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.

Psychiatry and antisemitism

In my most recent previous post, I did not explicitly say that psychiatry and antisemitism go together. They do, and I will argue that point here, publicly. Psychiatry and antisemitism are almost one and the same phenomenon, historically, philosophically, and politically.

In the 1930's, German psychiatrists actually piloted the killing machinery of the Nazi Final Solution. Tödliche Wissenschaft: Die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeuneren, und Geisteskranken, 1933-1945, by Benno Müller-Hill (Rowalt Taschenbuch, 1984), is probably the best written documentation of this horrific fact. The author had conversations with the nearest surviving relatives or descendants of some of the most infamous German war criminals who had been directly involved in exterminating the Jews of Europe. 

One is seized by an unholy vertigo reading the transcripts of Müller-Hill's interviews, when after perhaps only three or four, the same reasonable words obviously repeat as if rehearsed, with nearly identical statements from one witness to the next, arguing so very earnestly that each of the doctors was a good family man, hardly even a Nazi, just doing his job in a very difficult time with no evil intent. 

Alfred Hoche, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, was one prophet of direct medicalized killing. He wrote that various psychiatric disturbances were indications of what he called "human ballast" or "lebensunwertung Leben" (life unworthy of life). From early euthanasia programs to the industrial operation of the infamous death camps, psychiatrists were front and center. The gas chambers of Auschwitz had been disassembled from German psychiatric hospitals and shipped to Poland, and the personnel who knew how to use them traveled there, too, to turn millions of Jews into smoke. 

Laypeople in the Twenty-first Century hardly considered themselves scientifically competent to second-guess doctors until the obvious disaster of the Covid pandemic inspired the whole Western public, a full century after the nascent dawning of the Third Reich, to variously rebel against elite authorities who had been so happy to consign them to some basket of deplorables. Such glib disrespect of common Americans who lacked Ivy League diplomas merely echoed the philosophical theories of German psychiatrists, who knowingly embarked on the Nazi program to purify a master Aryan race, logically requiring full elimination of the Jews and bringing epic disaster to the world by 1945.

It's more than worth mentioning... that the Jews are the oldest continuing ethnic group in Western Civilization. Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion by millenia. Whenever anyone in the West gets the idea that the human world should be remade, their attention is necessarily directed to the Jews. Psychiatrists have frequently considered themselves capable of remaking the human mind, and thereby the world. From Brock Chisholm to Jeff Lieberman, the leaders of this purported "medical specialty" have conspired to power above all other purposes. The power of organized religion has been the primary barrier standing in their way, and no organized religion has such a record of demonstrated staying power against materialism as Judaism. There is no symbol of antipsychiatry as potent as a single Jewish martyr standing on a gallows and reciting the Sh'ma.

Jeff Lieberman deserves special mention. He is Jewish, so we should naturally wonder how he can be antisemitic. In my experience, most American Jews are instinctively favorable toward psychiatry as a generality, partly because they believe it is a medical specialty. They identify with Freud (a Jew), and while Jews are only two percent of the U.S. population, 14% of American doctors are Jewish. Lieberman wore a white coat and draped a stethoscope around his neck at every opportunity, right up to the day he was ostentatiously exiled from the profession he had led, as a racist.

When a Jew insists to a hostile world the Lord is one, he strikes directly against the central ideal of medical psychiatry, namely that the lord is nothing. The individual is nothing, there is no soul, there is only the neurotransmitter and the receptor, there is only brain, only mechanics, mud. We must look into the mirror and make peace with the fact that we are staring at a machine. We will be replaced by machines.

It's just not true. Psychiatry is a lie. Antisemitism is one cover for the lie, inextricable from psychiatry itself.