They say:
- Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults continue to experience mental illnesses annually.
This is propaganda, not fact. First of all, we should realize that "mental illnesses" are purported distinct, real brain diseases which cannot currently be diagnosed like most other medical conditions by objective tests or signs. The "diagnostic" procedures which were almost certainly followed to document and define the experiences of 1 in 4 U.S. adults consist of symptom checklists as described in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5. These days most people are pretty cynical about the DSM. Mental health professionals who really intend to help people with mental, emotional and behavioral problems almost universally admit that they use the DSM only because they have to, for insurance documentation and payment. They know that it is essentially bullshit, as Allen Frances stated directly, a full decade and a half ago.
Take schizophrenia, which Thomas Szasz compellingly argued long ago is a mere religious artifact of psychiatry. To officially "diagnose" this most-serious-and-scary of all mental illnesses, the patient must only show any two out of five specified symptoms. Thus, two people with officially, expertly "diagnosed" schizophrenia might have no symptoms in common at all. And all five of those specified symptoms are reported only by subjective, possibly prejudiced observers or by the patient him/herself, who may have variable interpretations and opinions of what exactly constitutes a hallucination, a delusion, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized behavior, or diminished emotional expression. E.g., is it a hallucination, or a delusion, or a lie, when a poor Chicago ghetto dweller insists that he is the king of Egypt? People make up things about themselves for a lot of different reasons. There is no simple brain basis for it. You cannot find any "King of Egypt delusion" by an MRI scan.
Or take personality disorders. No less authority than the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) cites DSM-5 to "define" this class of brain diseases/mental illnesses as "representing 'an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture.'" Should we really presume that the experts who diagnose personality disorders can easily identify and succinctly state, beyond argument, what an individual's culture consists of, and what its expectations are at any particular moment? That seems outrageously difficult to me. I remember 1964, when American culture expected loyal citizens of the USA to have family values and decry and resist communism around the world. Only four years(!) later that same culture expected tacit approval of free love, and resistance to the military draft. There may never have been such cataclysmic reversal of cultural expectations, before or since. A lot of personality disorders "developed" and were "cured" during those four years, not by brain changes or psychiatric "treatment," but by the 180-degree reversal of cultural expectations.
By these two examples, schizophrenia and personality disorders alone, we can consign this first statement from MHA's 2025 report to some historical dust bin along with equally notorious nonsense from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the Malleus Maleficarum. It is reasonable to believe that at least 1 in 4 Americans have mental, emotional and behavioral difficulties at some point during most years. But that's no statistic relevant to anything the mental health industry does. And it doesn't show that MHA helps anyone, or that the organization is anything but a front group for scammers.
Next, MHA says:
- The prevalence of mental health concerns among adults in the U.S. remained stable from 2021 to 2024, but these rates are still unacceptably high.
Well, OK... are "mental health concerns" the same thing as mental illnesses? Do we need to cure "mental health concerns" like we want to cure cancer and heart disease, or depression? And just by the way, how high is unacceptably high for these rates of prevalent "concerns" and who says so? How was this acceptability rate determined? Is MHA the supreme reliable authority on that?
Again, this is pure propaganda, meant to convince the tax-paying public that so-called "mental health professionals" (psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, security therapy aides and all the institutional government administrators who keep the clinicians in line) should get more respect, more authority and (lots) more money. Even if the claim that "prevalence of mental health concerns among adults in the U.S. remained stable from 2021 to 2024" were a provable, objective fact, it might just as well indicate that psychiatric "diagnoses" are no longer increasing in popularity as identity memes among Gen Z. Maybe young people have started trying to create better lives, instead creating excuses for screwing up. Maybe coercive mental health policies will just crash and burn in the next few years, and concerns among adults will change dramatically, like they did in the 1960s. Americans may decide to devote fewer hard-earned resources to this nonsense, rather than more, just like we decided to get the hell out of Vietnam!
The 2025 report then adds:
- Access remains a major barrier to care in the U.S.
No! Unlimited access to the public fisc is what they're lobbying for here. But the barrier to political power and wealth which mental health professionals believe they should be naturally entitled to results from the fact that they have never cured a single case of mental illness in a single individual; instead, they have wasted countless lives and endangered communities with drugs that disable productive people and cause random, unexplained violence.
"Access" is a watchword in this propaganda deluge. But it's cynical and false, because the only demand for better access comes from people other than patients. Patients do almost anything they can to avoid mental health "care" because the nearly universal experience is, treatment sucks. They ditch their meds, elope from facilities, and sue for abuse. They join recovery groups on line and become actively anti-psychiatry. They become the most skillful liars. Sometimes they pretend to appreciate "care" so they can be released from involuntary custody, with the intent to get work and save up just enough money to buy a gun. Then they take their revenge on the society that "treated" them only to ruin their sexuality, ruin their memory, enslave them. And we pay our taxes for that, so we deserve what we get. We are afraid of insanity. So we give our crazy people over to proclaimed "experts" who are in fact even crazier. He who troubles his own household shall inherit the wind as the proverb says, and the human race has never troubled its own household so severely as it has in the last century and a half, with psychiatry, an ill wind if there ever was one!
Psychiatric "treatment"--harmful drugs and shock--is NOT "care". Thank god for any and all barriers to access!
And the final key finding in the 2025 report:
- Mental health among youth (ages 12-17) in the U.S. improved significantly from 2023 to 2024. Continued support is needed to sustain these trends.
I agree with this one, but I'm sure my concept of support for youth is very different from what MHA recommends. Teenagers have not improved their mental health by taking more psychiatric drugs and believing more religiously in mental illness. They may have instead begun to realize that they can refuse psychiatry, including all of its useless or harmful "treatments," and all of its demeaning, dehumanizing "diagnoses."
There are far better games in life than disability and brain worship. We need to support youth by telling them they can be free. They can look outward and fly to the stars; they need not introvert to be trapped in their own heads. They can choose not to be slaves of a psych Big Brother.
Maybe they'll take up a version of Cato the Elder's call:
Psychiatria delenda est!
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