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Category: Child abuse

Categories
Child abuse Evil George Orwell Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Loren Mosher’s letter

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of the books that I wrote in 2000 (I added the triple parentheses this year):
 

A student-led panel discussion sponsored by NAMI

In NAMI’s website I saw the photo of Justin, a four-year-old boy with a suppliant expression on his face. The website says:

Meet Justin—a child with a mental illness. 

Justin was diagnosed with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) which made it difficult for him to succeed in school. Today medication helps Justin to attend classes with his peers and avoid the uncontrollable behaviors he previously experienced. [1] 

At the end of “Perpetrators and psychiatrists: an obscene alliance” I had mentioned an organization of family parents which calls itself National Alliance on Mental Illness(NAMI). Since this book deals with parents and psychiatrists, it is pertinent to delve a little deeper into this organisation of parents that, with the help of psychiatrists, has labelled and medicated thousands of children and adolescents during family conflicts. In recent times NAMI has gained such power in American society that I must speak out about what it is doing to little boys like Justin, even though I have to stomach the largest string of psychiatric lies and Newspeak propaganda that I know.

Following next I quote some passages from NAMI’s web site as I found it on the internet in May 2000. Let us read with attention NAMI’s lies. The following quotation is from NAMI’s book reviews, It’s Nobody’s Fault by (((Harold Koplewicz))), a bioreductionist psychiatrist of children and teenagers in a medical center of New York:

It’s Nobody’s Fault could not have been written 25 years ago. 

It reflects the monumental change that has taken place in understanding all mental illnesses—that they are brain disorders, disturbances in brain chemistry and nobody’s fault. The work deals with serious brain disorders in children and adolescents […].

Koplewicz is “must reading” for parents who feel guilty and remorse about the brain disorder of a child. [2] 

The truth is that NAMI does not approach genuine brain diseases such as epilepsy, the stroke or brain cysticercosis, but of those invented by psychiatrists. NAMI’s list includes: “schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), major depression, obsessive compulsive disorder [the label on little Justin] and severe anxiety disorders”[3]— “disorders” similar to drapetomania, dyasthesia Aethiopica, nymphomania, kleptomania and moral insanity to the psychiatric mind of other times.

In “Things you should know: NAMI facts”, this organization states who are the target of these labels: “Most often, severe mental illnesses are diagnosed in young people between the ages of 16-25”.[4] More extraordinary is to learn of the political goals of NAMI on these youngsters:

GOAL: NAMI will be recognized as the primary source for information and helpful referral on all aspects of mental illness. 

GOAL: The general public will understand that mental illnesses are non-fault, biologically based, treatable, and may eventually be curable. [5] 

Another goal of NAMI is to increase its membership “to at least one million families by the year 2000”.[6] Most significant of the folie à deux between these families and NAMI can be seen in a 1998-1999 NAMI poll to 900 parents. It showed that more than half of the polled parents said their GPs didn’t recognise the mental diseases that the polled parents believed to see in their offspring. [7]

In other words, according to NAMI the parents, not the medical doctors, are the ones to diagnose biomedical diseases. This is what Jeffrey Masson said above about the “identified” child by his parents: that a psychiatrist implied that parents did not err in home diagnoses and even quoted scholarly psychiatric journals to support his claim. Similarly, NAMI uses the word “identifying” alluding children.[8] NAMI’s blindness is such that even when they have evidence from physicians that home conflicts can disturb emotionally a child, they proclaim the biological cause of the disturbance:

Parents [of said poll] perceived that most professionals and services had not kept current with the latest research or treatment information and used outdated theories and approaches, including blaming families for their child’s disorder. 

“I took my son to a psychiatrist who said if we, parents, stopped fighting with each other, my son would be fine. It was our own fault”. [9] 

NAMI quotes these words as proof that the physician had not subscribed the latest fashion of biological reductionism, discarding the possibility that this fighting between mom and dad could affect the emotional state of the child. Other parents stated:

“The biggest issue we faced during the time our daughter began to manifest problems (when she was five years old) was to convince the ‘professionals’ that she did indeed have a disease that was biologically based and not caused by alleged child abuse [or] bad parenting”. [10] 

Is there another field beside the psychiatric where an organisation dares to air in every direction that the parents know more of biomedical symptoms than medical doctors?

In addition to these pediatricians it is revealing that some people who know these polled parents are under the impression that the parents might have something to do with their children’s mental state. This is inferred from the same information in the NAMI poll. To the statement “I often feel that others blame me for my child’s condition”, 29 percent of the polled marked “Strongly agree”, 21 percent “Agree” and 20 percent “Partially agree”. That is, 70 percent of those who actually know these parents may suspect a parental etiology of the problem. However, nothing more annoys NAMI that “the injustice of outright parent-blaming”. [11]

NAMI claims that “as many as 8 to 10 percent of all Americans suffer from severe mental illness, and as many as 1 in 5 families are affected”.[12] NAMI also claims that mental illnesses “affect about 20 percent of children and adolescents”[13] and that “an estimated 7.5 million children [in America], 12 percent of all children under age 18, have mental disorders”.[14] It is amusing to observe that this last figure contradicts the quoted before. Laurie Flynn, NAMI’s director, claims that “two-plus million Americans suffering from schizophrenia today receive substandard care”.[15]

As some critics have pointed out, psychiatrists, and now this organisation of “concerned” family parents not only invent diseases: they invent epidemics too.

Incredibly, an organisation that sees epidemics has started to influence American politics. NAMI has carried out successful campaigns in several states of the United States, with the support of local judges and social workers, to force children to take drugs against their will and without the need to commit them in the hospital. The New York Times estimates that in the year 2000 more than 4,000 outpatients in New York state will be given psychiatric drugs against their will due to NAMI and the new law.[16]

How is it possible that NAMI has obtained such power and influence? According to the periodical Mother Jones, from 1996 to 1999 eighteen drug firms donated more than ten million dollars to NAMI: Janssen ($2.08 m), Novartis ($1.87 m), Pfizer ($1.3 m), Abbot Labs ($1.24 m), Wyeth-Ayerst ($658,000), Bristol-Myers Squibb ($613,000) and Eli Lilly & Co., which among other drugs manufactures Prozac ($2.87 m).[17] This is evidence of the obscene alliance between abusive parents, psychiatrists and the forces of the free market.

The existence of organisations such as NAMI exhibits psychiatry as what it has always been: a fraudulent profession composed by mercenary pseudo-scientists that always plead for the interests of parents. NAMI’s goals (“The Nation’s Voice on Mental Illness” says its logotype) of controlling, stigmatise and medicate their rebellious children are so open that I must continue to quote them:

NAMI’s Policy Goals: An increase in federal funding for research in House and Senate appropriation bills—emphasizing / targeting children […].

