"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.

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.

This type of mental illness, psychiatry, antisemitism

I recently saw an interview clip with a Jewish student at Columbia University. This young woman was very impressive. She made a point, perhaps better than anyone I've heard or read, that the anti-Israel or anti-Zionist arguments from last year's demonstrations on elite college campuses are in fact arguments against the whole tradition, theory and culture of Western civilization, which the American university system is supposed to stand for and perpetuate. 

It reminded me first of my friend Gary Kash's explanations of antisemitism: (in part) it's not racism against Jews, it's rather jealousy of other people's success, plus paranoia over possible secret conspiracies. There have been plenty of undeserved successes and secret conspiracies in history. We can all wonder about them, just as we can buy lottery tickets and fantasize about how to spend a couple hundred million dollars. But the exceptional stories never really explain and don't change our real circumstances now, in present time. We only make things better for ourselves or anyone else by creating and organizing, i.e., by what we think of as work.

When ideas inspire human action, it's because there is some truth in them. The truth in antisemitism and anti-Western or anti-American agitation is the natural objection to bad conditions in the world. People don't like the ugly deaths of innocents, or starvation, or disease, too much heat or too much cold, too much  or too little rain. The Abrahamic tradition has postulated for millenia that these bad things happen because people disobey God or because we have not attained sufficient scientific understanding. That explanation (btw, it's not two different ones!) arguably enabled our species to progress all the way from an animalistic existence to an ability to reach the stars or wipe out God's creation on earth. So judging by such a result there was at least some truth in the foundations of the West.

But we have apparently stagnated. At least that's what the anti-American, antisemitic agitators must believe. There's truth in that, too, most of us feel it. The worst stagnation is in mental health, and that stagnation relates critically to all the others, though it's rarely recognized except by groups lobbying for more money for peculiar versions. Those groups repeat useless shibboleths like (IDHS's), "There's no health without mental health," while doing nothing to improve mental health. In fact these days they habitually use the term "mental health" to mean mental illness (e.g., "She suffered from mental health..."), which is totally, amazingly stupid, beyond Orwellian newspeak. 

An example of this useless stupid-speak was heard this morning in the wake of sickening circumstances, a mass shooting in midtown Manhattan. Fox News featured analysis by former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker, who seemed to speak of some presumed psychiatric diagnosis of the shooter when he said, "This type of mental illness is the most dangerous kind because they can act with purpose, and almost, you know, r-rationality... they can plan. But yet, obviously there's some type of mental illness involved here." 

Swecker is an FBI expert in protecting the public, not a medical expert in mental illness. Thus he gets away with implying that some specific type of mental illness ("this type") has been defined and identified, perhaps by someone more knowledgable than himself; but then in the next sentence he can step back to reality ("obviously there's some type") by acknowledging it's really just the glib, popular presumption of laypeople, aka myth. Fox's audience doesn't even notice that this guy has no clue what he's talking about. He almost certainly has no solid evidence, at this early stage of investigation, that the dead shooter had an identifiable purpose or any level of general ability to plan. 

Why does the FBI talk that way, and why do we all just buy it?

There is a widespread feeling that we are at the end of some road. Our elite universities, the highest symbol of rationality and rule by human reason, are going nuts. The world suddenly hates Jews again, as if that can be a new solution. Nobody knows whether there is a difference between evil and brain disease. We don't want to work, we just want to get lucky.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last...

J. Duncan's case

I have a client, Junior Duncan (not his real name), who is currently suing various individual employees of the Illinois Department of Human Services for sexual abuse he suffered while he was in their  custody. 

Junior is no longer an involuntary mental patient: he is now in jail because he violated court protective orders. He says he just wanted to retrieve his clothes and other possessions (including important legal documents), from a woman who had started a sexual affair with him while he had been her "patient" at Elgin Mental Health Center, aka "EMHC", the storied 19th Century psychiatric "hospital." That woman, the so-called "mental health professional"/perpetrator, later threw Junior out of her house after they had been living together as an intimate couple for months. Junior spent a long time on the street, and he was a mess (no shoes, no diabetes medication, etc.).

I believe Junior; everybody who knows how things work at EMHC easily believes him, and I'm pretty sure a federal jury will eventually believe him, too. This particular woman who put Junior out on the street was allegedly the second EMHC staff who had seduced him and used him as a sex slave while he was in custody. (I have to tell you it's pretty gruesome, Illinois taxpayers!)

I have long maintained, and most of the clients I've represented have agreed, that a psychiatric slave plantation is worse than prison. But currently, Junior says jail is petty brutal. He is held at Will County Adult Correctional Center in Joliet, on the misdemeanor charge for violating the court domestic protective orders. He's been beat up by guards a number of times, and medically neglected. 

One day not long ago he woke up on Thursday morning paralysed from the waste down. None of the jail personnel paid any attention. They probably presumed he was malingering, and after all, they all knew he was mentally ill, which means too crazy to think of as a regular human being. Junior didn't get better, though. He really couldn't walk. He attended a court hearing Friday morning in a wheelchair.

Several nurses or orderlies in the jail (see their names below) refused to help Junior until Friday night, by which time he couldn't stand up. Finally they shipped him off to the emergency room at St. Joe's Hospital, where doctors (also see names below) ordered emergency surgery after an MRI showed a tumor on his spine. Nobody heard from him for several days (his mother called me very worried) and it was not easy to find out what had happened. He is now recovering, but very slowly, because the jail is refusing to provide the physical therapy that was ordered. The jail is perfectly willing to risk Junior's chance of ever walking again, on the hope that he'll be released soon enough so they'll be rid of him and somebody else can be blamed, somebody else can pay.

Junior is litigious. As I have written elsewhere, this could be good evidence that he is no longer mentally ill. I'm not sure he will ever renounce the status, though. He thinks he needs it to maintain certain privileges and immunities. My tendency is to try to change his mind about that, but I'm his lawyer, not his minister or therapist. I know he didn't end up in his current condition because of "mental illness." He ended up in this condition because he was abused, defrauded, and enslaved by psychiatrists under a cynical guise of "treating" mental illness with snake-oil (fake) "medicine."

The offending and otherwise involved personnel at Will County Adult Correctional Center include several Wellpath agency-contracted employees, and several medical professionals at St. Joe's Hospital in Joliet. I haven't had time to repeatedly debrief Junior on all details, so I can't be sure these are all bad guys: Tom Ranovsky, Rakeya Smith, "Nurse Donna," Erica Paterson, Dr. Tiffney Luckett, "Dr. Rachel," Dr. Gandhi, and Tamir Hersonsky, M.D.(N.B., I think the final two names are surgeons at St. Joe's who are good guys.) This who's who will shake out by the time any new lawsuit is filed.

The situation is not mental health. It's bad people who fail to help others. No amount of scientific research, no new drugs, and no improved legal procedures, will ever turn people who have chosen to be bad, into beneficent doctors and public servants.

Rational argument, protest, Fuller Torrey

About fourteen and a half years ago, I wrote an article which has been the third-most popular out of more than 450 on this blog. This was my reaction to E. Fuller Torrey's claim in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that to reduce mass shooting incidents in America all we need to do is validate psychiatry, and then consistently lock up and drug the people whom psychiatrists "diagnose" as mentally ill and dangerous. 

I argued, maybe too rationally, that Torrey was a fanatic, proposing the use of supposed "medicine" to punish and restrain people; and by such proposal, he proves psychiatry is not, or at least not entirely, a medical specialty, and it is definitely not help. I said, and am still convinced almost a decade and a half later, that Fuller Torrey will ultimately be held responsible for far more harm to society than any mass shooter. What is called "forensic psychiatry" (involuntary "hospitalization" and court-ordered/forced "treatment") is a giant dodge for modern people who are afraid to protect themselves and their families and unable to witness anything un-pretty in their wimpy, over-protected lives.

People are desperately afraid of insanity. They are willing and even anxious to turn over the whole subject and all its myriad implications and phenomena to "experts". If a child from a suburban family "speaks in tongues" without religious upbringing on that phenomenon, it's probably "schizophrenia" which a "doctor" should "treat". Everyone bemoans, but also ignores the facts, that there is no cure for "schizophrenia" and any two "properly diagnosed" (i.e., strictly in accordance with DSM criteria) schizophrenics may have no symptoms in common at all. The "expertise" we are so happy to turn these problems over to is bullshit, as openly admitted by some of the field's most prominent practitioners.

