Category: Psychiatry
Discussing in a radio show with Carolyn Yeager the horrific Connecticut killings perpetrated by Adam Lanza, Professor Kevin MacDonald, who in addition to his studies on Judaism is familiar with child psychiatry, said:
I am in favor of biological psychiatry and in the understanding of all of these mental disorders in a biological manner.
In other words, like virtually all psychology academics, MacDonald is grossly misinformed about this subject.
Biological psychiatry is a pseudo-science insofar as the etiology of mental disorders is not somatogenic but psychogenic. I wonder if MacDonald knows that there’s an entire journal by professionals in mental health, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry that aims to debunk the claims of biological psychiatry. (For my own take on this very subject, see my paper that took years of research, “Why psychiatry is a false science”.)
In the interview MacDonald also said:
I don’t think we can really understand what is going on in his [Lanza’s] brain.
This confusion of the “mind” with the “brain” is pandemic too among the brainwashed, that is, almost all American society. MacDonald seems to ignore that the mind is not the brain, and that we can commit heinous acts, say killing children, with perfectly normal brains (though our souls must be rotten to the core).
Those psychiatrists that blame the brain for any mental disorder and try to fix it through physical means are similar to a hypothetical computer technician who claims there is no software—only hardware—, and always tries to fix the computers’ viruses of his clients by messing the mother board with his pliers. “Never use an antivirus if the software doesn’t exist.” The fact that in humans the “software” does indeed exist escapes the brainwashed individual. Again, see my paper linked above. It demonstrates that psychiatric bio-reductionism is as unscientific as the methods of this hypothetical computer technician (Greg Johnson corrected some of my syntactic inaccuracies of that paper).
MacDonald said:
His mother should have put him [Lanza] into a treatment facility… She seemed to be aware that he had severe problems. She apparently quit her job to be with him all the time… She knew that he had these demons. Well, if she had taken him into a treatment facility and if there would be good psychiatrists there they would not leave him out on the street. I do think that a lot of people have to be confined… In the old days we used to put [homeless people] in psychiatric hospitals.
There are no “good psychiatrists” in “psychiatric hospitals” for the simple reason that psychiatry is as pseudoscientific as, say, parapsychology or UFOlogy. MacDonald’s statement is also very common in his profession but is plagued with so many errors of judgment about both mental disorders and the psychiatric profession itself that I wish that my whole book was translated to English to be able to link it now!
Suffice it to say that when I lived in Marin County in California I interacted a lot with white homeless people, most of them perfectly sane. I wonder if MacDonald and his colleagues can see that living on the streets causes severe mental distress and not the other way around: that so-called schizophrenics end up homeless? Furthermore, unlike the ubiquitous Hollywood stereotype, people labeled as schizophrenics are, according to statistics and my own experience with these people, not more violent than non-schizophrenics.
In another part of the interview both Yeager and MacDonald stated that the anti-psychiatric ideas that deinstitutionalized the mental hospitals were promoted in the 1960s by the Left. While it is true that at the other side of the Atlantic typical anti-psychiatrists like Ronald Laing and David Cooper were leftists, in America the foremost critic of psychiatry, Tom Szasz, who incidentally died earlier this year, was not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination. What’s more, deinstitutionalization was in no way caused by Szasz’s views, who never had any power whatsoever in institutional psychiatry. Deinstitutionalization in America’s 1960s was a matter of social policy; of federal economic interests vs. state interests.
More to the point, Lanza’s monstrous actions are probably the result of having been victimized by an extremely abusive mother: the most heretical hypothesis in the mental health professions today (as heretical as saying in the academia that “Whites also have ethnic interests” or that “Hitler was not that bad after all”). However, I cannot explain the trauma model of mental disorders here, only link to a brief section of my book of what a psychiatrist, whom incidentally I once visited at his Dallas clinic, says about that model.
Briefly, if Lanza’s mother destroyed Adam’s mind society should have committed her, not the victim as MacDonald advised. By committing the original perpetrator, Adam Lanza would have felt socially vindicated and no pathological displacement of his rage on innocent children would have occurred.
But society assaults the victim instead. Through the mental health professions society makes a massive effort to obfuscate the fact that some parents produce the most horrible form of mental hell in a child’s mind. This blindness is precisely what drives the society, as explained in my book, to “re-victimize” a child who already was victim of maddening parental abuse. The psychiatric re-victimization is performed by means of an insulting psychiatric label together with psychotropic drugs and/or involuntary commitment: a blame-the-victim, soul-devastating action that often increases the chances of driving the child mad.
In my writings I speak of “the trauma model” to contrast it with the pseudo-scientific “medical model of mental disorders,” a medical model that MacDonald subscribes (“I am in favor of biological psychiatry and in the understanding of all these mental disorders in a biological manner”). Although the trauma model explains severe psychoses, it can also be used to explain comparatively lesser forms of mental distress, such as neuroses. Those who would like to visualize how engulfing mothers—and I am talking now of cases far less serious than Lanza’s—often drive the child into explosions of rage can see my essay-review of a silly bestseller authored by a junior whose father made a fortune in the Big Pharma.
Today I read a wonderful article by Andrew Hamilton at Counter-Currents about Norwegian revolutionary nationalist Anders Behring Breivik, 33. Hamilton let us know that among Norwegians the date July 22 is like September 11 in the US, that “literally everyone knows what it means.”
Recording and broadcasting of both, opening and closing statements by Breivik (April 16, 2012 & June 22, 2012) in Oslo District Court in Norway was prohibited. Reporters had to take manual notes.
It seems that Breivik’s courtroom statements have not been published by any major media outlet in any European language outside Norway. I would recommend future revolutionaries to study closely both statements and think seriously of what a trouble trio can do once it hits the fan.
Breivik’s statement
Thank you.
I think we can all agree that on July 22 a barbaric action occurred. What happened on July 22 in the government quarter and on Utøya were barbaric acts.
And I remember that on July 21 I thought after several years of planning, “Tomorrow morning I will die” [Breivik took a deep breath and leaned forward before continuing].
I came to within 200 meters of the government quarter. Then I remember I thought, “In two minutes I will die.”
And what am I going to die for? That’s what I’m going to talk about now.
I’m not going to deliver a speech. I gave my explanation on April 17th, and it contains many of my arguments. That statement explains the most. [See Breivik’s opening statement on Day 2 of the trial.]
There are still some things I did not say enough about, and that’s what I’ll take up now.
The Sanity Issue
I will start with the assessment of my sanity. As a starting point, every person under the law is presumed sane.
And of those who have evaluated me, a total of 37 highly qualified individuals, out of 37 people, 35 have not found any symptoms at all. And of the 37, two have found a multitude of symptoms.
So it’s pretty obvious what one should emphasize. The 35 people or the two people. It’s clear the prosecutors do not want to repeat here in court what I said in the interrogations. I will not go into that now.
The prosecutor said I wanted to claim mental incapacity in the beginning. That is not true.
In December or late November, when the firsaA [psychiatric] report came [concluding that Breivik was a paranoid schizophrenic], everyone was shocked
I was thinking: What to do next? I thought I would wait for the debate to die down. And I thought hard about strategy before demanding two new experts.
Also, gradually I thought: Now that I have been betrayed by two psychiatrists who do not have access to the conversations, how will I ever trust a psychiatrist again? That’s why I was considering not allowing myself to be examined again. If I get two reports against me, it’s over.
Democracy No Longer Functioning
As I’ve explained, especially on April 17 [the opening statement], the European democratic political model is not working. The arguments I presented emphasize the need for a fundamental change of leadership in Norway and Europe.
This began with World War II. In the 1960s the Labor Party decided that a large group of Pakistanis who had been refused entry into Finland, and who came to Norway on a tourist visa, should be granted residence.
And that was how the multicultural experiment in Norway began. The Labor Party decided that Norway should follow Great Britain’s example, with Asian and African mass immigration.
I have already talked a lot about the ridicule of cultural conservatives. So I will not talk much about it, except to address some high points.
The main characteristic has been political discrimination. Cultural conservative NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and youth organizations receive no funding. They are opposed. Perhaps the only cultural conservative newspaper we had in Norway, Norway Today, lost press subsidies just a few years ago.
