“The Chicago River?”

I got a couple of good reviews on my post about Nahuatl and mental health, so I’ll follow up on that success with something else from a recent text chain.

This one is a conversation with a very good friend and exceptional glass artist, Marlene Rose. My wife and I have had dinner with Marlene and her husband Thomas, in Chicago, a number of times. So it came as a surprise to me that she could be oblivious to the unique geography and significance of our area, even though she probably has never lived in the Midwest, and Thomas is (I think, and my uncertainty about that is another aspect of this story!) South African.

Marlene did a glass piece for us to replace art we’d had for many years which was destroyed by extreme vibrations from a construction project next door.

I sent her the picture to show where we had put her work, and she loved it, but responded to my text by asking, “What is the body of water in front of your house — is that the Chicago River?”

We laughed on this end of the text line, with a reaction that was basically, How could anyone be so stupid?

Many years ago, my wife was explaining to her Disney client Michael Eisner that she had to miss a meeting because we were moving that day. He asked where we were moving, and she told him to the beach in a Chicago suburb. He responded by asking, “Now, what body of water is your new house on?” Once again: Hahaha! Michael Eisner is so rich and powerful in Hollywood, but he’s frickin’ clueless!

The point is not what things people know or should know, but rather our reaction of estrangement. Marlene’s husband Thomas, with whom I’ve had wonderful discussions about history, might be equally disgusted with me, for not distinguishing easily and automatically between people from South Africa, England, Scotland, Ireland or Australia. I mean, they all speak English with a cool accent, right?

When people don’t acknowledge or understand realities that are close to us, especially when we cherish those realities as beautiful or important, we tend to “other” the people. We laugh at them or even feel they are somehow a bit less human.

In my text exchange with Marlene, I felt a strong need to educate her. I sent her pictures of Lake Michigan looking totally calm, like glass all the way to the horizon (which is illusory), and looking like the ocean, and I explained how the difference is all due to wind direction. I texted pictures of our beach in winter, when it closely resembles Antarctica. I recited statistics like 321 miles to the Straits of Mackinaw and 20% of the world’s fresh water.

She was politely impressed, but I still suspected that she didn’t truly get it.

Well! People know and create different things, right? How could my relationship to an aspect of the physical world (Lake Michigan) be of the same order of emotional significance as my friendship with living people?! Now that question really is a wonderful challenge.

When psychiatrists discover that their “patients” (sorry, I really do have to keep the word inside sarcastic quotation marks!) have unusual or obnoxious points of view, or don’t want to take “medication” (again sorry, but...) and don’t accept the mental health/illness orthodoxy, they are not reacting much differently on an individual level, than my wife and I do to clueless non-midwesterners.

Of course, there is one difference that’s huge.

Psychiatrists are legally empowered to force people to adopt their worldview, whereas I have no such authority for encouraging appreciation of the Lake Michigan shore in the dead of winter.

I think the only possible reconciliation could come from better understanding of the difference between our love for people, and our love for objects or places.

Nahuatl and Mental Health

My wife and daughter were texting to each other this morning. We have a running, group "family text" that seven of us use mostly to say things about the Cubs, or to advocate for vacation plans or purchases, and argue or kid around in a good-natured but competitive way, so I was privy to the back and forth between these two, as one of them was on a train and the other at home with little kids. The combination of auto-correct, casual language, and pressured, multi-tasked typing often produces pretty funny results...

Wife: Nahuatl so you k ow the cleaning. People are coming between 10 and 11?
Wife: Just so you know. My phone typed a weird non word

Daughter: Hahaha
Daughter: Are cleaning people coming between 10 and 11?

Wife: Yep.

Daughter: Oh wow. Okay.
Daughter: Good to know.

Wife: Yep. That's why I texted you.

Daughter: Cool! No prob. Well then you texted it was a weird word so I was confused.

(At this point, I interjected...)

Dad: Btw guys, Nahuatl is not "a weird word".
Dad: You offend Native Americans by saying that.

Wife: What does the word mean?

Daughter: Aztecs
Daughter: They are dead dad

Wife: I did not mean to offend anyone or use that word at all

Daughter: Lol
Daughter: We know that mom

Dad: It's a language for godssakes, and a whole remnant culture that partly survived despite the horrible racist depravities of Cortez and other Eurocentric ignoramuses like (daughter) who want to celebrate the arrogant illusion that we were able to kill them all centuries ago.
Dad: 😂😂😂

Daughter: Haha
Daughter: Now we are all educated.

