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Category: Psychiatry

Categories
Newspeak Psychiatry

On poor Anakin Skywalker

I just found out that Jake Lloyd, who portrayed Anakin Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, in The Phantom Menace—one of those silly movies of the Star Wars series (the good one appears in my list of 51 recommended movies)—was diagnosed as schizophrenic and interned in both prisons and psychiatric wards for a season of his life.

Note that in the mainstream media Lloyd’s version of the events of his adolescence is completely absent. We only have the opinion of the mother, the police and the psychiatrists: something typical in those diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I have already said on this site why those Aryans of noble soul should drop the term ‘schizophrenic’ (here, and with a specific case here) and don’t want to repeat myself.

Categories
Pseudoscience Psychiatry

On vaccine hesitancy

This is a response to a comment of Peter, a regular visitor, about whether or not to vaccinate our children, more formally called vaccine hesitancy. I place it as an entry instead of a simple comment because it involves two questions that I consider fundamental: (1) the principle of the non-falsifiable hypothesis as a litmus test of whether we are facing a pseudoscience, and my metaphor of conspiracy theorists who leave the courtroom every time the prosecutor speaks. Peter wrote:

I’m truly surprised that you would express such a credulous stance on this issue, with mine being that vaccination is a branch of medicine just as fraudulent and pernicious as biological psychiatry.

I’m not sure the analogy is adequate. Although psychiatrists cannot present their central hypothesis (that mental illness is a biomedical entity) in a falsifiable way, I suppose that medical science can present, without violating falsifiability, the claim that vaccines prevent, say, smallpox, pertussis or measles. ‘I suppose’ I wrote because I haven’t listened to the ‘prosecutor’ in the case of vaccines. And this brings me to Peter’s second statement:

Finally, you like to speak of listening to the Prosecution and the Defense to come to a fair conclusion about any contentious topic. So to what extent have you given the “Prosecution” a fair hearing on this issue?

For someone who has not entered the courtroom of the debate between those who believe in vaccines and those who don’t, the best analogy wouldn’t be the member of a jury. That would mean spending much time as those members do in American movies. Furthermore, the government compels them not to walk away while listening to both sides. Rather, I would be one of the citizens who listen to the trial from the seats, a layman who is not obliged to follow the case closely but simply wants to get a general idea of the controversy.

To argue, without using much time, that psychiatry is a false science one just has to read my linked article above, or watch any of Robert Whitaker’s videos (whom white nationalists should not mistake for Bob Whitaker). Ideally, in the case of vaccine hesitancy, Peter would link an open debate between ‘lawyer’ and ‘prosecutor’ so to speak. Only if, from that debate, I feel that the prosecutor won (that is, that the vaccine-hesitant POV sounds more scientific) I would use my time to study the subject.

Categories
Degenerate art Psychiatry Racial right

On prolefeed for alt-righters

The last days, using Joker as a pretext to talk about other issues (trauma model, exterminationism and premature violent acts), I had no choice but to watch a few reviews about the movie on YouTube.

I was disgusted (remember that I no longer go to the movies, although I made an exception with Joker): there are countless fans from all over opining positively about the junk culture that Hollywood Jews have manufactured.

For years I was intrigued by the fact that German Wikipedia touched on serious and cultural issues, which could potentially be used for the Aryan cause. On Wikipedia in English, on the contrary, we see a swarm of featured articles about videogames, movie artists, degenerate music and the whole range of the junk culture with which our enemies degrade the Aryan.

What is most striking is that quite a few among the alt-right consume the same junk as what the normies consume. How is that possible? I answered it in ‘Suicidal nationalists’, included in The Fair Race. The degeneracy of even white nationalists is such a terrible matter that I can only approach it from the POV that Judea’s triumph over Rome is practically absolute. But instead of commenting on all the crap I’ve seen about Joker these days, I would like to approach a single subject.

(The two Jokers, Heath Ledger left.) Ledger, the actor who played The Dark Knight Joker, also played the role of a homosexual in Brokeback Mountain. This movie, Brokeback Mountain was selected last year for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally and historically significant! Obviously, elevating this thing to such level is what the usual suspects do. But even the personal life of the actor, who died at twenty-eight, is revealing. The Wikipedia article on Ledger tells us about the result of his autopsy. The report concludes that ‘Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine’. It also states: ‘We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescribed medications’.

The guy died for taking psychiatric drugs: licit drugs against which I had alerted so much when I was doing anti-psychiatric activism in the previous decade. As far as Ledger is concerned, tell me who you admire and I’ll tell you who you are. That saying that I invented applies even to those who believe they are defending the white race when, in reality, they are attacking it by consuming the prolefeed that Jewry manufactures for us.

Categories
Child abuse Film Psychiatry

Joker, Molyneux and CC

Or:

An opportunity to present the trauma model
 

In recent years I don’t usually go to the movies. If there is something I say to my nephews when I see them it is that, in the media and the cinema, all the messages are bad. But yesterday I broke my habit after watching Stefan Molyneux’s video about the Joker movie.

I am glad that, as Molyneux confessed in one of his latest videos, eighty percent of his audience dropped last year. Is it because of his dishonesty about the JQ? Whatever caused the drop, from alt-lite to neo-Nazism, passing through white nationalism, Molyneux is the only notable personality in our underworld who has consistently talked about child abuse.