After July 22 subsidies to HRS [Human Rights Service], a cultural conservative organization, were halved. That’s an organization that has nothing to do with me. During the past 20 or 30 years there has been public funding of extreme left organizations in Norway such as Blitz [an “antifa” communist, anarchist, and socialist youth movement permitted by the state to employ violence against the Progress Party, the Fatherland Party, the Democrats in Norway, and others] Serve the People [Serve the People—Communist League; Tjen Folket – Kommunistisk Forbund, a Maoist group] and the Norwegian Center Against Racism [Antirasistisk Senter, an anti-white NGO].
Ethnic Deconstruction
Perhaps some will remember the leader of Future In Our Hands [Fremtiden i våre hender], Steinar Lem [a Norwegian environmentalist], who died of cancer a few years ago. One of the last things he said was something that had burned within him, but he had not dared to articulate before he knew he was going to die.
It was that we fought for Tibetan rights and the Tibetan indigenous people, but in Norway it is not permitted to say that Norwegians have as much right to a homeland as the Tibetans, and that our rights are in fact equally important.
He did not dare to speak the truth before he was told by his doctor that he was going to die. Only then did he dare to say what he thought.
In part of the compendium, I’ve written a lot about [ethnic] deconstruction and the absence of morality in Norway since 1968. They are huge problems. In Norway today, ideals are upheld that are extremely harmful and will be detrimental to our future.
When it comes to sexually transmitted diseases and the sexual revolution, it’s actually something that is underreported, and has created major problems in Europe. The ideal being upheld is to have sex with as many strangers as possible. Instead of focusing on the nuclear family, the focus is on dissolving it, and all the problems which that entails.
For example, the Sex and the City ideal, where Samantha and Carrie through 100–200 episodes of the series have sex with hundreds of men. These are the ideals that are upheld today. This is a disease. It’s like sugar to the audience. These sick ideals should be censored and shielded from our community.
So people neglect their duty to family and nation. They get education, travel, and are 35 before they start having children. Women should begin having children in their 20s. Our birth rate is below replacement level.
No Free Speech
One of the most influential people in Norway, Arne Strand [a print and broadcast journalist and former member of Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland’s cabinet] in Dagsavisen [the daily newspaper Strand edits, until 1999 the official organ of the Labor Party, now independent] has issued many statements about press subsidies.
He proposes that everyone on the right, to the right of Carl I. Hagen [former Vice President of the Storting (Norwegian Parliament) and ex-chairman of the Progress Party], should be censored, and excluded from the democratic process. He says straight out that government press subsidies [to the Left, denied to the right] are necessary to preserve the current political hegemony.
We must protect hegemony, we must not allow people the right to express themselves. The system of press subsidies ensures that Norway will never be a democracy, because those on the far right are excluded.
I will mention some important political actions by the Labor Party, those in power in Norway, that legitimize and may trigger violent counter-reactions.
Psychiatry and the Legacy of World War II
Svein Holden [one of Breivik’s prosecutors] said that after WW II not many people in Norway were sent to psychiatric wards. He meant that only novelist Knut Hamsun and Justice Minister Sverre Riisnæs were sent to mental hospitals.
[Sverre Riisnæs served in Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling (NS, National Unity) government during the German occupation; after the war he was imprisoned in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital from 1948–1960.]
But there were several. [“Breivik sits leaning forward in his chair as he speaks. Defense attorneys Geir Lippestad and Vibeke Hein Bæra lean back and look down at the table.]
It’s no secret that after the war many cultural conservatives and nationalists were neutralized with the help of psychiatry. Many members of the Nasjonal Samling were sent to the madhouse by Labor.
Halldis Neegaard Østbye, Quisling’s secretary and NS-ideologue, among other things wrote the book Jews’ War in 1943. She eventually died at Dikemark madhouse. Her and her husband’s ski factory was taken from them by the Labor Party at war’s end.
[Halldis Neegaard Østbye, active NS leader and prolific writer. In 1938 she wrote The Jewish Problem and Its Solution under the pseudonym “Irene Sword.” It was reissued in 1942 and 1943.]
And Knut Hamsun we know about.
These unconstitutional, unjust, illegal sentences should be abolished, and compensation provided to the relatives.
Non-NS’ers who were opposed to the Labor Party were also tried and declared mad.
An example is editor Toralv Fanebust [a harsh critic of Norway’s post-WW II trials and persecutions]. When the attempt [to declare him insane] failed, he was given a lengthy prison sentence for having written about important Labor Party members’ actions before and after the war.
His grandson has recently released the book Krigshistorien: oppgjør med mytene [War History: Reckoning With the Myths].
Violence Against the Right
What else has the political power instigated and applauded that is likely to precipitate violent resistance?
The Fatherland Party [FLP, Fedrelandspartiet, a nationalist party in Norway between 1990 and 2008] received about 0.5 percent of the vote in 1993, the first time they ran in Parliamentary elections.
[FLP leader] Bjarne Dahl in 1993 tried to legitimize political opposition to immigration. At a market square meeting in Oslo, he had his face smashed with an iron pipe, his jaw broken, and his teeth knocked out in attacks by some Blitz members [antifas belonging to the state-funded group mentioned previously].
Party leader and professor Harald Trefall [1925–2008, experimental physicist, anti-immigration activist, and Fatherland Party founder] was also hit in the face by something that was thrown. The party chairman was bleeding from a wound in the face.
Also, others were beaten and kicked.
When a horrified spectator tipped off Dagbladet [one of the country’s largest newspapers] about these violent attacks, he received the following response from Dagbladet: “Isn’t that good, then?”
This was their attitude. The same attitude shared by most of the press. The mass media made no mention of the violent and dangerous attacks against the Fatherland Party.
No Freedom of Association
On June 28, 2002, the parliamentary parties committed democratic suicide. They passed a new law saying that all parties that hadn’t received at least 5,000 votes in the last election were stricken [from the ballot].
They must collect 5,000 signatures under stringent restrictions. This means that there are very few small parties. It is almost impossible to start a new party in Norway today. In Sweden, the requirement is 1,500 signatures.
Vigrid logo
The PST [Police Security Service, Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste, internal secret police] boasts unrestrainedly about how they crushed Vigrid [link to its website]. The police called on all the young people in the organization and their parents. PST destroyed the organization through harassment of its young members.
[One day in 2004, agents from all 26 field offices paid personal visits to each of Vigrid’s members, many of whom were teenagers living with their parents. The investigators continued this tactic for several months, until about 60% of Vigrid quit the group. –Trans.]
What they have done is systematically harass political activists.
In addition, PST ran a comprehensive harassment campaign against the leader of Vigrid, Tore Tvedt. Among other things, extensive surveillance, house raids, arrests, and making sure he was repeatedly thrown out of rented houses.
At a school debate on August 28 in connection with the parliamentary elections of 2009, the party leader [Øyvind Heian] of the Norwegian Patriots [NP, NorgesPatriotene, a defunct anti-immigration party] received cuts in his forehead causing severe bleeding [during an attack by a far left anti-white mob including SOS Racism], forcing him to leave the meeting. The meeting continued as if nothing had happened. Neither the school administration nor the police did anything at all about the attack on the party leader.
Before local government elections last year the Christian Unity Party [KSP, Kristent Samlingsparti] was attacked by a person belonging to SOS Racism; they are communists.
Such things of course anger everyone with nationalist attitudes in this country.
That a counter-reaction has not occurred before July 22 amazes everyone who follows national trends. The anti-democratic forces that govern our country are obviously expecting something. This can be seen from the adoption of new surveillance measures. They have been doing exercises on scenarios like what happened [on July 22].
Yet those who govern the country say they have done nothing that could give rise to such a reaction. It is quite possible that many people connected with the power structure actually believe this.
Which means dark prospects for our country.
Communism and the Ruling Class
It is well known and documented that the Labor Party before World War II received funding from the Soviet Union. However, it is wrong to say that Labor is a full-fledged communist party. They do not support a planned economy. Hence the expressions “cultural Marxists” or “semi-communists.”
It is known that many Labor Party leaders had close relations to the Soviet Union right up to 1993. The Prime Minister’s father, [former Norwegian Foreign Minister] Thorvald Stoltenberg, had, for example, a code name in the KGB. Even Jens Stoltenberg [leader of the Labor Party and current Prime Minister of Norway] had a code name, “Steklov,” in the KGB archives.
