Rosh Hashanah, the advent of humanity

Somebody told me recently that Rosh Hashanah marks God's creation of Adam and Eve, the beginning of humanity. I have celebrated the Jewish High Holidays for most of my life, but this was the first time I ever heard that. I knew Rosh Hashanah glibly as "the Jewish New Year." 

Human beings were made in God's image, meaning they can create and choose and love, and they are basically immortal. If we think about this every year on Rosh Hashanah, we do ourselves a big favor. We are not bio-machines, or brains, or mechanical things defined and bound by physical laws. The Abrahamic religious traditions are all completely contrary to psychiatry's apotheosis of the brain and the modern tendency to view an individual as a physical body.

Eastern spiritual traditions are a bit more obscure to most Americans, but psychiatry remains intractably opposed to all religions, or alternatively it is an exclusive religion itself. Attempts to study the mind as a medical subject, or to treat mentally caused ills by medical means, are universally blasphemous.

Rosh Hashanah is a time of rejoicing, but also a call for serious introspection. It celebrates the completion of another year while we take stock of our life going forward. The shofar call reminds us of the binding of Isaac and the people's covenant with God.

Despite our shameful dalliance with psychiatry, we can return to the best in ourselves, to what we know in our hearts, to loving our fellow beings.

L'Shana Tova!

The AMA and Illinois' psychiatric plantations

I've been criticizing or disparaging the American Medical Association recently, mostly for their apparent (to me) complicity in re-stimulating the horribly destructive phenomenon of psychedelic drug use for medical cures and spiritual salvation. However, I should hasten to outline the connection of American medical orthodoxy to the recognizable formal institutions of psychiatric slavery.

I have never been any official enemy of the AMA, despite the organization's record (of which I have limited details myself) beginning in the 1950's, of harassing my religious community and its founder.

Perhaps the bottom line is only that during a certain period of time in the Twentieth Century, like many others in America and throughout the West, allopathic medical practitioners became too arrogant.

I remember my own grandfather, who was a renowned general surgeon in Flint, Michigan, as being a humble man despite common adoration he received from the community. As a teenager, my dad could be stopped for speeding 50 mph over the limit and the cop, seeing the name on the driver's license, would immediately ask if he was related to Dr. Kretchmar. When he admitted he was Dr. Kretchmar's son, he'd get off with a warning because the cop's mother's emergency gall bladder surgery had gone so well.

My mother recalled in her aged infirmity that her father-in-law always tried to remind people, "We (doctors) don't know everything, and we cannot control everything people want us to control." Just yesterday, my wife and I finally scattered my mother's ashes after keeping them on a shelf for seven years.

There was also a girl whom I had loved but decided not to marry, almost a lifetime ago. Going forward through the years, of course I lost touch with her. But I did know that at some point she had gone to work at AMA headquarters in Chicago. Recently I was in that building on a research errand and I asked the very pleasant lady who was assisting me in archives if she had ever heard of my long-ago paramour. To my surprize, she did know of her, but didn't think she worked for AMA any longer. Nevertheless, the connection somehow made me happy as I was leaving.

The bottom line is, I've never had a personal categorical animus against the AMA. But what other organization can be said to represent American doctors in their validation of psychiatry? The AMA formally accepted psychiatry as a medical specialty in 1934, when it approved the creation of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN). Psychiatry was one of the first specialties to be organized under an emerging system of specialty boards, which were overseen in part by the AMA and later the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). That formal acceptance encouraged state legislatures to allow psychiatrists to use legal force to recruit "patients", because in theory that force was "help". But in actual fact, psychiatry never provided benefits like real medicine. Unlike real medicine, it always caused net harm. And more fundamentally, "help" that goes unrecognized as such by the supposed  beneficiary simply is not help. Things can be intended as help; but if intentions fail, they do not change a harmful result.

Courts have come to accept anything written about a mental patient, even whether the writer is called a doctor or a security guard, nurse, social worker, etc., as valid evidence from a medical record. When the patient protests that a report is untrue, he/she is discredited as, after all, "mentally ill." The way it works is, anyone who doesn't agree they are mentally ill thereby conclusively proves whatever "diagnosis" a state psychiatrist has slandered them with; there is no other or any better proof of any disorder in the DSM.

