The following article was written partially before, and then finished shortly after, the December 4, 2025 conference of Inner Compass Initiative in West Hartford, CT. It intentionally recalls and emulates Tom Hayden's Port Huron Statement, written in June, 1962, for the Students for a Democratic Society. 

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 after the darkest lessons of 1945, by 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.

Dr. Pepper? What a nuisance!

Here's a question that is just screamed, every day, from Kiley Developmental Center: Are staff so stupid and incompetent that they endanger the lives of the disabled residents they are supposed tp help, or do they do cruel and obviously harmful things to those residents out of spite? Hopefully, from the view of my client, that question will not soon become: Will they be found civilly liable for a wrongful death, or will they be prosecuted for homicide?

My client's adult child is autistic, and has seizures which can be dangerous. She is prescribed anti-seizure meds, to be given twice a day with a can of Dr. Pepper and a straw. The doctor's prescription actually says, "...to be given with a can of Dr. Pepper and a straw," because it's a routine that this autistic patient is used to and very dependent upon, to take the meds. When the routine is not followed, or when the patient notices that it is altered arbitrarily (as best she can understand), that is a sure trigger for upset and hostility with staff. 

No can of Dr. Pepper with a straw? Maybe there's an argument and complaints, maybe no anti-seizure meds get taken, and the patient has a breakthrough seizure, goes to the hospital emergency room, aspirates vomit, gets pneumonia.... It's not a small matter, it's dangerous. Everyone at Kiley has been alerted and briefed that each morning and each evening this patient gets a newly opened can of Dr. Pepper with a straw in it, to take her anti-seizure meds.

It wouldn't seem to be very difficult to arrange this... the facility regularly gets paid thousands of dollars for their "care" of this patient; cans of Dr. Pepper are certainly available at stores right in the neighborhood; the instruction is actually part of a medical prescription written by a doctor! Why would it get screwed up, let alone consistently screwed up enough to make my client fear for her child's life?

But that is what happens. Frequently, my client's adult child doesn't get the can of Dr. Pepper and straw. Staff thinks gee, why not just pour some Dr.Pepper into a glass, isn't that more efficient? Well no, not when the patient ends up in the hospital because somebody was incapable of understanding the situation and  trying to be "reasonable".

Or maybe staff just feel like asserting their own control on the clinical unit, the patient's mother be damned. After all, staff are the professionals who know best about everything, right? I recall one comment about the "legitimate needs of the facility." Maybe staff think this patient's fresh can of Dr. Pepper with a straw to take a pill is just "maladaptive behavior" that they are entitled to manipulate or beat out of her. 

But if somebody dies, what will they think? "Oh well, we did our best?"

Kiley Snake Pit Adenda: The Evil John Cosgrove, Kinga Mucha

I noticed long ago that when somebody thinks you might have caught them, or that you might suspect them of doing something bad, they will go almost nuts trying to distract you and others from what they're afraid you might find out. They'll get very critical and unaccountably or disproportionately upset. The "doctor" I dubbed "evil John Cosgrove" in my last article reacted precisely this way, when I suggested in front of a dozen of his professional colleagues that he was pretending to have read records or reports which didn't exist. 

Evil Cosgrove said a certain patient had a record as being unusually prone to falls ever since childhood. That could explain why the patient always has visible bruises and abrasions every time her mother visits her at Kiley Developmental Center. Of course, another theory might be that the bruises and abrasions are evidence of Kiley staff slapping her around, punching her, knocking her down and terrorizing her on a daily basis to control her for the faux "legitimate needs of the facility" whenever she exhibits what they feel is "maladaptive behavior."

I checked around for these alleged records of proneness to falls since childhood. They don't seem to exist. I asked evil Cosgrove about the records. He responded by immediately becoming critical of me and all lawyers, and acting unaccountably upset. It was a tip-off. Maybe evil Cosgrove knows staff were beating that patient, and he is covering up crimes (possibly including rape). Or maybe not: but evil Cosgrove sure is nervous!

Kinga Mucha sent a false report to Illinois child protective services, threatening possible action against my client's guardianship of her disabled adult child. When she was questioned about this false report, by which time she had been advised that it was false and that forwarding it was a crime, she insisted that either, a.) the report was not really or not completely false; b.) she had corrected it; or c.) she hadn't intentionally filed it anyway, she was only following procedures. These were mutually contradictory excuses which weren't necessary to begin with. A simple apology and a factual correction or clarification would have sufficed to solve the problem. I think the issue was some allegation about refusing to provide medical information. In any event it was proven to be a falsehood; Kinga was basically left holding the bag.

Kinga repeatedly beseeched anyone who would listen: "I haven't done anything wrong!" She was a little hysterical about it, unwilling to even admit having made any innocent or careless mistake. She insisted that the issue was black and white: she was RIGHT and my client was WRONG. It was irrational, thus suspicious. Who knows, maybe Kinga was ordered by higher-ups to find evidence against my client that might threaten her guardianship of her adult child. It's not like Kiley/IDHS had no incentive, my client was a continuing nuisance to them.

Some would say that as a lawyer, as a professional, and officer of the Court, etc., I shouldn't caricature or insult people on the internet. I say they shouldn't torture and enslave people they are paid (with my taxes!) to help, and they shouldn't allow their peers to do that, either!

I've spent 24 years advocating and representing people who are beaten down, insulted and dehumanized. Who wants to help?

Psychiatria delenda est!

Kiley Snake Pit, Wade Frasier

Of the several Kiley staff I recently met at an Annual ISP Meeting for a disabled adult resident, the most difficult person to dislike was Dr. Wade Frasier, Unit Psychologist. He seemed professional and smart (or at least clever in the circumstances). He didn't interrupt or talk over anyone, as best I recall. He looked me in the eye several times. These are unusually positive personality and behavioral features for a snake pit employee. I found myself reflexively wondering why this gentleman had lowered himself to work in a snake pit.

There was no mistake, however, in assuming that Kiley Developmental Center, the state-operated facility under the purview of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) located on West Dugdale Road in Waukegan, IL, is absolutely a snake pit, as defined by Google: "noun... a place of overcrowded squalor, especially a poorly run mental hospital." 