[According to Wikipedia, until 1990 now-Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg “had regular contacts with a Soviet diplomat who later was revealed to be a KGB agent. According to Stoltenberg he immediately broke off this relationship when he came to the knowledge that his contact was a KGB agent. Several sources have confirmed that Stoltenberg’s code name within the KGB was “Steklov,” a name Jens Stoltenberg used as his online alias when playing computer games such as Age of Empires.]
Of two books about this, one, The Eagle Has Landed [Ørnen har landet, 2003] by Reiulf Steen I do not think has been suppressed, but I believe there’s a new book by Christopher Andrew that has been halted.
The problem with Labor is not their communist past, but that they refuse to acknowledge it.
Deconstructing the Nordic Race and European Culture
Labor Party Secretary Raymond Johansen claims they are required by international agreements to admit immigrants—instead of confessing that they want to transform Norway ethnically and culturally.
Raymond Johansen is intelligent enough to know that Japan and South Korea have experienced the same pressure from the UN to accept immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Japan and South Korea have learned to say no. They do not want the nation to be used as a dumping ground for the birth rate of the Second or Third World.
The political model in Japan and South Korea proves that countries that say no to mass immigration in the long run will be stronger than those open to mass immigration.
We will experience huge ethnic, cultural and religious conflicts. It is such conflicts that led to July 22.
This the Labor Party and Raymond Johansen know. If they had any integrity they would admit why they want mass immigration. In other words, they have exactly the same agenda as the social democrats in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain.
Labor wants to deconstruct Norwegian culture. They want to deconstruct the Nordic race and Norwegian and European culture.
Individuals who have manifested support for cultural conservative organizations have been systematically ridiculed, harassed and persecuted in Norway and Western Europe since World War II.
In Norway, several hundred people over the last ten years have lost their jobs and been branded as racists because they opposed immigration.
An example is Remi Huseby [the young spokesman for the Norwegian Defence League, a group affiliated with the English Defence League], who lost his job after being labeled an intolerant and vicious right-wing extremist on the ground that he was opposed to the Norwegian state ideology, multiculturalism.
As a result, his employer felt pressured to fire him. This is only one case that documents journalists and editors ridiculing and persecuting cultural conservatives from WW II to the present.
The worst thing is that this demonization is better than being ignored. Being ignored is the worst of all.
In hundreds of cases in Europe and Norway cultural conservatives, anticommunists, and nationalists have been driven to suicide by public labeling and demonization. It is the same as in the Soviet Union.
So, another point I thought of omitting: cultural self-loathing. Norwegian society is suffering from a cultural psychological disorder that manifests itself through self-contempt for Norwegian ideals. This collective cultural psychosis is caused by decades of cultural Marxism.
A good example is Norway’s contributions to the Eurovision Song Contest over the past four years.
We let a White Russian asylum seeker, probably with a Tartar background. It is indeed good that we very occasionally allow an asylum seeker to represent us. But what is going on?
A few years later we let Stella Mwangi [a black, Nairobi-born “Norwegian-Kenyan” singer] win with a bongo song. What is Norway doing, sending an asylum seeker as ambassador? Is it lack of Norwegians in Norway, or are they suffering from self-hatred?
Then we let an asylum seeker from Iran win. This is an insult to all Norwegians. The answer is simple. A great many Norwegians suffer from cultural delusions and have urgent need for “medication,” with immediate implementation of cultural protectionism and the Nordic ideal.
Regarding the definition of the term “indigenous people,” this means original or old residents. It does not mean ethnic Norwegians are not indigenous.
We know of course that the United Nations does not recognize ethnic Europeans as indigenous people. But we must observe the UN’s agenda, its creation when the Axis powers were defeated in WW II.
The UN supports the deconstruction of European states. So does the European Union [EU]. The UN does not support the idigenous European population because the UN is controlled by cultural Marxists—the same as the EU.
José Manuel Durão Barroso, who has been the EU’s supreme leader for many years, was a longtime member of the Portuguese Communist Party. This shows the kind of people that hold power in the EU and the UN.
So, to come back to the definition of the word “indigenous.” There is no definition of “indigenous peoples” that nationalists and cultural Marxists can agree upon. Europe’s nationalists and cultural conservatives use a different definition than does the EU or the UN. The correct definition is “old or original people.”
Why should one support the struggle for indigenous people in Tibet, Bolivia, and other places but not in Europe? Why do indigenous activists in other parts of the world receive support and praise, while indigenous activists in Europe are branded as racists?
The battle is identical for all indigenous activists, namely, to fight against the ethnic and cultural extinction of their people from immigration. The fact that activists elsewhere are supported while we are combated as if we were a disease is an intolerable injustice.
When it comes to ongoing ethnic deconstruction I would recommend that everyone read the essay [he mentions its title, but the reporter omits it] by David Coppell and Johan__.
Muslim Demographics
Regarding Mullah Krekar [a Kurdish Islamic refugee in Norway], the reason I wanted to call him as a witness was to shed light on orthodox Islam’s view of Europe. He calls himself a Kurdish religious leader. He is one of the few Muslim leaders who are honest about Islam’s takeover of Europe.
Krekar said:
“In Denmark they printed drawings, but the result was that support of Islam increased. I, and all Muslims, are evidence. You have not managed to change us. It is we who are changing you. Look at the changes in the population of Europe, where Muslims reproduce like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in Europe has 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries gives birth to 3.5 children.”
All the sources are in the compendium [Breivik says, looking at the judges].
I also remind you that Muammar Gadaffi, who was recently killed by NATO, said in March 2007:
“There are signs that Allah will grant us victory in Europe without use of the sword. We need no terrorists, we need no suicide bombers. The millions of Muslims in Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
I will mention a few points about demographics. Demographic examples documenting how Islamic demographic warfare works in practice.
Kosovo is a very good example that I have not talked about. In 1900 Kosovo was 60% Christian, 40% Muslim. In 1913 the figure was 50% [Muslim], 1948 72%; in 1971 it was 79 percent Muslim. In 2008, after NATO had bombed our Serbian, Christian brothers, Kosovo was 93% Muslim. In just 100 years Kosovo has gone from being a Christian country to being a Muslim country.
Lebanon is an occupied state. In 1911 it was 21 percent Muslim. Today there are more—approximately 80 percent. This is demographic warfare. Warfare that is waged against Europe and against Norway at this moment.
And not only against against Christians, but against Hindus as well. Pakistan [carved out of India as a Moslem state in 1947] was 25 percent Hindu in 1941; in 1948, 17 percent. Today, it is less than 1 percent. This is Pakistani “tolerance” for people who think differently. Bangladesh [which declared independence from Pakistan in 1971] in 1941 was 30 per cent Hindu; today it is less than 8 percent.
Then one can look at the exploding populations in Muslim countries.
In 1951 there were 33 million people in Pakistan. Today they are nearly 200 million. From 33 million to nearly 200 million in 60 years. Officially, they report a birth rate of 3.58, but it is of course a lie.
The media like to convey the idea that most Muslims support democracy, but it is not true. A survey conducted by the University of Maryland, in which 4,000 Muslims were queried, shows that 65 percent want to unite all Muslim countries into a caliphate, and 65 percent wish to implement strict interpretation of Sharia law.
“Child Killer”
One last point. Lawyers previously called me a child murderer. But we know that the average age on the island was over 18.
Many armies in the world have 18-year-old soldiers. Many of our own soldiers in Afghanistan are 18. Does this mean that we send children to war?
The Labor Party and the AUF [Labor’s youth auxiliary] are themselves guilty of mass murder of children in hospitals across the country. Thousands of children are killed every year by abortion. Muslims do not practice abortion because Sharia does not permit it. Labor is thus a culprit in mass murder, and then uses the low birth rate as an excuse for mass immigration.
Resistance Increasing
If you choose to recognize my claim of necessity, you will effectively send shock waves through all the illegitimate regimes in Europe.
The court should remember that the biased judges who worked for Hitler’s Germany were condemned by history after the war. Likewise, history will judge the judges in this case. [When Breivik said this, district court judges Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen and Arne Lyng looked directly at him.] History will tell whether they convicted a man who tried to stop the evils of our time. History shows that sometimes one must implement a barbarity to stop an even greater barbarism.
My brothers in the Norwegian and European resistance movements are sitting out there watching this case as they plan new attacks. They might be responsible for as many as 40,000 deaths. Yesterday, explosives were found at a Swedish nuclear plant, suggesting that my brothers in the Swedish resistance had something to do with it.