Extensive and meaningful involvement of psychiatrists trained in child and adolescent psychiatry in the diagnosing and treatment—including residential treatment [involuntary hospitalisation] […].

To identify at least three federal government policy barriers which obstruct treatment of childhood serious mental illness. Then to advocate appropriate federal Congressional and Administration policies responding to such barriers.[18] 

The lie NAMI repeats the most, that even the editors of the DSM would be embarrassed to iterate so many times, is that these children have “biological brain disorders”, for instance when NAMI advocates medication against their will.[19] This strongly reminds me what Solzhenitsyn observed: that in Stalin’s age there was no official communication in the Russian press that didn’t lie in some way about a propaganda statistic or social affair.[20] But let’s continue to listen to the Americans:

NAMI believes that children and adolescents with brain disorders have the right to thrive in nurturing environments, that all children and adolescents with brain disorders deserve to have early diagnoses with appropriate treatments.[21]

Orwell could not have said it better in the black-white Newspeak of the Ministry of Love. If NAMI manages to accomplish its political goals, the image that comes to my mind is similar to one of 1984: a parent in the future stepping on with both feet the child’s face and looking down in the name of his nurture, diagnosis and treatment.

I would like to annotate this essay on the nature of evil in mankind, in which I’ve already included many quotations, with two more quotations. Orwell wrote:

Twelve voices were shouting and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. [22] 

Tom Szasz quoted this passage of Animal Farm in one of his books because he fears that with time the Soviet Communist State and the American Therapeutic State could be undistinguishable. The other quotation is a letter of resignation of the renowned psychiatrist Loren Mosher. Mosher was the chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia in the National Institute of Mental Health (1968-1980). He wrote the following letter to the president of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Rodrigo Muñoz:

December 4, 1998

Dear Rod: 

After nearly three decades as a member it is with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment that I submit this letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. The major reason for this action is my belief that I am actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association. Luckily, the organization’s true identity requires no change in the acronym […].

This is not a group for me. At this point in history, psychiatry has been almost completely bought out by the drug companies. The APA could not continue without the pharmaceutical company support […].

No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts, rather we are there to realign our patients’ neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter whatever its configuration. 

So, our organization provides a rationale, by its neurobiological tunnel vision, for keeping our distance from the molecule conglomerates we have come to define as patients […]. It saddens me that after 35 years as a psychiatrist I look forward to being dissociated from such an organization. In no way does it represents my interests. It is not within my capacities to buy into the current biomedical-reductionistic model heralded by the psychiatric leadership as once again marrying us to somatic medicine. This is a matter of fashion, politics and, like the pharmaceutical house connection, money. 

In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI (I don’t remember the members being asked if they supported such an organization) […] the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the champion of their clients the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad / bad offspring. NAMI, with tacit APA approval, has set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring. For the most part we stand by and allow this fascistic agenda to move forward […].

The shortsightedness of this marriage of convenience between APA, NAMI and the drug companies (who gleefully support both groups because of their shared pro-drug stance) is an abomination. I want no part of a psychiatry of oppression and social control […].

Finally, why must the APA pretend to know more than it does? DSM IV is a fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than a scientific document […]. The issue is what do the categories tell us? Do they in fact accurately represent the person with a problem? They don’t, and can’t, because there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder[emphasis added]. So where are we? APA as an organization has implicitly (sometimes explicitly as well) bought into a theoretical hoax […].

We seem to have forgotten a basic principle: the need to be patient / consumer satisfaction oriented. I always remember Manfred Bleuler’s wisdom: “Loren, you must never forget that you are your patient’s employee”. In the end they will determine whether or not psychiatry survives in the service marketplace. 

Sincerely, 

Loren R. Mosher, M.D. 

This confession of an apostate of psychiatry shows that there are good people everywhere, even in that profession. Unfortunately, they are not the majority.

__________

[1] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[2] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[3] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[4] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[12] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[13] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[14] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[15] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[16] The New York Times (8 April 1999).

[17] I obtained this information thanks to a web site critical of psychiatry. (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[18] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[19] See for example “NAMI’s Policy on involuntary commitment”. (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[20] The Gulag Archipelago (op. cit.), pp. 325f.

[21] (In 2019 this pageis no longer available.)

[22] Thomas Szasz’s quotation are the last words of Orwell’s Animal Farm. In The Therapeutic State (op. cit.) the citation appears on page 237, in a chapter devoted to comparing Soviet with American psychiatry, with detriment to the latter. The image of the feet on the face as a symbol of soulless oppression appears in what O’Brien said to Winston in the Ministry of Love (Nineteen Eighty-Four, op. cit., p. 211).

______ 卐 ______

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Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Psychoanalysis

The Italian with an inferiority complex

In view that a couple of visitors have suggested that my anti-psychiatric series on Fridays could be due to the fact that I had a problem with psychiatry, I would like to clarify my personal motivations.

When, as a teenager, my mother made war with me at home, it occurred to her that in order to subdue me it would be easier for her to use a third party and she sent me with an Italian psychoanalyst, Giuseppe Amara (photo), who had studied with Erich Fromm in Cuernavaca in Mexico.

Why did I agree to go with an analyst? Because at seventeen, I imagined mistakenly, the analyst would treat me differently than my parents had treated me; I thought that my testimony about what was happening at home could move him.

Others who have visited this site have come to think that I am half crazy about my exterminationist ideas, formally collected in my Day of Wrath. Perhaps some have come to speculate that my mother’s initiative of so many years ago could have been justified! What these people ignore is that they are reversing cause and effect.

First came the assault at home and in the analyst’s office. Then came my hatred for a large part of humanity. As Jeffrey Masson said on page 126 of the British edition of Against Therapy: ‘How do children survive knowing that fathers can be so cruel, and that they can expect nothing but disbelief, derision, or indifference from the rest of the world when they attempt to talk about it’?

That was exactly what happened to me in consultation with Amara: he did not believe a word I said to him! The only thing he did was insult me in his office and side my parents a hundred percent!

As I said in my previous post about Freud, people are unaware that real-life psychoanalysis (not Hollywood) has nothing to do with traumas caused by abusive parents. It is something entirely different, as we will be seeing in my Friday entries.

But I did not want to talk about that fraudulent profession in this post. I confessed the above about quack doc Amara only because I wanted to mention something about the Jewish question.

As I have said on this site, the personal experience I have had with people moves me to say that the Latin Americans I have met sometimes behave like little Jews. They may not hate the gringos as much as Jewry does but they don’t like them in any way. And something similar happens in Spain. Spanish nationalists are able to identify more with Mestizo America than with North America.

