JAMA, Cato the elder, Pancho Villa (musings)

I recently read a report, in the 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 a popular hero, 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!