This is not published as a statement by or for any person or group, it's just my own personal thought. People who may choose to agree or adopt it pay me a high compliment, but I should not even claim credit or authority as the only author. Many phrases are taken or adapted from actual comments at the conference, by many very smart and inspiring people.
We may be at a historical inflection point. Fundamental change is in the air, and it makes me happy.
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West Hartford Statement
We are people of several generations, nationalities and traditions, raised in a common cultural context of increasing deference and respect or obeisance toward human reason, lately confined in a strict, oppressive structure of "healthcare" under arbitrary authorities of Western medicine.
Across planet Earth, we grew up in confident expectation of increasing freedom and dignity for individuals. The Twentieth Century's scourge of total war had hopefully been stymied, if not eliminated by the darkest lessons of 1945, new institutions of international law and justice, and scientific progress. Science was our friend if not our religion. But unfortunately, we have studied science only well enough to be consumers of its heavily marketed machinery, and not well enough to understand its purposes and philosophy in relation to human health.
As our leaders and our elders declared wonderful victories over infectious disease and discovered many fundamental keys to the structures and functions of biological bodies, we came to question whether our own basic nature was indistinguishable from that of other animals, or even cells. The importance of divinity was increasingly difficult to discern. We studied chemistry and engineering instead of arts and humanities. Communication became a science, and ironically, research into it was thereafter financed by the military. The golden age of advertising was as much a creation of the national security establishment occupying 5th Avenue, New York, as were the psychedelic 1960s in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. The ostentatious moral conformity of Ozzie and Harriet covered up secret agendas and nightmares. The Cold War ended but history was not finished after all, and we never figured out why. Now we find ourselves hopelessly caught in the quicksand of the most confusing, bitter and intractable divisions since 1968, perhaps since 1860 or 1789. The issues surprised us, or at least we pretend not to have seen them coming. But we have no time or inclination now to sit quietly and think, while even close friends and family threaten to hate us for our opinions. Everyone is out at ideological barricades or economic extremity.
As we contemplate whether to accept a vaccine, whether to allow our children to be screened for mental illness in school, whether we can safely and intelligently use artificial intelligence (whatever that is) without breaking some rule or law which we didn't even know existed, or whether our possessions and our very lives can ever be safe and secure, we hunger desperately for stable guideposts against which to evaluate our own thinking, emotions and behavior, and the thinking, emotions and behavior of our fellows. But such guideposts, if they ever did exist, are certainly missing now.
Many of us have witnessed heartbreaking, massive harm to people we love and to ourselves, from attempts to treat all human problems in thinking, feeling, and behaving medically. The rolling disaster of SSRI "anti-depressant" drugs has chemically excised sexuality from the bodies and lives of young people, and saddled millions of previously normal men and women with neurological injuries that cripple them into middle age and beyond. We were not told of the potential harms by those who knew they existed, so we could not give informed consent to be treated with these drugs. Rather, we were assured for decades that SSRIs "rebalanced" the chemicals in our brains. It was a lie. Now it seems credible that SSRIs caused suicidal ideation and behavior, not to mention random, unexplainable violence like school shootings, to increase. The drugs we were told could protect our children instead may have put them in terrible danger for over thirty years!
Some cannot help but wonder why the brutal torture of electroshock ("ECT") continues to be allowed in civilized societies under such a cynical guise as "a last resort treatment for severe depression." Literally cooking a person's brain by repeatedly forcing high electrical voltages through his/her skull is so obviously harmful that the public finds it difficult to believe this practice has continued. In response to the instant startled question, "But they don't really still do that, do they?" the liars typically reassure us, "Oh no, it's not the same, it's a completely different procedure." Then we discover to our horror that modern ECT is worse than what was depicted in old movies like Cuckoo's Nest. The muscle relaxants and anesthesia make it look less barbaric for the benefit of participating clinicians and observers, but the brain damage is more severe, because higher voltage is required to induce a grand mal seizure in a drugged patient.
Now at last, somewhere deep in a pharma research lab, men in white coats are working hard to make a saleable mental health "nuclear option" of psychedelic drugs including LSD, psilocybin, Ketamine, ecstasy and many others. Psychiatry has frequently replaced one class of harmful drugs with another, claiming each innovation was a "breakthrough" that would finally show mental disorders to be curable "illness-like-any-other" and usher in a new age of truly scientific treatment. The Inquisition's auto da fé was a highly technical 15th Century improvement on the earlier Roman crucifixion, as a cure for the insanity of witchcraft or heresy. By the 19th Century people began to prefer the magic of science over Christian miracles, and modern medicine was the new salvation. Opium, alcohol and quinine were in use alongside prayer during the American Civil War. Penicillin and sulfa became the new "miracle antibiotics" in the 1920s. By the 1950s the Salk vaccine worked against the polio epidemic, and Thorazine was the first of many great hopes against schizophrenia (which itself remained a sacred artifact of psychiatry, never any discovered brain disease). Finally the APA's DSM replaced the venerable Malleus Malificarum. But all this so-called "progress" in psychiatry never improved results for humanity. We spend more and more millions or billions researching drugs to heal our souls and find only drugs that fail to heal the damage from earlier drugs, plus ça change.