The same can be said of certain Italians. As far as I knew for the years that my mother forced me to go to his office, Amara, for example, could identify himself with the mestizos but never with the Aryans at the north of the Río Grande. The anecdote that moved me to write this entry is as follows.

After Star Wars premiered in 1977, Amara commented that he very much had disliked the movie. Remember that in that first film of the series, Mark Hamill, who represented the character of Luke Skywalker, looked very handsome on the big screen—much better than the youths in Amara’s native town (I once read he was born in Asmara in Eritrea).

During an analytical session Amara pronounced some words about Luke Skywalker that made a dent in my memory: ‘Creer que sólo un gringo puede ser un chingnón…’ (‘To believe that only a gringo can be a badass…’). I don’t remember the continuation of the sentence, but I do remember his gestures of extreme indignation at the movie he had just seen.

At that moment he, Amara, was like the patient and I the one who analysed his mind: as it was obvious to me that he said that just because he was a Mediterranean suffering from an inferiority complex before the neighbouring country at the north. Naturally, no Aryan ‘gringo’ would feel anything like that; on the contrary, he would identify with Luke.

As far as I know Amara is not Jewish. But his Mediterranean complex against the Aryan is obvious. And this is a feeling that I have observed not only in castizos and harnizos (those Latin Americans who could pass for Spanish but have some Indian blood), but also in many Mexican criollos: those who, like Amara, have no Indian blood.

But what I want to get to is the Jewish question.

My impression is that the exterminationist hatred felt by Jewry before the Aryan is only the tip of the iceberg of a much wider reality. It’s easy for me to see it because I almost never see Jews. But I treat Latin Americans with inferiority complexes constantly. And this must happen even in Europe, as the case of Amara illustrates: who could not tolerate the only episode of the Star Wars series that does not contain bad messages for the Aryan cause.

Categories
Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Literature Psychohistory

Inland

Yesterday the image of The Fair Race still enjoyed the privilege of being up on the sidebar. Today I put Day of Wrath in its place and I would like to explain my reasons.

I did not write The Fair Race, I only chose the essays that appear between its covers. The Fair Race is for normies. It opens with an essay on how the founding myth of the post-WW2 West—the defamation of Germany—is lethal to the Aryan race. That essay, together with the review of Hellstorm that is also collected there, could perfectly be the first two stones for the normie to start crossing the psychological Rubicon. In The Fair Race there are many other essays by several authors that could be considered as the rest of the path stones that help the uninitiated to finish crossing the river.

Day of Wrath, on the other hand, describes the land on the other side of the Rubicon. Unlike The Fair Race, I wrote all the essays in Day of Wrath; most of them published in my two books in Spanish, and translated into English for Day of Wrath.

The typical normie needs the stones to be able to cross the river. I needed them myself. The normie would be frightened if we drove him to the other side without the proper preparation.

This uninitiated may need to listen to the proponents of Alt-Lite, who do not focus on racial issues, before moving on to the stone of race realism. But the latter consists of bare scientific facts that the normie will assimilate at some time, and he will want to know a meta-perspective that encompasses such facts; let’s say, the intellectual product of some pundits of the Alt-Right. Eventually it will be necessary to continue crossing the river and run into the Jewish question and White Nationalism. But White Nationalism is still a stone inside the dangerous waters. Only a few become familiar with the beach on dry land on the other side of the river, National Socialism. But the Third Reich was murdered almost in its origins by Anglo-Saxon traitors, and there is hardly anyone in the world who has explored the inland beyond the beach, on the other side of the Rubicon.

Day of Wrath explores these new lands. It is a text that carries the philosophy of Himmler and Pierce to its ultimate consequences. If one sees the images that I chose for the two books, The Fair Race and Day of Wrath, he will perceive that only by expelling non-whites from the continent (that the white god Quetzalcoatl has just discovered) it will be possible for nymphs as ethereal as the one painted by Parrish almost one hundred years ago, to flourish. In other words, the exterminationist ideology must come first, then the fourteen words will have a chance to be fulfilled: something that those who are stepping on the path stones cannot see.

For reasons that I do not understand, today I received the last edition of Day of Wrath by FedEx when I requested it by ordinary mail. As can be seen if we compare it with the image of the sidebar, only my initials appear in the November 2018 edition. It is a book about which only one review has been written. The review was very negative and I rebutted it (here). But the criticism had a valid point: my old version was riddled with syntax errors. I had to run a grammar correction program to correct them since English is not my mother tongue.

The corrected edition that came to me today, with its new glossy cover, looks better than the previous edition, distributed by Amazon. Compared to the racial issue, Day of Wrath addresses the greatest of taboos. As one German disciple of Alice Miller, whose father had an important position in the Third Reich, said, the subject of the psychic ravages caused by abusive parents ‘is the most potent taboo of mankind’.

On the other hand, racism was not a taboo for the white man. From the ancient Egyptians who put up signs so that negroes did not pass beyond certain latitudes, the Spartans so proud of their Nordic heritage and the Roman patricians, as well as the Visigoths who burned at the stake those who miscegenated in Hispania, until the first decades of the 20th century when eugenics was openly taught in the US, racism only became taboo since the Anglo-Saxons betrayed our dear Führer.

Yes, only for the new generations has racism become a taboo. But what has never been discussed before, until our times, is the horrific way in which parents have been treating their children—something that is still taboo today, as no one wants to see that those who become schizophrenic were driven mad by their own parents. (See e.g., the series on psychiatry that I’ve been reproducing every Friday.)

That is the central theme of Day of Wrath, combined with what I’ve said to bring Pierce’s exterminationism out from the mere novelesque genre: a great excursion, already inland, after we reach the other side of the river.

Categories
Child abuse

Shine:

a dad more devastating than Mengele

Note of 21 October 2025: An updated version of this post appears here.

Categories
Child abuse G.L. Rockwell Psychiatry

Therapeutic States

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of my books:
 

The empire of psychiatric power is more than three hundred years old and grows daily more all-encompassing. But we have not yet begun to acknowledge its existence, much less to understand its role in our society. [1]

Thomas Szasz has also said that the social institutions involved in psychiatric violence are the family, the medical institution and the state.

In political theory, one of the definitions of state is ‘the monopoly of violence’. A common civilian cannot exercise violence on another civilian under the law, but the executive power of a state, safeguarded by the legislative and judicial powers, can. The executive power doesn’t only count on an army to protect his (or attack another) nation, but through the police it can exercise violence against its own citizens in those cases stipulated by the law.

If psychiatrists were normal and common citizens they could never exercise, or threat to exercise, any violence. But psychiatrists represent a privileged class of citizens: society allows them to exercise violence on some citizens. Furthermore, they possess special jails for these ends that they call ‘psychiatric hospitals’, which are outside the jurisdiction of the common penal system. This is apparent in the laws of a nation like England and the international law on human rights.