This was highly entertaining to me, partly because my daughter is as educated as I am, especially in the humanities and pre-modern history, and I was surprised when she apparently didn't know the word Nahuatl. She's also quite a bit to the left of me politically, so this was a rare opportunity for me to accuse her of political incorrectness!

But later I started thinking about the historical fact that Nahuatl had actually survived the overwhelming onslaught at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, of European guns, germs and steel. The language of the Aztecs gave us "tomato", "avocado", "chocolate", "coyote" and many other common names for things the conquistadores were encountering for the first time as they tore down the native temples in Mexico with their full and holy Christian zeal. I've read a half dozen books about the Conquest, and I believe it was one of the most fascinating events in recorded history.

One of the reasons the Conquest fascinates me is, the more you read about it, the more it seems almost impossible in retrospect. The Aztec empire was fabulously rich, with spectacularly developed arts and technologies, and a capital city with a larger population in its day than London, Paris and Madrid combined. The real story of exactly how a few hundred white Castilians took down Montezuma's empire in a couple years is so unlikely that it would never be believed as fiction.

But what's more pertinent to the funny text conversation transcribed above, is the equally unlikely fact that a couple million people still speak Nahuatl as their native language in our 21st Century world of nuclear energy, space vacations, molecular machines, social media and pocketable terabytes! The Aztec empire was utterly obliterated in the 1520's. The religion of the Sun God was expunged from the world, and the people were forcibly converted to Christianity. The suppression of the native culture was overwhelming. Within a generation, the entire New World was ruled by the iron fist of Spain, exploited for its gold and slave labor.

So we have a truly inexplicable, violent and inhuman historical event (Cortez's Conquest), absolutely connected to the unlikely survival of a remnant language (Nahuatl), as an almost negligible totem of a civilization that was vanquished centuries ago and that virtually disappeared from the earth. The great temples of Tenochtitlan are not even visible in the modern landscape of Mexico City, but about the same number of people speak Montezuma's tongue as ever did. Who predicts such strange contradictions?

I wonder whether obliteration of the American Psychiatric Association, the empire of medicalized "mental health" and the DSM, might come as unexpectedly as the demise of the Aztecs. I also know many people, probably the majority of humanity, continue to speak native languages of spirituality more naturally than those of science. Hundreds of years from now, the psychiatric idea that an individual is a mechanism, pure and simple, explainable and controllable with no reference to any concept of soul, might be just as gone as Montezuma's Sun God.

History is almost always an obscure allegory for any purpose of prediction and planning. It's a parable with hidden meanings or many alternate meanings. But it sure does tell us that strange things do happen.

SLOUCHING, Part 14 (Bibliography)

Sources and Bibliography:

Interviews

Fans of Adelle Davis (conversations in person or by phone) — Jacquelyn Meyers, George Meyers, Tom Meyers, Mary Anne Ahmad, Fazil Ahmad, Sue Strzuski, Sean Allen, Colin Thorne, Linda Sarkovich, Cathey True, Cheryl Berman, Robert Berman, Alan Nadolna, Sue Averill, Robert Furniss, Prof. John Rowe, Sarah Wells, Jesse Wells, Charles Uslander, Paddy Cunningham, Annie Cunningham, Steve Pinaire, Ray Boland, Jim Fisher, Diane Fisher, Peter Nelson, Pam King, Toni Shrambanis, Roger Akayama, Kathy Norman, Diane Stein, Jeanne Hornes, Jim Arnold, Sarah Arnold, Bill Penninger, Robert Bein, Betsy Bein, Tom Dickson, Sherry Dickson, Beverley Kretchmar, Lauran Kretchmar, Robert Pifke, Lauran Pifke, Greg Schoononver, Michel Schoonover, Pam Peterson, Linda Kravitz, David Kravitz:
September, 1997 - May, 1998

“John” of the Albert Hofmann Foundation in Los Angeles (by phone):
April 15, 1998

Leisey, George (by phone):
December 26, 1997
April 2, 1998
April 16, 1998
April 30, 1998

Saxon, Wolfgang (by phone):
April 28, 1998

Books:

Abramson, Harold A., M.D. The Use of LSD In Psychotherapy: Transactions of a Conference on d-Lysergic Acid Dyethylamide (LSD-25), April 22, 23, and 24, 1959, Princeton, NJ: The Josiah Macy Junior Foundation, 1960.