As the visitors of this blogsite know, I spent more decades investigating child abuse than the single decade I’ve dedicated to investigating the darkest hour in the West: whose report, The Fair Race, now appears as a free PDF. Since my oldest specialty is the subject of child abuse I must say that what Molyneux tells us in his one-hour video is, in general terms, correct.

The video revolves around the character Arthur Fleck / Joker, a mentally-ill man who dreams to become a stand-up comedian but so disregarded by a hellish and diverse Gotham City that decides to become a criminal. Curiously, the actor Joaquin Phoenix did not look to previous Joker actors for inspiration: he simply read some reports about political assassinations.

Hollywood movies usually lack psychological realism. For example, in the 1989 Jack Nicholson movie the Joker origin story simply falls into a vat of acid. The 2019 movie, on the other hand, gives its central character a plausible origin. So plausible that the film has been described as reminiscent of mass shootings in the US, and the incel community loved it. What’s more, some people from the establishment have expressed concern that Joker could inspire real-world violence.

In a moment of the first minutes of his video, Molyneux confesses that he has received horrific verbal abuse just for mentioning the naked facts of his own childhood, and that hostility toward those who were abused as children or teenagers is not uncommon if the adult victim dares to open his mouth.

At this point I would like to distinguish between dysfunctional parents and schizogenic parents, that is, parents who literally murder their children’s souls. While almost everyone I know comes from family dysfunction in one way or another, the category of schizogenic parents simply does not exist in our society. Since the 1950s the Big Pharma has ensured that civil society does not find out that there is a trauma model to understand the mental disorder that competes with its profitable medical model.

But what does all this have to do with the recent film Joker? As can be deduced from Molyneux’s video, and regardless of the sinister motivation of its Jewish creators, the film could be used, by us, to present the trauma model to the public. I was the one who started this Wikipedia article on the trauma model, an academic text that appeals to the left hemisphere of our brains. He who wants to delve deeper into this research line, and in a more literary way, can read my book Day of Wrath. On the other hand, he who prefers a personal testimony that presents the trauma model appealing to our right hemisphere could read John Modrow’s touching autobiography, How to Become a Schizophrenic.

Furthermore, he who is unwilling even to read any the above literature, but willing to educate himself on the subject having some fun, could see the films Shine (1996), Monster (2003), The Piano Teacher (2001) and even Artificial Intelligence by Spielberg, which can be used to grasp what proponents of the trauma model call ‘the problem of attachment to the perpetrator’.

Although it may seem incredible, sometimes fairy tales portray the destructive interaction of parents with their children. In almost all fairy tales, including modern fairy tales like Kubrick/Spielberg’s A.I. or Harry Potter, the parental figure is substituted so as not to touch it directly. In the case of the Potter series the abusers are Harry’s uncle and aunt. As to David, the child robot in A.I., obviously he had no biological parents but Monica functions like a substitute mother. But sometimes the storyteller sneaks parents directly into the story as the villains who abandon their children (for example in Tom Thumb).

But there are more serious forms of abuse than abandoning your child in the woods, what also happened to David. What Molyneux says about not forgiving schizogenic parents is true. I would go as far as to claim that to forgive such parents is the most toxic thing for the mental health of the victim. Mine is an opposed claim to what the establishment wants us to believe.

Why is the forgiveness that religionists and therapists preach so toxic? Because it is the abusive parents and society the ones who are currently murdering young souls. As the Armenian lawyer said in Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2015: ‘This city, these people [Boston people] are making the rest of us feel like we don’t belong. But they’re no better than us. Look at how they treat their children. Mark my words, Mr. Rezendes [another Armenian]: If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one’ (emphasis added).

For the victim, unilaterally forgiving the perpetrator or a society that never accepts its soul-murdering sins is simply a betrayal of oneself and the other adult victims, now suffering from mental stress and even disorders.

In addition to the first minutes of Molyneux’s video, using as a paradigm the Joker’s abusive interaction with his mother Penny in Gotham City, Molyneux advances ideas analogous to what I have known for a long time. Watch also the segments after minute 35 of his video: how female evil is still taboo in the film industry.

It is curious to note the chasm between those who, like Molyneux and I, have investigated child abuse due to our past, and those who did not have such destructive parenting.

Greg Johnson for example is a Batfan. In his recent review of Joker, which he writes under the penname of Trevor Lynch, Johnson prefers Heath Ledger’s Joker in the 2008 The Dark Knight than the Joker of the movie released this month. Johnson expresses very derogatory of this latest Joker: ‘You’d want to squash him like a bug’. ‘Ledger’s Joker launched a million memes, both because of his character and his lines. Phoenix’s Joker will have no such influence. He’s a pathetic nobody with nothing to say’. ‘Arthur [the Joker] is entirely absorbed in self-pity’. ‘Joker is a boring movie about a disgusting loser’.

