"Interfaith"

A friend invited me to an interfaith forum held in Phoenix, AZ last night, and I attended via Zoom. The subject was school shootings. Participants included Baptists, Jews, Hindus, and various others. I expected some religious views. After an hour I left the meeting a bit disappointed. (It probably continued for another hour or more, so it is possible that I missed all the good parts, being in a later time zone and too tired.) 

The first thing I had noticed was that everyone was first and foremost regretful and apologetic, over "the fact that this conversation has to take place at all." Geez, I don't know... if you really regret the conversation you find yourself in, why not just leave? We probably have to let people "virtue signal empathy" -- but I found it quite overdone. No matter what anyone had to say that could have been interesting or worthwhile, they had to start out with, "I'm so sorry..."

People who have been shot with real bullets would know whether that physical pain is worse than the emotional trauma of hearing about a shooting. I've never been shot, so I don't know. But victimhood is in enormous favor these days, it's almost like everybody wants to brag all the time that they hurt so bad, and I've become really sick of that!

The second characteristic of the dialogue which bored me to death was the clearly universal presumption that any possible solution to school shootings must lie with medicine or some other mechanical science. There was lengthy discussion of how much money security measures like scanners or metal detectors might cost, how expensive it might be to train teachers with firearms and where they would keep their firearms in the classroom, and many details of locked or unlocked doors. 

I didn't hear anyone question one particular statement: "We don't have enough mental health workers!" As if surely, surely a sufficiency of mental health workers would help prevent school shootings. I spend most of my days hanging out with mental health workers. They are almost all dull bureaucrats, and even the best and brightest of them have no idea what distinguishes good mental health from pure, evil insanity in any individual. They all figure it's something with the brain.

Not to mention, the advent of the very term "mental health worker," and the hiring of more and more of them to mostly recommend drugs for kids and push us all into a psychiatric view of ourselves and our world, is eerily coincident with the celebrated increase in school shootings! It's almost like psychiatry causes school shootings.

Anyway, my own disappointment with the part of this interfaith discussion which I heard before it was my bedtime was that there was no mention of any faith, or any religious morality or solution, at all. The Christians were asking in places of the dead after the One who is alive. The Jews never mentioned that the Lord is One. The Hindus seemed quite unconscious of any concept of Karma or spirituality.

There was a cop who made the single encouraging (for me at least) comment: "Personal interaction with the students is the number one priority." What do you know! It might be cops who can save the world.

Dunlap Day

This will be the second "official anti-psychiatry holiday" that I have suggested. (The first one was "Bye-bye Jeffrey Day", February 23). Now "Dunlap Day" will be October 24, as an annual remembrance of Adelle Davis' first LSD trip on that date in 1959. 

The celebrity nutritionist and author of such best-sellers as Let's Get Well (1965), Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit (1954), and Let's Have Healthy Children (1951) became a Hollywood phenomenon. But she wrote one book which most of her fans never knew about. If not for the requirement by her regular publisher that she use a pen name and refrain from any publicity, this little-known book could have been, Let's All Trip on LSD!

The actual title was Exploring Inner Space: Personal Experiences Under LSD-25, and the author (the pseudonym) was "Jane Dunlap." I wrote a history thesis about this at Northwestern University almost a quarter of a century ago, in 1998, which I later serialized on this blog, albeit a bit awkwardly in 14 parts (e.g., here, here, here, here and here).

I highly(!!) recommend the Dunlap book, if you can get a copy. It is almost shocking to read the justifications, theories, and public relations statements about psychedelic drugs from almost three quarters of a century in the past, and to notice that they are very nearly, sometimes close to word-for-word, the same things that are repeated today by the purveyors of a so-called "psychedelic renaissance."

I became aware of the Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) when I was at the 2019 annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco ("APAAM2019"), and I happened to meet and speak briefly with a woman whose name I didn't get at the time, but who I now suspect was none other than MAPS board member, and more recently a media spokesperson for the organization's vaunted "Psychedelic Science 2023" conference in Denver, Vicky Dulai.

MAPS has funded studies where researchers have been accused of professional misconduct, boundary violations and sexual abuse. The psychedelic renaissance enthusiasts are all worried that people like Vicky Dulai (or for that matter, that old wannabe-hippy Rick Doblin himself) will embarrass the movement and bring Nixonian enforcement tactics down on their heads to take away their beloved acid again, just like Allen Dulles took away Sid Gottlieb's acid in 1953, and like in 1968, when Congress found it to be a "cultural threat" and oh-so-tragically took it away from everybody. 

Some of the freaks think it will be best to defend against this existential threat to a new version of Tim Leary's "internal freedom" by making sure there are lots of MD psychiatrists close at hand wherever and whenever people take psychedelic drugs. But my guess is, it will always devolve into another Supernova festival with terrorists arriving on para-gliders, or another innocent Tate-LaBianca Hollywood home soaked in blood. And just by the way, psychiatrists are about as far removed from the best intentions for "internal freedom" as it is possible to get.