Psychedelics are explicitly soul drugs. They are well known to completely scramble the point of view that an individual has managed to assemble through his/her years of living, working with, fighting and loving others, and relating to the world. They remove a person's mind, in the extravagant hope that a better mind can be covertly patched in by "experts" who arrogantly claim to know best what is good and true. The experts attempt to implant their version of goodness and truth into humans they fear and despise as naive, bestial and prone (in their vast majority), to taking over whatever control of the world had previously been successfully hoarded by the experts. Alternatively a new mind might be patched in by random environmental forces impinging through pure happenstance. The person "treated" with psychedelics might become a holy superman, or Charles Manson: it's Russian roulette, maybe a final "breakthrough" in mental health by one shot that kills the field forever. Even the APA has nightmares now, despite their own raw will to power.
Some might argue that the political realm is the only important reality. They say we must each choose to stand either on the left with Comrade Lenin or on the right with Charlie Kirk, since middle-ground liberalism and practical conservatism alike have disappeared into nostalgic irrelevance. The latest claim is that mental illness is all a reaction to a bad society, so we must cure it by enforcing either broad social justice or God's Plan. Thus, why not revolution? Maybe this time the new boss will not be the same as the old boss. These urgent proponents ask us with some justification, where after all did meticulous reason and forbearance for error with careful, gradual correction ever get humanity? What was the end result of science, if not 1945: the black gate at Auschwitz and the hot mushroom cloud at Hiroshima?
However, others of us do not wish to descend into such deadly cynicism. We recall or envision better times and partially understand the reasons things changed for the worse. We may not have all the answers, but we believe we have a few, and we imagine that the downward spiral of the mental health of humanity can be stopped.
A key philosophical position which we commonly hold is that the study of the mind and solutions to human problems in thinking, feeling and behaving do not, and never did, naturally or necessarily belong to any medical specialty, and they are not owned by medicine generally. Between 1860 and 1960, Western civilization established a dominant cultural preference for materialistic theories, frames, and explanations of all things. We might complain now that we cannot even say the words God or soul, and everyone seems to believe that the mind and the brain are the same thing. We argue that this is an epic violation of epistemic justice. It may be a negative argument, which only identifies a mistake or a wrongness in current ideas. But if the identification is accurate, it opens the door for creative change. There are answers from the past, and wisdom beyond medicine or biology. Exclusion of that older and broader wisdom for its apparent inability to generate massive pharma profits from new drugs merely devastates human culture.
We notice that a new generation may not be supinely accepting the harm or invalidation of their own capacity as knowers. Their elders' prejudices may not deflate their credibility when they speak. They may demand a higher collective understanding of spirit, mind, and humanity extending far beyond fatuous DSM "diagnoses" and faux "anti-psychotic," "anti-depressant" or "anti-anxiolytic" "medicines" which require false theories of brain chemical imbalances to be invented by ad agency copy writers, to defraud the public into the mass self-drugging which makes hundreds of millions of normal people psychiatric patients-for-life for pharma profit.
It is our common intention that psychiatry be brought back under the law. Involuntary treatment must be entirely abolished from our statutes and legal precedents. The difference between help and control must be explicitly acknowledged, while both are understood as legitimate social tasks. A human being cannot be told she is being "helped" when half a dozen security personnel hold her down for an angry nurse to pull down her pants and stab her with a syringe to inject a drug she hates. Torture can be understood as such, as can retribution, or prison sentences, when others have been made angry or afraid. But it is never help. Confusing help and control is a cowardly act of someone unwilling to be an agent of social change and incapable of confronting a fellow human being. It demeans both medicine and law.
We would also agree to relinquish excuses that have long served those who would avoid justice they may fear will be too harsh. "Mental illness" and "insanity" are only buzzwords that rely on pretended "expert" knowledge to deny an element of intent. The language is entirely unnecessary. A criminal jury can always decide the issue of a defendant's intent better by common sense than based on the opinion of any mental health professional. Juries are intended to decide the guilt or innocence of a peer by common sense, not by medical (psychiatric) pseudo-sense. The nobility of our adversarial process lies largely in its refusal to pretend that jurors can or must decipher ultimate objective Truth. A person who is charged with an offense must be presumed ultimately responsible for his or her own behavior.
Without legally forced "hospitalization" and "treatment" and without the "insanity defense" (excuse) for crime, psychiatry itself may not survive in its current form. If it does survive, we expect it will be unrecognizable, having been radically altered from the modern version of slavery it now comprises, to some kind of real help for troubled people.
We are not against help: we are against lies and violence. The psychiatry we have encountered in our own lived experience is almost all lies and violence.
We look for and intend to create a better world.