Berle, Adolf A., Jr. Tides of Crisis: A Primer of Foreign Relations. New York: Reynaldo & Company, 1957.

Bloom, Alexander and Wini Breines. “Takin’ it to the streets,” A Sixties Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Bryon, George S. The Spy in America. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1943.

Burrough, Bryan. Vendetta: American Expess and the Smearing of Edmund Sara. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Cassidy, Neal. The First Third & Other Writings. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1971.

Cholden, Louis, MD., ed. Proceedings of the Round Table on Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and Mescaline in Experimental Psychiatry, Held in the Annual  Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 12, 1955. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1956.

Cohen, Sidney, MD. The Beyond Within, The LSD Story. New York, Atheneum, 1968.

Colby, William and Peter Forbath. Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. London: Hutchinson, 1978.

Cook, Blanche Wiesenthal. The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

Davies, Philip H.J. The British Secret Services. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996.

Davis, Adelle. Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954.

________. Let’s Have HealthChildren. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959.

________. Let’s Get Well. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.

Debold, Richard and Russell C. Leaf, eds.  LSD, Man & Society. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.

Dulles, Eleanor Lansing. Chances of a Lifetime: A Memoir. Engleweeod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980.

Dunlap, Jane. Exploring Inner space: Personal Experiences Under LSD-25. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961.

Edelman, Bernard, ed. Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Felix, Christopher. A Short Course in the Secret War. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1963.

Forcey, Charles.  The Crossroads of Liberalism: Carolyn, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Fox, Richard Wightman and T.J. Jackson Lear’s, eds. The Power of Culture, Critical Essays in American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Garber, Marjorie and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism & Fifties America. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Grose, Peter. Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. New York: Hougton Mifflin, 1994.

Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.

Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Jeffreys-Jones, Rodri. The CIA and American Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Johnson, Loch K. America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Karan, Donald. On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Kessler, Ronald. Inside the CIA. New York: Pocket Div. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorovich Firsov, eds. The Secret World of American Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Laqueur, Walter. The Uses and Limits of Intelligence. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993.

_______. The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

LeCarre, John. Smiley’s People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.

Lee, Martin A. and Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams - A Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1983.

Lifton, Robert Jay and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1995.

Long, Thomas M., MD and John Buckman. Lysergic Acid (LSD-25) & Ritalin in the Treatment of Neurosis. London: The Lambarde Press, 1963.

Lipton, Lawrence. The Holy Barbarians. New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1959.

MacLeish, Archibald. The American Cause. Duel, Sloan and Pierce, 1941.

_______. American Opinion and the War. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942.

MacPherson, Myra. Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.

Manchester, William. The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America,1932-1972. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.

Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchuria Candidate” - The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Masterman, J.C. The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Meyer, Donald. The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology From Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.

The National Institute of Mental Health, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. 1943-1966 Bibliography on Psychotomimetics (reprinted with permission of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals).

Newland, Constance. Myself and I. New York, Coward-McCann, Inc., 1962.

Pease, Stephen E. Psywar: Psychological Warfare in Korea, 1950-1953.  Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1992.

Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury: A History. New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1984.

Pinkerton, Allan. The Spy of the Rebellion. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Powers, Thomas. The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Richelson, Jefrey T. A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

 Riess, Curt. Total Espionage. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941.

_______. Das war ein Leben. Munich: Langen Muller, 1986.

Roder,  Dr. Thomas and Volker Kubillus. Die Manner Hinter Hitler. Malter, Switzerland: Pi- Verdot fur Politik und Gesellschaft, 1994.

Rorabaugh, W.J. The Alcoholic Republic, an American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels. New York: Ballantine, 1974.

Scheflin, Alan W. and Edward M. Option, Jr. The Mind Manipulators. New York: Paddington Press, 1978.

Sherry, Michael S. In the Shadow of War: the United States since the 1930s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Shulsky, Abram N. Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence. Washington: Bassey’s (US), 1993.

Simpson, Christopher. Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and It’s Effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988.

_______. Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Strong, Sir Kenneth. Intelligence at the Top, the Recollections of a British Intelligence Officer. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969.

_______. Men of Intelligence. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971.

Terkel, Studs. My American Century. New York: The New Press, 1997.