In the compendium I describe how to attack Swedish, German (…) [ellipses indicate missing material from the original transcript] nuclear power plants. It is intended to break the back of (…) PST knows that militant nationalists have access to weapons that can cause (…) It is my duty to warn about this because it can be prevented if the will is there.
Create an Ethnostate
In the compendium I described a solution that can prevent all future conflicts with ultra-nationalists.
The smartest thing that could be done is to give us autonomy, autonomy within a specific area of Norway for people who oppose mass immigration and multiculturalism. We are interested in having our own state within the state, reserved for the indigenous Norwegian people. In other words, national conservatives, orthodox Christians, and National Socialists.
Such a solution would be good for both parties. Marxists and liberals would not have to experience our anger and complaining about the current state. And we would not have to live in a multi-ethnic hell. I have written about this political model and will convey the proposal later.
A solution like this can be used in all European countries, and can thus prevent further escalation of the conflict between cultural conservatives and multiculturalists.
The starting point might be that they get control over an area equivalent to about 1–2 percent of the country, and the area increases proportionally with growth. If we do not succeed and flourish, the autonomous state will not be developed. This political model is similar to political solutions relating to indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. Many ultra-nationalists and others would feel positive about developing such a solution.
Fair Warning
The alternative is that we focus on the takeover of the entire country of Norway—something Marxists and liberals would be mightily displeased with.
But the current regime is not interested in dialogue with us, so we have nothing to lose and the conflict will escalate over the next few years. It might not be tactful to say this in that the prosecutor is “gunning” on with “mental incapacity,” but I must convey my peace proposal, which could save many lives in the future [Breivik raises his voice when he talks about what will happen in the future].
This trial should be about finding the truth. The documentation of my claims—are they true? If they are true, how can what I did be illegal?
Norwegian academics and journalists work together and make use of (…) methods to deconstruct Norwegian identity, Christianity, and the Norwegian nation. How can it be illegal to engage in armed resistance against this?
The prosecution wondered who gave me a mandate to do what I did. Was it the KT [Knights Templar] network? I have answered this before, but will do so again. Universal human rights, international law, and the right to self-defense provided the mandate to carry out this self-defense.
Everything has been triggered by the actions of those who consciously and unconsciously are destroying our country. Responsible Norwegians and Europeans who feel even a trace of moral obligation are not going to sit by and watch as we are made into minorities in our own lands. We are going to fight.
The attacks on July 22 were preventive attacks in defense of my ethnic group, the Norwegian indigenous people. I therefore cannot acknowledge guilt. I acted from necessity (nødrett) on behalf of my people, my religion and my country.
I therefore demand that I be acquitted.
♣
See endnotes at Counter-Currents
Or:
The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
7.- Final Analysis
(read in 1999)
Do you know that one of the editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official diagnostic guide of the American Psychiatric Association used by all psychiatrists, holds that for a “patient” to state that a therapist is boring is a primary sign of “the self-defeating personality disorder”? I propose the following experiment to those racially conscious individuals who believe that psychotherapy on mental issues represents a legitimate profession: Make an appointment in the nearest therapist office and express your racial concerns.
Your concern will be immediately labeled as pathological by the professional whether he or she is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst or a clinical psychologist.
I have devoted one of my most thoughtful papers to the subject of pseudoscience in biological psychiatry, but have not touched the subject of the non-psychiatric professions in the so-called “mental health” field. Here I would like to mention the book that has debunked psychoanalysis as ferociously as Phil Klass debunked the field of UFOlogy, or as James Randi, mentioned in my previous entry, has been exposing the “psychics” for decades. I refer to Jeffrey Masson’s Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst.
Final Analysis is, by far, the most searing exposé of psychoanalysis that I am aware of. Keep in mind that Masson was a Harvard professor, a prominent psychoanalyst and that later, when he realized that his own profession was a fraud, Masson completely abandoned the very lucrative practice of therapy.
Only from the literary point of view, Final Analysis is a treat: Masson’s misadventures in the cult of psychotherapy are as readable as any entertaining novel. It is true that, as a typical liberal, Masson ignores that race matters. But the above thought-experiment that any racialist could put into practice to check for himself the legitimacy of the therapeutic profession, moves me to quote Masson’s final words of his book:
There are no experts in loving,
no scholars of living,
no doctors of the human emotions
and no gurus of the soul.
♣
For the other nine books see here.
Or:
The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
3.- Laing and Anti-Psychiatry
(read in 1983)
Sometimes it is not an entire book what causes a deep impression in one’s values and worldview. Sometimes it is a single chapter; a single phrase.
The overwhelming majority of white nationalists are unaware of the fact that psychiatry is a false science. I mean: psychiatry is as false as, say, the Boasian anthropology that has become axiomatic throughout all anthropology departments in the West.
Before I entered the racialist arena I devoted quite a few years of my life to research this pseudoscience. The result was a massive exposé of psychiatry that benefited the Spanish-speaking people (for example, today I learnt that a blog was started with the title of one of my book chapters exposing the history of psychiatry).
The whys of the toleration of a pseudoscience within the academia and throughout the West have to do with the fact that the basic etiology of mental disorders lies in the abusive modes of parenting. But this truth has become a heresy in a world that only aims to perpetuate the status quo, including those nuclear families run by abusive parents.
When in 1983, standing in a bookstore because I was too poor to purchase the book, I read the interview of psychiatrist Theodore Lidz in Laing and Anti-Psychiatry, I corroborated what I suspected: that some parents are driving their children mad. Lidz’s words that a schizophrenogenic mother simply cannot conceive that her child sees the world with different eyes than her own made a huge impression on me to understand the dynamics in my own family.
More recently I have extensively written on this subject in Spanish, of which I have translated only a fraction to English (e.g., here and here). But all of my writing was possible only thanks to my reading this Lidz interview in a bookstore almost thirty years ago with no soft sofas. Lidz was one of the very very few psychiatrists that dismissed the medical model of mental disorders taken for granted in his own profession and proposed a trauma model instead. Abusive parents are the real and only culprits for the emotional fall of their offspring; blaming the child’s brain or the child’s genes, as his colleagues do, is a political rather that a scientific endeavor.
It is worth saying that when I lived in Houston I phoned Lidz, who was already in his nineties, and he appeared as warm and lucid as if he was in his prime. How different from Ronald Laing, the guru whose last name was chosen for the title of the book’s collection of anti-psychiatric essays. (In his later writing Laing looked like an intellectual snob rather than someone who fully sided the child against the all-out assault perpetrated at home in some extremely dysfunctional families.)
Laing and Anti-Psychiatry was published in 1971. Those who are under the impression that psychiatry has since proven the biomedical basis of mental stress and disorders would do a favor to themselves by reading the much more recent How to Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry by John Modrow (whom by the way I used to correspond).
♣
For the other nine books see here.
Ever since in an article of a white nationalist blogsite I was called “a Jew” and that my “behavior indicates that he’s a Jew” (by “behavior” the author meant my criticism of the truther movement), I realized that truthers suffer from huge psychological issues. For example, a commenter in that article’s thread who has the Truth Movement as a sort of litmus test for what he believes is the true nationalist, stated that the other “‘WN’ bloggers… are probably posting from Tel Aviv.”
While demonstrating that I am not a Jew is quite easy in these times of DNA tests, what I found disturbing is the notion that those who strongly disagree with truthers must be Jews, or even conspiracists themselves.
The following excerpts, taken from James B. Meigs’ foreword and afterword of Debunking 9/11 Myths corroborate that truthers are a little paranoid to say the least. Meigs is, technically, our foe—he writes as if “racism” and “anti-Semitism” were something wrong. Nonetheless, I find his arguments demystifying conspiracy theories compelling (no ellipsis added):
Foreword
Popular Mechanics set out to investigate conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks in late 2004, just as those claims were emerging from the swamps of extremist websites and radical Islamist organizations. We had no idea how much trouble we were about to stir up. Our first magazine article on the topic, which appeared in the March 2005 issue, closely examined the major scientific, military, aeronautical, and engineering-based claims commonly cited as evidence that 9/11 was, as conspiracy theorists like to say, an inside job. Our investigation found no evidence in support of the conspiracy claims.
