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.
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