Troy, Thomas F. Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency. Frederick,MD: University Publications of America, Inc., 1981.

Ward, R.H. A Drug-Taker’s Notes. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1957.

Weil, Gunther M., Ralf Meitner and Timothy Leary, eds. The Psychedelic Reader. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1965.

Winks, Robin W. Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Wise, David. Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA. New York: RandomHouse, 1992.

Wolf, Leonard and Deborah Wolf. Voices From the Love Generation. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968.

Yablonsky, Lewis. The Hippie Trip. New York: Pegasus, 1968.

Periodical, Journals, Internet Sites, Articles, Reports and other sources

Badrich, Steve. “Cold Warriors Woo Generation X: As the world turns, history hits the spin cycle.” NameBase News Line. No. 6, July-September 1994. New York: Public Information Research, Inc.

Berkowitz, Bruce D. and Allan E. Goodman. “The Logic of Covert Action,” The National Interest. No. 51, Spring, 1998. Washington, National Affairs, Inc.

The Booklist and Subscription Books Bulletin. Chicago: American Library Association.

Center for the Study of Intelligence home page, http://www.odci.gov/csi/index.html.

Central Intelligence Agency home page, http://www.odci.gov/cia/ciahome.html.

Greenberg, Maurice R. and Richard N. Haas. Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996.

Hebert, Richard J., Jr. “Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgment,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall 1987. Washington: Central Intyelligencve Agency.

Intelligence on the Web, http://www.fas.org/rip/intelwww.html.

Johnson, William R. “Clandestinityand Current Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 20. No. 3, Fall 1976. Washington: Central Intelligence Agency.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1961.

Library Journal, April 15, 1961. New York: R.R. Bowker Co.

Life magazine.

The Los Angeles Times.

McCarthy, Joseph R. “The International Communist Menace.” The Congressional Record (81 Congress, 2d Session, pages 1954-7) February 20, 1950.

Morrison, Jim. “Not to Touch the Earth” song lyrics on the compact disc Waiting for the Sun by theDoors. Elecktra/Asylum Records, 1968.

The New York Times

Pechan, Bruce L.  “The Collaborator’s Role In Evaluation,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer 1961). Washington, Central Intelligence Agency.

The San Francisco Chronicle

Springfield Union, April 30, 1961. Springfield, MA.

The Times of London Literary Supplement, December 15, 1961.

Virtual World of Spies and Intelligence, http://www.dreamscape.com/frank and/intelligence.html.

APA Annual Conference, 2019: Dinner in Haight-Ashbury

I was taken aback to say the least, that the history of the great Twentieth Century Hope for psychedelic salvation was so obscure, even among direct intellectual followers of the psychiatrists, spooks, and thought leaders who had once been so certain LSD could save the world, or at least provide a breakthrough for controlling it.

Even at this conference where CIA, psychiatry and Ketamine were all so up-front and so together, no one remembered Delysid; no one remembered Sid Gottlieb, Joly West and Frank Olson; or Adelle Davis (AKA Jane Dunlap) and Oscar Janiger. No one had any notion that Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary were johnies-come-lately, and that LSD was never the lucky catalyst of hippie street rebellion, but a phenomenon that purposefully trickled down from the most elite levels of society to arrive in the 1960’s and create its utterly unpredicted, utterly extraordinary impact on youth culture. Ozzie and Harriet lived in a secret psychedelic USA while  a rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouched from the black gate and the mushroom cloud of 1945, toward Haight-Ashbury to be born.

There was even a presentation during one of the poster sessions at APA Annual Conference 2019, by an organization which directly and overtly recommends various psychedelic drugs for “healing and well-being” and for “scientific research into spirituality, creativity, and neuroscience.” The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in Santa Cruz, CA.

 

I initially approached the pleasant, casual woman with MAPS as she was packing up her poster presentation. I asked whether during her time in San Francisco for the APA Conference she had made any pilgrimage over to Haight-Ashbury. She responded with an easy laugh, apparently understanding my reference to the 1960’s neighborhood synonymous with flowers in your hair and tripping. But I couldn’t interest her in any discussion of the history of this idea (or this fantasy) that people’s thinking, and the human personality itself, could and should be improved with psychedelic drugs.

