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These days, we are witnessing an acceleration in the use of psychiatry to target Americans, to label them as dangerous, to take away guns they own, to blame gun violence in the US on mentally ill people. (see also this story by Dan Roberts).
It’s a winning strategy, because most Americans don’t have a clue about the way psychiatry actually works or its pose of being a science.
The public hears techno-speak and nods and surrenders.
If psychiatrists are experts on the human mind, mice can navigate the Arctic in canoes. But psychiatrists are educated to be able to talk a good game.
And politicians are more than happy to mouth vagaries, and consign the problems of society to “mental-health professionals.”
It turns out that the phrase “mental health” was invented by psyops specialists, who needed to create an analogy to physical well-being.
The needed to, because the mind was (and is) a mystery to psychiatrists.
An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.
THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.
And along with that:
ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.
Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.
For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”
Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.
But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.
His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).
Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.
Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”
Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.
Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
BANG.
That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”
After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”
Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.
Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:
“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”
Translation: Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests – it’s a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they’ll believe it because psychiatrists place a name on their problems…
Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.
If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s. but it’s still important,” I think I’d make room on the front page.
If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear more room above the fold.
If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.
I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.
I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.
And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.
Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.
And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.
Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM-IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.
Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
- acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;
- life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;
- brain damage.
Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
- intercranial pressure leading to blindness;
- peripheral circulatory collapse;
- stupor and coma.
Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:
- serious impairment of cognitive function;
- fainting;
- restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).
Dr. Frances’ label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of toxic Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.
So what about Ritalin?
In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].
Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.
For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
Paranoid delusions
Paranoid psychosis
Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
Activation of psychotic symptoms
Toxic psychosis
Visual hallucinations
Auditory hallucinations
Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
Effects pathological thought processes
Extreme withdrawal
Terrified affect
Started screaming
Aggressiveness
Insomnia
Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
Psychic dependence
High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
Decreased REM sleep
When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
Convulsions
Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.
A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”
Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern – and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.
In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)
This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.
Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.
And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic – when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.”
I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the medical apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health – as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave.
The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders.
Thank you, Dr. Frances.
Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent psychiatrist, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”
PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker – that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.
BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [Emphasis added]
Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows the whistle on his own profession.
So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.
These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.
If I said the moon was made of green cheese, even if I were a Harvard professor, sooner or later someone would ask me to produce a sample of moon rock to be tested for “cheese qualities.” I might begin to feel nervous, I might want to tap dance around the issue, but I would have to submit the rock to a lab.
Dr. Barkley employs a version of logical analysis in his statement to the PBS Frontline interviewer. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. But if a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing – and that is absurd, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”
That logic is no logic at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.
Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.
As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win – except the patient.
So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug “safety” approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.
So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.
Under the cover story, it was all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.
And now, in the wake of the Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings, it matters even less who or how many people are labeled with mental disorders. The more the better, as far as government is concerned.
Just as in the old USSR, psychiatry becomes an instrument of oppression, a way to discredit any person the State wants to silence and destroy.
“…in the disputes between the East and West concerning the Russian opponents of the Soviet regime… [m]any dissidents went to lunatic asylums and were treated as mentally sick. Western doctors and the press accused Soviet doctors of being blind instruments of the regime and of having broken the solemn oath of their calling. The Russian doctors thought the West had gone mad in reproaching their behavior. For them, anyone who opposed such an efficient police power must be mentally disturbed. In their view, only those who had what Seneca called Libido morienti (the death wish) would dare to provoke the State. The Russian doctors were convinced that they were undertaking a humanitarian mission by placing the opponents of the regime in asylums and thereby reducing their aggression–the only hope for their survival. To reduce the outstanding to mediocrity was always a medical and human duty in a state where mediocrity had the better chance of survival.” – “Man: The Fallen Ape” by Branko Bokun
