitting is thriving. The adult baby sitting business is booming big time. The numbers of adult babies are growing very fast, as is, correspondingly, the numbers of adult baby sitters. Adult baby sitting is assured a great future. Looking at Number 2. above, for this pseudo-child status to be legislated into law, law that is actually in opposition to law,  you need another explanation for immaturity. Voila! Now we’ve got medicine, medical science, calling irresponsibility and deviance “disease”.

Medical expertise, where maturity is concerned, has been given  quasi-judicial powers. In fact, it is an alliance of medicine and law that allows for the practice of adult baby sitting on a wide scale basis. The letter of the law can be circumvented, when it comes to incarcerating a person in the adult baby pen, because a determination has been made by medical experts, upheld by judges, that adult behavioral immaturity is a matter of physical disease, and we have a law for containing people with said disease.

This confinement represents a quarantine without true contagion. There is a contagion, truly, but this contagion is a matter of 1. selling adult baby sitting, 2. job security, and 3.. manufacturing adult babies. What is really at work here is supply side economics. First you’ve got the demand for adult babies sitters to handle the supply of adult babies. This in turn generates a demand for more adult babies to fill the growing supply of adult baby sitters. They are out there, we just can’t let them slip through the cracks so to speak, can we?

This business is actually about, and always was about, prejudice, intolerance, and segregation. The old mental asylum represents a sort of nigger town for the mad. I know you’ve heard the slogan, “separate but equal”, well, separate by its nature usually means unequal, and if anything our treatment of the dementedly deviant segment of the population has been very inferior to that of our treatment of the non-deviant majority. The new community mental health system would change this equation ever so slightly by introducing the mental hospital/prison without walls.

Children are under pressure to grow up. Weaning a child from dependency on mama and daddy is what child-rearing is all about. If the child is slow (i.e. immature for its age), now we’ve got the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder tag to lay on the child. ADHD allows for more intensive child rearing. We’ve got baby baby sitting for those babies that are more stubborn in their babyishness than other babies. If only it was as simple as saying, “babies will be babies”. Well, actually, it is that simple.

The issue at hand concerns the adult babies who have not been caught, or, 75 % of the population. Arriving at 75 % involves, more or less, coupling the psychosis tags with the neurosis tags, that is, deviance as necessity with deviance as luxury. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to credit the psychiatric field, the drug industry, and the insurance business with a great deal of deception. This deception involves pushing bias as if it were proven fact. We don’t have illnesses here. We have adults treated like children. Change the expectation, and you change everything. Were we to treat adults like adults again, I think you’d begin to see a big improvement.

Psychiatry Drumming Up More Business From School Children

An abstract in HealthDay News announces, Most Teens With Psychiatric Disorders Don’t Receive Care. By care the article means psychiatric treatment. Consider, did we replace the words psychiatric disorders with the words personal problems, and if we replace the word care with the word solutions, we would be saying something entirely different. The question is whether, given a kid with overwhelming troubles, would the mental health system help the kid resolve those difficulties any better than the kid going at it alone. I think there is a great deal of question as to the effectiveness and benefits in the mental health system for doing so. In so many instances, people who enter that system only get worse. This is particularly true when there was little to nothing intrinsically wrong with the kid in the first place.

Let’s look at these disorders and their rates. We’ve got two types of disorders we are dealing with here. We’ve got specifically childhood and adolescent disorders, and we’ve got disorders that have a potential to persist into adulthood. I submit that both types of disorder are, in the main, entirely bogus. Let’s look at the stats given.

45 % of adolescents labeled with a psychiatric disorder received some sort of treatment during the course of a single year. If “having a psychiatric disorder” is synonymous with “receiving treatment”, maybe it is not such a bad thing that 55 % of the adolescents given diagnoses no longer receive treatment. The person, for example, who is unable to back out of “receiving services” is a lifelong or “chronic” mental patient.

Most likely to receive mental health services

ADHD                                                          73.8 %

Conduct Disorder                                     73.4 %

Oppositional Defiant Disorder              71   %

Least likely to receive mental health services

Specific Phobias                                        40.7  %

Anxiety Disorders                                     41.4  %

Services received

School setting                                            23.6 %

Specialty mental health setting             22.8 %

General medical setting                         10.1 %

Where are the statistics saying that 55 % of the kids given psychiatric labels are going to hell in a handbag because they aren’t receiving mental health treatment? Where are the statistics saying that 45 % of the kids are headed for the pearly gates because they are receiving services? Mental health workers and drug companies do better when they have more students doing business with them, but this doesn’t mean that the students are doing any better in treatment than they would do outside of treatment.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder only officially reached the age of consent with the recently published DSM-5. Previously ADHD was  primarily a juvenile chaos. Mine may be a minority opinion but I don’t think of this milestone as particularly conducive to good mental health. Quite the reverse. Now that adult ADHD is an official disorder label we are likely to see much more of it than we have seen in the past.