As I wrote in the very first article I ever published on this blog, psychiatrists in state institutions are confused about whether they are healers, jailors, or overall experts in sociology and law; and patients don't know why they are there or how to get out. Nobody's happy about it, and the public who foot the bill don't want to see, hear, or speak about the evil that's going on under a very thin guise of medically "treating" bad behavior, poor thinking and unpleasant emotions. Almost unbelievable failures of judgment bring us such preposterous policies as J. B. Pritzker's recently celebrated "universal mental health screening" mandate for all Illinois public school children. (This will never actually happen, but much money and good will certainly will be squandered on useless attempts to make it happen.)

The real issue is the difference between helping a person and controlling a person. Psychiatry has attempted to erase any line between the two actions and confuse them. The result is everyone suspects all offers of help, because from their clear experience, offers of help mostly threaten cruel betrayal. "Here, take this pill to correct the chemical imbalance in your brain, and cure your depression." (Oops, there goes your sexuality, and when you stop taking the pills, you'll be tortured by withdrawal!) "Here, we'll just shoot electricity through your brain and you'll feel better." (Oops, there goes your memory, your whole identity!) "Here, trip with psychedelics, you'll have amazing revelations about yourself and the world." (Oops, bad trip, now you're insane and you can never go back, so believe in me and let's have sex!")

I've written many times, and I continue to write almost every day, that coercion in mental health care is a fundamental insult to both scientific medicine and rational law. It degrades and undermines the most important bases of civilized society. Every intelligent person knows this instinctively, which is precisely why the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code is nearly as voluminous as the tax code: complexity is spawned by lies. We lie to each other and ourselves when we pretend we can help people by forcing them to take drugs they don't want and forcing them to say they believe things they don't believe. Minds are not changed by medicine, only bodies are. Brains cannot be minds, even by the best Twentieth Century mystical apotheosis.

Doctors are commonly presumed to be smart people. They had to go to college, and get into medical school, and go through long medical internships and residencies, and pass licensing exams, right? That proves they are smart, and we should all listen to them. But intelligence is really the ability and the constant, disciplined habit of discerning truth in microcosms and in the macrocosm. When a smart person starts lying, they lose intelligence very rapidly. Soon enough, they must resort to force in dealing with their fellows and the world.

Maybe the AMA started lying a lot, to recruit the force of the law in favor of their members' profession. Maybe they had to put a thumb on the scales of justice when they were afraid to admit, as my grandfather freely did, that doctors don't know everything and can't control as much as we all wish they could, to make us happy and immortal.

But the AMA's lies helped to bring us Elgin Mental Health Center, and Chester, Packard, Choate, Alton, Chicago-Read, and Madden: the whole plantation system of psychiatric slavery in Illinois! James Baker in Master Malis-with-malice's chains. Countless unknown, damaged people, and unmeasurable shame.

I am an abolitionist. I'll happily tear down part of what the AMA built.

The American Medical Association (AMA) on LSD

I've recently written about the Journal of the AMA and their apparently favorable view of current prospects that LSD will cure anxiety. There has been unusually strong interest in this. My September 5, 2025 article has received more views than anything I've written in quite a while, and I've noticed recent referrals from websites of the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, MIT, UCLA, USC, University of Colorado, UC/San Diego, and Yale.

This attention from relatively elite academic circles inspired me to research a bit more on the AMA's history in connection to psychedelics. It turns out to be an interesting subject. 

A quick synopsis has the AMA and its publications as not hostile to LSD from the end of the 1940s throughout 1950s, when psychiatrists were experimenting with psychedelic and psycholytic therapies. JAMA published a number of articles describing LSD research, mainly focusing on psychiatry, alcoholism, and the biology of hallucinations, as well as the potential of LSD as a promising research tool for simulating schizophrenia. 

Articles in JAMA and affiliated publications highlighted both the potential insights that LSD provided and its risks. The AMA’s general stance during this period was to support controlled, clinical use in psychiatric research, but not public or unsupervised use. This corresponds with my own research for a history thesis in the 1990s. Celebrity nutritionist Adelle Davis (writing under the pseudonym "Jane Dunlap") and her social circle seemed to cling to a belief that early LSD research was legitimate and respectable, even though it was secretive and obviously controlled by military and intelligence psychological warfare interests.

By the early 1960s, LSD escaped the laboratory. Figures like Timothy Leary popularized it, and use quickly spread to college campuses and youth counterculture. The AMA began raising concerns about safety issues (bad trips, psychotic breaks, accidents), the lack of standardized medical protocols, and increasing recreational use outside medical supervision. By 1966, the AMA released statements warning against unsupervised use and supporting tighter regulation. JAMA editorials described LSD as both a valuable research tool and a serious danger if misused. 