The article unleashed a flood of criticisms and accusations from those supporting such theories. These attacks ranged from the preposterous (it was said our magazine had published this investigation on orders from a cabal of Masons and Illuminati) to alarming (death threats were referred to our security department). Clearly, we had touched a nerve. The article quickly became the most widely read story in the history of Popular Mechanics’ Web site, with over 7.5 million views. (A detailed account of the reaction to our article, and what that reaction says about the conspiracy movement, can be found in the original afterword to this book on page 121 [see below].)
A team of Popular Mechanics reporters and editors then started work on a far more detailed book-length version of the report. By the time the first edition of this book was published in the summer of 2006, the 9/11 conspiracy furor was reaching a tipping point. The flurry of books on the topic had grown into an avalanche, with certain writers, such as former Claremont School of Theology professor David Ray Griffin, building a thriving cottage industry around the topic. Conspiracy fans had, with Orwellian overtones, taken to calling themselves “the 9/11 Truth Movement,” or simply “truthers.” Extremist talk radio programs such as The Alex Jones Show pushed the issue nonstop. And a video pastiche of conspiracy theories, a quasi-documentary known as Loose Change, was becoming an Internet sensation.
Popular Mechanics’ 9/11 project represented one of the relatively few attempts by mainstream journalists to grapple seriously with the conspiracy theory claims. So it was telling that most conspiracy theorists quickly decided that Popular Mechanics too was part of the conspiracy. In their minds, all our research could therefore be rejected a priori. We had run head on into a worldview that some experts call “conspiracism.” It is a mind-set that insists on reaching a predetermined conclusion regardless of what information is presented. Any facts that don’t fit the conspiracy paradigm need to be explained away. Since 2004, leading 9/11 theorist David Ray Griffin has written seven books and edited two others on the subject of 9/11. He devoted a chapter in his book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory, to explain why, in his view, the 9/11 reporting by Popular Mechanics and other mainstream journalists is invalid.
Griffin’s book devotes many pages to the idea that Popular Mechanics and our parent company, the Hearst Corporation, are somehow implicated in the vast conspiracy he sees behind 9/11. He digs up century-old controversies and finds tenuous links between the magazine’s staff and various government officials. But he never explains how a magazine—much less a major corporation—could possibly convince its employees to help cover up the most notorious mass murder in our nation’s history. Popular Mechanics has close to 30 editorial staffers and dozens of freelance contributors. Does Griffin imagine that whenever we hire new editors I bring them into a secret bunker and initiate them into an ultraclandestine society for world domination? Why wouldn’t such prospective employees run screaming from our building? In the years since we began our work on 9/11 conspiracy theories, a number of our staffers have moved on to other jobs. What would stop them from revealing a conspiracy that, if true, would be one of the biggest journalistic scoops in history? Did we swear them all to lifetime secrecy? As with so many conspiracy claims, the whole elaborate fantasy becomes practically laughable on close examination.
The original Popular Mechanics article addressed 16 of the most common 9/11 conspiracy claims. The first edition of this book expanded that list by four, and added much more detail. As a result, many of the more adept theorists simply moved on to new theories, or shifted their focus to issues that our team had not covered as deeply. For example, at the time we published the first edition, there was still no definitive account of why World Trade Center 7—which was not hit by planes, only damaged by debris—also collapsed. Not surprisingly, as the truther community moved away from talk about missiles and pods, it began focusing obsessively on elaborate theories concerning WTC 7. (With the benefit of much more detailed engineering analysis, this edition addresses—and debunks—those WTC 7 claims in depth.)
It is hard to argue without facts. And yet that is the position in which 9/11 conspiracists increasingly find themselves. One by one, the key factual underpinnings of their theories have been demolished. But still they argue on, their passionate conviction undiminished.
In the end, the truther community’s tendency toward unintentional self-parody has perhaps done as much to undermine its credibility as has the work of Popular Mechanics. Just when the conspiracy movement seemed to be making real headway toward deeply influencing American culture, a funny thing happened: it began to turn into a punch line. South Park offered a brutal parody of the conspiracist worldview in an episode called “Mystery of the Urinal Deuce.” Comedian Jon Stewart started tweaking truthers on The Daily Show, at one point holding up a sign reading “9/11 WAS AN OUTSIDE JOB.” And, in a common-sense answer to the vast legion of conspiracy-oriented websites, an assortment of sharp, and often satirical, blogs has emerged to challenge the truthers on their own turf. In particular, the blog Screw Loose Change offers devastating analysis of the truther community, and links to point-by-point rebuttals to the claims advanced in Loose Change.
Of course, conspiracy theories involving 9/11 will never fully go away. And a book like this, no matter how widely reported or carefully updated, will never convince the most dedicated conspiracists. But, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is important to have a clear, objective, and thorough response to the consistently false and deeply malicious claims of the conspiracy movement.
New York City
2011
Afterword
On February 7, 2005, I [James Meigs] became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy for global domination. It was on that day the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, with its cover story debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, hit newsstands. Within hours, the online community of 9/11 conspiracy buffs—which calls itself the “9/11 Truth Movement”—was aflame with wild fantasies about me and my staff, the magazine I edit, and the article we had published.
We had begun our plunge down the rabbit hole. Within hours, a post on www.portland.indymedia.org, which claims to be dedicated to “radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth,” called me “James Meigs the Coward and Traitor.” Not long afterward, another prominent conspiracy theorist produced an analysis that concluded that Popular Mechanics is a CIA front organization. Invective and threats soon clogged the comments section of our Web site and poured in by e-mail:
YOU HAVE DECLARD YOURSELF ENEMY OF AMERICANS AND FRIEND OF THE MOSSAD!
In a few short weeks, Popular Mechanics had gone from being a 100-year-old journal about science, engineering, car maintenance, and home improvement to being a pivotal player in a global conspiracy on a par with Nazi Germany. Not all the responses were negative, of course. One visitor to our Web site, after plowing through dozens of angry comments, left a supportive post that included this astute observation:
Some people are open to any possibility, and honestly examine all evidence in a rational manner to come to a conclusion, followed by a moral evaluation. Others start with a desire for a specific moral evaluation, and then work backwards assembling any fact that supports them, and dismissing any fact that does not.
As the hate mail poured in and articles claiming to have debunked the magazine’s analysis proliferated online, we soon learned to identify the key techniques that give conspiracy theorists their illusion of coherence.
Marginalization of Opposing Views
The 9/11 Truth Movement invariably describes the mainstream account of 9/11 as the “government version” or “the official version.” In fact, the generally accepted account of 9/11 is made up of a multitude of sources: thousands of newspaper, TV, and radio reports produced by journalists from all over the world; investigations conducted by independent organizations and institutions, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, Purdue University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the National Fire Protection Association, and Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.; eyewitness testimony from literally thousands of people; recordings and transcripts of phone calls, air traffic control transmissions, and other communications; thousands of photographs; thousands of feet of video footage; and, let’s not forget the words of Osama bin Laden, who discussed the operation in detail on more than one occasion, including in an audio recording released in May 2006 that said: “I am responsible for assigning the roles of the 19 brothers to conduct these conquests…”
The mainstream view of 9/11 is, in other words, a vast consensus. By presenting it instead as the product of a small coterie of insiders, conspiracists are able to ignore facts they find inconvenient and demonize people with whom they disagree.
Argument by Anomaly
In an article about the Popular Mechanics 9/11 report, Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer makes an important observation about the conspiracist method: “The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial [Post-script note of 2018: Presently I don’t believe this belongs to conspiratorial thinking] and the various crank theories of physics). All the ‘evidence’ for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.”
A successful scientific theory organizes masses of information into a coherent, well-tested narrative. When a theory has managed to explain the real world accurately enough for long enough, it becomes accepted as fact. Conspiracy theorists, Shermer points out, generally ignore the mass of evidence that supports the mainstream view and focus strictly on tiny anomalies. But, in a complex and messy world, the fact that there might be a few details we don’t yet understand should not be surprising.
A good example is the conspiracist fascination with the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. Since the 47-story tower was not hit by an airplane, only by the debris of the North Tower, investigators weren’t sure at first just how or why it collapsed hours after the attacks. A scientist (or for that matter, a journalist or historian) might see that gap in our knowledge as an opportunity for further research (see “WTC 7: Fire and Debris Damage,” page 53). In the conspiracy world, however, even a hint of uncertainty is a chance to set a trap. If researchers can’t “prove” exactly how the building fell, they say, then there is only one other possible conclusion: Someone blew it up.
