Should the APA panic? (and Boundaries)

The American Psychiatric Association is finishing up its annual conference in San Francisco today, at the very moment when a major international newspaper is actually calling for them to be exiled from the mental health world. The timing of Mac Maclachlan’s opinion piece in The Irish Times is just spectacular! It reminds me of Thomas Insel’s announcement that psychiatric “treatment” pretty much sucks, and that NIMH would dump the DSM for research purposes, just as APA came out with its newest edition of their ridiculous bible!  

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at APA. “Mental health services must be prised from grip of psychiatry” was all over my twitter feed this morning, and I did my best to pass that headline along to a couple guys who I know are probably there in San Francisco. 

Within the article, there are such “radical anti-psychiatry” views as:

"The over-prescription of medication reflects not just a system that offers insufficient alternatives to drugging young people, but trenchant resistance from the psychiatry profession…”

"We know that the ‘diagnosis’ of mental health conditions – practised primarily in Ireland by general practitioners, psychiatrists and psychologists – is inaccurate and unreliable; and that it is not a good basis for understanding mental health problems or deciding how to help people.”

"We know that there are no ‘biological markers’ or identified biological causes for mental health problems. There is no blood test, scan, metabolic or electrical brain pattern which maps neatly on to mental health conditions.”

"We also know that most people with mental health conditions can be effectively helped without drugs…”

"Mental health is a multidisciplinary field where the medical model approach is now very much a minority view, and where other professions and many patient/client representative groups – and indeed an increasing number of psychiatrists – advocate for a very different one. Our mental health services have not evolved to reflect what we know about mental health. They have maintained the vice-grip of a medical model and are designed to protect the privilege and interests of one profession at the expense of people’s mental health. There are better ways, and we all know it.”

This attitude, stated so concisely and decisively on the opinion page of a reputable, 200-year-old international publication, is a mortal threat to psychiatry. If mental health becomes a primarily non-medical concern, guys like my friend Joe Pierre, MD, or that silly little racist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, or Illinoisans James Patrick Corcoran, Richard Malis-with-malice, Syed Hussain and Bobby Sharpe, will certainly lose the prestige and money that they’ve become used to. 

Speaking of those Illinoisans, there’s another article hot off my feed today that bears directly upon them, as forensic psychiatrists: “Recovery Orientation Faces Challenges in Forensic Psychiatry Settings” is about a Swiss study which shows that psychiatry staff in institutions like EMHC are worried that they’ll lose authority and power if they try to help patients recover, instead of concentrating on control, security, drugging, and (perhaps) punishment, as they always have. Despite the pretenses of “hospitals” and “medicine” a recovery orientation is highly problematic. They really don't want their "patients" to recover: they want them to obey (i.e., as good slaves).

Lastly, I got an email today from some psychedelic apostle or skeptic entitled, "Psychedelics and polyamory: a survey for an article in www.ecstaticintegration.org." The title tells the story, but survey question number 4 is especially cogent: "Have you been encouraged towards a polyamorous lifestyle by a psychedelic healer, guide or leader? If so, could you tell us about it?"

As I've written repeatedly, one downside of psychedelics for mental health professionals includes a much stronger propensity among therapists and clients to slip into sexual relationships. (The other one is increased incidents of random psychotic breaks and dangerous behavior.)

It's almost comical (but for the gruesome harm it would cause) to imagine the catastrophe this would bring to secure forensic psychiatric facilities. In the Illinois Department of Human Services, administrators and bureaucrats already suffer from continuous high anxiety and must wrestle with an embarrassing, Mafia-like code of silence, about "boundary violations" by staff, who tend to think those slaves are there as property, after all, so why not use them for sex?

The advent of any psychedelic therapy as an optional treatment mode at EMHC would surely bring orgies to the clinical units, and deadly jealous revenge as a constant threat to anyone who works or is enslaved there. Bill Epperson in the parking lot on steroids!