In short, this paragon of medical orthodoxy was happy to toe the line that we know was laid down by the CIA from the early 1950s straight through the Haight-Ashbury hippie era, and continuing into the more recent "war on drugs" decades. Now in the 2020s,  JAMA ostentatiously pushes the agenda of MindMed, "a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel product candidates to treat brain health disorders..." (ticker symbol MNMD; contact Chris Brinzey, Investor Relations ICR Westwicke, ir@mindmed.co).

It simply means LSD for general anxiety, LSD for the multitudes, LSD for kids, LSD for the world!

Who's behind the scenes now? Plus ça change.

JAMA Psychiatry: "Turn on, tune in and drop out."

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a chronic condition marked by persistent, excessive anxiety and difficulty controlling everyday worries. GAD is one of the most common psychiatric disorders with a past-year prevalence among US adults of approximately 10%.

This is evidently why JAMA Psychiatry could be on board with dosing 35 million Americans with LSD. The authoritative on-line publication currently features a study by a dozen authors, nine of whom are affiliated with MindMed, the company which describes itself for investors as "...a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel product candidates to treat brain health disorders." LSD is their novel product, merely renamed and not much re-branded, as "MM120, lysergide-D tartrate."

MindMed is listed on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol MNMD. The stock traded as high as $150 per share in 2017, but is currently quoted at about $9.25.

Back in May, 2021, the company announced a partnership with the Chopra Foundation of Deepak Chopra, "...to educate and build public awareness around the use of psychedelic medicines to treat mental illness." Chopra claims that a person may attain perfect health, a condition completely free from disease, to never feel pain, and not age or die. MindMed's vision of LSD is similar, seeing the drug as a panacea, not only to treat GAD, but also for depression, post traumatic stress, fear of dying, addiction, personality disorders, pain relief, and even spiritual troubles.

If this sounds more like Haight-Ashbury 1967, than Twenty-first Century scientific medicine, that's because it is. Calling acid "MM120" doesn't change the fact that when you take it, you become psychotic for at least eight hours. Back in the day, LSD was officially known to psychiatrists as a "psychotomimetic" drug, literally meaning that its effects mimic psychosis. It was also considered a weapon of psychological warfare by the CIA, and praised as "dynamite" by Richard Helms and Sid Gottlieb. 

MindMed's "medicine" for GAD is not a different drug, it is LSD. It breaks apart and scrambles the pieces of a mind, so that some expert who knows better than ordinary humans can then install another mind in its place. In over 180 press releases since 2021, MindMed has never cited science which explains their project in any terms clearer than that.

JAMA Psychiatry now becomes a co-conspirator with some of the most notorious human rights criminals in history, and a contributor to the harm that will be wrecked upon the American public and culture by psychiatric use of psychedelic drugs.

They publish MindMed's dark "clinical study" but instantly refuse my comments on the ethical dilemmas of antipsychotic medications.

And we can be sure they'll never admit why.

JAMA Psychiatry and ethics

JAMA Psychiatry is the American Medical Association's Journal for and about the medical specialty of Psychiatry. It's as psychiatrically orthodox as any media source is likely to be. I subscribe because I want to know, and I consider it my job to know, what orthodox psychiatrists are thinking.

This morning I received an email copy of the September, 2025 on-line issue (Vol. 82, No. 9) of JAMA Psychiatry, which includes an opinion article entitled, "Ethical Dilemmas of Antipsychotic Medication Discontinuation," by Helene Speyer, Ph.D., John Lysaker, Ph.D., and David Roe, Ph.D. The authors hail from (respectively) the Mental Health Center of Copenhagen Hospital, the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta, and the Department of Community Mental Health at the University of Haifa.

The opening statement of fact in this article is:

Individuals diagnosed with psychotic conditions frequently attempt to discontinue antipsychotic medication, with varying levels of professional support. Between 2 and 5 years after a first episode of psychosis, 90% either discontinue antipsychotic medications entirely or receive very low maintenance doses, and over a 20-year treatment period, they make an average of 9 attempts to discontinue medication.

The authors argue that the framework for the therapeutic relationship in treating psychosis should perhaps evolve away from the current "shared decision-making (SDM)" model to one of "shared deliberation." They say this would show respect for patient autonomy and well being, and for sharing the risks and responsibilities of treatment decisions. Surely, anyone might surmise that when 90% of patients avoid treatment or attempt to discontinue medications, some soul-searching is appropriate. 