The English laws of mental health are a means by which the right to liberty of a citizen is moved to the side, a right warranted by both the common jurisprudence of that nation and the Article 5.1 of the European Convention of Human Rights. In the quotation of the English brochure I had already mentioned that the Mental Health Law of 1983 permits the compulsory admission to the psychiatric ward, and that similar dispositions in other countries exist.

This means no less than an exception within the law: the right to liberty is warranted between civilians except if the he is a psychiatrist. Just as the state, the psychiatrist has special powers to send another citizen to a prison. This can be proved by pointing out how the constitutional rights of an individual whom a psychiatrist has decided call him ‘insane’ become automatically annulled. If we take now as a paradigm the constitutional right of the United States, this individual is deprived from his right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury (Sixth Amendment), the right to bail (Eight Amendment), and the right that no person be deprived from liberty without due process of law (Fourteenth Amendment).

The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and many other countries are Therapeutic States, as Szasz calls nations that claim to be free but that through the medical and psychiatric institution have totalitarian traits. If in one of these States the accused of mentally ill doesn’t agrees with the legal exception of his country in favour of psychiatry, he cannot appeal to international law either. The Article 5 of the European Convention begins:

Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be deprived of his liberty,

However, the article continues:

save in the following cases and in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law… the lawful detention of persons for the prevention of spreading of infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts, or vagrants. [2]

We can agree with the statement regarding the prevention of infections and epidemics: the power to decide who is infected falls on scientists who can detect in their labs the existence of biological diseases. But just what the other group means, persons of ‘unsound mind’, is something that only the psychiatrist of a Therapeutic State has the power to decide because in these cases lab tests are not performed. The second part of the European Convention article of international law invalidates the first one: it leaves to the psychiatrist’s discretion to decide who has a ‘sound mind’ and who has an ‘unsound mind’.

To stamp someone with the label of insanity means that the first political step to his imprisonment has been undertaken (for instance, in the 1960s more Americans lost their liberty accused of unsound mind than the accused of a crime). [3] In short, psychiatrists have the powers to incarcerate an innocent citizen who has not broken any law.

This means that the psychiatrists have the power to derogate the civil status of a citizen to a lower level than that of the common criminal. Just remember how they wanted to commit George Lincoln Rockwell.

If we take as an example the bank assailant who killed a cop and some clients during the skirmish, after being caught he has the right to an impartial trial and to a lawyer, as well as the right to not being tormented or mutilated. On the other hand, the individual who has been identified by a psychiatrist automatically loses these rights: he is incarcerated without a trial and without a lawyer who can make an appeal. Moreover, he can be tormented with electroshock or even psychologically destroyed with neuroleptics or lobotomy.

For a teenager in conflict with his parents, his rights fall into an inferior level compared to those of the assailant or common criminal: he lacks any institution or state lawyer who could possible defended him. As we have seen, in generational conflicts of parents with their children the ‘identification’ invariably falls on the latter. Ronald Laing, the most popular anti-psychiatrist in the 1960s, stated in an interview of 1988:

Economics controls politics, so the pivotal issue is an economic one. To see what is happening, look at the textbook or manual called DSM-III, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition. Translated into economic and political terms, mental disorder means undesired mental states and attitudes and behaviour […].

The criteria in the manual are very useful for controlling the population because you can bring them to bear on practically anyone if the occasion seems to demand it. Look at this: ‘Oppositional disorder’ is a very good one. (Laing reads from the DSM-III🙂

The essential feature is a pattern of disobedient negativistic and provocative opposition to authority figures. For example, if there is a rule, it is usually violated. If a suggestion is made, the individual is against it. If asked to do something, the individual refuses or becomes argumentative. If asked to refrain from an act, the child or the adolescent feels obliged to carry it out. […].

These are not exceptional examples out of DSM-III. The overall drift is what contemporary modern psychiatry, epitomized by this DSM manual translated into eighteen languages, is imposing all over the world—a mandate to strip anyone of their civil liberties […] to homogenize people who are out of line. Presented as a medical exercise, it is an undercover operation. [4]

That this is the disposition in modern psychiatry is observed in the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, Parham vs. J.R. of 1979. This decision gives carte blanche to the States to enact laws that permit minors to be hospitalized if the parents and a psychiatrist want it without any right for the child or adolescent to a hearing or trial. [5] Let’s give the floor to one of these victims of the Therapeutic State. Following next I quote a letter sent on 12 December 1999 to a lawyer who fights for human rights within the United States:

I’m a 16 year old girl who has just gotten out of a ‘psychiatric treatment center’. I was there for over 4 months because I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality disorder and Manic Depression. Borderline Personality Disorder is the biggest f— joke I have heard of. All it is a description of an immature teenager. Haha. I am also not Manic Depressive. The psych people there somehow managed to convince everyone that I was, including my parents. (‘She has severe highs and lows. And she’s impulsive too!’) They put me on lots of medication.

During the first 2 months of my stay at the hospital I refused to take it. My behavior, thinking, and stability were fine, but since I wasn’t taking the medication I was ‘noncompliant and not ready for discharge’. So I decided to cheek the medication. Just so I could get out of the damn place. They found out that I was cheeking it though. Of course.

I haven’t been discharged yet. I won’t be. Ever. Instead my parents have decided to sign me out of the place AMA [against medical advice]. They finally realized I do not need to be in that place, nor did I ever.

Perfectly normal people are kept in treatment centers. Perfectly normal teenagers. Nobody was crazy there. Not even one person. They were just teenagers with divorced parents. Or teenagers who did a few drugs. Or teenagers who got suspended from school. Suddenly we were all Borderlines, Schizophrenics, and Manic Depressives who ‘needed’ long term hospitalization. We also ‘needed’ medication. They put us on heavy doses of anti-psychotics, mood stabilizers, antidepressants, anti-whatevers. I was the only patient who didn’t take the medication. I will never take psychiatric medication. I’ve tried it before. It does nothing except for turn me into a zombie. It dulls me out. Makes it so I can’t think straight. Everyone else took it though. [6]

There cannot be a clearer example of the alliance between parents and psychiatrists. In the United States, the sole will of the parents was enough to incarcerate or liberate a child. It’s noteworthy that Rachel, who wrote the above letter at sixteen, had a good grasp of what psychiatric diagnoses really are. In the dawn of the 21st century the diagnoses that were used against her and her mates (‘borderlines’, ‘schizophrenics’, ‘manic depressives’) are as fraudulent as the diagnoses that the psychiatrists used in the 19th century (‘moral insanity’, ‘folie lucide’, ‘nymphomania’). All this is camouflaged in medical language.