I reviewed the old blog article today, immediately after reading Betsy Levy Paluck's long Atlantic piece, "The Most Overlooked Value of Political Protest," which centers around predictable left-liberal issues like climate policy and reproductive choice, but also offers very valuable insight that applies anywhere on any political spectrum. What the author calls "a spiral of silence" is the snowballing tendency for silence to beget silence in conversations that approach controversial issues. People get more and more careful to never hurt anyone's feelings or let any voices ever be raised, until everyone just stops talking about anything but the weather for fear of stating a minority opinion. This undermines the kind of informal "common knowledge" about what other people think, which is essential for a democratic society.

Paluck suggests that we should speak up and become politically involved: i.e., we should protest. I think that is even more true for involuntary "patients" in state nuthouses than it is for regular people who are not accused of any "mental illness" imagined to make them "dangerous to self or others." Many of my clients are protesters, against the meds they hate taking, against the condescending, dehumanizing attitudes of so-called "mental health professionals," and against the ugly corruption, outright perjury, and wasteful bureaucracy in the psychiatric plantation system of the Illinois Department of Human Services.

I can describe grim details of endemic sexual abuse in state-operated institutions: female social workers have oral sex sessions with their male "patients" three times a week for years, only steps away from doctors and administrators specially trained to detect, prevent and report those crimes; male STA's and librarians seduce female "patients" and pass them around to each other like real chattel slaves; female "patients" get pregnant in the institutions and nobody knows whose fault that is, so there are well-worn routines for coercing them to have cheap abortions or hysterectomies; and the harm piles high as everyone, EVERYONE, sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil, as their Illinois Attorney General's office, taxpayer-funded legal counsel argues that they are all immune from any prosecution or civil claim, as experts who must be accorded discretion and who can never be contradicted by lawyers or mental patients (God forbid!!) about their almighty professional judgment or their "medical" diagnoses and treatments.

The bottom line is, most people think that everyone else rationally believes involuntary mental patients to always be the problem, and their overseers, the mental health professionals, to be the only (albeit occasionally, rarely, slightly imperfect) solution. So nobody ever discusses the things I see every day in my practice of law. Good, normal people don't know anything about state psychiatric "hospitals," and they don't want to know. This is why protests by psychiatric "patients" are probably increasing and need to increase a lot more. 

The question is whether such protests will be noticed. "Not taking your meds" was long agreed to be an unsocial behavior. Laura Delano and Cooper Davis were first of all protesters, just because they stopped taking meds. They are getting noticed, big-time now. I sent Laura's book to a patient who is protesting from inside Packard Mental Health Center yesterday. (I had to cut the hardcover off and turn it into a paperback so security won't have an easy excuse to withhold it from my client.) 

If Unshrunk is released in a paperback format, I'll buy a dozen for clients who'll be protesting, "...Takin' it to the streets!" What a party, man....

Then God help the IDHS nuthouse administrators.

Joe Pierre, Michael Gadson, and Milt Pinsky

These are three guys whom I am tempted to like. They're all apparently smart, very social, and on the opposite side of some critical issues from me. Being on the opposite side of issues is a positive trait which draws me to a person, because my constant anxiety is that I may be unaware of some threat that is sneaking up from just outside my field of vision. At any moment, I might become Professor James Lowry, searching in suppressed terror for my lost hat. Communicating frequently enough with people like Joe, Michael, and Milt reassures me that I'm not ignoring parts of the world that might kill me.

I just wrote about Dr. Joe Pierre yesterday, and I've written about him before. He is apparently a well-respected young psychiatrist who has been in his profession almost as long as I have been criticizing it or actively fighting for its abolition. He may not respect me as much as I respect him (he probably just can't, knowing I'm a Scientologist), but at least he does occasionally communicate.

Dr. Michael Gadson is a state psychiatrist and the Medical Director of one of Illinois' plantations (Packard Mental Health Center) where human beings are psychiatrized and enslaved. He's a master up in the big house. I was recently called on the carpet by someone who thinks this is a very unprofessional thing for me to say about an opposing party in legal disputes; but I'm not the only one saying it. My clients agree, from their own subjective experience (which of course the broader society might love to discredit as born from "mental illness" that no one needs to understand). And Tom Szasz, who was an M.D. psychiatrist just as qualified as all the slave masters and overseers whom I accuse, wrote several very compelling books that made the philosophical argument in great and scholarly detail.