Well, it didn’t look boring to me… But the commenters on Counter-Currents who opined about Johnson’s review said very similar things: ‘People like him deserve to get left behind by society, and the true tragedy of this movie is that successful, well-adjusted men like Thomas Wayne insist on trying to love the Arthur Flecks of the world and take care of them’. Really? The conservative commenter also said: ‘The defects like Arthur would be put in mental asylums and [eugenically] sterilized’. [1]

Such commenters remind me that, in the movie, Thomas Wayne, the billionaire father of the future Batman, labels those Gotham residents envious of the wealthy as ‘clowns’, not only the Joker. I don’t know how many viewers enjoyed the moment when, by the end of the movie, a rioter corners the Wayne family in an alley and murders Thomas and his wife sparing the child Bruce. Another commenter said: ‘One of the great things about Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is that he does not have an origin story’.

I dare not judge the Marvel universe as I feel deeply revolted by it. But in the real world, isn’t it good to know, say, the psychopathological motivations of those women in the Charles Manson family? But the commenters’ lack of elemental compassion is even noticeable about the previous Joker represented by Heath Ledger, an actor that incidentally has already passed away. In one of the dialogues the now dead Joker explains his scars. He said that his father ‘comes at me with a knife. “Why so serious?” He sticks a blade in my mouth. “Let’s put a smile on that face”.’

This father strikes me as ‘soul murderer’. Note this other phrase from the CC commenter: ‘Arthur [the Joker who’s alive] is far too damaged for any regular person to identify with him’.

How will a normie commenter identify with him if only one percent (or less) of Westerners have endured schizogenic parents?

Incidentally, last night, as I watched the psychological thriller, there were times when I laughed (as the character does in the film) when the audience was serious and nobody laughed. That happened to me, yesterday, in the climax of the film when the Joker kills the establishment character that Robert de Niro represented.

As I said, I usually don’t go to the movies now. But decades ago the same phenomenon occurred to me with some films by Luis Buñuel, whom I met personally, in which nobody laughed. It also happened to me when I watched Dr. Strangelove by Kubrick on the big screen. I laughed at the black humour in which the nuclear extermination of humanity was at stake while the hundreds of people watching the movie with me were quiet in the theatre. Only when I read a Kubrick biography by Vincent Lobrutto did I find out that Kubrick had a very black sense of humour. Then did I understand me and the non-laugher spectators of Dr. Strangelove!

Joker ends when Arthur laughs and tells a psychiatrist that she would not understand the joke…

_____________

[1] In the comments section on Joker in Counter-Currents Johnson shows how ignorant he is about psychiatry: a supposed branch of medicine with as little scientific basis as parapsychology or the study of UFOs, as shown in my writings (for example: here). Johnson wrote ‘If Arthur is adopted then his mental illness cannot be inherited from this mother’. This is a credulity stance regarding the psychiatric allegations that mental illness is genetic. Apparently, Johnson forgot what I said in one of my articles in which he himself corrected my syntax (see this piece which appears in my Hojas Susurrantes).

Categories
Child abuse Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Brief definition

I have been receiving some email feedback for my latest anti-psychiatric post and instead of posting this entry on Friday, as I had planned, I’m doing it today. At the beginning of the century, in another language I wrote the below conclusion of an online book:

The thought of [Alexis de] Tocqueville and [John Stuart] Mill provides the conceptual platform for understanding [Kingsley] Davis’s articles and [Michel] Foucault’s study; and it moves me to try a definition of the mental health movement that, in addition to what has been said in previous chapters [not translated for this site], takes into account their observations.

From the point of view of science, and specifically on the basis of the litmus test that distinguishes between science and pseudoscience, psychiatry, a supposed medical specialty, is not a science. The central concept in psychiatry, the entity called mental illness is not defined in biomedical terms but in political terms; and the so-called biological psychiatry has not presented its theories in a testable or falsifiable way: an unmistakable sign of pseudoscience.

From the point of view of politics and law, psychiatry is an organ of society that, from the family, regulates human behaviour. It is a paralegal institution of penalties in democracies. With drug-based technologies it controls deviant individuals: especially those who are either genuinely disturbed or have been abused by their parents. People stigmatised by psychiatry have not broken the law. Through this medical specialty, the System conceals the fact that some parents destroy the mental health of their children. In the case of the sane population, which is considerable—think of the millions of children and adolescents drugged at the initiative of their parents and the school—, the individual initiative is eliminated.

The ultimate truth about this matter is that the System has created an entire profession with the express purpose to blind the whole society to the truth discovered by dissenting psychiatrists: that some parents drive their children mad.

Categories
Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis

Advice to victims of psych abuse

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of the books that I wrote at the beginning of the century:
 
After the parody of the previous pagesI recover my original voice.

If you are a victim of abusive parents, the ideal is that you run away before they harm you.

If you stay in your parents’ home and they want to take you to the therapist, you blunder by believing he’ll be your ally. If you need someone to talk to, do it with a friend of your entire confidence. Don’t go with someone who makes his living from what abusive parents pay him, not even to one session. Remember that society gives the therapist powers to slander you with a psych label.

In case you have already gone with a therapist never, ever take any ‘medicine’ he gives you. These legal drugs are more toxic than the illegal ones that are being sold on the street. Having a real confident outside the mental health profession is the best option.

Alas, sometimes there is no one to trust or who is willing to listen. The family is such a monolithic institution that there are many taboos to question it, and the psychiatric profession has deceived many people.