It was Lenin who said that dictatorship is a power not limited by law. How psychiatry could not be corrupted if the way they label a girl with the DSM to strip her from her civil rights has no law that supervises it in our societies? Psychiatry is a profession that regulates itself. It is a state within the State that carries out the function of control of the unwanted.

Unlike George Lincoln Rockwell, Ezra Pound was no so lucky. He was committed in a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years. His supposed insanity was due to the fact that he had moved to Italy in 1924 and throughout the 1930s and 40s embraced Benito Mussolini’s fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley.

How to know if a modern society is a Therapeutic State? This is a state that searches for medical or therapeutical solutions for family and social problems; in the Western past, or in the Soviet Union, even for political dissidence. It is a society that can afford an extra legal system of penalties—the undercover operation of which Laing talked above—with the aim of sparing the dirty job on the constitution of a country. For legislators it would be too embarrassing to enact laws against women in disputes with their husbands, or against teenagers in disputes with their parents. Psychiatrists do the dirty job (‘moral insanity’, ‘dementia praecox’) that society in general, and legislators in particular, do not dare to do directly.

Szasz’s dream was to reform society to separate the state from the medical institution, just as the First Amendment of the United States Constitution separates church and state. Alas, although the Soviet Union and the psychiatric abuse of political dissidents is gone, in the West the inquisitorial power of physicians is well rooted, and civil society is doing very little to question it.

References

[1] Last words of a lecture by Thomas Szasz presented in the Foucault Symposium in Berlin University, May 1998.

[2] Tom Heller et al., Mental health and distress: module 3 (The Open University, 1997), p. 43.

[3] The manufacture of madness (op. cit.), p. 65.

[4] Ronald Laing, Interview (OMNI, April 1988), pp. 60f.

[5] Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584 (United States Reports, volume 442, p. 584), quoted in The antipsychiatry forum, section ‘Compliments’, answer of Douglas Smith to Lolobenchik (www.antipsychiatry.org). This website provides legal assistance in so-called psychiatric cases.

[6] Ibid. (www.antipsychiatry.org), section ‘Physical restraints’. Rachel signs her letter as ‘Rach’.

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Autobiography Child abuse Evil Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychology

Absolute imbecility

I had said in my last post that I would not add new posts this weekend. However, the drama in the neighbouring country of the north for the confirmation of Kavanaugh moves me to say a few words.

My life was destroyed (I was shipwrecked for decades) since my father began to believe from my mother a torrent of lies that she said about me throughout my adolescence. I try to explain why my mother did that in some pages of my two thick autobiographical books. Here I will not go into details, except saying that some parents, who were mistreated as children, become volcanoes of contained rage due to the commandment to honour our parents. Psychic volcanoes explode once these adult children get married, but they explode transferentially: with their own children.

But it was not my mother’s psychosis—a focalised psychosis, like a laser, on her first child—what destroyed me. What destroyed me was the folie à deux of my father with her: who subscribed her delusional system. In his marriage, my father was always a codependent child. When I began to grow up, instead of confronting his wife he found it more comfortable to share her psychosis. And since it was a focalised psychosis of his wife over her eldest son, my father joined her resulting in an amplifying spiral of abuse toward his son who most loved him: a spiral from my fifteenth to my nineteen.

But the story does not end there. My mother requested the services of a witchdoctor to finish destroying me. And when I wanted to ask for help with relatives and friends, nobody wanted to hear my story. ‘If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one’, is how one character summarises the issues in the film Spotlight, best picture at the 2015 Oscars. But the type of abuse in that film was incomparably less soul-murdering than what my sister and I suffered.

The rage I feel for the treacherous humanity that is so evident in my exterminationist faith is due to such a betrayal that society inflicted on me, but especially my father, because before he let himself be engulfed by his wife’s psychosis, I had been his favourite son. He lambasted, over the years, the son who loved him most simply because, in his codependent fusion, he could not but follow and follow his wife to the end of the world.

When, decades later, I managed to confront him in writing (the first part of Hojas Susurrantes) and especially orally, my father seemed to concede some of his guilt. But the codependent dynamic of a defamatory mother and a gullible father continued to the extent of driving my sister mad, who finally died in 2016. (Whoever wants to get an idea of how my sister was driven mad by parental abuse, read John Modrow’s book that I quoted in this post.)

So when I see the male protesters outside the Supreme Court with placards that you got to believe the women ‘victims’, the absolute imbecility of my codependent father cannot but come to mind for having always believed the paranoia of his crazed woman.

He who does not have the remotest idea of how a family dynamic goes from being dysfunctional to abusive, and from abusive to a spiral of amplifying abuse to the point of murdering a child’s soul, should read Modrow’s book. I think my autobiographical books are better but they have not been translated into English. If you do not have the motivation to even read Modrow’s book, at least take this class from Colin Ross…

Categories
Child abuse Psychiatry

Abusive

parents and psychiatrists: a criminal association

Note of 5 October 2025: This text has been updated and can be read here.

Categories
Child abuse Evil Psychiatry

Psychiatric re-victimization

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of my books:

 
Let us imagine Dora, a girl in a state of trauma because she was raped by her father. Imagine that instead of taking her to a common hospital, she is taken by her father to a psychiatric ward. The girl does not want to go there. All she wants is for some of her loved ones to comfort her. What would she feel if the admissions officer to the ward told her?:

We are going to commit you. The rape did not cause any trauma. That is completely surpassed in scientific psychiatry. You live in a paranoid, world Dora. Because of your symptoms, my diagnosis is that you suffer from schizoidism. And you run the risk of schizophrenia. A chemical imbalance in your brain is causing your anxiety attacks.

I see that my scientific interpretation causes you panic… Do you know, Dora, that the first sign of recovery of a teenager who feels violated is to accept that she is a sick woman? For the same reason, and to help you accept it, my prescription is to bombard your brain with antipsychotics.

Any rejection of my diagnosis and prescription will be considered resistance. And the resistance to you taking your meds, my dear Dora, is involuntary commitment in this ward.

Would not this ‘bio-reductionist’ interpretation—which reduces our pains to a biological factor—be an additional blow to this minor, something even more devastating than her father’s rape? The example, although hypothetical, illustrates what happens to many adolescents in the doctors’ offices: something that I call the re-traumatization or re-victimization of a victim, which could be defined in thus:

In common jurisprudence, measures are taken against the aggressor. In psychiatric jurisprudence, measures are taken against the victim.

Does this sound like Alice in Wonderland? In real life there was a case in which psychiatrists diagnosed a young victim of rape as ‘schizophrenic’. And even more incredible: a fourteen-year-old girl in a state of trauma for having been raped was electro-shocked, against her will, by the psychiatrists.[1]

These are not isolated cases. The following is an example of psychiatric re-victimization in the United States:

Rana Lee remembers the time she went to her doctor because her husband was beating her. The doctor, she told a congressional committee, ‘prescribed 10 milligrams of Valium three times a day to calm me down… He refilled it for five years, with no questions asked’. [2]

This doctor prescribed to drug not the aggressor, but the victim of the aggressor. I have heard testimonies from women that something similar happened to them. But at least these women were saved from a psychiatric diagnosis, not another victim of domestic abuse:

Psychiatrists are fond of stressing how much suffering schizophrenia causes. However, I can truthfully say being labeled a schizophrenic has caused me a hundred times as much suffering as the so-called ‘illness’ itself. Since recovering my sanity in 1961, I have spent decades struggling to gain some measure of self-understanding and self-esteem. In this regard, I never fully recovered from what psychiatry and my parents did to me until I finally realized I had never been ill in the first place. [3]

This confession comes from John Modrow. Re-victimized by psychiatrists, Modrow concludes that psychiatric praxis seems to be calculated to drive a person, who has already been traumatized, into madness.

A psychological re-traumatization is a direct violation of the Hippocratic oath: Primum non nocere!, first, do no harm. The practice itself of psychiatry represents a violation of this oath. ‘How, for example, can a psychiatrist validate his identity as a medical doctor without labeling others as mentally sick’, asks Modrow, ‘that is to say, without dehumanizing others and thoroughly destroying their identities?’ [4]

Of the theoreticians who approached the subject of what I have called here re-victimized victims, Harry Sullivan made the most valuable contribution to understand the interior world of these individuals. According to the Sullivan-Modrow model, the panic that makes a re-victimized victim enter a state of madness is caused by a consecutive series of external assaults that collapse the individual’s defences. In his self-analysis, Modrow ratifies Sullivan’s notion that when these defences collapse, ‘the individual goes into an intense state of panic and simply comes “unglued”, so to speak. In this panic state, the individual has a terrifying vision of himself as a person of no value or worth’. Talking about his own experiences, Modrow adds that ‘painful memories once repressed rise and come flooding into awareness with a gruesome, hallucinatory vividness’. [5]

The experience of the demolishing panic of the inner self could be described as a tearing up of the self where the betrayal of the universe is experienced. We could illustrate it if we imagine that Dora escaped the mental institution just to be repudiated by her extended family, as it was accustomed to do with raped girls. What would she feel? According to Modrow, the panic state that immediately preceded his own mental breakdown was ‘the most appalling and devastating experience that any person can undergo’. [6]

Pre-psychotic panic is the state when the mental health of an individual is at most risk. In this state the mind loses its centripetal force that gives cohesion to its inner self, so to speak.

I dislike medical terminology to speak about problems of the soul. Yet, I could say that Modrow’s panic attacks were iatrogenic. Iatrogenesis (from Greek iatros, physician) is one of the aberrations of the psychiatric profession. In his misguided endeavours to heal the therapist provokes new and more serious disorders than the already existent.[7]

The re-victimization of a victim of family abuse, frequently iatrogenic, is central to understand the nature of psychiatry but very few critics of psychiatry have pointed out to something so consequential. The exception is precisely Modrow:

The psychological harm which psychiatrists inflict on their patients is a subject which is not often discussed. One reason why this topic is seldom discussed has to do with the fact that the people who are the most knowledgeable on this subject—namely, the people who have been psychologically damaged by psychiatry—are rarely listened or taken seriously. The entire narrative section of this book [How to Become a Schizophrenic] illustrates the kind of psychological harm which psychiatry can cause. [8]

Due to the double spiral of extreme abuse, parental and psychiatric, the young Modrow had a psychotic episode. For a brief time he believed himself to be John the Baptist: a delirium of grandeur which, according to Modrow himself, was nothing more than a desperate attempt of his unconscious to super-compensate the feeling of bestial humiliation occasioned by his parents and the doctors paid by his mother.

___________

[1] The young man’s case is mentioned in Peter Breggin: Beyond Conflict: From Self-Help and Psychotherapy to Peacemaking (St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. 107; that of the girl, in T. Baker: ‘The minor issue of electroconvulsive therapy’, Nature Medicine, 1, pp. 199-200.

[2] Rana Lee, quoted en Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the ‘New Psychiatry’ (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 219.

[3] John Modrow: How To Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry (Apollyon Press, 1996), pp. 147f.

[4] Ibid., p. 227.

[5] Ibid, p. 18.

[6] Ibid., p. 19.

[7] An explanation of psychiatric iatrogenesis appears in chapter 5 of Robert Baker’s Mind Games: Are We Obsessed With Therapy? (Prometheus Books, 1996). Incidentally, in 1994 I talked to Dr. Baker personally in a conference of critics of pseudosciences.

[8] Modrow: How To Become a Schizophrenic, p. 226.

Categories
Child abuse Pseudoscience Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 5)

Faced with a multi-billion dollar business that has subtly bought the doctors, universities and the media, it is virtually impossible for the civil society to see what is happening. Just as in Heinroth’s time political actions were covered up in medical garb when the ideals of the Revolution were in the air, after the rebellion of the 1960s psychiatry reacted by covering itself more and more with the clothes of hard science, the paradigm of our days. In 1999 Professor Leonard Duhl of the University of California defined mental illness and poverty in the most perfect sense of the ideologists of the Great Confinement of the 17th century: ‘the inability to command events that affect one’s life’.[31]

The consolidation and enlargement of the psychiatric power continues in the 21st century. The tenfold increase in the use of neuroleptics in minors since the mid-1990s to the first five years of the new century, which is done with the publicity stunt that they are ‘at risk’, shows the cynicism of this marketing design.

Heinroth was a great visionary. He foresaw that drugs could be the prisons of the future. Although the neuroleptics had not been invented, Heinroth already spoke of ‘pharmaceutical means of restriction’ and ‘restrictive surgical means’, anticipating the lobotomy that Moniz would develop a century later.

Since the regulations that would define the policies of the psychiatrists were enacted in the 19th century, the expansion of the chemical Gulag meant that long-term involuntary hospitalization changed to long-term voluntary (or involuntary) drug addiction. Psychiatrists, of course, would say things differently. They say that in the treatment of mental illnesses the most outstanding event of the 20th century was the capability to synthesise these substances in laboratories. But this is one of the allegations of scientific progress that, analysed closely, is discovered fallacious.