In 24 years of advocacy and legal representation of involuntary psychiatric patients, I have never known anyone who actually wanted the treatment they were receiving at the hands of the State of Illinois. They frequently say they know it's necessary, but they desperately want a future when it won't be required. In fact, they only understand that their treatment helps in terms of avoiding more, or more severe, incarceration or punishment.

Well silly me. I naively expected that the editors at JAMA Psychiatry might be interested in my perceptions from my own years of close professional involvement in this system. I wrote a comment on the article by Speyer, et al., saying in part that mental health is probably the most fundamental profession that exists, and that healing and control are both legitimate (although different) activities in complex human communities. I did honestly believe that the authors' suggestion for "shared deliberation" was constructive for purposes of ethical analysis. I don't think I belittled anything the authors of the article had written. I basically agreed with them, and said so.

Nevertheless, I received a brief email very quickly (before 8:00 AM), saying the editors had decided not to publish my comment, and referring me to their on-line commenting policy. I thanked them for such an expeditious decision, but asked whether they might elaborate or suggest how my comment might have conflicted with the policy they referred me to. So far they have not been as quick to explain as they were to just say forget it, we don't want your thoughts in our publication.

Perhaps the only reason my comments conflicted with the on-line commenting policy of JAMA Psychiatry was by my disclosure of a potential conflict of interest: I told them that I am a lifelong Scientologist, and I don't believe the study of mind and the healing of mentally caused ills ought to be condoned in nonreligious fields (e.g., medicine). But the article I was commenting about was overtly, or perhaps even ostentatiously, about "ethical dilemmas." One might think views from disparate religious orientations could be relevant.

One doesn't have to be a Scientologist to intelligently consider ethics in a context of mental health, although I would say it certainly helps.

Maybe the editors of JAMA Psychiatry just aren't very good at it.

Psychedelics: psychiatry becomes (bad) religion

Mary Carreón, the Editor-in-Chief of DoubleBlind Magazine's email newsletter, asked a revealing question yesterday: "(S)hould a priest really lose his collar for trying to deepen his connection to God?"

She was referring to the formal deposition (removal from the priesthood) of Rev. Hunter Priest, the Episcopalian cleric who participated in a Johns Hopkins psychedelic study and later left his pulpit to found a "Christian Psychedelic" not-for-profit advocacy group called Legare. I wrote about this recently.

When confronted with arguments like those of my Episcopal priest sister--namely that trying to deepen one's connection with God by using drugs is quite un-Christian, often illegal, and perhaps blasphemous--psychedelic drug advocates fall back to a "scientific-medical" framework, saying that so much human misery might be alleviated if only they were allowed to do research. But the "research" they end up conducting when they are allowed to do so always looks more like (very dark) religion, not science. This has been true since the 1950's.

Jules Evans offers what might be a preview of horrifying, random and unpredictable violence that will call up memories of Jonestown and the Manson murders, which we may see rise out of popularity of psychedelics with elite special forces military personnel who have become a "Fort Bragg Cartel." One story features 82nd Airborne paratrooper Enrique Roman-Martinez, who liked LSD so much he had it tattooed on his arm. He went camping with some military buddies in Fort Bragg, they dropped acid, he had a bad trip and disappeared. His head turned up floating in a lake the next day, apparently chopped off with an axe. His body was never found and his death is still unsolved.

Besides such horror shows, a massive increase in sexual abuse under guises of mental therapy is also predictable. Various mainstream and psychiatric/psychological media have commented about this risk.

So we are looking forward to dark insanity, and less trust of professionals claiming to cure it: not exactly the road to salvation imagined generations ago by Timothy Leary and Adelle Davis. When Mary Carreón writes of a deepening connection to God, maybe she means the Other Guy.

It's good that the Priest lost his collar. Let's throw some psychs in jail, too.

Rick Perry, traumadelics, my sister the priest

Wow! We could have had an ibogaine freak for President.... The great hope for a "trauma-free" utopia engineered through neurochemistry is inspiring a whole new "traumadelic" culture.... And one Episcopal clergyman was just booted for (perhaps) looking for the living in a place of the dead. As the Wicked Witch of the West once said (while she was melting), "What a world, what a world!"

Boundaries collapse: politics, medicine, religion, and personal exploration become ridiculously scrambled. Psychedelic revivalism, a widening impulse for radical social change, and deep-seated confusion or disillusionment with authority suggests Yeats' falcon and falconer.