So the thought for today is, pity the screwed psychiatrists at their convention in San Francisco! Or... wake them up, and make them get honest jobs!

COVID and Psychiatry

Perhaps COVID 19 is related to human bodies (or the human race as an animal species) in exactly the same way that psychiatry is related to human society and culture. For me, a cure for COVID or a reliable defense against viral “pandemics” seems like precisely the same kind of project as defeating psychiatry.

I just read the abstract of an immunological study (it required clearing up some medical and biological terms, that's for sure!), which made me think that so-called “long COVID” is caused by what amounts to a tactical military intelligence failure by the immune system. The body sends the wrong troops to fight the wrong enemy with the wrong weapons, in specific battles (e.g., the “Second Battle of the Cerebral Spinal Fluid”). Thus, the virus survives in the war, and it continues to affect the body. More battles become necessary.

People wonder how the hell certain psychiatric ideas continue to percolate through our culture and cause harm. This is also, clearly, a tactical military intelligence failure. In fighting the virus of psychiatry, the correct troops do not arrive at the right place at the right time to win certain battles (e.g., the “Third Battle of Forced Drugging at Elgin Mental Health Center”), so the war drags on, and psychiatric ideas keep coming back to screw us up. 

The ultimate defeat of psychiatric fraud and coercion will come only when we can improve our intel, at the (analogous) level of minor ground patrols or skirmishes and all the way up to the whole theater of war around the world. Likewise, a cure for COVID will only be possible when the human body can improve the intel function of its immune system.

Both of these improvements will absolutely require a more capable and causative command. The individual commanding a body must become sufficiently able, industrious, curious, and willing, to actually improve the functioning of an enormous, complex army which is the immune system. And the only possible benevolent command for our human world must become a group that is ethical and competent enough to actually direct the administration of Earth, rather than merely control populations with lies and drugs.

Intelligence can be tactical or strategic: military, biological, or spiritual. It is always a product of two (and only two) things: analytical ability and organization.

I am recently much encouraged, from contemplating developments in mental health, public awareness, media, politics, and law. The cure for COVID and the defeat of psychiatric oppression may be right around the corner!

Sharpe

This so-called “doctor” believes he’s in control. He’s a pathetic, arrogant bully. My guy Gus has recently become so ideologically aligned with my personal anti-psychiatry philosophy and my abolitionist agenda, primarily because this particular psychiatrist has tried so hard to punish him and suppress him; and it was never necessary. 

But Sharpe doesn’t know the difference between punishing and helping a person. To him, these two things are the same as long as he’s the one doling it out. 

Gus asks a lot of questions, and he points out a lot of (often insignificant, perhaps) wrongnesses. But he doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t make many mistakes either. I have repeatedly taken what I thought might be risks, by publishing facts that I’ve gotten from Gus which I probably wasn’t able to independently verify. They’ve all turned out to be true.

The units Sharpe has worked on at EMHC are a disaster. Gabby and Latwon are allowed to fall in love in plain view; Nurse Manager Jai is allowed to keep telling staff, “Hey, let’s not report any suspicions about sexual activity to Administration or OIG, just keep it on the unit!”

This mafia-like culture comes from the top. On any particular clinical unit, the top is an MD psychiatrist. Sharpe, Hussain, Kareemi, Malis (great name, you can’t make that up!), and above them, Corcoran. The psychiatrists are the slave masters, with many overseers working under them. If you look far enough up the bureaucratic food chain, you may find non-MD’s who have managed to become slave masters as well. But it’s the actual psychiatrists who make the plantation what it is, with their horrible, dehumanizing philosophy that an individual is a machine, a brain, to be manipulated and controlled by medical technology. 

I recently met Dr. Meyer in person. I had believed her to be as bad as Sharpe. She’s quite assertive of her professional status, but not unpleasant or unhelpful or unintelligent. So maybe I was wrong about her. 