In psychopharmacology there are no biographies of John, Peter or Mary when they are prescribed neuroleptics, neither when they are prescribed antidepressants, when stimulants are prescribed, or when tranquilizers are prescribed. There are no people in biological psychiatry, or biologicistic psychiatry as I prefer to call it, only biochemical radicals that have to be normalized by other chemical substances. In an age that seeks easy solutions to the problems of the world, it is not necessary to delve into the past. Just calculate the dose of ‘happy pills’, be it Prozac or any other.

This also happens with the abuse of illegal drugs and the only difference is that the psychotropic drugs are legal. Approximately thirty million people have taken Prozac (fluoxetine), a drug that Newsweek has advertised with cover articles. The situation points more and more to the scenes of Brave New World of Aldous Huxley where, at the request of the State, every citizen consumed the drug called soma.

(First edition in the United Kingdom of Huxley’s famous novel.) In the medical profession the environmental factors that prick our souls have disappeared from the map. If the philosophy of the biologicistic psychiatrists is right, all our passions, traumas and conflicts, loves and fears, are not the result of our desires in conflict with the external world, but of the swings of small polypeptides in our bodies that are transformed into despair.

In the preface to some editions of the DSM it is said that the future will completely erase the ‘unfortunate’ distinction between the popular concept of mental disorder and physical illness. On January 1, 1990, California became the first American state to accept the main dogma in psychiatry: that mental disorders are, in reality, diseases originating in brain dysfunctions. For example, it is claimed that a high dopamine causes madness, and a low serotonin, depression. (This reminds me that for Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, insanity was caused by low blood circulation in the head.) But in real neurological science the dopamine and serotonin claims have been debunked.[32]

Bioreductionist psychiatry is anything that sees supposed biological abnormalities in the body rather traumatic events in the family or the environment. It is like studying trauma not as a reaction to an outrageous act, say, the incestuous rape of Dora [mentioned in the online book], but rather studying the temporal lobe of the raped girl, where the treatment is headed. The drugs, or the hammer of the electroshock, are the result of the medical axiom: ‘He who only knows how to use the hammer treats all things as if they were nails’.

I am not caricaturising the profession. In November 2002 I had a long discussion with Dr. Miguel Pérez de la Mora, an experimental cell physiology physician of the Department of Biophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and director of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In the discussion with Pérez de la Mora I was struck by the fact that, when I mentioned the mental state of the inmates in the concentration camps, my contender immediately jumped to the subject of the amygdala and the anxiety that he studied in his laboratory: an anxiety understood in a strictly biological way.

In our surreal discussion, I took a long time to make the obvious point to the doctor: that the cause of the mental stress of the inmates were the brutalities in the camps. But even granted this point Pérez de la Mora added—without laboratory tests—that only those inmates in the fields who presumably had a genetic predisposition could have been the ones who became upset. For this neurologist and his colleagues, the concentration camps were a mere ‘trigger mechanism’ for the disorder of a prisoner whose biology, presumably, was already defective!

I must clarify the concept of ‘trigger mechanism’ of a supposed latent mental disorder.

This is one of the main mantras of the psychiatrist, and exemplifies what I have called bioreductionism. For the bioreductionist, the human rights and psychological trauma are located in the background, and the only thing that matters is the genome project and the search for the ‘gene’ responsible for the disorder (or another strictly biological line).

The specialty of Pérez de la Mora is studying anxiety disorders in the laboratories of the UNAM, and during our discussion he confessed that the firm that manufactures the psychiatric drug Valium had financed his research. I pointed to Pérez de la Mora that a research financed by the same drug companies produces results with a clear biological bias. The eminent scientist told me that researchers rarely sell themselves to companies.

The reality is that the way that the pharmaceutical multinationals buy the scientists is infinitely subtler than direct bribery. Roche, which manufactures Valium, simply finances professionals who postulate biological hypotheses, and no other. Never Roche or the competition would give us a penny to those who investigate psychological trauma. Our line of research is a proposal that requires social engineering and changes in the nuclear family to avoid mistreatment of the children. But in our world nobody wants to finance the researcher who puts the parents in the dock.

For example, no institution funded the research to write this online book. On the other hand, the medical model promotes the drugging of the abused child without changing the parental mistreatment that caused the mental distress in the first place. Only in this way does the field enjoy the approval of society. If the anxiety that Perez de la Mora studies, or panic, depression, addictions, phobias, mania, obsessions and compulsions are the result of an abnormal biology, the human and existential content that has caused these experiences becomes irrelevant.

The thinking of our time is being confined to a one-dimensional world as far as mental health is concerned. Bioreductionism, the ideology of the medical doctors with blinders that do not want to see the social sides, is a doctrine whose conceptual frame is quite simple: determinism and reductionism (‘Your biology is your destiny’). But as psychiatrists present this doctrine to us with all its scientific sophistication, the matter apparently is complicated. The following Szaszian analogy illustrates how simple, at the bottom, biopsychiatry is.

The primitive witch-doctor, who tried to understand Nature in human terms, treated objects as agents: a position known as animism. The modern witch-doctor, who tries to understand the subjectivity of man in terms of Nature, treats agents as objects: a position known as bioreductionism. Primitive man has been demystified in our scientific era. Who will demystify psychiatry doctors?

There is a small group of thinkers who can do it: those who know how to distinguish between good and bogus science.

____________

[31] Leonard Duhl, quoted in Szasz: Pharmacracy, p. 95.

[32] See Valenstein, Blaming the Brain.

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Child abuse Evil Psychiatry

From the Great Confinement of Louis XIV of France to a Chemical Gulag (part 4)

From pesticides to antipsychotics

May 1954 is a memorable date for psychiatrists. For the first time, a neuroleptic (popularly known as ‘antipsychotic’) was marketed, chlorpromazine, commercially named Thorazine in the United States and Largactil in some European countries, which revolutionised treatment in the profession.

The first generation of phenothiazines from which chlorpromazine emerged had been used for pesticide purposes in agriculture. In addition, experiments were known to induce catalepsy in animals.

The neuroleptic was a chemical intentionally designed as a neurotoxin, but millions of Thorazine prescriptions were prescribed in the United States. Under the effects of chlorpromazine, patients now could be ‘moved about like puppets’, and the first psychiatrist who experimented in the United States with this neuroleptic said that it ‘may prove to be a pharmacological substitute for lobotomy’.[23] The campaign to sell Thorazine to the American society was so fierce that the same professionals called ‘Thorazine assault troops’ the propagandists of the company that manufactured them.[24]

This was the first massive incursion in the world of public relations carried out by a pharmaceutical company in a market that previously was very small: institutional psychiatry. In its first year of marketing, Smith, Klein & French obtained 75 million dollars with that drug. The rest, as they say, is history.[25]

In 1955, Time magazine called the professionals who opposed chlorpromazine ‘ivory tower critics’. Gregory Zilboorg, the same psychiatrist who held the authors of the medieval Malleus Maleficarum in high esteem, said that the public was being deceived and that the drug only served to control the inpatient. Another doctor raised his voice and said that chlorpromazine was more dangerous than heroin and cocaine. But the publicity muffled all internal dissidence.

By the mid-1960s more than ten thousand medical articles had been written about chlorpromazine. There were television campaigns that omitted any mention of the Parkinsonian-like effects of the drug, and the magazines were paid substantial sums if they advertised in their main articles the miraculous chemical. Time, Fortune and the New York Times were some of these prostitutes of the pharmaceutical corporations.

The use of neuroleptics soon was considered cutting-edge among psychiatric treatments, triumphing over the induced commas with insulin, electroshock and lobotomy. In the 1960s the revolution of this miraculous alchemy, from pesticides to antipsychotics, was consummated and the mindset of the public had been implanted with the message that they were ‘anti-psychotic’ medicines: an idea that persists today.

By 1970, nineteen million prescriptions for neuroleptics had been prescribed, and not just for people who were disturbed. Some juvenile delinquents and rebellious teenagers who were given the neuroleptic called it ‘zombie juice’, but the professionals counterattacked by introducing the euphemism ‘major tranquilizers’.

At the end of March 2001 in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, the prescription number of so-called ‘anti-psychotics’ was estimated in 43 million. In the case of children and adolescents, one study showed that between 1987 and 1996 the number of children who were given the drug had doubled. Between 1996 and 2000 the figure multiplied to reach the figure of one in fifty, although the most important age group was between 5 and 9 years old.[26]

The propaganda through which multinational drug companies infect civil society about the ‘need’ to take these neurotoxins is performed through campaigns of ‘education’ to medical visitors and counsellors of schools and parents. Joe Sharkey, a financial journalist and author of Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy, has reported that by the end of the 1980s, 25 percent of the earnings paid by health insurance went to the pockets of those who work in the area of mental health, largely due to the psychiatric treatment of these rebellious adolescents.[27]

Furthermore, since the 1970s these professionals entered into a frank association with the drug companies. The consortium between psychiatrists and Big Pharma (pharmaceutical multinationals) is so brazen that all psychiatric conferences are financed by these corporations, and in some medical centres all laboratory research is also financed by multinationals. These companies also fund psychiatric journals. In addition, a study of eight hundred articles by some of the most prestigious scientific journals that do not specialise in psychiatry (Science, Nature, Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Medicine) found that 34 percent of the authors had financial interests with the Big Pharma.

The pharmaceutical industry is the largest sponsor of psychiatric research in the United States, including research in universities and medical schools. It is estimated that in 1994 alone it spent one and a half billion dollars in academic research.[28] Some people have used the expression ‘Is academic medicine for sale?’ to describe this situation.

This is fundamental to understand why I say that psychiatrists, despite their impeccable medical credentials, enact a biased science. It is clear that the sponsorship that these companies provide results in biologicistic and pro-drug bias in research. The editors of specialised journals are very cautious when publishing articles by professionals who criticise biological psychiatry, especially if they question the effectiveness of psychotropic drugs or if they mention the terrible effects of drugs, such as tardive dyskinesia and dystonia produced by the so-called ‘antipsychotic’, symptoms which doctors euphemistically call ‘extrapyramidal symptoms’.

Drug companies spend huge sums on advertisements that appear in specialised journals, and the publishers are not willing to offend their sponsors with articles that denounce the epidemics of drug-induced tardive dyskinesia, on the threat that the companies will withdraw the advertising. The economic dependence of the journals with these companies leads not only to discretion, but many authors resort to self-censorship. As some mental health professionals say, the pharmaceutical industry owns the data obtained in the clinical tests it subsidizes and decides which studies should be published; chooses the authors, writes the articles and even the reviews to interpret the data.[29]

On the other hand, it is natural for new professionals in medical research to choose the area of the most promising future, that which is generously financed by the drug companies. That is where the funds for their careers are found. There is a whole book on the subject, How the Pharmaceutical Industry Bankrolled the Unholy Marriage Between Science and Business of Linda Marsa, and this trend is much more evident in psychiatry. In a psychiatric journal there is less guarantee of scientific accuracy than in other specialised journals. In the profession it is no longer heard, as it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s, that abusive parents drive their children mad. The economic interests to hide this reality are enormous.

For example, in the mid-1990s a pharmaceutical market analyst claimed that the US $1 billion market for neuroleptics could grow to 4.5 billion a year. In May 2001, a report by the Wall Street Journal evaluated the neuroleptic market at 5 billion dollars a year, five hundred percent growth in five years.

The total sales of neuroleptics in the United States in 2000 was 2.5 billion dollars, and international sales reached 6 billion dollars that same year. Only the neuroleptic Zyprexa gave Eli Lilly $ 1 billion in profits in 1998 (the incorrectly referred to as ‘antipsychotics’ are even used in veterinary!). In 1999/2000, the United States led the Western consumption of neuroleptics with 65 percent, followed by Europe with 22 percent and Latin America with 2.5 percent. (I am not counting Russia, Asia or Africa). Given that there are many people who want to control others in prisons, asylums, insane hospitals, correctional facilities for minors and even at home, the growth of market demand for these terrible drugs is comprehensible.[30]

These figures are key to understanding the psychiatry of our days: a chemical Gulag.
_______________

[23] Heinz Lehmann, quoted in ibid., p. 144.

[24] These words from the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French appear in Loren Mosher: ‘Soteria and other alternatives to acute psychiatric hospitalization’ in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1999, 187), that I read on the internet.

[25] Loren Mosher, Richard Gosden & Sharon Beder, ‘Las empresas farmacéuticas y la esquizofrenia’ en Modelos de locura, pp. 141s.

[26] These figures appear in Modelos de locura, pages 124s.

[27] Sharkey: Bedlam, p. 4. Sharkey’s book takes as a central theme the unjustified hospitalisations set up by psychiatrists, especially children and adolescents, to get as much money as possible from the insurance companies of their parents.

[28] This information appears in Valenstein: Blaming the Brain, pp. 199 & 187.

[29] Modelos de locura, p. 144.

[30] See Whitaker: Mad in America, and Valenstein: Blaming the Brain, chapter 6. See also Richard Gosden and Sharon Beder: ‘Pharmaceutical industry agenda setting in mental health policies’ in Ethical Human Science and Services (Autumn/Winter 2000). I wrote this piece fifteen years ago and have not checked the latest stats in scholarly journals. However, I keep watching Robert Whitaker’s updated videos in YouTube. Nothing in recent years has moved me to change my mind.

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