Conduct used to be a grade on a report card. Conduct was then previously not a disorder. Certainly making it a disorder might make things easier for teachers. I definitely don’t think making conduct a disorder makes things any easier for school children. Should conduct disorder progress into out and out criminality, the child would probably have to put some distance between him or herself and the school system. Or get expelled. I imagine conduct disorder helps flustered parents get disobedient children back into school following suspension or expulsion.

Oppositional defiant disorder is sheer nonsense. It means a child is being rebellious. Children do become rebellious. In fact, they go through phases that include rebelliousness. The terrible twos and the teenage years are two such phases, but they are by no means the only periods in childhood and adolescence potentially beset with disobedience and rebellion. If the child doesn’t grow out of it, the good news is that there is no adult ODD. Not yet anyway.

Anxiety is human, not medical. Nonetheless, psychiatrists and drug company exes make money treating it as medical. Ditto, phobias. This is a particularly sticky subject because children are particularly prone to anxiety and phobias. Adults, given much more life experience than children dealing with such, tend to be less seriously affected. Anxiety and fear are symptoms of inexperience. Inexperience is a disease that can be cured fairly easily. I suggest that parents and teachers experiment with ways to cure their school children’s inexperience as that is part of the job description.

The good news is that 55 % of the teens in this study once receiving mental health treatment are no longer receiving services. The bad news is that psychiatric researchers want even more teens to receive services. Swallow hard and go figure.

“Mental illness”, the belief

Among the major tenets of the Church of Biological Psychiatry is the belief, for there is no evidence supporting the claim, that what is commonly referred to as “mental illness” is an actual disease. Disbelief, to the converts to this faith, amounts to heresy, and they refer to this heresy as “stigma”. The idea is that if you belong to this church, you must believe in “mental illness”, and not to do so is to mistreat people thought to be diseased.

A couple of decades ago, a revisionist and protestant sect of dissident evangelists split from the Church of Biological Psychiatry.  This protestant church initially arose around the cathartic and redemptive power of mental health recovery. People infected with the “mental illness” bug were thought, by this church, to be capable of recovering their mental competence and, in many cases, completely so.

More recently, the Church of Mental Health Recovery has evolved into the Church of That Recovery That Is Not Recovery.  So many members of this church with the bug, were not losing that bug, and so it became incumbent upon parishioners to start in a new direction. I guess they’d grown attached to it. The feeling is that if the Church of That Recovery That Is Not Recovery continues to evolve in the direction in which it is going, it will eventually be entirely reabsorbed back into body of the mother church, the Church of Biological Psychiatry.

The “mental illness” lifestyle, ironically enough, is equivalent to the mental health lifestyle, that is, it is a lifetime of perpetual treatment for the affliction a person is presumed to have. Accompanying the initial curse of diagnosis (I do hereby pronounce thee “mentally ill”, and beyond hope of remedy or consequence), comes the attendant chronicity.  This chronicity, or lifelong path, is a matter of realizing the negative prognosis, or curse-fulfilling prophesy, issued by psychiatrists, the churches priestly caste of sorcerers.

The news is not all bad. Given advances made by the Church of That Recovery That Is Not Recovery, converts are learning to better enjoy their afflictions. Within the limitations of their debilities, the stricken are learning to carve the modicum of a decent existence out for themselves, however beset by hardship and suffering. The key to this silver lining, so to speak, is to be found in total compliance with mental health treatment plans.

If it weren’t for the great therapist who dwells in the sky, the creator of the drug research and development department, the “mentally ill” person, left to his or her own devices, would be lost. He or she would be just one more homeless refugee scrounging dumpsters for a bite to eat, mumbling to him or herself, and irritating business owners. He or she could even be squatting in the city jail for a spell. No more, he or she now can be diverted from that fate to a fate equally inane courtesy of Joe Tax Payer.

Believing in “mental illness”is not the same as believing in mental health. Believing in mental health is not the same as disbelieving in “mental illness”.  We could arrange this sentence in all its possible permutations regarding belief and disbelief, and it still boils down to pretty much the same thing. Maintaining a healthy skepticism, while keeping one’s feet squarely on solid ground,  creates a stabilizing effect. In a world where Big Foot, Nessy, ghosts and flying saucers still manage to captivate the popular imagination, it’s best to keep a wary eye out for wooden nickels and, one might add, false gods.

Changing Life Scripts

I don’t advocate consuming mental health services. I advocate not consuming mental health services. I advocate non-compliance with mental health treatment plans, in fact, as those treatment plans usually consist in little more than drug taking regimens. Those services that call themselves mental health are actually all about what is seen as “mental sickness”. Mental health services are a business then, and the business they are in the business of conducting is the business of labeling, managing, and “treating”  people deemed “mentally ill”. True mental stability, if there is any such thing, exists outside of the mental health services altogether, or at least, it isn’t a subject of concern for the mental health, actually “mental illness”, business.