Adelle Davis wrote that, "Many hundreds of people given LSD  have entered worlds of fantastic beauty where compassion and love have become compulsory." There is a deep, and deeply tragic, irony in her evident favor (assuming the final word in that sentence wasn't just added by a derelict editor) of compulsion. 

Richard Helms thought LSD was "dynamite!" for the fight against godless communism. Cary Grant, Henry Luce, and (probably) Jack Kennedy all believed, this just might be a drug to save the world.

Sorry guys, but we'll have to do the hard, honest work of learning to communicate with each other. That's what Dunlap Day will be about, for somber Yom Kippur-type reflection, balanced against a more celebratory Passover-like tone or freedom feast on Bye-bye Jeffrey Day.

And I should always conclude: Psychiatria delenda est!

Ecstasy and Integration

Psychedelic drugs, and other psychiatric drugs, along with modern psychiatry and psychology themselves, are one single, monstrous creature of World War II and the Holocaust. "Ecstatic integration" is actually a term which might mean solving insanity, criminality and war. 

One need only google "the joy of the knife" and read a bit about Nietzsche's termination of Western philosophy and reason, to know that Jules Evans is spot-on when he writes that joyfully celebrating the rape and murder of innocents is "...another sort of ecstatic experience, perhaps the oldest -- celebrating the bloody humiliation and desecration of your enemy." 

And I recall, even with vestige guilt, the response of my own hero W. T. Sherman, to an aide's question about how it could ever be possible to deal with young Confederate radicals who would never stop fighting: "Kill them. Kill them all."

One also need only read rapturous descriptions of LSD experiences, published as early as 1959-61, to understand that a psychedelic trip can be "ecstatic" either in the sense of union with God, or love of pure cruelty. Ecstasy is extreme emotion which overwhelms a person, whether heavenly or satanic. It is a disconnection ("ex-") from any and all standing or held position ("-stasis") in reason.

Young Israelis high on MDMA and psilocybin at the Supernova music festival in the desert, and Hamas terrorists who slaughtered them to parade mutilated bodies and captives for cheering crowds in Gaza, were comrades on that Saturday: literally brothers and sisters in holy ecstasy!

Integration, whether in psychology or mathematics, means bringing or connecting separate things together, solving them, making them one. 

Any rational aspiration for ecstatic integration must begin with recognition that the set and setting of planet Earth requires constant alertness and constant willingness to resist irresponsible surrender to ecstasy. Whatever wonderful or monstrous experience we have, we must reconnect that, to the shared purposes of every human being in the world. Ecstasy is only acceptable if and when it can be integrated, if and when we can be one. 

I do not believe that Western medicine holds or can produce knowledge which will enable us to solve insanity, criminality and war. That was the delusion which settled over us in 1945; it was our reaction to the black gate and the hot mushroom cloud. It was a continuation, or one more surrender to ecstasy. Biology is a wildly entertaining game, but it will never reduce a living person to a mere brain, or to any particle. 

Ecstatic integration will never be produced in a test tube or seen under a microscope. We must become ethical individual beings who can freely come together and cooperate in creation.

As I am writing this article, I am told that a nephew and his children are finally in the air back to Chicago, from Israel. It was a traumatic several days for them, but they will be home in time for shabbat.

Adonai eloheinu adonai echad.

Remedios Tiu

Nurse Remmy: do you remember April 30, 2023?

It was a Sunday, and you were on an afternoon shift on H Unit. A female UST patient was causing trouble, demanding that she be given the particular PRN meds that she liked. Security had to be called several times, because the patient was not just verbally abusive and hostile, she was spitting on people. Technically, spitting on someone is criminal battery.

But of course, there's little point in charging a mental patient who's already unfit to stand trial on some other charge, with battery. It's also a practical truth that patients don't abuse or neglect staff; so nobody calls OIG to report a patient spitting on staff, right?

OIG reports are a tough subject. Any staff at a facility like EMHC has a very strict duty to call OIG within four hours, if abuse or neglect of a patient is merely suspected. That rule applies even if (perhaps especially if) the vaguest suspicion of abuse/neglect is about a friend and close colleague. It would be much harder, just hypothetically, for you to call OIG with suspicions about Marge Antona, with whom you work pretty closely, than for you to call OIG about some CNA who's not even a union member. Right?

But I don't think you called OIG about any abuse/neglect at all, on April 30. So you must not have suspected any abuse/neglect by anybody on that day. Right?

The thing that seems problematic to me is the fact that a (non-union, African-America) CNA did get charged with felonies in Kane County for an incident on April 30, involving the psychotic UST patient who was spitting on staff all day. How do you think that happened?

It may seem like it's more or less water-over-the-dam now, in the sense that those criminal charges were eventually dropped. But I can't help thinking, it's very interesting that those charges were ever filed. Something about it makes no sense. There are also such crimes as making false reports to the police, conspiracy to obstruct justice... (I need not elaborate). And sometimes people get roped into complicated stuff that shouldn't be considered their fault. 

Anyone can call me if they have any information, excuses, clarifications or comments, etc. The truth might just save a lot of people some expensive trouble, it usually does. And I can be very easy to get along with when I'm being told the truth.