Admittedly, I had made my own prejudiced presumption that Kiley was a snake pit before I ever went there, based on a conversation I'd had with my friend Alan, who happens to be a long-time director of a private not-for-profit which gets very good results helping the same population that state facilities seem so hopelessly unable to help. When I mentioned that I had a client whose child was at Kiley, Alan actually grimaced and said, "Ooh. That place is a terrible snake pit!"

Other than Dr. Frasier, just about everyone else in that big annual meeting was predictably dull, disgruntled, even clearly incompetent. Kinga Mucha, who valiantly attempts to be a very pleasant woman, almost immediately called my client's daughter by the wrong name, while gratuitously asserting the predictable platitude, "Of course, we are all on the same side...." (Nice example for the caseworker in charge, right?) An evil Dr. John Cosgrove reported that the patient had been "...prone to falls since childhood, per records." (I asked him what records, and he did his awkward best to cover up the fact that he had no idea, he'd totally fabricated or imagined those "records" himself.)

Tyson the dietician reported the patient's normal fare and current weight. But he had no record of her weight over the previous six months, and (incidentally) no awareness that he could have just asked my client, the mother, who weighs her daughter whenever she visits at Kiley, about twice a week.

There was a skinny "Home Manager" whose name I don't recall, who tried hard to explain or excuse obvious staff neglect of their patient with inappropriate or irrelevant claims about "the needs of the facility" and my client's daughter's "maladaptive behaviors." These are favorite phrases, repeated incessantly, which nobody ever thinks need to be defined and which are perhaps intended to sound like authoritative medical/scientific/administrative lingo, but which I think are pure, unadulterated bullshit. They merely identify the speaker as a robotic cog in the machine with no ability to think at all. The only legitimate "needs" the facility has are better staff who will actually treat the people entrusted to its care and teach or enable adaptive behavior.

In addition to Dr. Frasier, I was impressed by an African-American woman who had really nice corn rows. She sat directly across the table from my client,and made a very practical suggestion or two. She offered to meet and confer whenever I wanted if I thought she could help with anything. She also warned me sternly, the way my wife probably would in similar circumstances: "Don't be mean, be nice!" The evil Dr. Cosgrove by contrast, merely snarled on his way out the door as the meeting ended: "Grrrr! That was a complete waste of time."

But Kiley is indeed an unrepentant snake pit. The buildings are in desperate need of paint and repairs. Many staff are in desperate need of getting fired, sued, or prosecuted. Their motto appears to be, "Never fail to get retribution against any parent who attempts to advocate for their child!"

I don't know why Wade Frasier demeans himself to work there.

The Doctors' Trial

United States v. Karl Brandt, et al., was the war crimes trial in 1946-7 which resulted in a court decision including ten rules about medical research on human beings that became what we now call The Nuremberg Code. Full transcripts of that trial are available on line.

It's hard not to notice when reading this material that there is no way forensic psychiatry in Illinois ever comports with the Nuremberg Code's principles of voluntary informed consent. In particular, the first principle of the Code states that a human subject of a medical experiment (compared for present purposes to a human subject of custodial medical treatment)... 

...should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

The difference between a subject of medical research and a patient in mental health treatment cuts different ways. On one hand it could be said that if a treatment procedure is accepted as meeting the standard in a given medical specialty (here psychiatry), then the patient is not presumed to be at such high or unknown risk as the subject of an experiment, undergoing an entirely novel procedure of completely unproven efficacy and unpredictable side effects. Thus, "free power of choice" probably comprises more critical variables for the research subject than for the patient in treatment.

However, this analysis presumes scientific integrity and beneficent art in the medical specialty (psychiatry). In other words, it presumes that schizophrenia, e.g., is a valid diagnosis that could be scientifically falsified and reliably cured by standard treatment. Unfortunately, such presumption is unwarranted at best. It is really a forlorn hope that common elements of "fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion" can be effectively covered up to avoid prosecution or civil liability.

If the treatment of mental, emotional and behavioral difficulties were as good as the treatment of a broken bone, or cancer or heart disease or diabetes, that would be one thing. It's altogether another thing, when sparse or non-existant psychotherapy, drugs and shock are only "treatment" in a commonly laughable sense, and when "diagnosis" is acknowledged by the medical specialty itself to be bullshit. Here in mental health, the "free power of choice" is at least as important to the fundamental ethic of primum non nocere as it is in medical research. 

The "patient" at Elgin Mental Health Center is arguably at as much risk of manipulation and abuse in 2025, from social workers, STAs, psych nurses, and doctors... as was any inmate at Dachau in 1944 (from all the same types of supposed professionals and bureaucrats). Indeed, I have litigated a lengthening list of federal lawsuits involving such allegations, and I'm pretty sure I can continue to bring cases for an unlimited number of future plaintiffs, for the rest of my life!

In 23 years, I have never had a client who failed to conclude that he/she would have been better off pleading guilty to charged crimes and accepting an honest prison term, than landing in the hands of psychiatric clowns and vindictive, little state employees who tragically degrade medicine and law.

Nobody who pleads Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) and goes to a "hospital" for help with the mental illness said to have caused them to commit a serious crime ever got off with an easy sentence. Their creeping disability and dehumanization until a distant Thiem date is a far worse punishment than prison.

Going into it, they are not informed. As I wrote over sixteen years ago, patients at EMHC think the nuthouse is a softer prison, and the treatment plan is their punishment option, chosen by someone they can't identify now, at a moment in court they don't quite recall.

Their plea is not voluntary, and the Nuremberg Code is violated.

Lockean...

John Locke was a physician, and one of the most important philosophers in the history of Western political thought. It behooves all of us to take any time we can to study Locke to any extent, however brief. He wrote a great deal in English that was a bit different from the language we speak and read in the 21st Century, so the study might seem a daunting project at first glance. Locke is probably remembered most frequently for a fundamental principle of religious tolerance, at least for religious beliefs that do not disturb the civil peace. (I can't help noting, the title of this blog reflects that same limitation: Don't piss off the neighbors!)

In 1693, Locke published (anonymously) Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which included this fascinating advice: 

"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be entered by degrees as he can bear it, and the earlier the better."

Ironically, I was alerted to this quote today by War on the Rocks, an on-line newsletter about currently evolving military strategy and tactics. A fence against a world which a young gentleman must bear by degrees, is an amazing picture. I might love to describe it at enormous lengths, or to paint it, if I only knew how to paint. But here I'll try not to waste time and space.

Locke was advising aristocratic friends about raising their child when he wrote the letters that became the anonymous 1693 book. A fence to keep the world away was what most members of that class wanted for their children. Locke evidently believed to the contrary, that children should become adults as quickly as possible; parents should acquaint them actively and early with the world despite dangers and unpleasantness.

My mother frequently admonished my sisters and me, "You have no idea how lucky you are!" She meant that we should get a college degree and be eternally grateful to have been born into an educated, privileged class similar to John Locke's friends. She wasn't racist, but she was certainly prejudiced against people whom she considered were less educated. Education into high human rationality was the solution to all evil. Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, 50 million casualties in WWII, communism... never would have happened if only enough smart people had asserted themselves to correct the bad guys' policies at the right historical moment.

I take John Locke's quote on a more tactical level. A gradually increasing ability to bear the world in its ugliness and insanity, and a steadfast quest for knowledge with the intention to understand and improve things, are the logical prerequisites to creation of a better world. This is classical liberalism: the West, the United States of America before and after the Civil War, enduring even through the darkest moment of 1945. 

Locke was persecuted and forced into exile from England for his "radical" political and religious views. He learned to live most of his life very carefully in turbulent times. His philosophy is replete with carefulness. I think the discipline to live carefully is very valuable and very boring. 

Anyone's fence against the world must have controlled gates to be opened for fast forays out to obtain knowledge. A love of action, constantly testing the limits of what one can bear, is necessary.

Is a lawyer the opposite of a spy? I sure would like to speak to Wild Bill Donovan over good whiskey about John Locke!

JAMA, Cato the elder, Pancho Villa (musings)

I recently read a report, in the venerable Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) no less, about a randomized clinical trial which tends to prove that professional psychological therapy is no better for treating eating disorders than web-based guided self-help.

I quickly passed this JAMA report on to my friend Diane, who could have been one of the "specialized (predominantly master degree-level) therapists" who participated in the study. I asked her whether it portends that her professional specialty is fated to wither away as mostly useless. My wife advised against this because she didn't think Diane would take it well, but I at least added a laughing emoji at the end, to indicate that I didn't intend any serious insult. But so far, no response.

This is no stretch however, to say that it's discreditable for "mental health professionals," when the world's leading medical journal points out how anyone does just as well to treat a prevalent eating disorder which affects more than 52 million women and 10 million men by going on line for self-help, rather than employing a specialist for therapy. Why spend the money and time for nothing? Not only that, but people might wonder if maybe the rest of the "mental health" profession, and the mass government bureaucracy it has spawned, are equally useless! It is at the very least embarrassing, right?

Cato the elder was the Roman statesman who ended every speech, and even dinner conversations, with the meme, "Carthago delenda est!" which translates as "Carthage must be destroyed." I have tried to adapt that call, for an anti-psychiatry movement which flourished in the 1960s but caved against the "decade of the brain" and the fraudulent but very successful ad campaigns about "chemical imbalances in the brain" causing depression to be cured by the Prozac chemical balancer. Now with all that nonsense revealed as an epic scam, with millions of young people deprived of their natural sexuality and millions more "mental health consumers" saddled with horrible withdrawal symptoms for indeterminate weeks, months or years, we who are anti-psychiatry in the 21st Century can say, "Psychiatria delenda est!" and mean it.

It took three wars over more than a century for Rome to finally replace the Punic Mediterranean empire. If we go back the same amount of time from today, to 1907, history marks passage in that year of the first state law (in Indiana) for sterilization of criminals and the insane. Coming forward through the full embarrassment of the Freudian cult and the near end of the world in 1945, to Brock Chisholm's advocacy for "...reinterpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong..." by psychiatry, and the invention by Nathan Kline and his ilk of "antidepressant", psychedelic, and other horrible drugs to literally dehumanize millions in the name of "mental health," we might see that indeed, however long it might take, psychiatry must be destroyed!

As I began to write this article, I found out that my daughter is headed for Mexico on a business trip. I texted her saying have fun, and give my best to Poncho Villa, who is buried, apparently in many separate pieces, all around the country. 

I have a t-shirt with a really ugly picture of Pancho Villa over the caption, "Disrupt!" I've worn that t-shirt several times when I was on vacation in Mexico. I almost always get strong approval from locals, who point and laugh, and say, "Viva Villa, we need that man now!"

Pancho Villa was the last foreign military commander to ever lead an armed invasion of the continental United States. That was in 1916. In response, General John J. Pershing was dispatched by President Woodrow Wilson on a year-long campaign to capture and punish Villa, but "Black Jack"  was never able to accomplish his mission. Pancho Villa was loved by the poor people of Mexico. He finally died gruesomely of gangrene, yet as a popular hero or even a legend, before Pershing's well-suppied American army of 10,000 men could catch up with him.

History can be surprizing.

Fugazy medicine

Years ago, I wrote about crazy guys and forensic mental health workers being brothers in delusion. Today I learned a new word, fugazy (pronounced "foo-GA-zi"), that basically means crazy, cheap fake, or otherwise messed-up and useless. It's perfect to describe Elgin Mental Health Center and all the other psychiatric slave plantations in Illinois. Fugazy psychiatry, fugazy law, or fugazy help. Fugazy science. Fugazy medicine. I love this word!

I had a staffing out at Elgin yesterday for a "patient" who has been declared unfit to stand trial (UST) for a relatively minor crime (ie, not murder). It came up that EMHC is not providing any "treatment" to get this person fit. Fitness for trial consists of precisely two factors: 1. the defendant understands the charges he/she faces; and 2. the defendant is capable of assisting his/her legal counsel in their own defense. 

In almost every case, the issue is the latter. Public defenders (or sometimes, private counsel) do not want to pursue the same trial strategy the defendant wants to pursue, so they use a psychiatric "diagnosis" to say the defendant isn't able to assist them. The judge buys it, and the defendant becomes a psychiatric slave.

In the case of yesterday's "patient" everybody wants her to believe in her "schizophrenia diagnosis" and to take "medication" for it. If she doesn't, then they will presume she cannot work with her legal counsel to assist in her own defense. It's a little hard to know exactly what she wants, other than to blame the treatment team at EMHC and mental health professionals generally for everything that seems wrong everywhere. Of course, that project aligns quite well with my professional pursuits, so I'm happy to advocate for her. On top of that, she actually insists upon paying me.

The EMHC treatment team, and perhaps the administration, would prefer that I would not advocate for this "patient," so they have told her explicitly not to pay me, and they are actively trying to prevent her from doing so by confiscating her checkbook. It's an opportunity for a tort claim for intentional interference with contractual relations.

Given that their job at EMHC is to get the patient fit to stand trial, and that the only reason she is classified as unfit is that she allegedly cannot assist her attorney (everyone around the table yesterday nodded when I asked if it was true, that was the sole basis of the unfit evaluation), one might expect that the treatment team would have spoken to their "patient's" attorney, at least once. They have not done so. Will County Assistant Public Defender Kylie Blatti reportedly has never called EMHC, never spoken with anyone on the treatment team, and nobody seemed to think that is unusual or problemtic.

It's easy: a psychiatrist called the Defendant "schizophrenic"? Nobody needs to ask or know anything else, no trial needs to happen, just lock her up on the plantation, drug her, and force her to work as a "mental patient" as long as possible. Everyone on the treatment team, plus administrators, security personnel, etc., all get good state salaries and benefits. The more slaves they hold and the  longer they hold them, the better they all do! UST(g)(2) is wonderful!

Civil rights are violated, the taxpayers are robbed. Oh well, it's mental health. Forensic psychiatry.

FUGAZY.

"KEY FINDINGS"

I received an email today from Mental Health America (MHA) promoting their just released 2025 State of Mental Health in America Report, which lists four key findings that truly beg for comment. 

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!

Purpose... and Sex, Drugs & Rock'n Roll

A recent conversation with a young man who committed a heinous crime and ruined his own life plus the lives of various others made me think about the importance of knowingly and constantly pursuing some productive purpose. If a person has some well defined, good thing which he truly desires to create or to achieve, he will not get crazy and commit crimes. And that's probably the only way to avoid getting tricked or gradually sucked into a debased, dark life.

The young man told me that his purpose going forward will be to help people overcome trauma and bad habits. I'm not sure those were his exact words, it's just my best recollection of his meaning.

How would he work toward that purpose constantly enough to stay distracted from the constant sales pitch of the world around him, which recommends sex, drugs and rock'n roll above all else? It's unlikely that he could resist that pitch, as is immediately demonstrated to me by my own automatic thoughts even as I write this: surely there's nothing fundamentally wrong with rock'n roll -- drugs can be immensely helpful if they are used correctly in emergencies -- sex is fundamental to life, isn't it? And the confusion seeps in from the very start.

How can I love Dylan's lyrics in Like a Rolling Stone and Mr. Tamborine Man; or the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil and Get off of My Cloud; or Lennon & McCartney's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Happiness is a Warm Gun... without secretly wanting to be disaffected, cynical, high and violent? The music of my youth is all around me all the time. I can never fully separate myself from it and I would never want to. My whole world is in that music; all of history is in those lyrics. Roger McGuinn's 12-string riffs, Hendrix's explosions in the national anthem, "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name!" and "You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal" feel like important pieces of my fundamental being.

How can I have benefitted from the polio vaccine, antibiotics, a neurosurgeon's skill and general anesthesia, and yet want to prohibit or discourage others from free, informed use of Prozac, psilocybin and cognitive behavioral therapy? Why would I hate to know that my children ever smoked weed, when I did it frequently myself my first year in college and sang John Prine's Illegal Smile song with so much joy? Why would I search for the perfect combination of drugs that might enable a dog groomer to make Spensuril beautiful and better smelling without getting bitten, yet tell that same groomer how deluded she is for implying something problematic about Spensuril's brain chemistry which a vet ought to know how to expeditiously fix?

And sex? Well, I have three wonderful children and three beautiful grandchildren. I've been married to the same woman for fifty years. But like everyone else (I think), it's not as though I was never some sort of pervert or cheater. It's not like the explicit scenes in the movies Poor Things and Body Heat, or the beautiful and silly sensuality of the women in "Sex and the City" never got my attention, or skirts and blouses never invited my notice. And what of erotic dreams for godsakes? Can Nietzsche really explain desire as a primary expression of the fundamental drive in all living things to grow, expand, and overcome resistance, not merely to survive, with his theory of the "will to power?" I desperately want it to be a happier issue than that!

So how can I advise the young man in trouble, though I am a relatively incompetent philosopher? I guess I would just say create a purpose. Your choice need not be perfect or serious. In fact, it should be as casual and even arbitrary as any game can be. If you get tired of a game you know you freely chose to play, you can stop playing it. And there isn't really any purpose except those you create yourself.

The complexity, and probably all travail in life, comes from games that are apparently not freely chosen. "Recovery from mental illness" is perhaps an example. People think, and are told that they have to. It's so serious. The brain is so serious, because it's so complex, and it's everything after all.

Except that's a lie: psychiatry's lie, to be exact. My first advice to the young man is refuse psychiatry!

And how about a nice, casual purpose: Psychiatria delenda est!

Rosh Hashanah, the advent of humanity

Somebody told me recently that Rosh Hashanah marks God's creation of Adam and Eve, the beginning of humanity. I have celebrated the Jewish High Holidays for most of my life, but this was the first time I ever heard that. I knew Rosh Hashanah glibly as "the Jewish New Year." 

Human beings were made in God's image, meaning they can create and choose and love, and they are basically immortal. If we think about this every year on Rosh Hashanah, we do ourselves a big favor. We are not bio-machines, or brains, or mechanical things defined and bound by physical laws. The Abrahamic religious traditions are all completely contrary to psychiatry's apotheosis of the brain and the modern tendency to view an individual as a physical body.

Eastern spiritual traditions are a bit more obscure to most Americans, but psychiatry remains intractably opposed to all religions, or alternatively it is an exclusive religion itself. Attempts to study the mind as a medical subject, or to treat mentally caused ills by medical means, are universally blasphemous.

Rosh Hashanah is a time of rejoicing, but also a call for serious introspection. It celebrates the completion of another year while we take stock of our life going forward. The shofar call reminds us of the binding of Isaac and the people's covenant with God.

Despite our shameful dalliance with psychiatry, we can return to the best in ourselves, to what we know in our hearts, to loving our fellow beings.

L'Shana Tova!

The AMA and Illinois' psychiatric plantations

I've been criticizing or disparaging the American Medical Association recently, mostly for their apparent (to me) complicity in re-stimulating the horribly destructive phenomenon of psychedelic drug use for medical cures and spiritual salvation. However, I should hasten to outline the connection of American medical orthodoxy to the recognizable formal institutions of psychiatric slavery.

I have never been any official enemy of the AMA, despite the organization's record (of which I have limited details myself) beginning in the 1950's, of harassing my religious community and its founder.

Perhaps the bottom line is only that during a certain period of time in the Twentieth Century, like many others in America and throughout the West, allopathic medical practitioners became too arrogant.

I remember my own grandfather, who was a renowned general surgeon in Flint, Michigan, as being a humble man despite common adoration he received from the community. As a teenager, my dad could be stopped for speeding 50 mph over the limit and the cop, seeing the name on the driver's license, would immediately ask if he was related to Dr. Kretchmar. When he admitted he was Dr. Kretchmar's son, he'd get off with a warning because the cop's mother's emergency gall bladder surgery had gone so well.

My mother recalled in her aged infirmity that her father-in-law always tried to remind people, "We (doctors) don't know everything, and we cannot control everything people want us to control." Just yesterday, my wife and I finally scattered my mother's ashes after keeping them on a shelf for seven years.

There was also a girl whom I had loved but decided not to marry, almost a lifetime ago. Going forward through the years, of course I lost touch with her. But I did know that at some point she had gone to work at AMA headquarters in Chicago. Recently I was in that building on a research errand and I asked the very pleasant lady who was assisting me in archives if she had ever heard of my long-ago paramour. To my surprize, she did know of her, but didn't think she worked for AMA any longer. Nevertheless, the connection somehow made me happy as I was leaving.

The bottom line is, I've never had a personal categorical animus against the AMA. But what other organization can be said to represent American doctors in their validation of psychiatry? The AMA formally accepted psychiatry as a medical specialty in 1934, when it approved the creation of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN). Psychiatry was one of the first specialties to be organized under an emerging system of specialty boards, which were overseen in part by the AMA and later the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). That formal acceptance encouraged state legislatures to allow psychiatrists to use legal force to recruit "patients", because in theory that force was "help". But in actual fact, psychiatry never provided benefits like real medicine. Unlike real medicine, it always caused net harm. And more fundamentally, "help" that goes unrecognized as such by the supposed  beneficiary simply is not help. Things can be intended as help; but if intentions fail, they do not change a harmful result.

Courts have come to accept anything written about a mental patient, even whether the writer is called a doctor or a security guard, nurse, social worker, etc., as valid evidence from a medical record. When the patient protests that a report is untrue, he/she is discredited as, after all, "mentally ill." The way it works is, anyone who doesn't agree they are mentally ill thereby conclusively proves whatever "diagnosis" a state psychiatrist has slandered them with; there is no other or any better proof of any disorder in the DSM.

As I wrote in the very first article I ever published on this blog, psychiatrists in state institutions are confused about whether they are healers, jailors, or overall experts in sociology and law; and patients don't know why they are there or how to get out. Nobody's happy about it, and the public who foot the bill don't want to see, hear, or speak about the evil that's going on under a very thin guise of medically "treating" bad behavior, poor thinking and unpleasant emotions. Almost unbelievable failures of judgment bring us such preposterous policies as J. B. Pritzker's recently celebrated "universal mental health screening" mandate for all Illinois public school children. (This will never actually happen, but much money and good will certainly will be squandered on useless attempts to make it happen.)

The real issue is the difference between helping a person and controlling a person. Psychiatry has attempted to erase any line between the two actions and confuse them. The result is everyone suspects all offers of help, because from their clear experience, offers of help mostly threaten cruel betrayal. "Here, take this pill to correct the chemical imbalance in your brain, and cure your depression." (Oops, there goes your sexuality, and when you stop taking the pills, you'll be tortured by withdrawal!) "Here, we'll just shoot electricity through your brain and you'll feel better." (Oops, there goes your memory, your whole identity!) "Here, trip with psychedelics, you'll have amazing revelations about yourself and the world." (Oops, bad trip, now you're insane and you can never go back, so believe in me and let's have sex!")

I've written many times, and I continue to write almost every day, that coercion in mental health care is a fundamental insult to both scientific medicine and rational law. It degrades and undermines the most important bases of civilized society. Every intelligent person knows this instinctively, which is precisely why the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code is nearly as voluminous as the tax code: complexity is spawned by lies. We lie to each other and ourselves when we pretend we can help people by forcing them to take drugs they don't want and forcing them to say they believe things they don't believe. Minds are not changed by medicine, only bodies are. Brains cannot be minds, even by the best Twentieth Century mystical apotheosis.

Doctors are commonly presumed to be smart people. They had to go to college, and get into medical school, and go through long medical internships and residencies, and pass licensing exams, right? That proves they are smart, and we should all listen to them. But intelligence is really the ability and the constant, disciplined habit of discerning truth in microcosms and in the macrocosm. When a smart person starts lying, they lose intelligence very rapidly. Soon enough, they must resort to force in dealing with their fellows and the world.

Maybe the AMA started lying a lot, to recruit the force of the law in favor of their members' profession. Maybe they had to put a thumb on the scales of justice when they were afraid to admit, as my grandfather freely did, that doctors don't know everything and can't control as much as we all wish they could, to make us happy and immortal.

But the AMA's lies helped to bring us Elgin Mental Health Center, and Chester, Packard, Choate, Alton, Chicago-Read, and Madden: the whole plantation system of psychiatric slavery in Illinois! James Baker in Master Malis-with-malice's chains. Countless unknown, damaged people, and unmeasurable shame.

I am an abolitionist. I'll happily tear down part of what the AMA built.

The American Medical Association (AMA) on LSD

I've recently written about the Journal of the AMA and their apparently favorable view of current prospects that LSD will cure anxiety. There has been unusually strong interest in this. My September 5, 2025 article has received more views than anything I've written in quite a while, and I've noticed recent referrals from websites of the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, MIT, UCLA, USC, University of Colorado, UC/San Diego, and Yale.

This attention from relatively elite academic circles inspired me to research a bit more on the AMA's history in connection to psychedelics. It turns out to be an interesting subject. 

A quick synopsis has the AMA and its publications as not hostile to LSD from the end of the 1940s throughout 1950s, when psychiatrists were experimenting with psychedelic and psycholytic therapies. JAMA published a number of articles describing LSD research, mainly focusing on psychiatry, alcoholism, and the biology of hallucinations, as well as the potential of LSD as a promising research tool for simulating schizophrenia. 

Articles in JAMA and affiliated publications highlighted both the potential insights that LSD provided and its risks. The AMA’s general stance during this period was to support controlled, clinical use in psychiatric research, but not public or unsupervised use. This corresponds with my own research for a history thesis in the 1990s. Celebrity nutritionist Adelle Davis (writing under the pseudonym "Jane Dunlap") and her Beverly Hills psychoanalysis social circle seemed to cling to a belief that early LSD research was legitimate and respectable, even though it was secretive and obviously controlled by military and intelligence psychological warfare interests.

By the early 1960s, LSD completely escaped the laboratory. Figures like Timothy Leary spread it far beyond clandestine psychoanalytic cadres, to college campuses and into the whole burgeoning youth counterculture. The AMA raised concerns about safety issues (bad trips, psychotic breaks, accidents), lack of standardized medical protocols, and increasing recreational use outside "proper" medical supervision. By 1966, AMA released statements warning against unsupervised use and supporting tighter regulation. JAMA editorials described LSD as both a valuable research tool and a serious danger if misused. 

In short, this paragon of medical orthodoxy was happy to toe the line that we now know was laid down by the CIA from the early 1950s straight through the Haight-Ashbury hippie era, and continuing into the more recent "war on drugs" decades. Now in the 2020s,  JAMA ostentatiously pushes the agenda of MindMed, "a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel product candidates to treat brain health disorders..." (ticker symbol MNMD; contact Chris Brinzey, Investor Relations ICR Westwicke, ir@mindmed.co).

It simply means LSD for general anxiety, LSD for the multitudes, LSD for kids, LSD for the world!

Who's behind the scenes now? Plus ça change.

JAMA Psychiatry: "Turn on, tune in and drop out."

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a chronic condition marked by persistent, excessive anxiety and difficulty controlling everyday worries. GAD is one of the most common psychiatric disorders with a past-year prevalence among US adults of approximately 10%.

This is evidently why JAMA Psychiatry could be on board with dosing 35 million Americans with LSD. The authoritative on-line publication currently features a study by a dozen authors, nine of whom are affiliated with MindMed, the company which describes itself for investors as "...a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel product candidates to treat brain health disorders." LSD is their novel product, merely renamed and not much re-branded, as "MM120, lysergide-D tartrate."

MindMed is listed on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol MNMD. The stock traded as high as $150 per share in 2017, but is currently quoted at about $9.25.

Back in May, 2021, the company announced a partnership with the Chopra Foundation of Deepak Chopra, "...to educate and build public awareness around the use of psychedelic medicines to treat mental illness." Chopra claims that a person may attain perfect health, a condition completely free from disease, to never feel pain, and not age or die. MindMed's vision of LSD is similar, seeing the drug as a panacea, not only to treat GAD, but also for depression, post traumatic stress, fear of dying, addiction, personality disorders, pain relief, and even spiritual troubles.

If this sounds more like Haight-Ashbury 1967, than Twenty-first Century scientific medicine, that's because it is. Calling acid "MM120" doesn't change the fact that when you take it, you become psychotic for at least eight hours. Back in the day, LSD was officially known to psychiatrists as a "psychotomimetic" drug, literally meaning that its effects mimic psychosis. It was also considered a weapon of psychological warfare by the CIA, and praised as "dynamite" by Richard Helms and Sid Gottlieb. 

MindMed's "medicine" for GAD is not a different drug, it is LSD. It breaks apart and scrambles the pieces of a mind, so that some expert who knows better than ordinary humans can then install another mind in its place. In over 180 press releases since 2021, MindMed has never cited science which explains their project in any terms clearer than that.

JAMA Psychiatry now becomes a co-conspirator with some of the most notorious human rights criminals in history, and a contributor to the harm that will be wrecked upon the American public and culture by psychiatric use of psychedelic drugs.

They publish MindMed's dark "clinical study" but instantly refuse my comments on the ethical dilemmas of antipsychotic medications.

And we can be sure they'll never admit why.

JAMA Psychiatry and ethics

JAMA Psychiatry is the American Medical Association's Journal for and about the medical specialty of Psychiatry. It's as psychiatrically orthodox as any media source is likely to be. I subscribe because I want to know, and I consider it my job to know, what orthodox psychiatrists are thinking.

This morning I received an email copy of the September, 2025 on-line issue (Vol. 82, No. 9) of JAMA Psychiatry, which includes an opinion article entitled, "Ethical Dilemmas of Antipsychotic Medication Discontinuation," by Helene Speyer, Ph.D., John Lysaker, Ph.D., and David Roe, Ph.D. The authors hail from (respectively) the Mental Health Center of Copenhagen Hospital, the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta, and the Department of Community Mental Health at the University of Haifa.

The opening statement of fact in this article is:

Individuals diagnosed with psychotic conditions frequently attempt to discontinue antipsychotic medication, with varying levels of professional support. Between 2 and 5 years after a first episode of psychosis, 90% either discontinue antipsychotic medications entirely or receive very low maintenance doses, and over a 20-year treatment period, they make an average of 9 attempts to discontinue medication.

The authors argue that the framework for the therapeutic relationship in treating psychosis should perhaps evolve away from the current "shared decision-making (SDM)" model to one of "shared deliberation." They say this would show respect for patient autonomy and well being, and for sharing the risks and responsibilities of treatment decisions. Surely, anyone might surmise that when 90% of patients avoid treatment or attempt to discontinue medications, some soul-searching is appropriate. 

In 24 years of advocacy and legal representation of involuntary psychiatric patients, I have never known anyone who actually wanted the treatment they were receiving at the hands of the State of Illinois. They frequently say they know it's necessary, but they desperately want a future when it won't be required. In fact, they only understand that their treatment helps in terms of avoiding more, or more severe, incarceration or punishment.

Well silly me. I naively expected that the editors at JAMA Psychiatry might be interested in my perceptions from my own years of close professional involvement in this system. I wrote a comment on the article by Speyer, et al., saying in part that mental health is probably the most fundamental profession that exists, and that healing and control are both legitimate (although different) activities in complex human communities. I did honestly believe that the authors' suggestion for "shared deliberation" was constructive for purposes of ethical analysis. I don't think I belittled anything the authors of the article had written. I basically agreed with them, and said so.

