My sadness recalls a scene from the end of the movie Schindler's List, when Oscar Schindler (played so brilliantly by Liam Neeson), was surrounded by a crowd of liberated Jews whose lives he had saved from the Nazis. The war was over, Schindler was a saint to these people. He had once been very rich but he was broken now, he and his wife wore the poorest clothes as disguise to escape from advancing Russians, and he broke down, sobbing uncontrollably when he looked at the car he was about to leave in, mumbling, "I could have got more out, I should have sold this car. One more, one more...."
Since 1945 there has been an ongoing holocaust of souls perpetrated by the Gruppenführers and Oberführers of psychiatry. I weep for every individual who has succumbed. So many people I should have rescued but didn't or couldn't, even some people I loved!
My fear recalls plots from the Robert Redford-Brad Pitt movie Spy Game or various, far darker versions of case officer-agent relationships. These remind me of Richard Helm's understanding of trust (there's never sufficient reason for it, ever: it is always an arbitrary decision taken purely as a luxury that can be afforded), or the tragic conclusion of Smiley's People by John le Carré: "I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred and they are his. We have crossed each other's frontiers. We are the no-men of this no-man's land." I've had nightmares where I become a psychiatrist, psychiatrists and their slaves are my only friends, and no one else understands me.
I have adopted (and adapted) an old habit from Cato the Elder, adding "Psychiatria delenda est!" to almost any conversation or statement, however non-sequitur. The Roman was right about Carthage, and I believe I am right about psychiatry, it must be destroyed.
A Congressional roundtable hearing on mental health was held yesterday morning in the U.S. House, by the Oversight Committee. I was thrilled to discover that Laura Delano was one of three guests invited to testify. When I first met Laura more than a decade ago, she was a nobody (but for her family name), who was still trying to recover from psychiatry, and my sense was, still afraid. Now she is a thought leader, an expert. She is as effectively anti-psychiatry as anyone I know, although she goes to pains to disavow that label. (I wish she wouldn't!) I hope she is completely secure, because people will surely try to ruin her.
The Chairman of the hearing (Congressman Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin) opened with a statement that included, "I think the mental health establishment in this country is such a total scandal... We have so many people entering the mental health establishment thinking they will solve their problems, and in so many cases instead of solving their problems, they made their problems so much worse." He added at one point that he believes many people who seek help from psychiatrists would be much better off never having anything to do with them at all. He is 100% right about that!
Meanwhile, Bob Whitaker and Mad In America just put out a compelling article exposing the apparent trend toward re-institutionalization (under a guise of protecting the public from all the dangerous crazy people) as leading to policies that violate basic human rights. I know from my own legal work in Illinois that the morale of institutional mental health workers continues to tank. United Nations authorities have weighed in for a couple years now to say involuntary psychiatric "treatment" should be abolished. Even Federal Reserve banks are weighing in against involuntary "hospitalization" and "treatment". It is worth recalling Thomas Szasz's prediction that psychiatry will wither away if it loses its legal authority to coerce people and force drugs or shock on them in the name of "medicine". That is exactly what I understand various obvious social trends, and many political conversations and events, to portend.
Another very encouraging development is the unexpected difficulty and increasing complexity of getting psychedelic drugs approved for treatment of psychiatric conditions. The so-called "renaissance" of psychedelic research thankfully did not bring these psychosis-inducing poisons out of the anti-drug "dark ages" after all. Hopefully this impossible so-called "science" will be remembered as a brief, quirky chimera or simply forgotten by history.
More and more people, if cautiously, seem to accept my admonishment that the study of the mind, as distinct from the body or the brain, and the healing, as distinct from mere profitable servicing, of mentally-caused ills... should not be alienated from religion or condoned in non-religious fields. Mental health is NOT naturally a medical issue. The mind is not understandable as a bio-mechanical machine, and a person is absolutely NOT a mere animal to be controlled.
In any event, I sure hope my grieving for souls lost to the psychiatric holocaust can soon be over and my nightmares will not come true!