Later on I ran into the MAPS lady and a companion in the cafeteria of the exhibition hall. They pretended (I really have to presume it was a pretense) to never have heard of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, with which their organization has a very clear connection. Perhaps a legacy of Oscar Janiger, Human Be-Ins, and Ronald Stark’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love just doesn’t comport well with a PR line about research and education on “medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana.” Or maybe some modern-day Richard Helms is ordering covert cover, somewhere behind the scenes.

That evening I had dinner at Magnolia Brewing, a very hip pub at 1398 Haight Street. After my fish and chips I walked north one block and took a left, past the Grateful Dead house at 710 Ashbury.

I couldn’t help singing to myself ...Start out runnin gonna take my time, a friend of the Devil is a friend of mine.

The thing is, this San Francisco annual meeting of the APA in 2019, with its sunny, triumphant Spravato exhibit, its  carefully understated CIA recruiting station, its concealed Sandoz logo, and its furtive MAPS promotion, could just as easily have been the Atlantic City annual meeting of the APA in 1955, when a round table discussion was held to debate whether LSD represented the latest best hope to solve psychiatry’s deepest mystery of schizophrenia, or a breakthrough into the Freudian unconscious. All the same elements — the psychs, the spooks, and the druggies — were present. 

But #APAAM2019 doesn't remember, or pretends not to remember, #APAAM1955. (There were no hash tags back then, either.) 710 Ashbury looks very well maintained, but empty now, like memory.

If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep, tonight.

APA Annual Conference 2019: The Exhibition Hall

The exhibition hall is always a place of many wonders at an APA conference. Almost every Pharma company I ever heard of has a big, fancy exhibit pushing the latest and greatest drugs to “cure” every problem in thinking, feeling and behaving. It looks a lot like Disneyland.

Many smaller companies peddle their wares. Certain of these I look for every year. The two U.S. firms that manufacture electroshock machines, Somatics, Inc. and Mecta Corp. are always there. I think it’s always the same two or three old guys manning these booths, every year.

But I should cut to the chase of my favorite issue at this 175th APA celebration. I’ve published a lot of information on this blog, in response to the recent, obvious (some might say gushing) enthusiasm over  the potential to treat depression and other mental disorders with psychedelic drugs, especially Ketamine. My point has been that there’s a fascinating history of this idea, going back to the dawn of LSD use in America by intelligence agencies and psychiatrists, in the 1950’s. It’s not a new idea. It was researched and tested for at least a decade, with many millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, before anybody ever heard of Ken Kesey, Augustus Owsley Stanley, or Timothy Leary. (The CIA’s MKUltra project rings a bell with many people.)

The agency has its booth every year at APA, just like MECTA and Somatics. But tragically, they seem to have forgotten their history. Nobody there even knew what Delysid was.

That was the trademark of Sandoz Corporation for LSD. The CIA had a contract with Sandoz to supply their monopoly on the world’s acid supply until the early 1960’s. I thought, well, maybe the people at the Sandoz exhibit would remember.

Actually calling it the Sandoz exhibit is inaccurate, though. That Sandoz name was on the back of the display, where almost no one would see it. Anyway, I asked the very attractive woman who wanted to sell me a smart phone app called reSET-O whether she new anything about the history of the predecessor company from Basel, Switzerland and its breakthrough psychedelic product. Nope.

OK, OK. Well, surely the people over at the spectacular Spravato display would have some sense that the precedent for curing depression by a Ketamine psychedelic trip was Ablert Hoffman’s 1943 bike ride, and all that came afterward through Dulles, Helms and their followers in the Summer of Love? I walked over and asked a nice young woman if I was in the right place to score some “special K”. But again, no joy. She laughed, but she didn’t know the history.

(Next: Dinner in Haight-Ashbury.)

APA Annual Conference 2019

It had been a couple years since I spent several days in another city, hanging out with 20,000 psychiatrists and hobnobbing with attractive young Pharma reps. (I think of Private Joker’s protest in Full Metal Jacket, “I gotta get back in the shit... It’s been weeks since I heard a shot fired in anger!”)

This year’s APA conference in San Francisco celebrates the association’s 175th year. It opened Saturday evening with much self-congratulation and optimistic tone from outgoing President Altha J. Stewart, M.D., and smiles all around the stage from establishment psychiatric luminaries like Jeffrey Lieberman, Steven Sharfstein, Saul Levin and a dozen others. Attendance is in the tens of thousands. Perhaps a majority are Americans, but only just a bare majority.

The headliner event in opening ceremonies was a “Fireside Chat With Valerie Jarrett.” Jarrett was President Barack Obama’s senior advisor. She’s a great, entertaining personality, but one suspects she knows very little about current issues in mental health. Her comments were pretty well limited to the standard tropes about stigma, parity, community organizing, and the brief glory of the Affordable Care Act. She promoted her new book, and the APA showed its members their influential friend. It was anticlimactic.

Saturday morning, Wendy Burn, President of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists, had tweeted out an invitation to a networking reception for the RCPsych Pan American Division scheduled for Sunday afternoon, apparently to anyone attending the APA Annual Meeting in San Fran. However when I responded that I would accept, she clarified that it was only for APA conference delegates. I told her I was a registered attendee at the conference, but she lamented that I had to be a British Psychiatrist (her capital P) or a member of the PanAmerican Division of the College. (Oops I’m no Brit, so I couldn’t go.) Wendy and I had some perfectly social back forth via Twitter Saturday, but it turned out I was registered for another course when she was giving her big speech, so I would not be able to hear or meet her. After she confirmed that her impression, like mine, was that this year’s conference was astoundingly international. I asked why she herself had traveled so far, and whether she thought the APA President might cross the pond to be at a corresponding RCPsych event. I never got an answer to that one.

The most fun moment on Saturday was announced by a text alert to all attendees: “Protesters are outside facing the South building. Use the Exhibition Level Tunnel or the Level 2 Sky Bridge to move between buildings.” I figured those protesters were probably my CCHR friends, so I went out to watch, along with a few score psychs brave enough to ignore the warning.

Lo and behold, it was indeed the expected CCHR demo. There were hundreds of fearsome Scientologists with hundreds of insulting signs and megaphones in the street. And they were very well organized. The chant was: TIME. TO. STOP! ELEC. TRO, SHOCK! This continued for a space of some minutes in the pouring rain. Then all of a sudden, the entire mass of demonstrators rapidly advanced in military unison across the street, directly at the “defending” rabble of psychs outside their convention. It looked like a William Wallace charge of the Scots army! Very dramatic, pure fun. They stopped in the nick of time with only a few feet to spare, pointed fingers, and altered the chant to: WE’RE. TALKING. TO. YOU! I’d guess that for at least some seconds, the people on the “defending” side wondered whether they’d made a mistake by being there.

(To be continued...)

Malis with malice, redux

I attended a staffing at Elgin Mental Health Center (“DSH”) today, for James, a client who is so unfortunate as to have Dr. Richard Malis as his treating psychiatrist. Dr. Malis has been after James to talk about a certain subject which he believes will evidence delusion. James refuses, wisely in my opinion. He doesn’t think there is any upside whatsoever, Malis just wants to create evidence of latent psychosis to enable an argument that James should take unwanted, debilitating antipsychotic drugs.

Well... James is in his 70’s. He been at DSH for many years and he hasn’t had any behavioral problems other than minor rules violations for more than a decade. He hasn’t taken any psychiatric  “medications” for a couple decades, and there’s no chance that he ever will again. He’s very smart, nothing is wrong with him, he gets along better than almost any “patient” (the word is inside sarcastic quotes because they are all forced “patients”, they’re really psychiatric slaves) that I know of.

So Dr. Malis came up with a recent innovation in James’ case: covertly deny him needed medical treatment under a guise — hold his off-grounds pass for “elopement risk” thereby requiring him to be transported to the real hospital (DSH is not a real hospital, it’s a plantation) and humiliated with leg irons, chains and handcuffs. James refuses to endure that, and therefore he gets no opthamological exams for his glaucoma. I wrote an earlier post about this a couple months ago.

Recently James suffered a groin injury playing basketball, for which he was told to get an MRI by the medical doctor at DSH. The trouble is, of course, the plantation doesn’t do MRI’s, only real hospitals do. To go to a real hospital, James, in a wheelchair due to his basketball injury at age 72(!), has to be chained against Malis’ trumped-up “risk” that he’ll escape. So he’s not going to get any MRI. Richard Malis thinks this kind of punishment, this brutal and malicious  coercion, will eventually convince James to talk to him and reveal his thoughts, etc.

I think it will teach James that the only way to maintain any human dignity at all on the plantation, the only conceivable path to any nobility, is noncompliance, resistance by any and every means. I think James dreams about payback, every day. I sure know I would.


Psychiatria delenda est!