This “mental illness” business that calls itself a mental health business is interested in doing what most businesses are interested in doing, and that is expanding. When you expand your business you add more employees and, to do that, you must take in more clients, therefore, you need more people to assent to seeing themselves as “ill” in the head. Here’s where it gets sticky. As there is no reliable test to prove the existence of any “mental disorder” whatsoever, this determination of “mental illness” is mostly a matter of suggestion and persuasion.

Few, if any,m mental health workers feel that their job is to work for the contraction of their profession. The result of this expansion of mental health “care” is an epidemic of so called “mental illnesses”. “Mental illness”  is advancing on physical ailments for the number one position when it comes to the numbers of people taking in federal disability payments. As “mental illness” is mostly a matter of suggestion and persuasion, with a bit of  drug induced brain dysfunction thrown in, what we’re talking about is a population of essentially artificially created invalids.

The mental health pitch being in actuality a “mental illness” pitch is a matter of public relations, deception, and advertising. If people talk “mental illness”, runs the ruse, they are doing something about “stigma”. That they are also selling this idea of “mental illness”, and with it, it’s treatment, is not so much a subject of discussion, not by the mental health industry anyway. The result is that the individual identity is lost  through a categorical designation, a member of this set of people designated “diseased”. You are not going to get fewer people claiming to have “mental illnesses” by saying, as they are saying now, “It is okay to be mentally ill.”

If it is okay to be “mentally ill” (or to have a “mental illness”), why do we have “mental health” workers? Basically because “mental health” workers have been much more successful at persuading people they are “sick” than they have at persuading people they are “well”. It’s okay to be “mentally ill” because “mental health” professionals have basically failed to achieve positive outcomes in their clients. They have failed to achieve positive outcomes in their clients basically because it is not in their interests to do so. The bread and butter of people in the mental health business is provided by the same people to which they’ve attached “mental illness” labels. Take those labels away, and you also take away your job.

We need a change of thinking in the community beyond the “mental sickness” business to change this situation in a big way. Mental stability, almost by definition, resides in that area outside of the whole field of mental health, actually “mental sickness”, treatment. Redeeming a person from “mental illness” one must also redeem the same person from the mental health system. Mental health is not to be found in the mental health system. Mental health is to be found outside of the mental health system where “mental sickness” is the first presumption. )Reality( exists outside of the bracketed (mental health system). When you’ve got an artificial invalid, the best antidote is a validation in reality. Consider the script of a drama. If the leading man or lady is an invalid, well, change the play and you’ve got a different, that is a vital and valid, leading man or lady. It is my contention that we can change the play, be it tragic, comedic, or romantic, for a number of people, and therefore, change the outcomes they face in life.

Introducing The Church of Psychotherapy

Although I have dealt with the Church of Biological Psychiatry at one time or another on this blog, there is another religion in the mental health field that I haven’t dealt with in a major way. I’d like to try to correct that error of omission if possible. The religion I am referring to is the Church of Psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy, the practice at the heart of this religion, is all about talk. It is, as it has been put, talk therapy. I’m not completely opposed to talking things out. Sigmund Freud, an early prophet of the church, was big on insight coming of these talks. Insight that I feel could be used to correct instances of faulty logic, especially when this faulty logic involves spilling your guts to a priest of psychotherapy.

Doctors of this divinity compare very favorably with disciples of the goddess Venus in her most terrestrial manifestations, that is, psychoanalysts like prostitutes charge money for their services. You’ve got an elite doing for you for a fee what any friend would do for you for free, if you had any friends. Lack of friends is a primary reason some people utilize the services of a priest of this religion.

1 in 5 people, according National Institute of Mental Health propaganda, have a “mental illness”. Priests of the Church of Psychotherapy are not as inclined to believe in “mental illness”, a cardinal principal in the Church of Biological Psychiatry, but they do all believe in Psychotherapy, that is, in talk. Most of the 1 in 5 people alleged to have a “mental illness” are thought to have what is referred to as a “minor mental illness”. The Church of Psychotherapy has been more instrumental, it is thought, although this is not universal, in treating people with “minor mental illnesses” than in treating people with “major mental illnesses”.

“Minor mental illnesses” were introduced as neuroses by early prophets of the Church of Psychotherapy. Some of the converts to this religion think, despite the 1 in 5 statistic from the NIMH, that 100 % of people of the world are (or “have” in a more updated contemporary lingo) neurosis. Okay, so if 1 in 5 have been caught, that leaves 4 in 5 running around loose.

Priests in the Church of Psychotherapy have to make a living somehow, and what better way to “earn” your keep than to make your spiritual calling a way of life? That’s right! If 100 % of the people are “sick”, just as the Christian church is fraught with sinners, 100 % of the people would be in need of the services you offer. Good deal, huh, for a practitioner of this faith?

Unfortunately for the Church of Psychotherapy, the Church of Biological Psychiatry upset their applecart with the release of the DSM-III in 1980. Psychotherapy, from the absolute necessity it once was seen as being, by this act was rendered something of a luxury again. The Church of Biological Psychiatry, much more adamant about maintaining the divide between “sick” and well, thinks more drastic measures necessary, and these drastic measures come to you courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry.