Every time I re-publish this piece, I find another angle to emphasize.
This time, it's reductionism, the strategy of making the truth, whatever
it is, into something overly simple and, therefore, deceptive and
false.
Approaching the subject of human suffering and anguish, from an honest
viewpoint, gives you all sorts of experience to explore: people are
abused, they are minimized, they have severe nutritional deficits, they
live in poverty, they are surrounded by the threat of violence, they
receive poor and confusing educations, they are exposed to toxic
chemicals and drugs, they develop weak immune systems, they don't know
how to cope with peer pressure to conform, they never learn what freedom
means, and so forth and so on.
And then...all this is reformulated and boiled down to a series of
so-called mental disorders with names and labels. Symbols.
Reductionism.
Such symbols can snare many people and drag them into slave-camps of the mind.
If you want people to become far more ignorant than they already are,
you need look no further than the field of psychiatry, which is rife
with symbols, which are the names of so-called mental disorders. There
are about 300 in the official psychiatric bible. They appear to
designate actual mental states, but upon close inspection, they're empty
of scientific meaning.
Pretending to represent erudite research, they impart gibberish.
An acceptance of these mental-disorder symbols automatically
short-circuits any investigation of the mind's true potential or power.
False map, no authentic territory, no treasure.
As a psychiatrist who left his profession in disgust once wrote me, "I
was playing a shell game with my patients. I could label a person with
one disorder, prescribe a drug, eventually diagnose a new disorder,
combine drugs, adjust the dosages, and go on this way for many
appointments. But all the labels were shams..."
They're symbols. They appear to stand for something solid, but they don't.
As I've shown in several articles, all so-called mental disorders are
based on no definitive diagnostic tests. No saliva, no blood, no genes,
no brain scans, for any of the 300 labels.
So what we have in psychiatry is a secular organized religion, a Tower
of Babble outfitted with thousands of entirely fictional symbols. Which
the priests know how to use. They have that training.
People in the general population are asking for shorthand explanations,
and the professional symbol-talkers fulfill that need. That's the
exchange. That's the transaction. The psychiatrist announces a symbol,
which is the label for a disorder, the patient asks what it means, and
the doctor explains.
Without the symbol, however, nothing happens. Nothing is consummated.
Give a human a symbol and he's all ears. He wants to know. He must
know. A symbol functions like a scent to a dog. He has to track it
down.
If psychiatrists could make it work, they'd wear purple robes
embroidered with esoteric shapes and signs and a tall hat topped by a
star. They'd gaze into a pond and stir the water with a stick and
produce Insight. They'd channel an entity from Ursa Minor in a dark
room with organ music.
Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations,
used his skills to promote his uncle's work. Surely, Bernays saw, in
Freud, a brilliant salesman, who had invented a whole new library of
symbols that could be dumped on the masses, and then translated for
public consumption.
A new church of the mind would be born.
The first question to ask is: do these mental disorders have any scientific basis? There are now roughly 300 of them.
An open secret has been 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.
In a PBS Frontline episode,
Does ADHD Exist?, Dr. Russell
Barkley, then an eminent professor of psychiatry and neurology at the
University of Massachusetts Medical Center, unintentionally spelled out
the fraud.
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: 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]
Oh, indeed, that does make them invalid. Utterly and completely. All 297
mental disorders. They're all hoaxes. Because there are no defining
tests of any kind to back up the diagnosis.
You can sway and tap dance and bloviate all you like and you won't
escape. You are looking at a science that isn't a science. That's
called fraud. Rank fraud.
There's more. 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 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 obliquely 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.
If this is medical science, a duck is a rocket ship.
To repeat, Dr. Frances' work on the DSM IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs
to be prescribed, because the definitions of Bipolar and ADHD were
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 self-admitted label-juggling act also permitted the
definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and
greater use of Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of
choice.
So... what about Ritalin?
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