Who knows, maybe I’ll meet Sharpe in person and he won’t just try to talk over me and shut Gus and me up. Maybe he’ll act like a decent human being. 

But for now, I think he’s a total idiot. 

Hey, hey, STA Shinzetta Warlick

 The "mental health professional" in the title is an STA-III. That's a pretty high position. She gets a paycheck day after tomorrow, for $6800.00 (gross pay).

But some years ago, Shinzetta had a brief romantic/sexual fling with a male patient. Since he was involuntarily committed at the IDHS facility where Shinzetta was staff, she could have been charged with a felony at the time. There's little likelihood of criminal prosecution now, but this thing is not going away.

What happened was more or less detailed in my post to this blog on February 3. As always, I promise to retract, remove, and apologize for, anything I write about any named individual if it turns out to be untrue. I have in fact removed whole articles, and amended others, in the past. And that was even though what was written was not, strictly speaking, untrue, it was just unnecessarily mean. Shinzetta should call me.

But I have not heard anything from her yet. The story I am referring to can thus only be presumed to be basically accurate. 

Hard to say how long before it's a big flap.

Elon Musk is on the side of EMHC

Apparent justification and endorsement of coercive psychiatry came yesterday afternoon from none other than the world’s richest—and many think smartest—man. At 12:14 pm on 5/07/23, he tweeted:

 “Some individuals are a danger to themselves and society and it’s not fixable. Unfortunately, we do need to keep them in psychiatric facilities. ‘Normal’ people are sometimes afraid that perhaps they would be falsely committed to such an institution. They do not realize how far they are from true insanity.”

As I write this, the tweet has been viewed over 4 million times. It has inspired 2,436 comments, 4,146 retweets, and over 36,200 likes. Of course, I contributed several of those thousands of comments. 

The obvious, reasonable argument is well-worn, and not unpredictable from a libertarian-populist. But it’s surprisingly facile for a person who has such superior means to acquire knowledge. 

First of all, I wonder what Elon believes “true insanity” actually is, and how he knows, or how anyone knows, “how far (normal people) are from (that).”

Psychiatrists don’t know what insanity is, though they think they see it every day, and they have always presumed it to be brain disease. It’s not a medical idea in fact, it’s a legal one, and no such explanatory brain disease has ever been discovered.

I suggested, with one comment to Elon, a possible lesson about the distance or closeness between normality and insanity: clandestinely dose 10 “normal” people with about 300 mics of LSD, and just watch for a few hours. The CIA and various leading psychiatric researchers did that for at least a decade, and they carefully noted the results. Musk may not know the history (but I’d be surprised). The generally observed phenomenon in that secret research was: “normality” becomes “insanity” in about twenty minutes, in any human being.

My second point is that psychiatric facilities do NOT make dangerous people less dangerous, but only control dangerous people in the same sense that prisons or chains (or execution, for that matter) would control them. 

And as a NYTimes book reviewer once wrote, our love affair with modern psychiatry is a sub-prime crisis waiting to happen. Maybe since the pandemic and the latest advent of radical political populism, it’s not really waiting anymore. Everybody tends to hate and rail against “experts” these days. There haven’t been literal heads on pikes yet, but we’ll see. 

People are reasonably afraid that they could be “falsely” committed to a psychiatric facility. Psychiatric “diagnosis” is well known, and officially acknowledged, to be bullshit. With the suicide-inducing “treatments” of SSRI’s being prescribed so widely for the depression that we can all expect to come down with (like a virus) any day now, almost anyone might be alleged to be dangerous to him/herself in a dark moment. 

But I’m not even sure what a “false commitment” would be, since no one can ever prove that they don’t have mental illness, or that they are not dangerous. I know many people who have tried, and it is actually an impossible legal argument. 

If you get along well enough with your family and your neighbors, maybe no one will come after you; but if things go south, the “men in white coats” will be there on call. 

We all know this, instinctively. Maybe only Elon Musk is sufficiently certain that things won’t go south for him.