Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Thankful for the budget ax

In today's Chicago Tribune Bonnie Miller Rubin interviews University of Chicago law professor Mark Heyrman under the headline, "Mental health care offers easy target for budget ax". The presumptive attitude is, of course, everyone knows it's a bad thing to spend less money on psychiatric solutions to human problems.

But I rather think the best thing that's happened for mental health, in many years, is states going broke. Heyrman's Trib interview confirms it.

He talks about "low cost, simple services -- medications ... to keep someone healthy." But psychotropic medications don't keep anyone healthy. Sometimes these drugs keep dangerous people disabled from hurting themselves or others. But then again, it seems that sometimes they incite violence. As anyone who has ever taken them knows, they cause weight gain, diabetes, sexual dysfunction and a host of other very unhealthy conditions. If you take psychotropic meds, just deduct 25 years from your life expectancy.

Professor Heyrman believes mental illness makes people quite sick, but he has absolutely no sense that this is metaphorical sickness. He is a true believer in the strict medical model, despite generations of its documented failure. This scientism, this insanity-equals-brain-disease, goes precisely nowhere to improve anyone's life or to make any community safe.

It's so last century, in more ways than one. For this interview, in Heyrman's version of Assertive Community Treatment, people merely "remind you to take your meds, help solve problems...." Of course Dr. Goebbels, we don't mention coercion, which is endemic even in the term ("Assertive...").

People don't forget to take psych meds so much as they stop taking them on purpose or refuse to take them. That's because they hate them, and that's because the meds don't help, they hurt. I'm sure the Gestapo reminded people to do things, too, like salute properly and so on. And nobody believed so strongly in the biological determinism of all things human or sub-human.

The Trib stays in character with it's anti-Semitic founder, Robert McCormick.

But in this century we will not continue to pay for psychiatry's terrible solutions, with or without Obamacare. The DSM/APA/NAMI/Pharma/
NIMH world view is passing rapidly. These days many people know it's possible to recover fully from mental disorders, and it's easier the more you avoid those exact "low cost, simple services" which Mark Heyrman would love to make everyone accept, whether they like it or not.

Be glad Illinois is broke!

10 comments:

  1. Hear, hear! The less money thrown at these low cost, simple services, the better off we'll be. The best thing I ever did for my son was to extract him from the medical model of seeing his "illness" as a problem.

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  2. I am ECSTATIC to see governments going broke and becoming unable to payroll goose-stepping psychiatric Nazis.

    Mark Heyrman, incidentally, is the President of Jews for Hitler. That's the nickname I bestowed on him over a decade ago when a Chicago federal court FORCED him on me as my lawyer in a lawsuit I brought alleging my psychiatric captors were denying to me MINIMALLY HUMANE CONDITIONS OF CONFINMENT REQUIRED BY INTERNATIONAL INSTRUMENTS ON TORTURE AND PRISONERS. Heyrman argued, over my objections, that my captors should have the right to do this if they declared their crimes to be "therapeutically advisable".

    Heyrman is not simply deluded or mistaken about anything. He takes SADISTIC GLEE in hurting so-called "mental patients".

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  3. Stop calling them medicines like they do, call them what they are "drugs". Medicines are for disease, they have a start and finish date. Drugs don't have a finish date.

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  4. Hello Mr. Kretchmer,

    I found your blog yesterday and I have spent some time reading though many of your post. Very interesting, and I agree with a lot that you say, but I have a question, and I'm not sure if this is the appropriate means, if there is an appropriate means, of asking you a question, yet I have or know of no other means to do so.

    If I'm correct, I have learned that you are a member of the Church of Scientology. I've long been a fan of Dr. Thomas Szasz, and I understand that he has a relationship with the Church, even though he is not a member, or religious, from what I gather.

    Something you said, I believe in one of your blog posts (but it would be difficult for me to find it) and on your twitter account/page (or whatever it's called) is: "Study of mind/healing of mental ills shouldn't be alienated from religion, or condoned in non-religious fields."

    May I ask, what do you mean by religion? (I know very little at all about Scientology.)

    I, by the way, am an atheist, and perhaps I'm wrong, but I believe that Dr. Szasz is as well, and yet he obviously has a lot to say about "mind/healing of mental ills." Thus my puzzlement and my question, if you don't mind.

    Anyway, I'm glad to have found your blog.

    Thank you.

    Best wishes.

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    Replies
    1. John, I should refer you to the very first thing I posted on this blog, back in March of '09 I think....

      As for Tom Szasz... in my several contacts with him over the last ten years or so, I never had the impression that he professes or would favor any sort of anti-spiritual philosophy or ultra-materialism. His beliefs regarding an Abrahamic God, or gods generally, I would not really know.

      Thanks for reading!

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    2. Hello Mr. Kretchmer.

      Thank you for your reply.

      Yes, your first post is the one I remembered having first read your statement on your view, as quoted above from your twitter post. Thank you.

      I've read it again now, and I'll likely read it again, and I will be giving it some more thought.

      As I see it, even though we're in agreement on much of what I've read from you, we have a fundamental disagreement with respect to your statement in your first post: "Religious faith is essentially causation of knowledge of first postulate, beyond reason and reasonable justification." That is the cornerstone of any other disagreements we would have, I believe.

      Regardless, thank you for making your blog available. I've very much enjoyed reading and thinking about what you and others have had to say, and I will continue to visit your blog for your thoughtful comments re psychiatry and mental illness and law, etc. I appreciate your righteous anger over the injustices and irrationality that you have and continue to witness in your work.

      Best,

      John

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    3. You're quite right on the fundamental disagreement, I suppose... I cannot imagine how or why one would justify religious faith, per se, in reason.

      Thanks again for your comments.

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  5. Poisons, which is the correct term, do.

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  6. SRK,

    As an attorney, you may be interested in a vision... to transform the mental health system -

    http://discoverandrecover.wordpress.com/mental-health-freedom-and-recovery-act/

    Duane

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