♣
My comment:
Meigs’ afterword goes on for other ten pages but the excerpts quoted above give the picture: a psychological analysis of the truther mentality goes to the core to understand the movement. For instance, this “Someone blew WTC 7 up” is exactly what I call “paleologic” modes of mentation, and illustrated it with a classic example by a psychiatrist: “If the Greeks are afflicted by epidemics, it is because Phoebus wants to punish Agamemnon.” (“Paleologism” is the subject of some chapters of my book.)
Re the Scientific American statement about “holocaust denial” cited above even Mark Weber, a revisionist historian and current director of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) who has authored over a hundred articles relating to holocaust claims, has acknowledged that “it cannot be disputed” that “millions [of Jews] were forced from their homes; millions lost their lives” (listen the April 25, 2012 “Mark Weber Report: Holocaust Deceit, Remembrance and Reality”).
Contrary to what WN truthers claim, I believe that rejecting 9/11 conspiracy theories, and seriously considering the new approach to holocaust studies represented by Irmin Vinson, Mark Weber and David Irving are the mark of the mature nationalist.
A recent article about a psychiatric pill in the United Kingdom that “cures racism” elicited some lively comments at The Occidental Observer of which I’ll only reproduce a few:
Fender said…
“Why am I not surprised to see that such a ‘study’ should come out of England?” (Jarvis Dingle-Daden)
The Anglos are natural schemers and utopians, just like the tribe [the Jews]. That’s why they’ve been natural allies for the past four centuries. Along with the tribe, they feel they have a right to “improve” and rule over the world.
This is why I’m starting to believe that the Anglos, and to a lesser extent, the Western Europeans, need to be miscegenated out of existence by the lower races. They’re a downright dangerous race of people—basically the vicious bulldogs of the tribe, attacking anyone who stands up to them.
The Northern and Western European nations are hotbeds of Marxism, “antiracism,” and utopian thought. They’re a threat to Central and Eastern Europe, where many people have been immunized against Judaic nonsense due to their past histories with communism. We never, ever see studies like this [the search of an anti-racist psychiatric drug] coming from Russia, the Czech republic, Ukraine, etc. Estonia recently honored its SS heroes and its government actually prevented the dumb antifa from interfering. Tens of thousands of proud nationalists openly march the streets of Russia and Ukraine. The governments of Belarus and Hungary are explicitly pro-White. These are the governments and nations that the Anglo-Jewish power establishment wants to destroy.
This may offend some, but if the European races hope to survive, its most infected limbs need to be amputated. In my mind, this means the Anglos and Nordics. Both tribes are fiercely Marxist, universalist, and suicidal, and they cannot be allowed to take the rest of Europe down with them.
Bobby said…
Fender, I agree with you completely on the views you hold of the groups you mentioned. I have had a theory about this for quite a while now. Let me try it out on you.
After the disaster for Europe called World War II, most Europeans were devastated in a way that Americans cannot even imagine. War, or any aggression at all, became anathema to them. They became sick and tired of any conflict. So they decided to throw themselves fully into materialism. The factories of Europe started going and because of the Soviet and American distrust of each other a mere two to three years after the war, the U.S. quickly lost any “moralistic” ideas of punishing Germany any longer. Instead some money was pumped into Europe not out of any altruism, but for the practical purpose of helping to defend America’s interests.
So Western Europe experienced a boom in prosperity that it had never known in modern times. You could see this by the increase in car ownership, and the general state of better living. In fact, the German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, a trained economist, announced that concentrating on economics would be Germany’s salvation. All kinds of frivolous activities were engaged in and it continues. What I’m saying is that Western Europeans, unlike their poor and caged-in relatives in the East, became lazy, supermaterialistic, and confused.
The confusion was the result of the widespread leftist egalitarian teachings in almost every single university in Western Europe. And of course, along with this teaching went the usual guilt-trip that whites were the problem and need to repent and change the world, etc. The Western Eurocrats got away with pushing this stuff, because the economies of Europe were good and no one saw a reason to complain.
So, even though things are rapidly changing in Western Europe, due to economics and the left’s successes in preaching egalitarianism, [what] this sixty-plus year brainwashing and shangrilla Western Europe experienced is still the model in the minds of most Western Europeans, even though the paradigm is changing.
Things are most dangerous when an accepted paradigm no longer has relevance and a new one is about to emerge.
Hasbara Matata said…
Slavic superiority. Right.
The root of the problem with all Whites in this regard—being “liberal” [means] suicide—is Christianity. Like Marxism, which is Christianity’s twin that was born second, Christianity is proxy-Judaism; it makes us self-destructive, since we’ve internalized universalist kosher hokum along with a Jew as the savior and creator of the universe. Unfortunately, after 2000 years of Whites soaking their brains with Jewish myths, there are very few who are psychologically capable of accepting it.
It’s a lesson that even Kevin MacDonald himself needs to learn.
Fender said…
Apartheid was constructed because the WASPs thought that, deep down, blacks are just like them. Same thing with Manifest Destiny and colonialism: these never happened due to racial supremacism, but because WASPs thought savages can be civilized. Now the WASPs think White racialists are the savages, and that they too can be civilized, in their “altruism” they’re going to murder and oppress any Whites in their attempt to improve and civilize the world.
I’ll grant you that Slavs have a grin-and-bear-it mentality, but let’s not forget that the Jews needed to mass murder millions in the East to gain power while they took over the West without firing a shot.
Vened said…
Fender: I have an acquaintance. She and her parents were born in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). They left Rhodesia long time ago for obvious reasons. She still thinks that giving up that land to blacks was the right thing to do. She is of English descent. I see exactly the same Anglo mindset in the United States of America.
As an Eastern Slav, my blood boils watching Anglos abandoning North America…
Categories
Alexander the Great Alice Miller Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Archeology Carl Gustav Jung Carthage Child abuse Christendom Ethnic cleansing God Hojas Susurrantes (book) Holocaust Human sacrifice Infanticide Lloyd deMause Maxfield Parrish Mayas Neanderthalism Old Testament Philosophy of history Pre-Columbian America Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychohistory Psychology Stefan Zweig
Translation of pages 543-609 of “Hojas susurrantes”
Note of September 2017: I have removed this text because a slightly revised version of it is now available in print within my book Day of Wrath.
Categories
A break
Let’s take a break: not adding new entries to this blog for a couple of months in order to invite visitors to become familiar with a subject that has not been discussed adequately in the nationalist community.
I refer to the legal drugging of children, especially white boys, for purposes of social control, the subject of my previous post.
P.S. of February 21:
I have changed my mind. While it’s true that white nationalists are totally clueless about the fraudulent profession known as psychiatry, recent documentaries and online courses about the forthcoming energy and financial meltdown have moved me not to postpone any longer my next entry.
This text appears in Day of Wrath
______ 卐 ______
“An irrefutable hypothesis is a
sure-fire sign of a pseudoscience.”
—Terence Hines [1]
According to Ron Leifer, there have been four parallel critiques of psychiatry: Thomas Szasz’s conceptual and logical critique of the mental illness idea; Leifer’s own parallel critique of social control through psychiatry, Peter Breggin’s medical evaluation of the assaults on the brain with drugs, electroshock and lobotomy, and the cry of those who have been harmed by it.[2]
Another way to question the validity of psychiatry is to examine the scientific basis of biological psychiatry. This fifth parallel critique, which I would call the evaluation of the scientific status of psychiatry, takes psychiatry to task on its own theoretical base. Exponents of this late strategy have focused on the various bio-reductionist claims and logical fallacies in psychiatry;[3] on the dubious science behind psychopharmacology,[4] and on statistical analyses that show that poor countries with few psychiatric drugs called neuroleptics (“antipsychotics”) fare much better in the treatment of people in psychotic crisis than the rich countries.[5]
Here I will present an apparently innovative way to call into question the scientific status of biological psychiatry.
However odd it may seem, biopsychiatry has not been attacked from the most classic criteria to spot pseudosciences: Karl Popper’s test that distinguishes between real and false science, and the principle known as Occam’s razor. Both of these principles have been very useful in the debunking of paranormal claims,[6] as well as biological pseudosciences such as phrenology.