In some cities there are places for people in distress where you can get some shelter. When I lived in England, part of the college course on mental health consisted of visiting Drop-in centres. I realised that only a few of those who took shelter there were genuinely disturbed; the majority were unemployed people in Manchester. It was refreshing to see that in those centres there were no psychiatrists or other professionals, not even social workers. No one who sided society or the family directed these centres. They even offered me to work if I volunteered. It’s not a bad idea that you go to one of these shelters for people in distress.

If the city where you live lacks a Drop-in shelter, or if there are no jobs to flee from your abusive parents, or if you are suffering from a panic attack, go to the nearest library and see if they have books by Alice Miller (child abuse) or Robert Whitaker (the most readable critic of psychiatry). If not, ask for any of these books:
 

Thomas Szasz, Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s criticism of psychoanalysis and psychiatry (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). 

The critique of language is the most radical of all critiques. This is the number one book in my list because if we don’t uproot from our vocabulary the Newspeak of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists it will be impossible to understand the victims of the family. The millenarian humanities history, biography and especially autobiography after Modrow (see below) are more than enough to understand the human mind. The new and aggressive psychiatric and psychoanalytic ideologies, and especially their language, only mystify our self-understanding.

Karl Kraus, who lived in Freud’s Vienna, was a man of good heart who perceived the dangers that the Newspeak of psychiatry and psychoanalysis represented for the underprivileged of his native city. Kraus tried to debunk it in the strongest terms in his periodical, but his admonitions fell in deaf ears:

Yes, our pitiable state is partly caused by stupidity […]. Profound stupidity carries deep conviction and cannot be bought off for any price. The greatest public menace, therefore, is the incorruptible psychiatric expert […]. The very unselfishness with which such psychiatric outrages are perpetrated suggests that they spring from pathological imbecility rather than from any other source. If only such idiocies were not destined, in each and every case, to destroy a life! (p. 135). 

I would recommend reading Anti-Freud together with the appendix of 1984where Orwell resumes ‘The principles of Newspeak’.
 

John Modrow, How to become a schizophrenic: the case against biological psychiatry(Seattle: Apollyon Press, second edition, 1996).

In spite of the fact that Modrow uses a psychiatric label on the very title, on the first page he writes mockingly:

Actually I have about much belief in the reality of ‘schizophrenia’ as I have in the reality of witchcraft or demonic possession. 

This book consists of two parts: an autobiographical recount of the author’s experiences about how he lost his mind when he was young due to parental abuse, and a scientific debunking of psychiatry.

The value of Modrow’s book lies in that compared to, say, a brilliant essay by Ronald Laing about madness, Modrow explains how he lost his mind from his own subjective experience. Given the unique value autobiography has in the true study of the human psyche, Modrow’s study must be considered a paradigm to understand the victims disturbed by an all-out assault at home. Robert Baker, a professor of psychology that I met in 1994, has said that Modrow ‘is, perhaps, the unrecognized and unappreciated world’s foremost authority on this disorder [schizophrenia]’. [1]
 

Jeffrey Masson, Against therapy: emotional tyranny and the myth of psychological healing (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997).

——————, Final analysis: the making and unmaking of a psychoanalyst (London: HarperCollins, 1991).

Everyone should know, then, that to step into an office of a psychotherapist, regardless of the latter’s persuasion, is to enter a world where great harm is possible (Against Therapy, p. 298). 

The most difficult thing for a fish is to do a critique of the water.

Let’s imagine a fish in a factory-polluted waters. The only way this animal may realise that the pollution is poisoning it is to see the factory from a POV outside of the lagoon. But his aquaculture prevents it from doing so.

We are living 120 years after the first case of psychotherapy, Freud with Dora. Nowadays psychotherapy is a multibillion-dollar quack profession accepted and respected by society. Many of Freud’s ideas are now part of our culture’s folklore: repressed memories, sexual sublimation, phallic symbols, castration anxiety and more—the ‘water’ we breathe every day in our lagoon. Following the metaphor, Szasz and Masson are the amphibians that evolved, came out from the lagoon and saw the polluting factory from a privileged viewpoint.

Masson, a great fan of psychoanalysis in the past, defrocked himself from the profession because he didn’t want to play the role of an agent of the family, but of the family’s victims. He convinced me that the diverse schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have not broken away from psychiatry. It’s very telling, Masson says, that no psychotherapist dares to denounce electroshock in the media. Those who still believe that psychotherapy (including psychoanalysis) and psychiatry are essentially different things would benefit from reading these books by Masson.

Many people have not realised yet that Freud was a writer of fiction. It’s incredible that Freud’s literary fiction has bamboozled so many intellectuals and sophisticated people. Someone said hyperbolically that the criminal of criminals is the philosopher. This sentence may be imputed not only on Marx but on Freud as well: the damage their followers did to the 20th century has not been fully appreciated yet.

After reading the Afterword to the second edition of Against Therapy I felt very pleased to see that Masson concludes his book advising his readers that instead of childishly searching for ‘therapy’ in a paternal figure they write their autobiographies.
 

Alvin Pam, ‘Biological psychiatry: science or pseudoscience?’ in Colin Ross and Alvin Pam Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry: blaming the body (NY: Wiley & Sons, 1995), pp. 7-84.