Nevertheless, I received a brief email very quickly (before 8:00 AM), saying the editors had decided not to publish my comment, and referring me to their on-line commenting policy. I thanked them for such an expeditious decision, but asked whether they might elaborate or suggest how my comment might have conflicted with the policy they referred me to. So far they have not been as quick to explain as they were to just say forget it, we don't want your thoughts in our publication.

Perhaps the only reason my comments conflicted with the on-line commenting policy of JAMA Psychiatry was by my disclosure of a potential conflict of interest: I told them that I am a lifelong Scientologist, and I don't believe the study of mind and the healing of mentally caused ills ought to be condoned in nonreligious fields (e.g., medicine). But the article I was commenting about was overtly, or perhaps even ostentatiously, about "ethical dilemmas." One might think views from disparate religious orientations could be relevant.

One doesn't have to be a Scientologist to intelligently consider ethics in a context of mental health, although I would say it certainly helps.

Maybe the editors of JAMA Psychiatry just aren't very good at it.

Psychedelics: psychiatry becomes (bad) religion

Mary Carreón, the Editor-in-Chief of DoubleBlind Magazine's email newsletter, asked a revealing question yesterday: "(S)hould a priest really lose his collar for trying to deepen his connection to God?"

She was referring to the formal deposition (removal from the priesthood) of Rev. Hunter Priest, the Episcopalian cleric who participated in a Johns Hopkins psychedelic study and later left his pulpit to found a "Christian Psychedelic" not-for-profit advocacy group called Legare. I wrote about this recently.

When confronted with arguments like those of my Episcopal priest sister--namely that trying to deepen one's connection with God by using drugs is quite un-Christian, often illegal, and perhaps blasphemous--psychedelic drug advocates fall back to a "scientific-medical" framework, saying that so much human misery might be alleviated if only they were allowed to do research. But the "research" they end up conducting when they are allowed to do so always looks more like (very dark) religion, not science. This has been true since the 1950's.

Jules Evans offers what might be a preview of horrifying, random and unpredictable violence that will call up memories of Jonestown and the Manson murders, which we may see rise out of popularity of psychedelics with elite special forces military personnel who have become a "Fort Bragg Cartel." One story features 82nd Airborne paratrooper Enrique Roman-Martinez, who liked LSD so much he had it tattooed on his arm. He went camping with some military buddies in Fort Bragg, they dropped acid, he had a bad trip and disappeared. His head turned up floating in a lake the next day, apparently chopped off with an axe. His body was never found and his death is still unsolved.

Besides such horror shows, a massive increase in sexual abuse under guises of mental therapy is also predictable. Various mainstream and psychiatric/psychological media have commented about this risk.

So we are looking forward to dark insanity, and less trust of professionals claiming to cure it: not exactly the road to salvation imagined generations ago by Timothy Leary and Adelle Davis. When Mary Carreón writes of a deepening connection to God, maybe she means the Other Guy.

It's good that the Priest lost his collar. Let's throw some psychs in jail, too.

Rick Perry, traumadelics, my sister the priest

Wow! We could have had an ibogaine freak for President.... The great hope for a "trauma-free" utopia engineered through neurochemistry is inspiring a whole new "traumadelic" culture.... And one Episcopal clergyman was just booted for (perhaps) looking for the living in a place of the dead. As the Wicked Witch of the West once said (while she was melting), "What a world, what a world!"

Boundaries collapse: politics, medicine, religion, and personal exploration become ridiculously scrambled. Psychedelic revivalism, a widening impulse for radical social change, and deep-seated confusion or disillusionment with authority suggests Yeats' falcon and falconer.

Indeed psychedelic drugs, originally understood as psychotomimetics, make minds fall apart and obliterate people's centered understanding for dealing with the world. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry has lately made research into ibogaine his life's mission and publicly declared himself to be the "Johnny Appleseed of ibogaine." But in 2006 he believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and eternal consignment of non-Christians to hell. It might be said that whatever carefully constructed utility and truth Perry's mind was once centered on while he was an evangelical Christian has clearly fallen apart. He may believe he was only brain-injured by football and a farm accident, and various researchers have suggested that psychedelics are like "vitamins" for neurogenesis. But it's hard to not suspect that Perry's earlier faith simply wasn't effective for solving mental and emotional troubles. So he adopted a new faith, in ibogaine and the complexities of brain function, to replace his ineffective Christianity.

This is not unprecedented in American history. In the mid-Twentieth Century, LSD was a sacrament for the youth counter-culture. Celebrity nutritionist Adelle Davis admitted that she experimented with it (on herself as well as her 13-year-old son and his friends) in hopes of "finding chemical Christianity," to counter the hot breath of atheistic Communism in the world. Adelle was at least briefly quite convinced she had attained a true spiritual breakthrough. 

A century before that, the three largest Protestant churches in the United States split down the middle and elected to foment a most destructive war, because their common faith in Jesus apparently didn't solve the issue of slavery. The northern and southern divisions of the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians hated each other with such a vengeance as only siblings in faith could have conjured.

American Evangelical Protestantism was replaced by modern medicine and the apotheosis of the brain, as the motivating theology for the Twentieth Century. The currently emerging (or re-emerging) traumadelic model for mental health is based in this theology. Supposedly, everyone must realize he or she is a victim of childhood challenges, which will necessarily disable each person in the absence of some kind (different, depending on who you ask) of "therapy," whether it be psychedelic drugs or an eccentric, mystical talking cure, or most likely, a combination of the two. The essential point is that people must surrender personal agency to their expert betters (usually medical doctors), and the state must give those expert betters more legal power and pay them better than it currently does. A corollary point holds that only these same expert betters should be allowed to evaluate whether or not any particular "therapy" works.

It's difficult to predict how this cultural phase will wind down for humanity. Psychedelic-assisted therapy students and patients were left in the lurch and investors lost millions of dollars when psychedelic companies began to contract or collapse, especially in the wake of the FDA's refusal to approve MDMA (aka, Ecstasy) for treatment of PTSD. With the triumphant return of Donald Trump, the whole "wounded child" personality archetype is suddenly disfavored, and non-military, non-law-enforcement projects are not as easily funded as they once were. Since the pandemic, nobody even trusts doctors.

I have a sister who became an Episcopal priest late in life. When we were in college together, she took LSD, and I never did. Her husband (since divorced) has told me that she was a major enthusiast. I've recently corresponded with her about the so-called "psychedelic renaissance," figuring her perspective as both a former acid head and more recently a member of the clergy would be unique. She assured me that she was entirely appalled by the suggestion that any faithful Episcopalian would ever believe they can use psychedelic drugs for spiritual gain. I was surprised, because the literature of the "renaissance" is replete with that exact purpose, and I would have expected that Episcopalians would not be immune to its appeal.

The Episcopal Church did not formally split between north and south in the Nineteenth Century the way the three Protestant denominations did, although there was still a lot of acrimony over the slavery issue. Episcopalianism is a Catholic faith, and therefore, more characterized by top-down authority. However, this issue of psychedelic drugs for spiritual benefit does not find unanimity among the Episcopal flock. A priest named Hunter Priest was recently deposed for "Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the Clergy" because he refused to abandon his advocacy as a founder of the non-profit Ligare, which describes itself as "a Christian psychedelic society," and for his public participation in a Johns Hopkins psilocybin clergy study. For his part, Priest is unrepentant, arguing that "...several Episcopal Church bishops, as well as many clergy, seminary professors, and laypeople from multiple denominations have expressed how important they believe (his psychedelic) work is."

My sister says she thinks it's a good thing that this guy is no longer a member of the clergy. But psychedelic drugs are an issue that is not resolved by Christian theology, even as slavery was not resolved before Grant accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox and Sherman burned Columbia to the ground; until Lincoln lay dead from the assassin's bullet to his brain and every drop of blood drawn with the lash was paid by another drawn with the sword.

Somebody said people are not spiritual beings, they are white or black bodies; they are brains, biological machines: mechanisms pure and simple, objects explainable and controllable with no reference to any concept of soul. This was the falsehood to turn us against each other. It was a lie by a psychiatrist.

As the creed of my Church states, we believe that the study of the Mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields.

EMHC's N Unit is a low-functioning unit

But "low-functioning" doesn't describe patients. It describes staff.

Just for example, there's Joe Basso, Social Worker II. Joe spent months getting my guy Gus' pass packet together. For most of that time, he just kept saying it was "with the court," or "with the Administration," but it was obvious that Joe had no clue where the packet actually was, it was lost. Vik Gill stood up for Joe, or in fact covered up for him, by coaching him on how to finish the packet. Gus finally got his passes, although nobody knew the court had approved them and Gus was unable to use them for a full month (maybe two) after the judge would have expected his order to be complied with. 

I'm not sure why Vik Gill wants to keep Joe around, unless it's because nobody else wants to work on low functioning N Unit, and Vik doesn't want to be any shorter on staff than he already is. He doesn't want to be stuck as the last person of authority on crashing-and-burning N Unit. Dr. Nidea, the unit medical doctor, recently quit; and Dr. Ronett the psychologist is on her way out the door, too. Nobody gets psychotherapy at EMHC anymore; but that's true on all the other IDHS plantations, too.

The Nurse-Manager for M and N units is Teresa Niacua (my spelling may be wrong). Hers is a fairly high position, she basically has an administrative title. But after less than a year on the job, it's clear that Teresa is as dumb as rock, just like Joe "Basalt" Basso. Gus has asked for her help with problems of normal services that Joe is unwilling or too dumb to perform, like making copies of documents, obtaining forms, or getting a memo to security to enable a monthly staffing in the forensic program building legal conference room. These are things social workers are supposed to do for patients. But Teresa can't do them either, she just protests that she'll send it back to the incompetent social worker. Joe would no doubt say (with Vik Gill's backing) that he works really, really hard for all those patients assigned to him. (He has two besides Gus.) In any event, Joe is incompetent at his job, Teresa is incompetent at hers, and the whole clinical unit is dysfunctional. Nobody helps anyone with anything (especially "mental illness"); they just try to avoid trouble, which is a sure way to guarantee trouble will come.

Part of the problem is simple corruption, which comes from low morale, which comes from incompetence. Gus hates the corruption, and all the corrupt staff hate him for seeing it at all. Rules against contraband are broken all the time. One patient has markers which are banned: a green one was found just lying on the floor recently, and a new social worker made a big display of dramatically asking, "Which patient had this?!" although she clearly already knew. That new social worker covers over the window in her office door with some opaque plastic so no one can tell when she's in there. She's following a long line of rule breakers in this, including social worker Xiaomara (who quit) and social worker She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (who went to prison). Drs. Ronett and Gill are also aware of patients who have banned items (laptops with bluetooth wifi, let alone large markers) on the unit, but they never report it or investigate. Staff frequently cheat on sign-in rules and hours, but nobody cares.

I attended Gus' monthly staffing today, and I asked the treatment team why they are unable to perform the most basic administrative functions. Joe Basalt just stared down at the table. He needs a haircut and looks stoned. Gill stood up the whole time because he can't easily sit right now, with some back or shoulder injury. What a motley crew! But other units are just as bad, and some people are even worse. 

I attended three more staffings today, all for Hartman Unit patients. The first one featured none other than Richard Malis-with-malice, who had absolutely no patience with my mild sarcasm, about how therapy groups at EMHC seem to not be important for any purpose of helping patients, but only for making the staff who run them look good. The psychologist in the room had just told the patient that his attendance was needed in her therapy group precisely because almost no one else comes to it. I thought that was just too funny to not comment on. But Malis-with-malice got up and walked out, like some kind of drama queen, ending the staffing to "protest" my disrespect.

But I do honestly disrespect these people who, with all their self-important, arrogant pretext, try to tell their slaves that they, as "experts" alone know what is best for "recovery" from the invented "mental illness" myths. Almost every psychiatric slave I've ever worked for in the past two+ decades is smarter than Dr. Malis-with-malice, who is actually a bad and dishonest man, or Joe "dumb as basalt" Basso, who might just want to get high.

Then there's Rose, my Hartman Unit social worker friend who loves old rock'n'roll, and was so caring today as to ask about the welfare of a patient who recently Thiem'd out. 

Rose is the best, and all is not lost.