Indeed psychedelic drugs, originally understood as psychotomimetics, make minds fall apart and obliterate people's centered understanding for dealing with the world. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry has lately made research into ibogaine his life's mission and publicly declared himself to be the "Johnny Appleseed of ibogaine." But in 2006 he believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and eternal consignment of non-Christians to hell. It might be said that whatever carefully constructed utility and truth Perry's mind was once centered on while he was an evangelical Christian has clearly fallen apart. He may believe he was only brain-injured by football and a farm accident, and various researchers have suggested that psychedelics are like "vitamins" for neurogenesis. But it's hard to not suspect that Perry's earlier faith simply wasn't effective for solving mental and emotional troubles. So he adopted a new faith, in ibogaine and the complexities of brain function, to replace his ineffective Christianity.

This is not unprecedented in American history. In the mid-Twentieth Century, LSD was a sacrament for the youth counter-culture. Celebrity nutritionist Adelle Davis admitted that she experimented with it (on herself as well as her 13-year-old son and his friends) in hopes of "finding chemical Christianity," to counter the hot breath of atheistic Communism in the world. Adelle was at least briefly quite convinced she had attained a true spiritual breakthrough. 

A century before that, the three largest Protestant churches in the United States split down the middle and elected to foment a most destructive war, because their common faith in Jesus apparently didn't solve the issue of slavery. The northern and southern divisions of the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians hated each other with such a vengeance as only siblings in faith could have conjured.

American Evangelical Protestantism was replaced by modern medicine and the apotheosis of the brain, as the motivating theology for the Twentieth Century. The currently emerging (or re-emerging) traumadelic model for mental health is based in this theology. Supposedly, everyone must realize he or she is a victim of childhood challenges, which will necessarily disable each person in the absence of some kind (different, depending on who you ask) of "therapy," whether it be psychedelic drugs or an eccentric, mystical talking cure, or most likely, a combination of the two. The essential point is that people must surrender personal agency to their expert betters (usually medical doctors), and the state must give those expert betters more legal power and pay them better than it currently does. A corollary point holds that only these same expert betters should be allowed to evaluate whether or not any particular "therapy" works.

It's difficult to predict how this cultural phase will wind down for humanity. Psychedelic-assisted therapy students and patients were left in the lurch and investors lost millions of dollars when psychedelic companies began to contract or collapse, especially in the wake of the FDA's refusal to approve MDMA (aka, Ecstasy) for treatment of PTSD. With the triumphant return of Donald Trump, the whole "wounded child" personality archetype is suddenly disfavored, and non-military, non-law-enforcement projects are not as easily funded as they once were. Since the pandemic, nobody even trusts doctors.

I have a sister who became an Episcopal priest late in life. When we were in college together, she took LSD, and I never did. Her husband (since divorced) has told me that she was a major enthusiast. I've recently corresponded with her about the so-called "psychedelic renaissance," figuring her perspective as both a former acid head and more recently a member of the clergy would be unique. She assured me that she was entirely appalled by the suggestion that any faithful Episcopalian would ever believe they can use psychedelic drugs for spiritual gain. I was surprised, because the literature of the "renaissance" is replete with that exact purpose, and I would have expected that Episcopalians would not be immune to its appeal.

The Episcopal Church did not formally split between north and south in the Nineteenth Century the way the three Protestant denominations did, although there was still a lot of acrimony over the slavery issue. Episcopalianism is a Catholic faith, and therefore, more characterized by top-down authority. However, this issue of psychedelic drugs for spiritual benefit does not find unanimity among the Episcopal flock. A priest named Hunter Priest was recently deposed for "Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy" because he refused to abandon his advocacy as a founder of the non-profit Ligare, which describes itself as "a Christian psychedelic society," and for his public participation in a Johns Hopkins psilocybin clergy study. For his part, Priest is unrepentant, arguing that "...several Episcopal Church bishops, as well as many clergy, seminary professors, and laypeople from multiple denominations have expressed how important they believe (his psychedelic) work is."

My sister says she thinks it's a good thing that this guy is no longer a member of the clergy. But psychedelic drugs are an issue that is not resolved by Christian theology, even as slavery was not resolved before Grant accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox and Sherman burned Columbia to the ground; until Lincoln lay dead from the assassin's bullet to his brain and every drop of blood drawn with the lash was paid by another drawn with the sword.

Somebody said people are not spiritual beings, they are white or black bodies; they are brains, biological machines: mechanisms pure and simple, objects explainable and controllable with no reference to any concept of soul. This was the falsehood to turn us against each other. It was a lie by a psychiatrist.

As the creed of my Church states, we believe that the study of the Mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields.