I recently had an interesting back-and-forth on Twitter with a San Francisco psychiatrist named Joe Pierre. He had first posted a link to an article in Vogue, by a woman who was very thankful for her psychiatric diagnosis, which had apparently helped her by offering an explanation and the beginning of a solution to her hypomania.
I jumped on that, perhaps a bit roughly, by saying in ten years the same woman might think the exact opposite; I had seen many people change their minds about whether psychiatry had been good or bad for them, once the drugs stopped working and the brutal project of withdrawal began. Dr. Joe told me that I should "get past" my own professional experience, and my religious beliefs. Then I wouldn't be so predictably narrow minded and instead I would be able to envision positive outcomes from psychiatric treatment, and imagine circumstances in which involuntary treatment would be justified.
Well, I could have gone on and on about such suggestions and such arrogance. People don't "get past" their own experiences and their deeply held beliefs just because somebody else is sure of a different opinion. I suppose I can envision possible positive results from psychiatry and imagine justifications for forced drugging and shock; but I honestly think the results of psychiatry have been and will continue to be epically terrible, and forced "treatment" is just grossly wrong.
I still like Dr. Joe. At least I "like" him as an opponent with whom I can exchange restrained if hostile tweets, like some kind of ideological target practice. I think he's reasonably well intended and smart, and I learn from him. So I tried to cut to the quick by explaining that my "anti-psychiatry" views with which he so earnestly disagrees are all derived from a single position. That is: the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion, or condoned in non-religious fields.
To my surprise, this statement was not rejected, but quite productive of more good exchange. Dr. Joe wasn't sure exactly what I meant, but he quoted Carl Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul: "Among all my patients in the second half of life -- that is to say, over thirty-five -- there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook."
I told Dr. Joe that I know too little about Jung, perhaps only that he was considered a bit of a mystic, and he treated Clover Dulles (wife of Allen Dulles) in 1945. With that thought (of Dulles), it suddenly dawned on me that the whole conversation was high irony indeed!
Here I was, in a dialogue in 2022, with a San Francisco psychiatrist who was only marginally willing to briefly tolerate me, and the subject of Jung/Dulles/1945 became a point of some agreement.
The thing is.... When wide-eyed, soft hearted American youths had to confront the corpses stacked up like cordwood, with others still barely breathing, at Dachau and Belzec and Chelmo, and when the public contemplated the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and the American holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the whole world realized on some level, we have to find a way to not ever do this again. That was 1945. Allen Dulles was still in Switzerland at the beginning of the year, with his wartime mistress Mary Bancroft, a devotee and patient of Carl Jung. By summer, they were joined by Clover Dulles. Allen, Clover and Mary all sought the help of Dr. Jung, each perhaps for a different problem (e.g., Allen for advice on how to influence the defeated German population, Mary and Clover probably for more personal, less political issues).
Eight years later, Allen Dulles signed off on Richard Helms' brainchild project, MKUltra. He also made sure that his own CIA had a complete monopoly on the world supply of LSD. The drug was initially considered by the MKUltra researchers to be a breakthrough offensive weapon in the emerging war for men's minds, by which anyone could be rendered psychotic with a single dose. But by the late 1950's various private psychiatric experimenters were recommending it for spiritual enlightenment of the whole American population. If one reads some of the reports by rich Hollywood celebrities (e.g., Adelle Davis, Auldus Huxley, Cary Grant) circa 1959 (Kesey and Leary were definite latecomers as acid celebs), it's easy to discern the over-the-top, Jungian mystical-religious, evangelical fervor.
I asked Dr. Joe if he was aware of the connection between Jung/Dulles/1945, and the current exuberant promotion of "psychedelic assisted therapy" as a new breakthrough since SSRI antidepressants failed to cure chemical imbalances in the brain. The desperation of Dresden and Enola Gay hangs again over psychiatry's very bad year, 2022. He responded, "I agree, the connection that you imply is there."
More recently (just today, I think) Dr. Joe tweeted separately, "One of my least favorite phrases to hear is, 'I'm micro-dosing with psilocybin.' Not sure how they're defining 'micro-dosing,' but all the people I've seen using this phrase have been floridly psychotic."
I picture my Twitter counterpart strolling up Haight Street from the Grateful Dead House on Ashbury, in the direction of George Hunter White's Chestnut Street acid brothel/safe house on Telegraph Hill. I hate to underestimate him, but I can't help worrying that Dr. Joe, like almost everyone else in mental health, remains clueless. Materialistic "mind science" failed to provide any magic button for saving the world from Godless Communism in the last century; psychedelics and psychiatry will only encourage more florid psychosis in this one.
Maybe my San Francisco psychiatrist friend has some dawning suspicion that in the last resort our problem remains that of finding a religious outlook on life. Plus ça change.
But the rough beast LSD slouches again, towards America to be born. And guess what, today is Pearl Harbor Day.
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