Mario Bunge, the philosopher of science, maintains that all pseudosciences are sterile. Despite of its multimillion-dollar sponsoring by the pharmaceutical companies, biological psychiatry remains a sterile profession today.[7] Despite its long history of biological theories since 1884 when Johann Thudichum, the founder of modern neurochemistry, believed the cause of madness were “poisons fermented in the body” to the current dopamine theory of schizophrenia, psychiatrists have been unable to find the biological cause of the major disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.[8]
This lack of progress was to be expected. If the biologicistic postulate on which psychiatry lays its foundational edifice is an error, that is to say, if the cause of mental disorders is not somatogenic but psychogenic, real progress can never occur in biological psychiatry; and the subject of mental disorders should not belong to medical science but to psychology.
Nancy Andreasen, the editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, the most financed and influential journal of psychiatry, recognizes in Brave New Brain, a book published in 2001, that:
• There has not been found any physiological pathology behind mental disorders;
• nor chemical imbalances have been found in those diagnosed with a mental illness;
• nor genes responsible for a mental illness have been found;
• there is no laboratory test that determines who is mentally ill and who is not;
• some mental disorders may have a psychosocial origin.[9]
A better proof of sterility in biopsychiatry can hardly be found. It is worth saying that a book reviewer tagged Andreasen’s book as “the most important psychiatry book in the last twenty years.”[10] The above points show us why, since its origins, psychiatry and neurology are separated.
Popper’s litmus test
While neurology deals with authentic brain biology, it is legitimate to ask whether psychiatry might be searching for a biological mirage.
In The Logic of Scientific Discovery philosopher of science Karl Popper tells us that the difference between science and pseudosciences lies in the power of refutability of a hypothesis.[11] Despite its academic, governmental and impressive financial backing in the private sector, psychiatry does not rest on a body of discoveries experimentally falsifiable or refutable. In fact, the central hypothesis in psychiatry, a biomedical entity called mental illness—say “schizophrenia”—cannot be put forward as a falsifiable or refutable hypothesis.
Let us consider the claim that psychiatrists use the drugs called neuroleptics to restore the brain chemical imbalance of a schizophrenic. A Popperian would immedia-tely ask the questions: (1) What is exactly a brain chemical imbalance? (2) How is this neurological condition recognized among those who you call schizophrenics and which lab tests are used to diagnose it? (3) Which evidence can you present to explain that the chemical imbalance of the so-called schizo-phrenic has been balanced as a result of taking the neuroleptic?
Before these questions the psychiatrist answers in such a way that he who is unfamiliar with the logic of scientific discovery will have great difficulties in detecting a trick. For instance, Andreasen has acknowledged that there have not been found biochemical imbalances in those diagnosed with a mental illness and that there is no laboratory test that determines who is mentally ill and who is not. That is to say, Andreasen is recognizing that her profession is incapable of responding to the second and third questions above. How, then, does she and her colleagues have convinced themselves that neuroleptics restore to balance the “chemically unbalanced” brains of schizophrenics? Furthermore, why does Andreasen have stated so confidently at the beginning of the section in Brave New Brain that addresses the question of what causes schizophrenia that the disorder “is not a disease that parents cause”?
Speaking in Popperian terms the answer is: by contriving a non-falsifiable or irrefutable hypothesis. In contrast to neurologists, who can demonstrate the physiopathology, histopathology or the presence of pathogen microorganisms, Andreasen and other psychiatrists recognize that they cannot demonstrate these biological markers (faulty genes or biochemical imbalances) that they postulate in the major disorders classified in the revised, fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV-TR. If they could do it, psychiatry as a specialty would have disappeared and its body of knowledge merged in neurological science. What psychiatrists do is to state that after almost a century of research in, for instance, schizophrenia, the medical etiology of the “disease” is still “unknown,” and they claim the same of many others DSM-IV behaviors.
As Thomas Szasz has observed, in real medical science physicians observe the pathological alterations in the organs, tissue, and cells as well as the microbial invasions, and the naming of the disease comes only after that. Psychiatry inverts the sequence. First it baptizes a purported illness, be it schizophrenia or any other, but the existence of a biological marker is never discovered, though it is dogmatically postulated.[12] A postulate is a proposition that is accepted without proof. Only by postulating that these disorders are basically genetic and that the environment merely plays a “triggering” role can psychiatrists justify to treat them by physical means. On the other hand, if neuroses and psychoses are caused by poor parenting and extreme parental abuse respectively, to treat them with drugs, electroshock or lobotomy only “re-victimizes” the victim.[13]
In the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed in the United States,[14] but since the advent of neuroleptics only about two hundred surgical lobotomies are performed each year in the world. About 100,000 people are being electro-shocked every year in the United States alone, many against their will.[15] North America consumes about 90 per cent of the world’s methylphenidate (“Ritalin”) for American and Canadian children. Many parents, teachers, politicians, physicians and almost all psychiatrists believe in these “medical model” treatments for unwanted behaviors in children and teenagers.
On the other hand, the “trauma model” is an expression that appears in the writings of non-biological psychiatrists such as Colin Ross. Professionals who work in the model of trauma try to understand neurosis and even psychosis as an injury to the inner self inflicted by abusive parenting.[16] As shown in the next essay of this book, the psyche of a child is very vulnerable to persistent abuse while in the process of ego formation. Some books of the proponents of the old existential and “schizophrenogenic” mother are still in print.[17] More recently, the books by Alice Miller have also become popular.[18] In a moving and yet scholarly autobiography John Modrow maintains that an all-out emotional attack by his parents caused a psychotic crisis in his adolescence.[19] Despite claims to the contrary, the trauma model of psychosis is still alive. Only in 2004 two academic books were released on the subject,[20] and in the Journal of Psychohistory Lloyd deMause still suggest that the gamut of mental disorders, from the dissociative states and psychoses of ancient times to the neuroses of today, are consequence of child abuse.[21]
Unfalsifiability
Let us take as an example an article published in a July 2002 Time magazine. The author used the case of Rodney Yoder, abused during his childhood and as adult hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Chester, Illinois. From the hospital Yoder undertook an internet campaign for his liberation. Catching on the favorite phrases of psychiatrists the Time writer tells us: “Scientists are decades away [my emphasis] from being able to use a brain scan to diagnose something like Yoder’s alleged personality disorders.”[22] In the same line of thinking, Rodrigo Muñoz, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association in the 1990s, stated in an interview: “We are gradually advancing to the point when we will be able [my emphasis] to pinpoint functional and structural changes in the brain that are related to schizophrenia.”[23] That is to say, psychiatrists recognize that at present they cannot understand a mental disorder through purely physical means, though they have enormous faith they will in the near future. Hence it is understandable what another psychiatrist told the Washington Post: “Psychiatric diagnosis is descriptive. We don’t really understand psychiatric disorders at a biological level.”[24] Psychiatrists only rely on conduct, not on the individual’s body, to postulate that there is a biological illness. Child psychiatrist Luis Méndez Cárdenas, the director of the only public psychiatric hospital in Mexico which specializes in committing children, told me in a 2002 interview: “Since the cause of any disorder is unknown, the diagnosis is clinical.”
More to the point, in February 2002 I debated psychiatrist Gerard Heinze, the director of the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría (the Mexican equivalent to the American National Institute of Mental Health or NIMH.) Arguing with Heinze I rose the question of the lack of biological markers in his profession. Heinze answered enumerating two or three diseases that medical science has not fully understood; he tried to make the point that mental disorders lie in this category of still incomprehensible diseases. For example, until 2006 the Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome, which makes some children start to age since their childhood, was an authentic biomedical disease of unknown etiology. But its existence was not controversial before 2006: it was enough to see the poor aged children to know that their problem was clearly somatic. On the other hand, diagnoses of the alleged psychiatric disorders are so subjective that their inclusion in the DSM has to be decided by votes in congresses of influential psychiatrists. Heinze’s point would not have strained my credulity to the breaking point if most of the 374 DSM-IV diagnoses were already proven biomedical illnesses with only a few of them remaining as mysterious diseases. But we are asked to believe that virtually all of the DSM behaviors are mysterious diseases “of unknown etiology”!
One last example related to a 2003 hunger strike of psychiatric survivors in Pasadena, California, who demanded scienti-fic proof of mental illness as a genuine biomedical disease, will illustrate this attitude.[25]
A demand of the hunger strikers was addressed to the American Psychiatric Association and the offices of the Surgeon General. Psychiatrist Ron Sterling dismissed the strikers’ demand for positive scientific proof describing the mental health field in the following way: “The field is like cardiology before cardiologists could do procedures like electrocardiograms, open-heart surgery, angiograms and ultrasound […]. Since brain structure and physiology are so complex, the understanding of its circuitry and biology are in its infancy.”[26] The Surgeon General Office did not even bother to respond. However, in a statement released in September 2003 the American Psychiatric Association conceded that:
Brain science has not advanced to the point where scientists or clinicians can point to readily discernible pathologic lesions or genetic abnormalities that in and of themselves serve as reliable or predictive biomarkers of a given mental disorder or mental disorders as a group… Mental disorders will likely be proven [my emphasis] to represent disorders of intracellular communication; or of disrupted neural circuitry.
The trick to be noticed in the above public statements is that psychiatrists, physicians all things considered, are stating that even though the etiology of mental disorders is unknown such etiology is, by definition, biological, and that it is only a matter of time that it will likely be proven. This is the hidden meaning of the code word “of unknown etiology.” By doing this psychiatrists dismiss in toto the work of the many researchers who have postulated a psychogenic origin of mental distress and disorders.
Although it is more parsimonious to consider a psychological cause for a mental disturbance that has no known biological markers, with its somatogenic dogma orthodox psychiatry ignores the simplest hypothesis, the model of trauma. To inquire into Yoder’s childhood, for instance, is axiomatically dismissed in a science that clings to only one hypothesis. In other words, by postulating unknown etiologies that will be discovered in the future by medical science—never by psychologists—, these physicians have presented us a biological hypothesis of mental disorders in such a way that, even if wrong, cannot be refuted.
If psychiatrists were true scientists they would present their biological hypo-thesis under the falsifiability protocol that Popper observed in hard sciences. Let us consider the hypothesis:
“At sea level water boils at 40º C.”
This is a scientific hypothesis in spite of the fact that the proposition is false (water does not boil at 40º but at 100º C). The hypothesis is scientific because it is presented in such a way that it just takes putting it to the test in our kitchen with a thermometer to see if it is true or not: if water does not boil at 40º C, the hypothesis is false.
In other words, according to Popper the scientific quality of a hypothesis does not depend on whether the hypothesis is true, but however paradoxical it may seem, it depends on whether the hypothesis may be refuted assuming it is false.
Thus the hypothesis that at present water boils at 40º C can be refuted: it is a scientific hypothesis. On the other hand, the hypothesis that schizophrenia and the other major mental disorders are biological and that this “will likely be proven,” the words of the American Psychiatric Association, cannot be refuted: it is not a scientific hypothesis. Against this biological hypothesis there is no possible evidence at present, that is, there is no empirical evidence that can show that the hypothesis is wrong.
This is the sure-fire sign of a pseudoscience.
Conclusion
A biopsychiatry that drugs millions of children with healthy brains is not a genuine science. True scientists, such as geologists or biologists, never postulate their central hypotheses as non-falsifiable hypotheses that “will likely be proven.” It is the futuristic stance of psychiatrists what gives the lie to the claim that their belief system is scientific.
A pseudo-science is a belief system that pretends to be scientific. Psychiatry is not the only biological pseudoscience, but it exhibits the same unequivocal signs of pseudoscience present in every system that pretends to be scientific. Other biological pseudoscientists such as phrenologists or the communist proponents of anti-Mendel genetics did not comply with the Popperian requirement of presenting their conjectures in falsifiable form either.
All pseudosciences, biological or paranormal, have four things in common. Just as its biological sisters (phrenology and anti-Mendel genetics) and its paranormal cousins (e. g., parapsychology and UFOlogy), psychiatry is a “science” that (1) presents its central hypothesis in a non-falsifiable way; (2) idolizes in perpetuity that sole hypothesis; (3) violates the economy principle by ignoring the more parsimonious alternative, and (4) is completely sterile. After decades of research neither phrenologists nor psychiatrists, para-psychologists or ufologists, have demons-trated the existence of the (alleged) pheno-mena they study.
In other words, psychiatrists do not have medical or scientific evidence to back their claims. Their own recognition that they cannot tell us anything about the above-mentioned question—with which lab tests do you diagnose this so-called neurological condition?—demonstrates that their schizophrenia hypothesis is unscientific. The same can be said of ADHD, bipolar “illness,” depression and the other major DSM disorders.
In a nutshell, psychiatry is not a science. Since the middle 1950s the lack of a mental health science in the medical profession has been compensated by an invasive marketing and the aggressive sales of psychiatric drugs by the pharmaceutical companies.[27]
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[1] Terence Hines, Pseudoscience and the paranormal: a critical examination of the evidence. New York: Prometheus Books, 1988, p. 2.
[2] Ron Leifer, “A critique of medical coercive psychiatry, and an invitation to dialogue,” Ethical Human Sciences and Services, 2001, 3 (3), 161-173 (the journal has been renamed Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry).
[3] Colin Ross & Alvin Pam, Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry: blaming the body. New York: Wiley & Sons, 1995.
[4] Elliot Valenstein, Blaming the brain: the truth about drugs and mental health. New York: Free Press, 1998.
[5] Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: bad science, bad medicine, and the enduring mistreatment of the mentally ill. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, 2001.
[6] The Committee for the Scientific Inquiry, that publishes the bimonthly Skeptical Inquirer and whose members included luminaries such as Martin Gardner, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, has been a think tank in the debunking of pseudosciences since 1976.
[7] Cf. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, a journal authored by a group of mental health professionals that specializes in debunking biopsychiatry.
[8] For a critical review of the dopamine theory of schizophrenia see for example Valenstein, Blaming the brain, pp. 82-89; Ross and Pam, Pseudoscience, pp. 106-109.
[9] Nancy Andreasen, Brave new brain: conquering mental illness in the era of the genome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
[10] Ty Colbert, book review in Ethical Human Sciences and Services, 2001, 3 (3), p. 213.
[11] Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Routledge, 2002, chapters 4 and 6 esp.
[12] See for example Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: medicine and politics in America. Connecticut: Praeger, 2001.
[13] César Tort, “Cómo asesinar el alma de tu hijo” in Hojas Susurrantes, Lulu distributors, 2016.
[14] As to date Whitaker’s Mad in America is the most readable exposé I know of the darkest period in American psychiatry.
[15] Ibid.
[16] See for example Silvano Arieti, Interpretation of schizophrenia. New Jersey: Aronson, 1994. Originally published in 1955, this celebrated treatise is worth revisiting.
[17] See for example Ronald Laing, The divided self: an existential study in sanity and madness (Selected works of R.D. Laing, 1). New York: Routledge, 1999.
[18] E.g., Alice Miller, Breaking down the wall of silence: the liberating experience of facing painful truth. New York: Dutton, 1987.
[19] John Modrow, How to become a schizophrenic: the case against biological psychiatry. New York: Writers Club Press, 2003.
[20] Colin Ross, Schizophrenia: an innovative approach to diagnosis and treatment. New York: Haworth Press, 2004. See also John Read, Loren Mosher and Richard Bentall, Models of madness. New York: Routledge, 2004.
[21] See e.g., Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of the Psyche and Society” in The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Other Press, 2002.
[22] John Cloud, “They call him crazy,” Time, 15 July 2002.
[23] Rodrigo Muñoz, quoted in Jeanette De Wyze, “Still crazy after all these years,” San Diego Weekly Reader, 9 January 2003.
[24] Thomas Laughren, quoted in Shankar Vedantam, “Against depression, a sugar pill is hard to beat: placebos improve mood, change biochemistry in majority of trials of antidepressants,” Washington Post, 6 May 2002.
[25] Fred Baughman, Peter Breggin, Mary Boyle, David Cohen, Ty Colbert, Pat Deegan, Al Galves, Thomas Greening, David Jacobs, Jay Joseph, Jonathan Leo, Bruce Levine, Loren Mosher and Stuart Shipko, “15 December 2003 reply by scientific panel of the Fast for Freedom in Mental Health to the 26 September statement by the American Psychiatric Association.” (I read this article at the beginning of 2004 in mindfreedom.org.)
[26] Ron Sterling, “Hoeller does a disservice to professionals,” op-ed rebuttal, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9 September 2003.
[27] Valenstein, Blaming the brain (op. cit.).