Gold-plated psychiatry? Ha!

The August 26 edition of the Southtown Star, a neighborhood newspaper in Chicago, includes a letter from one Cornell Hudson of Steger.

Mr. Hudson complains that U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-2nd) is receiving the best medical care in the world from the Mayo Clinic, which most of his constituents could never afford.  He continues, "Because of a recent lack of funding, his constituents can no longer visit the recently closed community mental health center that has served the South Side for 37 years. Had Jackson sought care from this center, it might still be open."

But community mental health centers, and state institutions like Tinley Park Mental Health Center, are being closed because the people of Illinois simply do not want to pay for this garbage any more. Psychiatry has clearly failed to reduce mental illness by operating under a medical model, given the opportunity of almost unlimited funding for at least two generations. Arguably, the total efforts of the mental health orthodoxy have dramatically increased the incidence of mental illness and disability!

This is no great mystery, or rocket science. What's happening is, the state's broke, and it's absolutely going to stop wasting money on many worthwhile things, let alone on utter nonsense.

Take Cornell Hudson's sarcastic statements literally for a moment. How many of Jesse Jackson's constituents would just happily "visit" the old community mental health center? Most of those who ever found themselves there as "patients", I guarantee, were under some sort of duress. They might just as likely be thrilled that they never have to go back there again.

Perhaps Mr. Hudson is upset that he can no longer get a family member drugged out of difficult-to-manage behavior for free. Or maybe he's just upset about the bum who is ensconced more often on the corner by his house. That doesn't mean that these individuals ever wanted or needed the neuroleptic poisons which were dispensed by the community mental health center.

It also doesn't mean that Jesse Jackson Jr. will ever benefit from the so-called "treatment" he's getting for his so-called "mood disorder" at Mayo. If I were to bet my own money, I'd say Jackson's political career, if not his life, is over unless he can extract himself from the machine trying to "diagnose" and "treat" him.

There's one other bet I would make. I attended one of the public meetings on the closing of Tinley Park Mental Health Center, and I was struck by the total disconnect between the media coverage of the situation and the obvious reality. So-called "consumers of mental health services" were NOT the the people protesting closure: unionized state mental health workers were.

So I'll wager that Cornell Hudson is a member of AFSCME, or a paid lobbyist.

PSYCHS AND CRIME

OK, here's a simple question for any and all criminal defense attorneys:

Out of your last 100 cases, how many defendants never had any contact at all with the mental health system or a mental health professional before they were arrested?

This can be an educated guess, or a careful survey of files. I would bet dollars to donuts that the actual percentage is pretty low. We could also ask:

Out of your last 10 cases of violent crime, how many defendants had never taken psychiatric drugs before they were arrested?

If you're not a criminal lawyer, ask one you know these questions. I would love to get a good volume of data.

I think psychiatry creates crime.

Thankful for the budget ax

In today's Chicago Tribune Bonnie Miller Rubin interviews University of Chicago law professor Mark Heyrman under the headline, "Mental health care offers easy target for budget ax". The presumptive attitude is, of course, everyone knows it's a bad thing to spend less money on psychiatric solutions to human problems.

But I rather think the best thing that's happened for mental health, in many years, is states going broke. Heyrman's Trib interview confirms it.

He talks about "low cost, simple services -- medications ... to keep someone healthy." But psychotropic medications don't keep anyone healthy. Sometimes these drugs keep dangerous people disabled from hurting themselves or others. But then again, it seems that sometimes they incite violence. As anyone who has ever taken them knows, they cause weight gain, diabetes, sexual dysfunction and a host of other very unhealthy conditions. If you take psychotropic meds, just deduct 25 years from your life expectancy.

Professor Heyrman believes mental illness makes people quite sick, but he has absolutely no sense that this is metaphorical sickness. He is a true believer in the strict medical model, despite generations of its documented failure. This scientism, this insanity-equals-brain-disease, goes precisely nowhere to improve anyone's life or to make any community safe.

It's so last century, in more ways than one. For this interview, in Heyrman's version of Assertive Community Treatment, people merely "remind you to take your meds, help solve problems...." Of course Dr. Goebbels, we don't mention coercion, which is endemic even in the term ("Assertive...").

People don't forget to take psych meds so much as they stop taking them on purpose or refuse to take them. That's because they hate them, and that's because the meds don't help, they hurt. I'm sure the Gestapo reminded people to do things, too, like salute properly and so on. And nobody believed so strongly in the biological determinism of all things human or sub-human.