The most difficult thing for a fish is to do a critique of the water. But the most difficult thing of all, even more difficult than to criticise psychotherapy, is to criticize a pseudosciencethat is being taught to medical students.

The psychiatrists of the 19th century had the political genius to perceive that science, and not the humanities, was going to be the paradigm of the 20th century. So they invested their ideology with a scientific robe. But as Alvin Pam says:

What I mean is much more fundamental: biological psychiatry cannot fulfill its mission properly because in its current state it has more the accoutrement of a scientific discipline than the substance. To be sure, this statement will raise skeptical eyebrows. It will be the burden of this chapter to spell out the grounds for such a broad iconoclastic assertion. 

A common ‘fish’ frequently listens in his aquaculture that the gene of depression has been discovered; that a physician won the Nobel prize for his investigations on dopamine (that the psychiatrists relate with ‘schizophrenia’); that in his school Ritalin is recommended for kids who suffer from ‘attention deficit disorder’; that studies on twins have demonstrated that ‘mental illnesses’ are hereditary, etc. Since our fish is completely immersed in this water it’s impossible that it becomes aware that the water is contaminated. His critical intelligence has no basis to realise that these affirmations don’t come from scientists but from pseudo-scientists that have self-deceived themselves in order to make a profit.

Pam’s chapter originally appeared in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavicaand represented the ‘emergence from the water’ for a student of psychiatry who read it and became aware that in her university she had been taught a false science (pp. 241f). Pam’s paper uses the same jargon that biological psychiatrists use and it contains almost two hundred references of specialized literature. It’s ideal for medical doctors and scientists who are interested in a scholarly rebuttal of the claims of psychiatry and its ‘medical model’ of mental disorders.
 

Peter Breggin, Toxic psychiatry: why therapy, empathy and love must replace the drugs, electroshock, and biochemical theories of the ‘new psychiatry’ (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

The picture I have drawn looks overwhelming, yet it is not an exaggeration. Psychiatry is a giant industry, protected by a state monopoly and promoted by a psycho-pharmaceutical complex with multi-billion-dollar power (p. 370). 

Just as Loren Mosher, Breggin realized that his profession might be based on a theoretical fraud. There is nobody more authoritative to debunk a cult or a pseudoscience than he who devoted decades of his life researching its foundations.

Breggin has fought against the tide in his profession. He sides children re-victimized by his colleagues. He has performed campaigns against the revival of lobotomy, electroshock and the medication of children and the elderly with neuroleptics.

Breggin’s book is a treatise of almost five hundred readable pages for the non-specialist. In the chapters on the alliance of parents with psychiatrists, Breggin denounces psychiatric labels and the drugs that are being prescribed to millions of children and adolescents—yes, millions of them [2]—at the initiative of psychiatrists hired by the parents.

Anyone who has been deceived by the media and believes that depression or even a severe mental disorder is of biological nature, or that it may be treated medically, must read Breggin’s book, especially if he is taking psychiatric drugs.

Breggin’s chapter on electroshock shocks the reader: it shows the truly inquisitorial methods of the psychiatric profession. It’s also shocking the chapter on the alliance of psychiatry with the medical schools in the universities; the insurance and the drug companies; the media, some government institutions and associations of parents: everyone except the ‘patient’ identified by all of them.

Since 1971 Breggin is director of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. Originally the centre was founded to oppose the revival of lobotomy, and today it opposes the inclination in our culture to diagnose and medicate children and adolescents. Since 1999 the centre publishes a journal critical of bio-reductionist theories. [3]
 

Thomas Szasz, The manufacture of madness: a comparative study of the Inquisition and the mental health movement (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997).

During the past two decades I have devoted much work and many words to exposing the scientific stupidity, the philosophical folly, and the moral monstrosity of this official psychiatric posture. [4] 

Aristotle said that to obtain a truly profound knowledge about something it’s necessary to know its history. This scholarly treatise showed me what is psychiatry and why psychiatrists do what they have been doing in the last three centuries. In this work Szasz examines the great similarities between the Inquisition and psychiatry, including present-day psychiatry. Without the Inquisition there can be no ‘witches’. Likewise, without the Psychiatric Institution there can be no ‘schizophrenics’. In other words, psychiatrists manufacture madness.

Ignoring this work reminds me of the Russian who was ignorant of The Gulag Archipelagobefore the fall of the Berlin wall. Trying to understand the mental health movement without reading Szasz is like trying to understand Stalin’s Russia without reading Solzhenitsyn.

___________

Notes

[1] Mind games (op. cit.), p. 223.

[2] Your drug may be your problem(op. cit.), p. 16.

[3] Information about the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology can be obtained in the website (http://www.icspp.org) or writing to ICSPP, 4628 Chestnut Street, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA.

[4] Schizophrenia (op. cit.), p. 44.

______ 卐 ______

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Categories
Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves - book) Psychiatry Science

How to murder your child’s soul *

* with the help of a psychiatrist

 
In first place, marry a man who super-loves children, someone who’s got grace and charisma with them.