Dr. Gadson is an extremely professional, and apparently very "caring" clinician. He recently walked me to the parking lot and figured out how I could get into my car after I had locked myself out. I told him, "Doc you saved my ass, thank you very much!" But I always feel like I should check to be sure he's not holding a knife behind his back when he smiles and tells a patient, "I'm only here to help with your recovery, not to sabotage it..." or "Your assertive communication skills are improving...".

Milt Pinsky is a neighbor. He's hard-core, left- or far-left-leaning Democrat, and he loves to argue politics. He always brings out every sympathy I might have for Republican views (there aren't really that many of them). Milt and I have virtually never ended an argument on a bad note. I'm looking forward to seeing him tonight in fact, at a local social event. I will probably have a conversation that will begin with, "Milt! You look pretty good, but I've been warned to be very careful about triggering you right now, in case you're too upset that Trump has been nominated for the Nobel and his every action looks golden, even through the eyes of CNN." If the event makes a good story, I may blog about it further.

My mother was a very devoted Christian, and "Love thine enemy!" was a principle close to her soul. There are two ways that makes sense to me. The first is that if you can love somebody and understand their views, you won't have to fight them, and the world will be better without so many fights. The second way is that if you love your enemy to enable knowing him better, you can probably kill him quicker.

I go back & forth with the Christianity. But Milt and his wife are friends.

Joe Pierre's egghead SOB arrogance

Maybe I should take it as a compliment that Dr. Joe Pierre, the San Fransisco psychiatrist with whom I occasionally argue/discuss on social media, believes that I am so educated as to know the meaning of "QED" as an abbreviation for the latin phrase, quid  erat demonstrandum. This translates to "that which was to be proved." It's a sort of showboating or peacocking at the end of a written or logical argument, perhaps analogous to a raised fist and screaming grimace after a long three-pointer right at the buzzer in basketball, or a gloating, ecstatic dance in the end zone after a touchdown reception.

Dr. Joe has been increasingly prone (like a huge number of people, maybe most of the population of the USA these days) to political tirades presented as obvious logic that everybody just has to agree with or prove themselves to be of subhuman intelligence. The famous example of this, and of how it can utterly fail to win over opponents, was Hillary Clinton's phrase, "basket of deplorables." (It's pretty safe to presume that Dr. Joe voted for Hillary, by the way, and if he reads this article, I expect his reaction will be, "Of course I did!")

Recently, Dr. Joe posted on X: Measles update: 1168 cases and counting--we're now 106 shy of the 1274 from 2019, which would make it the worst outbreak in over 30 years. With new airport exposures, it's likely we'll get there. Meanwhile, RFK Jr is like "vaccines are the problem." 

I responded to his post: You're rooting for this, right Doc? Like it's more important to score political points against anyone who challenges orthodoxy than to identify and disseminate truth. 

His retort was: Don't conflate "expecting" with "rooting." The effects of RFK's vaccine denialism will demonstrate themselves soon enough and will likely be well beyond the scope of measles. Highlighting this is a case of QED, not "wanting Trump and his regime to fail" as is often claimed. 

I could go on and on about this exchange.

• If he weren't "rooting," Joe could easily have added "unfortunately" or "alarmingly" somewhere in the post. And rather than "...we'll get there," he could have written, "...I'm afraid it will happen." His "expecting" rather than "rooting" denial is transparently disingenuous; sorry, but he was rooting. I should add that rooting for a disease, while simultaneously claiming that the same disease is so dangerous as to justify abrogating people's informed consent and coercing them to accept medicine they don't want, seems quite contrary to the fundamental ethics of medicine.
• What exactly is "RFK's vaccine denialism?" That's a curious way of labeling it, probably meant to imply without having to argue that RFK's views on vaccines are ignorant prejudice and simply must give way to the proper judgment of experts or the established facts, like with "Holocaust denialism" or "climate denialism" or some other clearly discredited denialism. But many people consider some issues to still be open, and they have a freedom of speech right to keep talking about them. If Joe doesn't want to take any responsibility for convincing anyone of any arguable point on vaccines, he would be free to simply laugh at the dinosaurs for their views. But then why would he bother to go on about it on social media?
• I never said anything about wanting Trump to fail. Joe's protest there is a protest too much. He definitely wants Trump to fail more than he wants the measles outbreak to be limited to any particular number. Saying "Trump and his regime" also might betray Joe's view that the current administration is some non-democratic entity rather than the duly elected, appointed and confirmed executive branch of our government. Isn't this a brand of "denialism"?