The Trib stays in character with it's anti-Semitic founder, Robert McCormick.

But in this century we will not continue to pay for psychiatry's terrible solutions, with or without Obamacare. The DSM/APA/NAMI/Pharma/
NIMH world view is passing rapidly. These days many people know it's possible to recover fully from mental disorders, and it's easier the more you avoid those exact "low cost, simple services" which Mark Heyrman would love to make everyone accept, whether they like it or not.

Be glad Illinois is broke!

Demise of Psychiatry: A Reading List

Everybody has read Whitaker and Breggin. Lots of people know of Grace Jackson. Szasz has his loyal disciples (I am one). Here are four books less on the radar, but equally as useful and significant.

American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, by Richard Noll (2011, Harvard University Press); and Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, by Ethan Watters (2010, Free Press/Simon & Schuster). These two are really about history.

Noll covers a critical period of psychiatry in intense detail, from about 1895 to the 1930's, when the disease model of mental illness came and went. The lives, careers and mistakes of Emil Kraepelin, Adolf Meyer, Eugen Bleuler and other luminaries are detailed. Parallels with the present are striking, and the reader is seriously tempted to predict what will happen with DSM-5, purely based on history tending to repeat itself. Noll himself does not discourage this, although the connections seem to be an afterthought for him.

Watters is more of an investigative journalist. He chronicles the spectacularly successful promotion over the past two generations, of the biomedical model of mental illness around the world. In a sense, this recent history picks up almost exactly where Noll's left off, and it shows a returning swing of the pendulum, although neither Kraepelin nor Freud even appear in Watters' index. Each of the four stories told in this book - of the rise of anorexia in Hong Kong, the arrival of PTSD in Sri Lanka, the altered concept of schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and the mega-marketing of depression in Japan - is much more interesting with the backdrop of the earlier psychiatric century.

Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, by Raymond Tallis (2011, Acumen Publishing); and Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis, by Paris Williams (2012, Sky's Edge Publishing). These two books suggest a new look at what we can know and what we should do about the mind.

Tallis offers a highly respectable, technical/philosophical disputation of the intertwined ideas, that we are our brains and that consciousness is just another evolutionary adaptation. Aping Mankind is serious reading, but highly rewarding. One is compelled to respect the argument that ascribing thought to bits of brain is less scientific materialism and more mystic faith. The credentials of the author, who was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience, make him difficult to ignore.

Paris Williams is ideally suited to demonstrate the scientific and philosophical arguments of Raymond Tallis. Rethinking Madness is all about clinical and personal experience which points inexorably to the conclusion that the medical model of mental illness is destructive, and must be replaced by a recovery model wherein people can integrate personal experience and overcome distress. Attempts to make people happier and safer by fine-tuning their brain chemistry are shown to be a mistaken and generally dehumanizing project. Psychosis is not brain disease, and schizophrenia does not really even exist.

Read these four books, and then just try to imagine that the demise of psychiatry as we know it is not imminent. It will be hard.

Mr. D again, Karadzic

On a couple occasions in 2010, I wrote about a client whom I called Mr. D. He was almost killed by a psychiatrist at Elgin Mental Health Center, and his sister has remained very unhappy about that ever since.

Mr. D is not out of the nuthouse yet, he's still there, still getting treated. His monthly staffing was today. His psychiatrist (third or fourth one he's had) was not available, nor was his social worker, nor was anyone from the Elgin administration. His sister and parents attended staffings regularly for years, but they recently gave that up as a useless waste of time. Mr. D himself also refused to come today.

The family are "ethnic cleansing" refugees. They have learned one basic thing from their experience with Egin Mental Health Center, the Illinois Department of Human Services, and American forensic psychiatry: There is no better justice in the USA than there was in Bosnia, and the differences between psychiatrists who wield state power, whether their names are Amin Daghestani, Syed Hussain or Radavan Karadzic, are insignificant.

Despite the complete impasse in this case and the startling record of abuse and malpractice, the substitute social worker at today's staffing indicated that everything was just fine. Mr. D actually attended her therapy group on responsibility this week, and he was participatory. How encouraging!

It's just beyond my imagining, why the system still keeps Mr. D locked up away from his family, drugged and dehumanized. The system is simply evil. It needs to be obliterated.

Who Speaks for the Disabled?

Today's Chicago Tribune (page 25) includes the ostensibly pro-family perspective of attorney William Choslovsky. I'm mainly in favor of respecting the choices of families over those of self-proclaimed advocates, and certainly over those of state bureaucrats.

However, it is absolutely critical to presume, first of all, that the disabled may speak for themselves. It's only when an individual disabled person clearly does not speak for him or her self, that we may ethically consider anybody else's choice.

This is more complicated than it looks because disabled people do not really speak for themselves when they cannot pay, in addition to when they are actually incapable of speech. For that matter, to the degree that any of us cannot pay for or independently create what we want, we are all "disabled".

Many Americans may sincerely wish to live in the White House, but they must respect highly ritualized choices of around a hundred million fellow citizens on that, and they only have one chance every four years. This is not an entirely different kind of conflict from one where a profoundly retarded person sincerely wishes to live in their own home, but cannot work to pay the mortgage. Who speaks for another is not an entirely different kind of question from who depends on whom.

Hopefully we each depend, first of all, on ourselves. After that we have families, friends, community groups, organizations and governments, more or less in that order. Who speaks for us is closely tied to whom we depend on. It just has to be.

It's not a question of who, in all cases, ought to speak for the disabled. It's a separate question in each case, which is inextricably bound up with the particular relationships and dependencies of the individual disabled person.

If Johnny murdered his girlfriend and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and mom and dad have the idea that Johnny was adopted after all, so it's probably a genetic mental illness and they can't help him, then maybe Johnny is not represented any better by mom and dad than he is by the state, when they say he needs to take anti-psychotic medication for the rest of his life. And in fact, if Johnny can't pay for his own private attorney, he'll sure have to deal with other agendas.

NAMI has served the interests of medical psychiatry and pharma for thirty years with a heavy pretense of being all for families who know what's best for their own mentally ill. Obviously it's not always true. Sometimes people just want a magic pill, and they can be fooled. Calling a person disabled can be a power play, too.

I worked for a client who was at Choate Mental Health Center in Anna, IL. That's the facility offered by William Choslovsky as an example of a campus with real community life, where Rita and Kevin Burke's son Brian lives happily. My client would certainly argue that Choate was a prison for him, and the state should close it and every institution like it.

He speaks for himself, and I agree with him.

Another proposed resolution...

                                   RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, Systematic review has been undertaken over the past decade at national, state and local governmental levels, and in collaboration with private and not-for-profit research, regarding strategies to address potential incidents that could have large-scale health consequences including disease outbreaks, natural disasters and terrorist attacks; and

WHEREAS, The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, after conducting its own review of these issues, published a National Health Security Strategy of the United States of America in December, 2009; and

WHEREAS, The 2009 HHS Strategy is replete with statements recognizing an overarching necessity to convince the people to trust and independently cooperate, at the individual, family and community levels, with organized efforts by authorities in the amelioration of any significant health incident; and

WHEREAS, Contrary to these overarching security needs for broad trust and cooperation, notable social trends now exist toward increasing public doubt and cynicism, especially with regard to medical science and health care; and

WHEREAS, An example of such doubt and cynicism was a New York Times book review in 2009, which characterized Americans' recent love affair with modern psychiatry as a sub-prime crisis waiting to happen; and

WHEREAS, Over the last several years, the American Psychiatric Association and the world community of mental health professionals have been in an uproar regarding the general validity of psychiatric diagnosis, as evidenced by incessant protests over the new paradigm of "dimensional" definitions of mental disorder to be established in 2013 by the publication of the fifth revision of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5); and

WHEREAS, Endemic, spectacular and increasingly frequent media stories of health care fraud and falsified medical studies are not conducive to pubic confidence in and cooperation with authority on issues of health; and

WHEREAS, An ultimate security threat might entail a catastrophic failure of confidence in authority and cohesion in the face of disaster; therefore

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE, That a fundamental distinction shall be recognized: between practical and empirically-proven medical science and clinical health care practices, as opposed to popular or academic scientism embodying mere theories or wishful thinking about easy solutions to human behavior and magic pills for all unpleasant life experiences; and be it further

RESOLVED, That our government shall refrain whenever possible from forcing, coercing or deceiving families or individuals into health care solutions which they do not choose themselves by fully informed consent; and be it further

RESOLVED, That human emotions and complex behavior are not realistically a subject for, and may never be amenable to, medical management, especially such management as should ever be attempted by any state medical or mental health bureaucracy; and be it further

RESOLVED, That fundamental and vital principles of any health security strategy shall be free and honest information, open dialogue, and collaboration with the people.