In the second place, you must understand that your child is part of your mind. His thoughts and desires are your private property, part of your heritage. His emergent mentality is a computer and you have the right and duty to program it as you please.

All initiative, natural spontaneity or free will of the child that doesn’t reflect your programming is a symptom of a mental illness, so you must harass him inexorably.

If by reaching puberty your son rebels before your engulfing behaviour, ask help from your husband. Correct him between the two of you. Your husband still has much more physical strength than your son, and if you use your feminine arts to humiliate your son and tease him and your husband giving him tremendous slaps on his little face, much the better. The stronger the super-loving dad hits on his tender heart, the gravest trauma he’ll cause.

The objective is to provoke a bestial confusion of feelings: that the one who showed your son the greatest love as a child is the one who shows him the greatest hate as a teen.

This is the key to murder your child’s soul, and if your husband fails to develop the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome you may not achieve your goals. Remember that nothing undermines more the fragile and developing mind of a teenager who adores his loving dad than these inexplicable changes.

If even with these measures you haven’t reached the inner self of your son to injure it, hire the services of a specialist! A psychiatrist, psychoanalyst or clinical psychologist will do the job.

Your son will go to forced sessions in the Ministry of Love.

Since he’s already mortally wounded by the transformation of his loving dad, you’ll have a golden opportunity precisely in this instant of maxim vulnerability to victimise him again to produce, at last, irreversible psychic injury. If in addition to this you chose a gentleman O’Brien with fame in the media, no one will suspect anything of the drastic step you have taken.

If under treatment in the Ministry of Love your son suffers from panic attacks and develops paranoid delusions (“my mother wants to posses my thoughts”, “my father turns into Mr. Hyde”, “the shrink’s drugs cause akathisia in me”), don’t dare to believe they’re resonances of your splendid education or the medical attack. The therapist will inform you that in no way should parents be blamed for your child’s disorder. On the contrary: the evidence of a biological anomaly in your child is overwhelming. This wise man in doctor’s gown has a Malleus Maleficarum DSM manual where he can easily find the name of his ailment. Once diagnosed, his prescription will be to bombard the brain of the hallucinated bub with the most incisive neuroleptic.

Please make sure he doesn’t get his own way to avoid the chemical lobotomy, lest already grown up he decides to write an autobiography! On the other hand, if your son takes his pills he’ll be left meek as a lamb and he will never be able to say what you, your husband and the therapist did to him.

Then you’ll have once more the adored little child of your dreams, albeit a mentally handicapped one. And remember: you have the Medical Institution, the State and Society itself on your side…
 

______ 卐 ______

 
The parody above is taken from the second chapter of my book. My late sister suffered something similar but she was not the only victim of the family. As I said recently in ‘The eternal feminine’, the details are not to be discussed in this blog. Here I prefer to discuss understandable issues for ‘the eternal masculine’.

It’s a pity that YouTube has deleted a recent video of Richard Spencer that I mentioned in my yesterday comment. Spencer said there that the psychiatrists are over-medicating without being aware, as most of the nationalists do not realise either, that all psychiatric practice is pseudo-scientific.

Although the passage translated above is a dramatisation, when I investigated specific cases of mental disorders I could see that each disturbed individual told stories as horrific as my dramatisation. The model I rely on in my books is simple: major trauma families naturally cause symptoms in children. From the point of view of parsimony, my trauma model contains the least amount of speculative elements.

Psychiatry does exactly the opposite. Unlike neurology that does have biomarkers, psychiatry blames genes or aberrant metabolisms without any proof, as Loren Mosher acknowledged in the bold-typed letters of my yesterday post.

Occam’s razor is the ultimate word in scientific decision-making. It is a rule that has been the cornerstone of the scientific method since it was expressed by William of Occam in the 14th century. It establishes that when we face two or more scientific hypotheses for the same fact, we must adopt the one that contains the least amount of speculative elements. ‘Assumptions should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary’, says Occam’s rule in its current formulation.

Psychiatry violates Occam’s razor. By blaming the body without medical proof, it simply ignores the heartrending testimonies of the victims of enormous abuse at home, as the psychiatrists make their living from what the abusive parents pay them, not their victims.

The English speaker who wants to research mental disorders from the point of view of the trauma model should read John Modrow’s How to Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry, which contains a long autobiographical section. Incidentally, I used to correspond with Modrow and still have his letters, written in pencil.

Categories
Alice Miller Feminized western males Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves - book) Psychiatry

Queer generation

Racist folks who have passed away—Robert Mathews, David Lane, Dr. Pierce, Revilo Oliver, Ben Klassen, George Lincoln Rockwell—were tougher than the younger white nationalists of today. They were also far less compromising with the System’s lies than what we see nowadays in the Alt-Right scene. This reminds me an obituary that I wrote on October 16, 2012 and I translate now into English:

Tom Szasz (1920-2012)

I heard that Thomas Szasz died last month, who had a great influence on my thinking while writing the second book of Hojas Susurrantes twelve years ago. After learning about his death I visited YouTube and watched a long lecture by Szasz at his ninetieth birthday.

Although my critical study of psychiatry is now a thing of the past in my life—the race replacement that occurs throughout the West is infinitely more alarming—I had not seen critical material about psychiatry since then. But I used the news about Szasz’s death to watch other anti-psychiatric videos.

I was surprised to discover that Robert Whitaker [not to be confused with the one who coined the mantra], another of the authors mentioned in Hojas Susurrantes, has published a book critical of the profession that became a bestseller. Anatomy of an Epidemic is even influencing the fraudulent profession that we call psychiatry (this is just one of the several didactic videos of Whitaker that I watched following the death of Szasz).

Finally, remembering the trauma model of mental disorders, so central to my Hojas Susurrantes, yesterday, as I continued to refresh myself on the latest news in psychiatry criticism, I saw several interviews with Colin Ross including this one about trauma. (I quote Ross at length in a pivotal chapter in Hojas Susurrantes.)

How interesting was it to learn that it was the elder Szasz the only one in these videos who, at the beginning of the Q&A session, spoke with the right emotional tone—an open and emotional condemnation—that if a child is sent to a psychiatrist, it is because ‘the parents had done something wrong’, not the child!

Ross, on the other hand, the very psychiatrist who coined the term ‘trauma model’ when referring to parents who drive their children mad, spoke sparingly about the parents in the above-linked interview: as if he wanted to soft-pedal his main message, or convey a politically-correct image to a wider audience.

Whitaker, the psychiatry critic with the most momentum because of his bestseller, doesn’t even know that abusive parents are the cause of mental disorders. He even thinks—as orthodox psychiatrists do—that the aetiology of mental distress and disorders ‘could be biological’!

I’ve already said it elsewhere and I’m not afraid to say it again: Psychiatry critics of the first generation of critics, now all dead—Szasz, Lidz, Laing, Miller—were much braver than critics who are still with us—Whitaker, Ross and those scholars who publish in the journal that Breggin founded.

I am writing this post to reassess the critics of the old guard, and especially Szasz, who has left us.

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
Evil Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Neuroleptics – psychiatrist Peter Breggin

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of the books that I wrote at the beginning of the century:


The profession originated during the industrial revolution as a method of bypassing legal restraints on the incarceration of homeless street people. State mental hospitals, within which the profession originated, were lockups for the poor […].

By the 1930s these giant lockups, which shoved the problem of poverty under the institutional rug, had become too large and unmanageable. Lobotomy and various shock “therapies” were developed for subduing the inmates. In the 1950s, drugs were developed that induce chemical lobotomies. [1] 

In addition to eliminating bibliographic references, in the following paragraphs the quotation marks on the word “schizophrenia” are mine. And just as I did with Arieti’s quotations, to avoid psychiatric Newspeak I took liberties to replace other mentions of that word with the word “insanity”, placing brackets on it:

The neuroleptic drugs have gradually become promoted as agents with a specific “antipsychotic” effect on “schizophrenic” symptoms. Meanwhile, psychosocial approaches have fallen into disrepute among many psychiatrists. Patients have been instructed to remain on neuroleptics for a lifetime and told that it was safe to do so. The public was told that the “miracle” drugs had emptied the hospitals and returned millions of patients to normal lives. 

The reality. In 1973, psychiatrist George Crane gained the attention of the medical community by disclosing that many, and perhaps most, long-term neuroleptic patients were developing a largely irreversible, untreatable neurological disorder, tardive dyskinesia. The disease, even its mild form, is often disfiguring, with involuntary movements of the face, mouth or tongue. Frequently, the patients grimace in a manner that makes them look “crazy”, undermining their credibility with other people. In more severe cases, patients become disabled by twitches, spasms, and other abnormal movements of any muscle groups, including those of the neck, shoulders, back, arms, legs, and hands and feet. The muscles of respiration and speech can also be impaired. In the worst cases, patients trash about continually. 

The rates of tardive dyskinesia are astronomical. The latest estimate from the American Psychiatric Association indicates a rate for all patients of five percent per year, so that 15 percent of patients develop tardive dyskinesia within only three years […].

There are no accurate surveys of the total number of patients afflicted with tardive dyskinesia. There are probably a million or more tardive dyskinesia patients in the United States today, and tens of millions have been afflicted throughout the world since the inception of neuroleptic treatment. Despite this tragic situation, psychiatrists too often fail to give proper warning to patients and their families. [And when TD appears] often psychiatrists fail to notice that their patients are suffering from tardive dyskinesia, even when the symptoms are flagrant. 

In 1983 I published the first in-depth analysis of the vulnerability of children to a particularly virulent form of tardive dyskinesia that attacks the muscles of the trunk, making it difficult for them to stand or walk. This is now an established fact. In the same medical book, I offered the first detailed documentation showing that many or most tardive dyskinesia patients also show signs of dementia—an irreversible loss of higher brain and mental function. Indeed, it was inevitable that these losses would occur. The basal ganglia, which are afflicted in tardive dyskinesia, are richly interconnected with the higher centers of the brain, so that their dysfunction almost inevitably leads to disturbances in cognitive processes. Since my observations, a multitude of studies have confirmed that long-term neuroleptic use is associated with both cognitive deterioration and atrophy of the brain […].

Shocking as it may seem, this brief review can only scratch the surface of neurological disorders associated with these drugs, let alone the vast number of other potentially serious side effects. For example, in a small percentage of patients the neuroleptic reaction goes out of control, producing neuroleptic malignant syndrome. The disorder is indistinguishable from an acute inflammation of the brain comparable to lethargic encephalitis and can be fatal. 

Given that these are exceedingly dangerous drugs, what about their advantages? How do they “work”? It is well known that these drugs suppress dopamine neurotransmission in the brain, directly impairing the function of the basal ganglia and the emotion-regulating limbic system and frontal lobes and indirectly impairing the reticular activating system as well. The overall impact is a chemical lobotomy—literally so, since frontal lobe function is suppressed. The patient becomes de-energized or de-enervated. Will or volition is crushed, and passivity and docility are induced. The patient complains less and becomes more manageable. Despite the claims for symptom cure, multiple clinical studies document a non-specific emotional flattening or blunting effect. 

This cannot but remind me Giovanna’s already quoted words to me and Luisa about her group-therapy mate: “Claudia is very sluggish”: another of Amara’s victims. [Note of 2019: the anecdote appears in another chapter of my book in Spanish. All of them were white girls by the way, that I met in 1976.]

There is no significant body of research to prove that neuroleptics have any specific effect on psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions. To the contrary, these remain rather resistant to the drugs. The neuroleptics mainly suppress aggression, rebelliousness, and spontaneous activity in general. This is why they are effective whenever and wherever social control is at a premium, such as in a mental hospital, nursing homes, prisons, institutions for the persons with developmental disabilities, children’s facilities and public clinics, as well as in Russian and Cuban psychiatric political prisons. Their widespread use for social control in such a wide variety of people and institutions makes the claim that they are specific for “schizophrenia” ridiculous. (They are even used in veterinary medicine to bend or subdue the will of animals. When one of our dogs was given a neuroleptic for car sickness, our daughter observed, “He’s behaving himself for the first time in his life”.) 

The fact that neuroleptics are used to tame animals discredits so completely the theory that these drugs have a specific “antipsychotic” effect that these veterinarian data are withheld for the young students of medicine and psychiatry.[2]

That is a very important piece of info. Breggin continues:

But isn’t [insanity] a biochemical and genetic disease? In reality, there’s no convincing evidence that [insanity] is a biochemical disorder. While there are a host of conjectures about biochemical imbalances

These conjectures refer precisely to the “negative chemical imbalances” that, with a potent neuroleptic, Amara wanted to “remove” from Claudia’s body without any physical proof of their existence.

the only ones we know of in the brains of mental patients are those produced by the drugs. Similarly, no substantial evidence exists for a genetic basis of “schizophrenia”. The frequently cited Scandinavian genetic studies actually confirm an environmental factor while disproving a genetic one. Such conclusions may seem incredible to readers who have been bombarded with psychiatric propaganda, and I can only hope they will personally review the literature and read Toxic Psychiatry[see “Suggested readings” at the end of this book] for review and analysis. But even if [insanity] were a brain disease, it would not make sense to add further damage and dysfunction by administering neuroleptics. 

If the neuroleptics are so dangerous and have such limited usefulness, and if psychosocial approaches are relatively effective, why is the profession so devoted to the drugs? The answer lies in maintaining psychiatric power, prestige, and income. What mainly distinguishes psychiatrists from other mental health professionals, and of course from non-professionals, is their ability to prescribe drugs. To compete against other mental health professions, psychiatry has wed itself to the medical model, including biological and genetic explanations, and physical treatments. It has no choice: anything else would be professional suicide […].

After falling behind economically in competition with psychosocial approaches, psychiatry formed what the American Psychiatric Association now admits is a “partnership” with the drug companies. Organized psychiatry has become wholly dependent for financial support on this unholy collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry. To deny the effectiveness of drugs or to admit their dangerousness would result in huge economic loss on every level from the individual psychiatrist who makes his or her living prescribing medication, to the American Psychiatric Association which thrives on drug companies largesse. 

If neuroleptics were used to treat anyone other than mental patients, they would have been banned a long time ago. If their use wasn’t supported by powerful interest groups, such as the pharmaceutical industry and organized psychiatry, they would be rarely used at all. Meanwhile, the neuroleptics have produced the worst epidemic of neurological disease in history. At least, their use should be severely curtailed. [3] 

In 1995 I came across Claudia with her parents in the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City. Already in her thirties she told me she was studying the Open High School—at this time of day.

Sometimes I wonder how many more youngsters Amara has destroyed. Cases like Claudia’s, and according to Breggin many more around the world—about 250 to 300 million persons have been given neuroleptics [4]—, show why Jeffrey Masson wants a trial for every psychiatrist who has ruined a life. [5]

___________

[1] Peter Breggin, Beyond conflict (op. cit.), p. 150.

[2] Toxic psychiatry (op. cit.), p. 58.

[3] This article, “Should the use of neuroleptics be severely limited?”, was originally published in Stuart Kirk and Susan Einbinder (eds.) Controversial issues in mental health(Allyn & Bacon, 1993), and can be read uncut in the author’s website (www.breggin.com/neuroleptics).

[4] Toxic psychiatry (op. cit.), p. 90.

[5] Masson said this in the talk show Geraldoof 30 November 1990.

______ 卐 ______

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