Anyway my main point, I guess, is just that most psychiatrists are arrogant SOB's (NB: unlike QED, SOB is an abbreviation for an English phrase that most people know) who are incapable of legitimately arguing or proving their beliefs, so they are reduced to refined practices of cowardly, covert coercion for which it is ultimately necessary to recruit government and police assistance. 

I'll continue following Joe Pierre, MD on X because he gives me good examples of psychiatric arrogance, and once in a while he inspires me to learn abbreviations of Latin phrases.

"Patients" with no doctors at fake "hospitals"

If you're an involuntary "patient" in a psychiatric "hospital," you should probably have a psychiatrist or psychologist who is assigned to your "treatment" team... right? 

There are constitutional arguments that say, if the state is depriving you of liberty without convicting you of a crime, it must have a justification like protecting you or helping you, or protecting the community. This only becomes an issue in the context of so-called "mental illness," because that term means you "have" some disease or disorder that both absolves you of criminal responsibility and simultaneously renders you dangerous or otherwise unacceptable in society. In plainer terms, people are committed to state nuthouses for their own and everybody else's good, to be cured of insanity.

This would be evidence of our modern enlightened morality, kindness and tolerance, not to mention scientific/medical genius, if only the nuthouses ever did cure anyone's insanity, and perhaps if only the clinicians who work there for taxpayer-funded salaries and pensions actually knew what mental illness is. But they never cure anyone, and they don't have a clue what they're doing.

In fact, sometimes they don't even show up.

Illinois' psychiatric plantation system has such a shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists that these days, many patients ironically complain about not getting treatment. "Treatment" is AKA abuse or even torture, so a lack of it may arguably be a good thing. But defense attorneys and prosecutors lately even tell courts that criminal defendants should not be sent to these plantations because, whatever you may call treatment, abuse or torture, people who go to the plantations obviously are not helped. Choate Mental Health Center is especially discreditable, but other facilities are no better.

Take the Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard MHC, where Kasturi Kripakaran, Kathleen Treanor, Sara Broyles and Michael Gadson pretend to be legitimate helping professionals. I know a patient who recently called Dr. Gadson, after he officially claimed he was the psychiatrist heading that patient's treatment team. Gadson didn't want to hear any complaints or concerns the patient had, however. He was just angry that the patient knew his phone extension and was thereby able to call him in his office. He  said explicitly, he was "not allowed" to talk to this patient more than once a month!

The situation is inconsistent (at least) with the idea that a psychiatrist is in charge of a treatment team and the patient is the most important member. It's possible that Dr. Gadson has too many important administrative duties to pay any attention to real patients. And maybe this particular patient is suing him, so he's "not allowed" (by his lawyers!) to have regular communication with the plaintiff.

In any event, "treatment" for this patient is not happening. And critically, the Illinois Department of Human Services cannot do anything about that. But they never have been able to provide help for mental/emotional/behavioral problems. It has always been a scam on the taxpayers, who are easy to take advantage of because they've been convinced that insanity is dangerous, and they don't know what insanity really is, and many of them are afraid they or somebody in their family might "have" some.

But when we consider "mental patients" who get pregnant in state custody and are not allowed to talk to their psychiatrists, we have to wonder what exactly we're paying for.

Right?

On diagnosis being bullshit

"It's bullshit," was originally a comment by Allen Frances, the Chairman of the APA committee which wrote DSM-IV, to psychologist Gary Greenberg, in 2011. Keeping that point closely applied to the DSM itself is a good idea for two reasons.

First, the DSM is the single most important modern source by far, of the idea that mental illnesses are discrete medical conditions that can and should be diagnosed. It names hundreds of such medical conditions, and details precisely how anyone should decide whether or not any one of them exists in any individual. It is a manual (that's what the M stands for). It is strongly reminiscent, as I have frequently said before, of the Malleus Maleficarum, which preceded it by about 500 years.

Very few people read the Malleus any more. They may read more recent historical perspectives, analyses and commentaries about it; but there's no substitute for the whole medieval text itself, in a reliable English translation assuming a reader is not proficient in Latin. This was a manual eerily similar to the DSM. It continued in widespread use for the detection and prosecution of witches, and it remained in print, for about 300 years. (The DSM has only been around for about 50.) The Malleus was probably not known by common people in the 16th and 17th Centuries, at least not nearly as well as the DSM is known by the general population in the West today: the "Hammer of Witches" was a handbook only for the most educated and powerful men in Europe.

My point is that the DSM has had similar influence and cultural impact to the Malleus. Allen Frances' 2011 statement would be comparable to a hypothetical admission in the year 1500 by Jacobus Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer that after all, there were no witches.

The second reason one might limit application of Frances' honest admission, "It's bullshit," is to save time and headaches. Psychiatric "diagnosis" evolved into such an incredible rabbit hole in the last seventy-five years that even trying to follow what is called research about it now becomes an endless maze of confusion and a very long journey through strange lands of arcane nomenclature and weird acronyms.

For example, "e-mhGAP-IG." You may laugh... but this stands for the World Health Organization's latest mobile app. It's intended to improve detection of depression in primary care, which has supposedly not been up to par in certain countries that only use the standard "mhGAP-IG" (an earlier non-screen, paper version of the same tool). Here's a research report all about it from no less authority than the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), published just last week!

I spent at least an hour going down this rabbit hole this morning. I never got a better understanding of anything being done in the real world, beyond the thought I had when I read the first sentence of this report, which identified a purpose, "to improve detection of depression." 

My thought, immediately, was that detection of depression isn't really detection of a fact, it's promotion of a theory or proposed explanation. Real diseases are actually detected by medical tests. Psychiatric disorders are merely alleged by evaluations from checklists in the DSM. Big difference. Huge!

Read this research report. By the end, you'll laugh at yourself for even caring what these ridiculous people are talking about, but you'll cry for the human wastage: so much blood, uncountable treasure, a century of lost progress in mental health knowledge.

And read the Malleus Maleficarum. Tom Szasz wrote a whole book comparing the European witch hunts to the modern mental health movement, and it may have been his best book.

Torquemada had "research," too. The Church and APA are scientists!

Stahl's Deprescriber's Guide--seriously?

One fascinating story from the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting this month in Los Angeles is the mere fact that such a stalwart psychopharmacology authority as Stephan M. Stahl may be jumping on a bandwagon, which until very recently was widely derided as "antipsychiatry." Stahl must be one of the top  ten promoters of psychiatric drugs in the world! Why would he help "deprescribe"-?

Maybe it's an opportunistic business move for Stahl. His new book is due out in exactly six months, and it's expensive ($60 for a paperback of just over 500 pages). I may buy a couple dozen copies and give them out to clients and nuthouse psychiatrists. Any legitimacy attributed to getting people off psychiatric drugs is deliciously seditious in the context of the state plantation system. But I can't help thinking my friend Rodney Yoder will be absolutely sure that the real intention here is to own the deprescribing craze, i.e., own it to exploit it, or to make it disappear.

If we take everybody off the drugs, we will inevitably saddle the forensic psychiatric system with the impossible requirement that clinicians must talk to patients. They hate that. They want to be doctors who are obeyed, not counselors who must listen or empathize. And anyway, it's too expensive (not to mention useless) to do anything with dangerous crazy people other than just drug them into sufficient disability so that they conveniently, without ugliness, disappear. That is clearly the modus operandi of Illinois' Department of Human Services.

In the meantime, I saw headlines this morning about North Carolina's psychiatric slave system, which sounds to me very similar to Illinois' plantations. It can be expected that horrible abuses will be found in every state if competent investigations are conducted. They might be. We are inches away from a widespread realization by the American public that the kind of "mental health" we have been sold since 1945 has been a harmful scam. Psychiatry as we have known it will cease to exist without forced "hospitalization" and "treatment." Tom Szasz predicted that long ago.

Involuntary psychiatry has long been lamented, at least on and off, as necessary. But it doesn't protect the public or serve justice. The drugs have long been lamented, at least occasionally, as imperfect. But they don't help anyone or cure anything.

These facts are being acknowledged, implicitly, even in the media and amazingly, at APAAM2025! There will be efforts to distract attention from the facts, but psychiatry may lose its status and power.

That would be a happy development indeed. Psychiatria delenda est!