THE 12TH BLOG FOR THE OUTLAW OF PSYCHIATRY NOW !

2008-06-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

ON SOME ADDED HORRIFYING NEW DANGERS OF PSYCHIATRY IN THE SERVICE OF THE RULERS
by Justice Lover

As if the past and present practices of coercive psychiatry are not inhuman enough there are now new terrorist (and secretive, of course) methods of control, torture and murder by new technologies which have been developed by scientists at the service and on the order of the rulers. Those secret technologies would make psychiatry infinitely more dangerous to humanity !

The following article highlights some of those horrific dangers.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7123
On the Need for New Criteria of Diagnosis of Psychosis in the Light of Mind Invasive Technology by Carole Smith
Global Research, October 18, 2007
Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, 2003.

"We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radiofrequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterised by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use." [Excerpt]

For those of us who were trained in a psychoanalytical approach to the patient which was characterised as patient centred, and which acknowledged that the effort to understand the world of the other person entailed an awareness that the treatment was essentially one of mutuality and trust, the American Psychiatry Association's Diagnostic Criteria for Schizotypal personality was always a cause for alarm.

The Third Edition (1987) of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) required that there be at least four of the characteristics set out for a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and an approved selection of four could be: magical thinking, telepathy or sixth sense; limited social contact; odd speech; and over-sensitivity to criticism. By 1994, the required number of qualifying characteristics were reduced to two or more, including, say, hallucinations and 'negative ' symptoms such as affective flattening, or disorganised or incoherent speech – or only one if the delusions were bizarre or the hallucination consisted of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behaviour or thoughts. The next edition of the DSM is not due until the year 2010.

In place of a process of a labelling which brought alienation and often detention, sectioning, and mind altering anti-psychotic medication, many psychoanalysts and psychotherapists felt that even in severe cases of schizoid withdrawal we were not necessarily wasting our time in attempting to restore health by the difficult work of unravelling experiences in order to make sense of an illness. In this way, psychoanalysis has been, in its most radical form, a critic of a society, which failed to exercise imaginative empathy when passing judgement on people.

The work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Harold Searles or R.D. Laing - all trained as psychiatrists and all of them rebels against the standard procedures – provided a way of working with people very different from the psychiatric model, which seemed to encourage a society to repress its sickness by making a clearly split off group the carriers of it. A psychiatrist in a mental hospital once joked to me, with some truth, when I commented on the number of carrier bags carried by many of the medicated patients around the hospital grounds, that they assessed the progress of the patient in terms of the reduction of the number of carrier bags. It is too often difficult to believe, however, when hearing the history of a life, that the "schizophrenic" was not suffering the effects of having been made, consciously and unconsciously, the carefully concealed carrier of the ills of the family.

For someone who felt his mind was going to pieces, to be put into the stressful situation of the psychiatric examination, even when the psychiatrist acquitted himself with kindness, the situation of the assessment procedure itself, can be 'an effective way to drive someone crazy, or more crazy.' (Laing, 1985, p 17). But if the accounting of bizarre experiences more or less guaranteed you a new label or a trip to the psychiatric ward, there is even more reason for a new group of people to be outraged about how their symptoms are being diagnosed. A doubly cruel sentence is being imposed on people who are the victims of the most appalling abuse by scientific-military experiments, and a totally uncomprehending society is indifferent to their evidence. For the development of a new class of weaponry now has the capability of entering the brain and mind and body of another person by technological means.

Harnessing neuroscience to military capability, this technology is the result of decades of research and experimentation, most particularly in the Soviet Union and the United States. (Welsh, 1997, 2000) We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radiofrequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterised by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use. The patents deriving from Bernard J. Eastlund's work provide the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level, particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than accomplished by the prior art, the detonation of nuclear devices at various yields and various altitudes. (ref High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project, HAARP).

Some patents, now owned by Raytheon, describe how to make "nuclear sized explosions without radiation" and describe power beam systems, electromagnetic pulses and over-the-horizon detection systems. A more disturbing use is the system developed for manipulating and disturbing the human mental process using pulsed radio frequency radiation (RFR), and their use as a device for causing negative effects on human health and thinking. The victim, the innocent civilian target is locked on to, and unable to evade the menace by moving around. The beam is administered from space. The Haarp facility as military technology could be used to broadcast global mind-control, as a system for manipulating and disturbing the human mental process using pulsed radio frequency (RFR). The super-powerful radio waves are beamed to the ionosphere, heating those areas, thereby lifting them. The electromagnetic waves bounce back to the earth and penetrate human tissue.

Dr Igor Smirnov, of the Institute of Psycho-Correction in Moscow, says: "It is easily conceivable that some Russian 'Satan', or let's say Iranian – or any other 'Satan', as long as he owns the appropriate means and finances, can inject himself into every conceivable computer network, into every conceivable radio or television broadcast, with relative technological ease, even without disconnecting cables…and intercept the radio waves in the ether and modulate every conceivable suggestion into it. This is why such technology is rightfully feared."(German TV documentary, 1998).

If we were concerned before about diagnostic criteria being imposed according to the classification of recognizable symptoms, we have reason now to submit them to even harsher scrutiny. The development over the last decades since the Cold War arms race has included as a major strategic category, psycho-electronic weaponry, the ultimate aim of which is to enter the brain and mind. Unannounced, undebated and largely unacknowledged by scientists or by the governments who employ them – technology to enter and control minds from a distance has been unleashed upon us. The only witnesses who are speaking about this terrible technology with its appalling implications for the future, are the victims themselves and those who are given the task of diagnosing mental illness are attempting to silence them by classifying their evidence and accounts as the symptoms of schizophrenia, while the dispensers of psychic mutilation and programmed pain continue with their work, aided and unopposed.

If it was always crucial, under the threat of psychiatric sectioning, to carefully screen out any sign of confused speech, negativity, coldness, suspicion, bizarre thoughts, sixth sense, telepathy, premonitions, but above all the sense that "others can feel my feelings, and that someone seemed to be keeping up a running commentary on your thoughts and behaviour," then reporting these to a psychiatrist, or anyone else for that matter who was not of a mind to believe that such things as mind-control could exist, would be the end of your claim to sanity and probably your freedom. For one of the salient characteristics of mind-control is the running commentary, which replicates so exactly, and surely not without design, the symptoms of schizophrenia. Part of the effort is to remind the victim that they are constantly under control or surveillance. Programmes vary, but common forms of reminders are electronic prods and nudges, body noises, twinges and cramps to all parts of the body, increasing heart beats, applying pressures to internal organs – all with a personally codified system of comments on thoughts and events, designed to create stress, panic and desperation. This is mind control at its most benign. There is reason to fear the use of beamed energy to deliver lethal assaults on humans, including cardiac arrest, and bleeding in the brain.

It is the government system of secrecy, which has facilitated this appalling prospect. There have been warning voices. "…the government secrecy system as a whole is among the most poisonous legacies of the Cold War …the Cold War secrecy (which) also mandate(s) Active Deception…a security manual for special access programs authorizing contractors to employ 'cover stories to disguise their activities. The only condition is that cover stories must be believable." (Aftergood & Rosenberg, 1994; Bulletin of Atomic Scientist). Paranoia has been aided and abetted by government intelligence agencies.

In the United Kingdom the fortifications against any disturbing glimmer of awareness of such actual or potential outrages against human rights and social and political abuses seem to be cast in concrete. Complete with crenellations, ramparts and parapets, the stronghold of nescience reigns supreme. To borrow Her Majesty the Queen's recent observation: "There are forces at work of which we are not aware." One cannot say that there is no British Intelligence on the matter, as it is quite unfeasible that the existence of the technology is not classified information. Indeed it is a widely held belief that the women protesting against the presence of cruise missiles at Greenham Common were victims of electro-magnetic radiation at gigahertz frequency by directed energy weapons, and that their symptoms, including cancer, were consistent with such radiation effects as reported by Dr Robert Becker who has been a constantly warning voice against the perils of electro-magnetic radiation. The work of Allen Frey suggests that we should consider radiation effects as a grave hazard producing increased permeability of the blood-brain barrier, and weakening crucial defenses of the central nervous system against toxins. (Becker, 1985, p. 286).

Dr Becker has written about nuclear magnetic resonance as a familiar tool in medecine known as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. Calcium efflux is the result of cyclotronic resonance which latter can be explained thus: If a charged particle or ion is exposed to a steady magnetic field in space, it will begin to go into a circular or orbital, motion at right angles to the applied magnetic field.The speed with which it orbits will be determined by the ratio between the charge and the mass of the particle and by the strength of the magnetic field. (Becker, 1990,p.235) The implications of this for wide scale aggression by using a combination of radar based energy and the use of nuclear resonating are beyond the scope of the writer, but appear to be worth the very serious consideration of physicists in assessing how they might be used against human beings.

Amongst medical circles, however, it has so far not been possible for the writer to find a neuroscientist, neurologist or a psychiatrist, nor for that matter, a general medical practitioner, who acknowledges even the potential for technological manipulation of the nervous system as a problem requiring their professional interest. There has been exactly this response from some of England's most eminent practitioners of the legal profession, not surprisingly, because the information about such technology is not made available to them. They would refer anyone attempting to communicate mind- harassment as a psychiatric problem, ignoring the crime that is being committed.

The aim here is not to attempt a comprehensive history and development of the technology of mind control. These very considerable tasks - which have to be done under circumstances of the most extreme difficulty - have been addressed with clarity and courage by others, who live with constant harm and threats, not least of all contemptuous labelling. Their work can be readily accessed on the internet references given at the end of this paper. For a well-researched outline of the historical development of electro-magnetic technology the reader should refer to the timeline of dates and electromagnetic weapon development by Cheryl Welsh, president of Citizens against Human Rights Abuse. (Welsh 1997; 2001). There are at least one and a half thousand people worldwide who state they are being targeted. Mojmir Babacek, now domiciled in his native Czech Republic, after eight years of residence in the United States in the eighties, has made a painstakingly meticulous review of the technology, and continues his research. (Babacek 1998, 2002)

We are concerned here with reinforcing in the strongest possible terms:

i) The need for such abuses to human rights and the threats to democracy to be called to consciousness, and without further delay.

ii) To analyse the reasons why people might defend themselves from becoming conscious of the existence of such threats.

iii) To address the urgent need for intelligence, imagination, and information - not to mention compassion - in dealing with the victims of persecution from this technology, and

iv) To alert a sleeping society, to the imminent threats to their freedom from the threat from fascist and covert operations who have in all probability gained control of potentially lethal weaponry of the type we are describing.

It is necessary to emphasise that at present there is not even the means for victims to gain medical attention for the effects of radiation from this targeting. Denied the respect of credulity of being used as human guinea pigs, driven to suicide by the breakdown of their lives, they are treated as insane – at best regarded as 'sad cases'. Since the presence of a permanent 'other' in one's mind and body is by definition an act of the most intolerable cruelty, people who are forced to bear it but who refuse to be broken by it, have no other option than to turn themselves into activists, their lives consumed by the battle against such atrocities, their energies directed to alerting and informing the public of things they don't want to hear or understand about evil forces at work in their society.

It is necessary, at this point, to briefly outline a few – one might say the precious few – attempts by public servants to verify the existence and dangers inherent in this field:

In January 1998, an annual public meeting of the French National Bioethics Committee was held in Paris. Its chairman, Jean-Pierre Changeux, a neuroscientist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, told the meeting that "advances in cerebral imaging make the scope for invasion of privacy immense. Although the equipment needed is still highly specialized, it will become commonplace and capable of being used at a distance. That will open the way for abuses such as invasion of personal liberty, control of behaviour and brainwashing. These are far from being science-fiction concerns…and constitute "a serious risk to society." ("Nature." Vol 391, 1998).
In January 1999, the European Parliament passed a resolution where it calls " for an international convention introducing a global ban on all development and deployment of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings. It is our conviction that this ban can not be implemented without the global pressure of the informed general public on the governments. Our major objective is to get across to the general public the real threat which these weapons represent for human rights and democracy and to apply pressure on the governments and parliaments around the world to enact legislature which would prohibit the use of these devices to both government and private organisations as well as individuals." (Plenary sessions/Europarliament, 1999)
In October 2001, Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich introduced a bill to the House of Representatives which, it was hoped would be extremely important in the fight to expose and stop psycho-electronic mind control experimentation on involuntary, non-consensual citizens. The Bill was referred to the Committee on Science, and in addition to the Committee on Armed Services and International Relations. In the original bill a ban was sought on 'exotic weapons' including electronic, psychotronic or information weapons, chemtrails, particle beams, plasmas, electromagnetic radiation, extremely low frequency (ELF) or ultra low frequency (ULF) energy radiation, or mind control technologies. Despite the inclusion of a prohibition of the basing of weapons in space, and the use of weapons to destroy objects or damage objects in space, there is no mention in the revised bill of any of the aforementioned mind-invasive weaponry, nor of the use of satellite or radar or other energy based technology for deploying or developing technology designed for deployment against the minds of human beings. (Space Preservation Act, 2002)

In reviewing the development of the art of mind-invasive technology– there are a few outstanding achievements to note:

In 1969 Dr Jose Delgado, a Yale psychologist, published a book: "Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society". In essence, he displayed in practical demonstrations how, by means of electrical stimulation of the brain which had been mapped out in its relations between different points and activities, functions and sensations, - by means of electrical stimulation, how the rhythm of breathing and heartbeat could be changed, as well as the function of most of the viscera, and gall bladder secretion. Frowning, opening and closing of eyes and mouth, chewing, yawning, sleep, dizziness, epileptic seizures in healthy persons were induced. The intensity of feelings could be controlled by turning the knob, which controlled the intensity of the electric current. He states at the end of his book the hope that the new power will remain limited to scientists or some charitable elite for the benefit of a "psychocivilized society."

In the 1980's the neuromagnetometer was developed which functions as an antenna and could monitor the patterns emerging from the brain. (In the seventies the scientists had discovered that electromagnetic pulses enabled the brain to be stimulated through the skull and other tissues, so there was no more need to implant electrodes in the brain). The antenna, combined with the computer, could localize the points in the brain where the brain events occur. The whole product is called the magnetoencephalograph.

In January 2000 the Lockheed Martin neuroengineer Dr John D. Norseen, was quoted (US News and World Report, 2000) as hoping to turn the electrohypnomentalaphone, a mind reading machine, into science fact. Dr Norseen, a former Navy pilot, claims his interest in the brain stemmed from reading a Soviet book in the 1980's claiming that research on the mind would revolutionize the military and society at large. By a process of deciphering the brain's electrical activity, electromagnetic pulsations would trigger the release of the brain's own transmitters to fight off disease, enhance learning, or alter the mind's visual images, creating a 'synthetic reality'. By this process of BioFusion, (Lockheed Martin, 2000) information is placed in a database, and a composite model of the brain is created. By viewing a brain scan recorded by (functional) magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, scientists can tell what the person was doing at the time of recording – say reading or writing, or recognise emotions from love to hate. "If this research pans out", says Norseen, "you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it." But Norseen says he is 'agnostic' on the moral ramifications, that he's not a mad scientist – just a dedicated one. "The ethics don't concern me," he says, "but they should concern someone else."

The next big thing looks like being something which we might refer to as a neurocomputer but it need not resemble a laptop – it may be reducible to whatever size is convenient for use, such as a small mobile phone. Arising from a break-through and exploitation of PSI-phenomena, it may be modelled on the nervous-psychic activity of the brain – that is, as an unbalanced, unstable system of neurotransmitters and interacting neurones, the work having been derived from the creation of a copy of a living brain – accessed by chance, and ESP and worked on by design.

On receiving a communication from the writer on the feasibility of a machine being on the horizon which, based on the project of collecting electromagnetic waves emanating from the brain and transmitting them into another brain that would read a person's thoughts, or using the same procedure in order to impose somebody else's thoughts on another brain and in this way direct his actions – there was an unequivocal answer from IBM at executive level that there was no existing technology to create such a computer in the foreseeable future. This is at some variance with the locating of a patent numbered 03951134 on the Internet pages of IBM Intellectual Property Network for a device, described in the patent, as capable of picking up at a distance the brain waves of a person, process them by computer and emit correcting waves which will change the original brain waves. Similar letters addressed to each of the four top executives of Apple Inc., in four individual letters marked for their personal attention, produced absolutely no response. This included the ex- Vice President of the United States, Mr Al Gore, newly elected to the Board of Directors of Apple.

Enough people have been sufficiently concerned by the reports of victims of mind control abuse to organise The Geneva Forum, in 2002, held as a joint initiative of the Quaker United Nations Office, Geneva; the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research; the International Committee of the Red cross, and the Human Rights Watch (USA), and Citizens against Human Rights Abuses (CAHRA); and the Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies, which was represented by the Professor and Senior Lecturer from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford.

In England, on May 25, 1995, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. carried an article based on a report by Nic Lewer, the peace researcher from Bradford University, which listed "more than 30 different lines of research into 'new age weapons'…"some of the research sounds even less rational. There are, according to Lewer, plans for 'pulsed microwave beams' to destroy enemy electronics, and separate plans for very-low-frequency sound beams to induce vomiting, bowel spasm, epileptic seizures and also crumble masonry." Further, the article states, "There are plans for 'mind control' with the use of 'psycho-correction messages' transmitted by subliminal audio and visual stimuli. There is also a plan for 'psychotronic weapons' – apparently the projection of consciousness to other locations – and another to use holographic projection to disseminate propaganda and misinformation." (Welsh, Timeline). Apart from this notable exception it is difficult to locate any public statement of the problem in the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, the problem of credulity does not necessarily cease with frequent mention, as in the United States, in spite of the number of reported cases, there is still not sufficient public will to make strenuous protest against what is not only already happening, but against what will develop if left unchecked. It appears that the administration believes that it is necessary and justifiable, in the interests of national security, to make experimental human sacrifices, to have regrettable casualties, for there to be collateral damage, to suffer losses in place of strife or war. This is, of course, totally incompatible with any claims to be a democratic nation which respects the values of human life and democracy, and such an administration which tutors its servants in the ways of such barbaric tortures must be completely condemned as uncivilised and hypocritical.

Disbelief as a Defence Mechanism

In the face of widespread disbelief about mind-control, it seems worth analysing the basis of the mechanisms employed to maintain disbelief:

i) In the sixties, Soviet dissidents received a significant measure of sympathy and indignant protest from western democracies on account of their treatment, most notedly the abuse of psychiatric methods of torture to which they were subjected. It is noteworthy that we seem to be able to access credulity, express feelings of indignant support when we can identify with victims, who share and support our own value system, and who, in this particular historical case, reinforced our own values, since they were protesting against a political system which also threatened us at that time. Psychologically, it is equally important to observe that support from a safe distance, and the benefits to the psyche of attacking a split-off 'bad father', the soviet authorities in this case, presents no threat to one's internal system; indeed it relieves internal pressures. On the other hand, recognizing and denouncing a similar offence makes very much greater psychic demands of us when it brings us into conflict with our own environment, our own security, our own reality. The defence against disillusion serves to suppress paranoia that our father figure, the president, the prime minister, our governments - might not be what they would like to be seen to be.

ii) The need to deposit destructive envy and bad feelings elsewhere, on account of the inability of the ego to acknowledge ownership of them - reinforces the usefulness of persons or groups, which will serve to contain those, disowned, projected feelings which arouse paranoid anxieties. The concepts of mind-invasion strike at the very heart of paranoid anxiety, causing considerable efforts to dislodge them from the psyche. The unconscious identification of madness with dirt or excrement is an important aspect of anal aggression, triggering projective identification as a defence.

iii) To lay oneself open to believing that a person is undergoing the experience of being invaded mentally and physically by an unseen manipulator requires very great efforts in the self to manage dread.

iv) The defence against the unknown finds expression in the split between theory and practice; between the scientist as innovator and the society who can make the moral decisions about his inventions; between fact and science fiction, the latter of which can present preposterous challenges to the imagination without undue threat, because it serves to reinforce a separation from the real.

v) Identification with the aggressor. Sadistic fantasies, unconscious and conscious, being transferred on to the aggressor and identified with, aid the repression of fear of passivity, or a dread of punishment. This mechanism acts to deny credulity to the victim who represents weakness. This is a common feature of satanic sects.

vi) The liberal humanist tradition which denies the worst destructive capacities of man in the effort to sustain the belief in the great continuity of cultural and scientific tradition; the fear, in one's own past development, of not being 'ongoing', can produce the psychic effect of reversal into the opposite to shield against aggressive feelings. This becomes then the exaggerated celebration of the 'new' as the affirmation of human genius which will ultimately be for the good of mankind, and which opposes warning voices about scientific advances as being pessimistic, unenlightened, unprogressive and Luddite. Strict adherence to this liberal position can act as overcompensation for a fear of envious spoiling of good possessions, i.e. cultural and intellectual goods.

vii) Denial by displacement is also employed to ignore the harmful aspects of technology. What may be harmful for the freedom and good of society can be masked and concealed by the distribution of new and entertaining novelties. The technology, which puts a camera down your gut for medical purposes, is also used to limit your freedom by surveillance. The purveyors of innovative technology come up with all sorts of new gadgets, which divert, entertain and feed the acquisitive needs of insatiable shoppers, and bolster the economy. The theme of "Everything's up to date in Kansas City" only takes on a downside when individual experience – exploding breast implants, say – takes the gilt off the gingerbread. Out of every innovation for evil (i.e. designed for harming and destroying) some 'good' (i.e. public diversion or entertainment) can be promoted for profit or crowd-pleasing.

viii) Nasa is sending a spacecraft to Mars, or so we are told. They plan to trundle across the Martian surface searching for signs of water and life. We do not hear dissenting voices about its feasibility.

Why is it that, when a person accounts that their mind is being disrupted and they are being persecuted by an unseen method of invasive technology, that we cannot bring ourselves to believe them? Could it be that the horror involved in the empathic identification required brings the shutters down? Conversely, the shared experience of the blasting of objects into space brings with it the possibilities of shared potency or the relief that resonates in the unconscious of a massive projection or evacuation – a shared experience which is blessed in the name of man's scientific genius.

ix) The desire 'not to be taken in', not to be taken for a fool, provides one of the most powerful and common defence mechanism against credulity.

Power, Paranoia and Unhealthy Governments

The ability to be the bearer and container of great power without succumbing to the pressures of latent narcissistic psychoses is an important matter too little considered. The effect of holding power and the expectation and the need to be seen as capable of sustaining it, if not exercising it, encourages omnipotence of thought. In the wake of this, a narcissistic overevaluation of the subject's own mental processes may set in. In the effort to hold himself together as the possessor, container and executor of power, he (or indeed, she) may also, undergo a process of splitting which allows him, along with others, to bear enthralled witness of himself in this illustrious role. This may mean that the seat of authority is vacated, at least at times. The splitting process between the experiencing ego and the perceiving ego allows the powerful leader to alternate his perception of himself inside and outside, sometimes beside, himself. With the reinforcement of himself from others as his own narcissistic object, reality testing is constrained. In this last respect, he has much in common with the other powerful figure of the age, the movie star. or by those, in Freud's words, who are "ruined by success."

In a world, which is facing increasing disillusion about the gulf between the public platforms on which governments are elected, and the contingencies and pragmatics of retaining defence strategies and economic investments, the role of military and intelligence departments, with their respective tools of domination and covert infiltration, is increasingly alarming. Unaccountable to the public, protected from exposure and prosecution by their immunity, licensed to lie as well as to kill, it is in the hands of these agents that very grave threats to human rights and freedom lies. Empowered to carry out aggression through classified weapon experimentation which is undetectable, these men and women are also open to corruption from lucrative offers of financial reward from powerful and sinister groups who can utilize their skills, privileged knowledge and expertise for frankly criminal and fascist purposes.

Our information about the psychological profiles of those who are employed to practice surveillance on others is limited, but it is not difficult to imagine the effects on the personality that would ensue with the persistent practice of such an occupation, so constantly exposed to the perversions. One gains little snatches of insight here and there. In his book on CIA mind control research (Marks, 1988), John Marks quotes a CIA colleague's joke (always revealing for personality characteristics): "If you could find the natural radio frequency of a person's sphincter, you could make him run out of the room real fast." (One wonders if the same amusement is derived from the ability to apply, say infra-sound above 130 decibels, which is said to cause stoppage of the heart, according to one victim/activist from his readings of a report for the Russian Parliament.)

Left to themselves, these servants of the state may well feel exempt from the process of moral self-scrutiny, but the work must be dehumanising for the predator as well as the prey. It is probably true that the need to control their agents in the field was an incentive to develop the methods in use today. It is also an effectively brutalising training for persecuting others. Meanwhile the object, the prey, in a bid for not only for survival but also in a desperate effort to warn his or her fellows about what is going on, attempts to turn himself into a quantum physicist, a political researcher, a legal sleuth, an activist, a neurologist, a psychologist, a physiologist – his own doctor, since he cannot know what effects this freakish treatment might have on his body, let alone his mind. There are always new methods to try out which might prove useful in the search to find ways of disabling and destroying opponents – air injected into brains and lungs, lasers to strike down or blind, particle beams, sonar waves, or whatever combination of energies to direct, or destabilise or control.

Science and Scepticism

Scientists can be bought, not just by governments, but also by sinister and secret societies. Universities can be funded by governments to develop technology for unacceptably inhumane uses. The same people who deliver the weapons - perhaps respected scientists and academics - may cite the acceptable side of scientific discoveries, which have been developed by experimenting on unacknowledged, unfortunate people. In a cleaned up form, they are then possibly celebrated as a break-through in the understanding of the natural laws of the universe. It is not implausible that having delivered the technical means for destruction, the innovator and thinker goes on, wearing a different hat, to receive his (or her) Nobel Prize. There are scientists who have refused to continue to do work when they were approached by CIA and Soviet representatives. These are the real heroes of science.

In the power struggle, much lies at stake in being the first to gain control of ultimate mind-reading and mind-controlling technology. Like the nuclear bomb, common ownership would seem by any sane calculations to cancel out the advantage of possession, but there is always a race to be the first to possess the latest ultimate means of mass destruction. The most desirable form is one that can be directed at others without contaminating oneself in the process - one that can be undetected and neatly, economically and strategically delivered. We should be foolish to rule out secret organisations, seeing threat only from undemocratic countries and known terrorist groups.

As consumers in a world which is increasingly one in which shopping is the main leisure activity, we should concern ourselves to becoming alert to the ways in which human welfare may have been sacrificed to produce an awesome new gadget. It may be the cause for celebration for the 'innovator', but brought about as the result of plugging in or dialling up the living neuronal processes of an enforced experimentee. If we are concerned not to eat boiled eggs laid by battery hens, we might not regard it morally irrelevant to scrutinise the large corporations producing electronically innovative 'software.' We might also be wary about the origins of the sort of bland enticements of dating agencies who propose finding your ideal partner by matching up brain frequencies and 'bio-rhythms'.

We do not know enough about the background of such technology, nor how to evaluate it ethically. We do not know about its effects on the future, because we are not properly informed. If governments persist in concealing the extent of their weapon capability in the interests of defence, they are also leaving their citizens disempowered of the right to protest against their deployment. More alarmingly, they are leaving their citizens exposed to their deployment by ruthless organisations whose concerns are exactly the opposite of democracy and human rights.

Back in the United Kingdom

Meanwhile, back in England, the Director of the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Professor Colin Blakemore, also the elective Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council writes to the author that he "... knows of no technology (not even in the wildest speculations of neuroscientists) for scanning and collecting 'neuronal data' at a distance." (Blakemore, 2003, ) This certitude is at distinct variance with the fears of other scientists in Russia and the United States, and not least of all with the fears of the French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux of the French National Bioethics Committee already quoted (see page 5). It is also very much at odds with the writing of Dr Michael Persinger from the Behavioural Neuroscience Laboratory at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. His article "On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Algorithms" (1995), he describes the ways that individual differences among human brains can be overcome and comes to a conclusion about the technological possibilities of influencing a major part of the approximately six billion people on this planet without mediation through classical sensory modalities but by generating electromagnetic induction of fundamental algorithms in the atmosphere. Dr Persinger's work is referred to by Captain John Tyler whose work for the American Air Force and Aerospace programmes likens the human nervous system to a radio receiver. (1990)

Very recently the leading weekly cultural BBC radio review had as one of its guests, the eminent astro-physicist and astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, who has recently published a book, "Our Final Century", in which he makes a sober and reasoned case for the fifty-fifty chance that millions of people, probably in a 'third-world country' could be wiped out in the near future through biotechnology and bio-terrorism – "by error or malign release." He spoke of this devastation as possibly coming from small groups or cults, based in the United States. "…few individuals with the right technology to cause absolute mayhem." He also said that in this century, human nature is no longer a fixed commodity, that perhaps we should contemplate the possibility that humans would even have implants in the brain.

The other guests on this programme were both concerned with Shakespeare, one a theatre producer and the other a writer on Shakespeare, while his remaining guest was a young woman who had a website called "Spiked", the current theme of which was Panic Attack, that is to say, Attack on Panic. This guest vigorously opposed what she felt was the pessimism of Sir Martin, regarding his ideas as essentially eroding trust, and inducing panic. This reaction seems to typify one way of dealing with threat and anxiety, and demonstrates the difficulty that a warning voice, even from a man of the academic distinction of Martin Rees, has in alerting people to that which they do not want to hear. This flight reaction was reinforced by the presenter who summed up the morning's discussion at the end of the programme with the words: "We have a moral! Less panic, more Shakespeare!"

The New Barbarism

Since access to a mind-reading machine will enable the operator to access the ideas of another person, we should prepare ourselves for a new world order in which ideas will be, as it were, up for grabs. We need not doubt that the contents of another's mind will be scooped up, scooped out, sorted through as if the event was a jumble sale. The legal profession would therefore be well advised to consider the laws on Intellectual Property very judiciously in order to acquit themselves with any degree of authenticity. We should accustom ourselves to the prospect of recognizing our work coming out of the mouth of another. The prospect of wide-scale fraud, and someone posturing in your stolen clothes will not be a pretty sight. The term "personal mind enhancement" is slipping in through the back door, to borrow a term used by the Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and it is being done through technologically-induced mental co-ercion – mind raping and looting. In place of, or in addition to, cocaine, we may expect to see 'mind-enhanced' performances on "live" television.

The brave new science of neuropsychiatry and brain mapping hopes to find very soon, with the fMRI scanner - this "brand new toy that scientists have got their hands on" - "the blob for love" and "the blob for guilt", (BBC Radio 4: All in the Mind, 5 March, 2003). Soon we will be able to order a brain scan for anyone whose behaviour strikes us as odd or bizarre, and the vicissitudes of a life need no longer trouble us in our diagnostic assessments. In his recent Reith Lectures for the BBC (2003), Professor Ramachandran, the celebrated neuroscientist from the La Hoya Institute in San Diego, California, has demonstrated for us many fascinating things that the brain can do. He has talked to us about personality disorders and shown that some patients, who have suffered brain damage from head injury, do not have the capacity to recognise their mothers. Others feel that they are dead. And indeed he has found brain lesions in these people. In what seems to be an enormous but effortless leap, the self-styled "kid in a candy store" is now hoping to prove that all schizophrenics, have damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, which results in the inability to distinguish between fantasy (sic) and reality. Since Professor Ramachandran speaks of schizophrenia in the same breath as denial of illness, or agnosia, it is not clear, and it would be interesting to know, whether the person with the head injury has been aware or unaware of the head injury. Also does the patient derive comfort and a better chance at reality testing when he is told of the lesion? Does he feel better when he has received the diagnosis? And what should the psychoanalysts – and the psychiatrists, - feel about all those years of treating people of whose head injuries they were absolutely unaware? Was this gross negligence? Were we absolutely deluded in perceiving recovery in a sizeable number of them?

It is, however, lamentable that a neuroscientist with a professed interest in understanding schizophrenia should seek to provide light relief to his audience by making jokes about schizophrenics being people who are "convinced that the CIA has implanted devices in their brain to control their thoughts and actions, or that aliens are controlling them." (Reith Lecture, No 5, 2003).

There is a new desire for concretisation. The search for meaning has been replaced by the need for hard proof. If it doesn't light up or add up it doesn't have validity. The physician of the mind has become a surgeon. "He found a lump as big as a grapefruit!"

Facing up to the Dread and Fear of the Uncanny

Freud believed that an exploration of the uncanny would be a major direction of exploration of the mind in this century. The fear of the uncanny has been with us for a very long time. The evil eye, or the terrifying double, or intruder, is a familiar theme in literature, notably of Joseph Conrad in The Secret Sharer, and Maupassant's short story, Le Horla. Freud's analysis of the uncanny led him back to the old animistic conception of the universe: "…it seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to the animistic phase in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression." (Freud: 1919. p.362)

The separation of birth, and the childhood fear of 'spooks in the night', also leave their traces in each and every one of us. The individual experience of being alone in one's mind – the solitary fate of man which has never been questioned before, and upon which the whole history of civilised nurture is based - is now assaulted head-on. Since growing up is largely synonymous with acceptance of one's aloneness, the effort to assuage it is the basis for compassion and protection of others; it is the matrix for the greatest good, that of ordinary human kindness, and is at the heart of the communicating power of great art. Even if we must all live and die alone, we can at least share this knowledge in acts of tenderness which atone for our lonely state. In times of loss and mental breakdown, the starkness of this aloneness is all too clear. The best of social and group constructiveness is an effort to allay the psychotic anxieties that lie at the base of every one of us, and which may be provoked under extreme enough conditions.

The calculated and technological entry into another person's mind is an act of monumental barbarism which obliterates– perhaps with the twiddling of a dial – the history and civilisation of man's mental development. It is more than an abuse of human rights, it is the destruction of meaning. For any one who is forced into the hell of living with an unseen mental rapist, the effort to stay sane is beyond the scope of tolerable endurance. The imaginative capacity of the ordinary mind cannot encompass the horror of it. We have attempted to come to terms with the experiments of the Nazis in concentration camps. We now have the prospect of systematic control authorised by men who issue instructions through satellite communications for the destruction of societies while they are driving new Jaguars and Mercedes, and going to the opera.

This is essentially about humiliation, and disempowerment. It is a manifestation of rage acted out by those who fear impotence with such dread, that their whole effort is directed into the emasculation and destruction of the terrifying rival of their unconscious fantasies. In this apocalypse of the mind the punitive figure wells up as if out of the bowels of the opera stage, and this phantasmagoria is acted out on a global scale. These men may be mad enough to believe they are creating a 'psychocivilised world order". For anyone who has studied damaged children, it is more resonant of the re-enactment from the unconscious, reinforced by a life devoid of the capacity for empathic identification, of the obscenities of the abused and abusing child in the savage nursery. Other people -which were to them like Action Man toys to be dismembered, or Barbie Dolls to be obscenely defiled - become as meaningless in their humanity as pixillated dots on a screen.

Although forced entry into a mind is by definition obscene, an abbreviated assessment of the effects that mind-invaded people describe testifies to the perverted nature of the experiments. Bizarre noises are emitted from the body, a body known well enough by its owner to recognise the noises as extrinsic; air is pumped in and out of orifices as if by a bicycle pump. Gradually the repertoire is augmented - twinges and spasms to the eyes, nose, lips, strange tics, pains in the head, ringing in the ears, obstructions in the throat, pressure on the bowel and bladder causing incontinence; tingling in the fingers, feet, pressures on the heart, on breathing, dizziness, eye problems leading to cataracts; running eyes, running nose; speeding up of heart beats and the raising of pressure in the heart and chest; breathing and chest complaints leading to bronchitis and deterioration of the lungs; agonizing migraines; being woken up at night, sometimes with terrifying jolts ; insomnia; intolerable levels of stress from the loss of one's privacy. This collection of assorted symptoms is a challenge to any medical practitioner to diagnose.

There are, more seriously, if the afore-going is characterised as non-lethal, the potential lethal effects since the capability of ultrasound and infra-sound to cause cardiac arrest, and brain lesions, paralysis and blindness, as well as blinding by laser beam, or inducing asphyxia by altering the frequencies which control breathing in the brain, epileptic seizure – all these and others may be at the fingertips of those who are developing them. And those who do choose to use them may be sitting with the weapon, which resembles, say, a compact mobile telephone, on the restaurant table next to the bottle of wine, or beside them at the swimming pool.

Finally – if the victims at this point in the new history of this mind-control, cannot yet prove their abuse, it must be asserted that, faced with the available information about technological development – it is certainly not possible for those seeking to evade such claims – to disprove them. To wait until the effects become widespread will be too late.

For these and other reasons which this paper has attempted to address, we would call for an acknowledgement of such technology at a national and international level. Politicians, scientists and neurologists, neuroscientists, physicists and the legal profession should, without further delay, demand public debate on the existence and deployment of psychotronic technology; and for the declassification of information about such devices which abuse helpless people, and threaten democratic freedom.
Victims' accounts of abuse should be admitted to public account, and the use of psycho-electronic weapons should be made illegal and criminal,
The medical profession should be helped to recognise the symptoms of mind-control and psychotronic abuse, and intelligence about their deployment should be declassified so that this abuse can be seen to be what it is, and not interpreted automatically as an indication of mental illness.

If, in the present confusion and insecurity about the search for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, we conclude that failure to locate them - whatever the truth of the matter –encourages us to be generally complacent, then we shall be colluding with very dark forces at work if we conclude that a course of extreme vigilance signifies paranoia. For there may well be other weapons of mass destruction being developed and not so far from home; weapons which, being even more difficult to locate, are developed invisibly, unobstructed, unheeded in our midst, using human beings as test-beds. Like ESP, the methods being used on humans have not been detectable using conventional detection equipment. It is likely that the signals being used are part of a physics not known to scientists without the highest level of security clearance. To ignore the evidence of victims is to deny, perhaps with catastrophic results, the only evidence which might otherwise lead the defenders of freedom to becoming alert to the development of a fearful new methods of destruction. Manipulating terrorist groups and governments alike, these sinister and covert forces may well be very thankful for the professional derision of the victims, and for public ignorance.

References

Laing, R.D. (1985) : Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist. Macmillan, 1985

Welsh, Cheryl (1997): Timeline of Important Dates in the History of Electromagnetic Technology and Mind Control, at:
www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~welsh/timeline.htm

Welsh, Cheryl (2001):Electromagnetic Weapons: As powerful as the Atomic Bomb, President Citizens Against Human Rights Abuse, CAHRA Home Page: U.S. Human Rights Abuse Report: www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~welsh/emr13.htm

Begich, Dr N. and Manning, J.: 1995 Angels Don't Play this HAARP, Advances in Tesla Technology, Earthpulse Press.

ZDF TV: "Secret Russia: Moscow – The Zombies of the Red Czars", Script to be published in Resonance, No. 35

Aftergood, Steven and Rosenberg, Barbara: "The Soft Kill Fallacy", in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept/Oct 1994.

Becker, Dr Robert: 1985,The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, William Morrow, N.Y.

Babacek, Mojmir: International Movement for the Ban of Manipulation of The Human Nervous System: http://mindcontrolforums.com/babacek.htm and go to: Ban of Manipulation of Human Nervous System

"Is it Feasible to Manipulate the Human Brain at a Distance?"
www.aisjca-mft.org/braindist.htm

"Psychoelectronic Threat to Democracy"
http://mindcontrolforums.com/babacek.htm

Nature: "Advances in Neuroscience May Threaten Human Rights", Vol, 391, Jan. 22, 1998, p. 316; (ref Jean- Pierre Changeux)

Space Preservation Act: Bill H.R.2977 and HR 3616 IH in 107th Congress – 2nd Session: see: www.raven1.net/govptron.htm

Sessions European Parliament:
www.europarl.eu.int/home/default_en.htm?redirected=1

Click at Plenary Sessions, scroll down to Reports by A4 number, click, choose 1999 and fill in oo5 to A4

Delgado, Jose M.R: 1969. "Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society", Vol. 41, World Perspectives, Harper Row, N.Y.

US News & World Report: Lockheed Martin Aeronautics/ Dr John Norseen; Report January 3/10 2000, P.67

Freud, Sigmund: 1919: Art and Literature:" The Uncanny". Penguin,
Also "Those Wrecked by Success."

Marks, John: 1988 :The CIA and Mind Control – the Search for the Manchurian Candidate, ISBN 0-440-20137-3

Persinger, M.A. "On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Fundamental Algorythms"; In Perception and Motor Skills, June, 1995, vol. 80, p. 791 – 799

Tyler, J."Electromagnetic Spectrum in Low Intensity Conflict," in "Low Intensity Conflict and Modern Technology", ed. Lt. Col. J. Dean, USAF, Air University Press, Centre For Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, Maxwell Air Force base, Alabama, June, 1986.

Rees, Martin Our Final Century: 2003, Heinemann.

Conrad, Joseph: The Secret Sharer, 1910. Signet Classic.

Maupassant, Guy de: Le Horla, 1886. Livre de Poche.

Carole Smith is a British psychoanalyst. In recent years she has been openly critical of government use of intrusive technology on non-consenting citizens for the development of methods of state control. Carole Smith
E-mail: rockpool@dircon.co.uk

(Emphasis by Justice lover)

2008-06-01T23:59:00.001-07:00

EXPOSING MORE PSYCHIATRIC CRAP AND
THE LIES ON WHICH COERCIVE PSYCHIATRY IS FOUNDED
by Justice Lover
The following article was first published by Asylum, "the magazine for democratic psychiatry". It is necessary, of course, to abolish the schizophrenia label, but not enough. Psychiatry must be absolutely and immediately outlawed before it inflicts more numerous deaths and suffering on innocent people. Psychiatry, with its alliance with Big Pharma, and with its barbaric history, cannot and never will be democratic.
It must be outlawed now as a dangerous terrorist and fascist quackery !

The Campaign for Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label

Paul Hammersley and Terence McLaughlin
(This and the previous post are excerpts from the 2 June, 2008, issue of Peter Myers' newsletter, peter.myers@mailstar.net)

The idea that schizophrenia can be viewed as a specific, genetically determined, biologically driven, brain disease has been based on bad science and social control since its inception. If the scientific argument against `schizophrenia' is judged to be won, it remains to take the evidence to the people, to explain and develop the alternatives in the full light of day. This is why the campaign is led by Asylum, the magazine for democratic psychiatry, psychology, education and community development. We believe the time is fully ripe for a paradigm shift across the field of mental distress and that the alternative knowledges and resources are now in place to mobilise for change. No more will we view the scandal where intelligent persons are expected to accept discredited diagnoses for fear of being labelled as `lacking in insight' and having treatment forced on them.

Read (2004) lists a fundamental dissatisfaction with the concept of schizophrenia as an illness that can be traced back over 80 years. More recently Bentall (1990, 2003), and Boyle (1990) have published elegant, well researched arguments clearly demonstrating that the concept of schizophrenia is neither valid nor reliable. Despite this, mainstream psychiatry continues to perpetuate the myth that when talking about ‘schizophrenia' we are discussing something that actually exists. For example, the opening statement of the NIMH public information website in the USA reads as follows:

“Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe disabling brain disease”

As Read (2004) points out, such an opinion is common in psychiatric textbooks and drug company pamphlets.

The CASL campaign is driven by two central factors:

1) The concept of schizophrenia is unscientific and has outlived any usefulness it may once have claimed.

2) The label schizophrenia is extremely damaging to those to whom it is applied.

Reliability

For a diagnosis to have any clinical utility it must be reliable. That is to say there must be consistency in how individuals are diagnosed. There is no evidence that this has ever been the case with schizophrenia. Read (2004), has illustrated how it is possible for 15 individuals with nothing in common to be gathered together in one room and ALL be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Test- retest analysis is as low as 37% and in 1970 when 194 British and 134 American psychiatrists were asked to provide a diagnosis on the basis of a case description, 69% of the Americans diagnosed schizophrenia whilst only 2% of the British did so. There is no definitive evidence to suggest that the reliability of the diagnosis has improved since that date.

Validity

An unreliable diagnosis cannot by definition be valid. However it is worth pointing out quite how poorly the diagnosis of schizophrenia performs in terms of validity. Firstly, a diagnosis of schizophrenia tells us nothing about cause. Biological research into cause offers little more than a series of dead ends (Bentall 2003, Read 2004), and the significance of genetic inheritance in schizophrenia has been vastly overstated and is seriously methodologically flawed (Joseph 2004). Secondly, a diagnosis of schizophrenia tells us nothing about prevalence rates. It is often blandly asserted that schizophrenia has a prevalence rate of 1% in all societies. This is not true; there is a wide disparity of prevalence between rural and urban environments and different research has shown prevalence rates of between 0.33 and 15%. In addition a diagnosis of schizophrenia tells us little about the course of the illness. Kraepelin initially suggested that schizophrenia was a chronic deteriorating condition in all cases. We now know that all outcomes are possible from chronicity to complete recovery. Interestingly Marius Romme, the Dutch Psychiatrist, has argued that those most likely to make a complete recovery are individuals who reject or drop out of the psychiatric system.

Stigma

To be labelled ‘a schizophrenic' is one of the most devastating things that can happen to anyone. This label implies dangerousness, unpredictability, chronic illness, inability to work or function at any level and a lifelong need for medication that will often be ineffective (Whitaker 2005), but will usually cause unpleasant side effects. To champion the idea that schizophrenia is an illness just like any other (sometimes referred to as mental health literacy) makes the situation worse, in that it has been shown to increase amongst other things mistrust and a desire for social distance.

Sincere attempts have been made to rescue the word for humanity (Jenner et al., 1993) yet we have had to conclude that the continuation of the concept serves only the greed of Big Pharma in the pursuit of producing yet more `magic bullets' The desire of our campaign to place the label ‘schizophrenia' into the diagnostic dustbin, in which it most certainly belongs, is not based solely on the poor science that surrounds it but also on the immense damage that this label can bring about. A single word can ruin a life as surely as any bullet and schizophrenia is just such a word.

Japan abolishes schizophrenia?

There is hope. In 2002 in order to remove the stigma and prejudice associated with the term schizophrenia, The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology renamed the condition. Their reasons were that the old term ‘Seishin Buntreyso Byo' (mind- split disease) was ambiguous, had purely negative connotations and was in part related to the inhumane treatment of most people who carried the diagnosis (Sato 2006). The new term is ‘Togo Shitcho Sho' (Integration disorder). It is defined not as a specific illness, but as a syndrome based on a stress vulnerability model, with many different causes, symptoms and outcomes. This change was brought about largely by lobbying from service users and family groups, and has been welcomed by service users and families alike.

Alternatives

Alternatives already exist. Given the high levels of trauma in the lives of individuals who experience psychosis (Read et al 2004, Hammersley et al 2003) Professor Marius Romme in The Netherlands has for a number of years called for a new diagnostic category of post-traumatic psychosis. Colin Ross in the United States has made a similar call for a category of Dissociative Psychosis.

Yet alternatives also exist outside the language of psychopathology (Parker et al, 1995; Romme and Escher, 2000). In recognising the role of language and being prepared to make a practical deconstruction of what it produces (in this case forms of pathology) is taking one step in enabling communities, through self help networks, to regain control and ownership of human experience. Romme and Escher have remained particularly faithful to the contribution of knowledge of `experts by experience' and we remain firmly convinced that the future health of communities lies largely in the hands of organisations like the Hearing Voices Network and new initiatives like the Paranoia Network and depressiondialogues. The hope and promise of radical change is not something to be relegated wistfully to a bygone age but is firmly on the agenda today (McLaughlin, 2003). Furthermore growing alongside CASTL is a widespread enthusiasm to form a European Association for Democratic Psychiatry as the mechanism to bring about decisive change in public policy, media activity and social attitudes.

The CASL campaign began as collaboration between The COPE Initiative at the University of Manchester , the Hearing Voices Network and supporters of Asylum magazine (Asylum Associates). We are working to build a broad coalition of service users groups and like minded professionals, with the aim of bringing a more coherent and humane diagnostic system to service users worldwide. Yet it is more than that. We are looking to a future when we can talk less of the associations for democratic psychiatry and more of the International Association for Democratic Communities.

References :

Bentall, R.P. (1990). Reconstructing schizophrenia. London : Routledge.
Bentall, R.P. (2003). Madness Explained. Allen Lane . Penguin Books.
Boyle, M. Schizophrenia: A Scientific delusion. London : Routledge. UK .
Jenner, F.A., Monteiro, A. C. D., Zagallo-Cardoso, J. A. and Cunha-Oliveira, J. A. (1993) Schizophrenia: A Disease or Some Ways of Being Human. Sheffield : Sheffield UP.
Joseph, J. The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology under the Microscope. Ross-on-Wye. PCCS Books.
Hammersley, P.A., Dias, A., Todd, G., Bowen Jones, K., Reiley, B Bentall, R.P. (2002). Childhood trauma and hallucinations in bipolar affective disorder: A preliminary investigation. British Journal of Psychiatry, 182, 543-547.
McLaughlin, T. (2003) `The view from democratic psychiatry.' European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health 6(1) 63-66.
Parker, I, Georgaca, E, Harper, D, McLaughlin, T and Stowell Smith, M (1995) Deconstructing Psychopathology London : Sage .
Read, J, Mosher, L.R. & Bentall, R.P. (2004). Models of Madness. ISPS Publications.
Romme, M. and Escher, S. (2000) Making Sense of Voices: a guide for mental health professionals working with voice-hearers. London : Mind
Sato, M. (2006). Renaming schizophrenia: A Japanese Perspective. World Psychiatry, Feb, 5, 1, 53-55.
Whitacker, R. (2004). The case against anti-psychotic drugs: a 50-year history of doing more harm than good. Medical Hypotheses, 62, 5-13

FIRST COMMENTS

Marius Romme Emeritus Professor of Social Psychiatry:

"We have known for quite some time that the concept of schizophrenia has no scientific validity. We now however have an alternative which is more helpful. It is time to challenge the old concept and leave it behind.

The old concept is harmful because, it is impossible to solve the problems of the patient diagnosed with this illness. We now not only know that the symptoms exist and the illness does not, but we now know more about where the symptoms come from. It is a false suggestion that the symptoms are the result of an underlying illness. The symptoms are partly a reaction to serious problems in the life of the person and partly a reaction towards other symptoms. Therefore attention should be given to the reality for the patient of his /her complaints and the background for each of them should be explored. Only then do we discover what the problems for the patient are, and only then we might be able to help solve those problems. When for example hearing voices is the complaint related to a serious problem in the person's life and the explanation of the person is that it is the voice of God, this can be a reaction on hearing that voice as an explanation. This in itself is not a symptom but a reaction to the strange overwhelming voice often with the metaphoric meaning of a needed spiritual power or a father figure, wanted or feared".

Jacqui Dillon National Chair of the Hearing Voices Network

'In our experience, gained through more than 15 years running a national network, listening to people who hear voices, many of them living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia; it is clear that there is a definite link between traumatic life events and psychosis. On a daily basis, we hear terrible stories of sexual, emotional and physical abuse, and the impact of racism, poverty, neglect and stigma on peoples' lives. We do not seek to reduce people to a set of symptoms that we wish to suppress and control with medication. We show respect for the reality of the trauma they have endured and bear witness to the suffering they have experienced. We honour peoples' resilience and capacity to survive, often against the odds. The reduction of peoples distressing life experiences into a diagnosis of schizophrenia means that they are condemned to lives dulled by drugs and blighted by stigma and offered no opportunity to make sense of their experiences. Their routes to recovery are hindered. Rather than pathologising individuals, we have a collective responsibility to people who have experienced abuse, to acknowledge the reality and impact of those experiences and to support them to get the help they need. Abuse thrives in secrecy. We must expose the truth and not perpetuate injustice further; otherwise today's child abuse victims become tomorrow's psychiatric patients."

Campaign for the Abolition of Schizophrenia Label

By Dr. Terry Lynch, GP and psychotherapist, Limerick , Ireland .

Lynch, Terry (2004) Beyond Prozac: Healing Mental Distress, Ross-on-Wye, PCCS Books.

In our modern 21 st century, access to information has never been easier at any time in the history of the world. Yet, some aspects of life remain very poorly understood. One glaring example of this is the degree to which the general public understand – or more accurately, misunderstand – so-called ‘mental illness', and ‘schizophrenia' in particular.

The term ‘schizophrenia' needs to be abolished for a number of reasons. The so-called ‘illness' which the term is purported to represent is a gross misinterpretation of the experience of people so labelled. The schizophrenia label encourages the ongoing ignoring of key issues which are virtually always present in the life experience of people who receive this label. For example, issues such as great trauma in their lives; terror; immense loss of autonomy and of their sense of Self; overwhelm; powerlessness; immense emotional pain; intense isolation.

The term ‘schizophrenia' is taken to mean that a person who experiences certain experiences (such as hearing voices, becoming paranoid, experiencing ‘delusions', withdrawing to a major degree) is fundamentally abnormal; crazy; clearly and obviously suffering from a major illness, which we have come to call ‘schizophrenia'.

This interpretation is incorrect. Many mental health care workers who take the time to listen intently and work collaboratively with people who go through these experiences come to realise that, far from being abnormal or crazy, these experiences make sense in the context of the person's sense of Self, their experiences, and their life. By rejecting and dismissing the experiences, we also reject and dismiss the individual who is experiencing these.

The term ‘schizophrenia' has been taken a step further into inaccuracy and misinterpretation. The term is now widely seen as synonymous with the presence of a biological abnormality within the person's brain. This view has been enthusiastically promoted within some quarters, despite the reality that no consistent, reliable, or durable biological abnormalities have been identified, and in spite of the reality that the ‘diagnosis' is always, always made without reference to any tests, because there are no biological tests for this ‘condition'. This gross misrepresentation (ie that ‘schizophrenia' is known to be a biological illness) is used to justify the long-term (often life-long) use of mood-altering substances (often inaccurately referred to as antipsychotics) as the primary ‘treatment' of this ‘illness'.

The upshot of this worped logic and bad science is that recovery rates from ‘schizophrenia' in modern westernised societies trails well behind that in underdeveloped countries, according to World Health Organisation studies. The misguided obsession with imagined biological abnormalities over several decades has had the effect of reducing the attention on and research into psychological, social, human approaches to helping people get their lives back on track. There are many, many people – some of whom spoke at the Hearing Voices Network Annual Conference 2006) – whose recovery (from the traumatic experiences which caused their experiences of hearing voices, paranoia, etc) was impaired, and/or blocked by the preoccupation with the diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia' and its supposed ‘treatment' rather than working collaboratively with the person to explore the distress, seek to ascertain what may lie behind the distress, and with compassion, gentleness and caring, help the person to resolve their pain and move on with their life.

So-called ‘mental illness', including ‘schizophrenia', is one of the last remaining unrecognised apartheids left in our society. Well intentioned intervention is not necessarily effective intervention, and because it is well-intentioned, and provided by society's appointed experts, it can be even more damaging, subtle and pervasive.

Abolishing the label ‘schizophrenia' is an important step towards reversing the enormous travesty of natural justice which has existed in this area for decades. Not having a label, a ‘box' to put people into, will facilitate the development of more humane, healing, collaborative working relationships between all concerned, including the experiencer and those who care, love, and work with them. ==

A Carer's View of Schizophrenia

Some people like the term ‘schizophrenia'. The diagnosis does enable some service users to access benefits they might otherwise not, so they may find it useful. Some psychiatrists like to have a simple label they can use to describe people who otherwise have a confusing and diverse range of inconsistent symptoms; it suggests that they recognise these behaviours. In so doing, it enables them to ignore and discount the history and traumas of the service user, and all aspects of his or her life since everything is dismissed as ‘psychosis' and ‘fantasy'. Some families think initially but mistakenly that if there's a ‘diagnosis', it represents a well-defined situation for which a genuine treatment and route to recovery is known, as happens with other health problems. So, initially, there may be brief relief with the diagnosis. However, this does not last. All affected families are horrified when the label ‘schizophrenia' is soon attended by another damning label, that of ‘severe and enduring mental health problem', yet despite this devastating prospect, they are urged NOT to give up hope as this is important to their relative's recovery.

In practice, most families continue to hold the hope of recovery, and to work unstintingly for their family member's support with absolute dedication sometimes for decades and often despite the unsupportive disinterest, and sometimes outright hostility and inhumanity, of many staff. The family often hold the flame which helps and inspires the service user throughout his illness. This is called LOVE, and it is discounted and dismissed by the services and the NHS obsessed as it is with regulations and procedures.

The government has ‘recovery' as its goal though how to reconcile ‘recovery' with the ‘severe and enduring' label is a contradiction neither explored nor explained, and the treatment offered continues to be the same drugs.

As carers begin to search for information, they meet other carers and families; they come to know service users also diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia' who have been maintained on drugs for decades and whose lives, along with those of their families, are slipping by in poor or no quality, stigmatised, rejected, isolated and dumped by mainstream society.

Soon, the vast range of symptoms and histories included in the umbrella diagnosis ‘schizophrenia' is apparent and it is inconceivable to everyone except the psychiatrist that all these people could, or should, have the same diagnosis or the same treatment. By relying almost entirely on drugs, other therapies of proven value are ignored, often not even mentioned. When carers / families want to discuss other options with the psychiatrist, their request is usually refused or ignored. So, if you're in the right place with more forward thinking and humane approaches available, your service user family member can access empathic therapies, taking into consideration his/her specific history and experiences with understanding and allowing him/her to process them then move on with improved chance of recovery. But, if you are not in an enlightened area, you are supposed to accept the total devastation of your family meekly and without question.

‘Schizophrenia' was coined nearly a century ago. No other branch of medicine continues to rely on the faltering first footsteps taken so long ago. It is time it was abandoned so that service users can be treated individually, have their symptoms and histories properly addressed so they can recover proper control of their lives. Once schizophrenia has been abandoned as a concept, the medicalisation of mental illness and the domination of the drug companies is no longer acceptable. This is not recovery; it is sedation and containment using a chemical cosh lobotomy. Service users need appropriate individualised support, so that the 80% recovery rates achieved in the developing World can be seen here instead of the 20% we have currently. A recent comment by an enlightened psychiatrist was to the effect that the service user was in charge of his own recovery, but the psychiatrist supported his/her journey properly so that it was ordered and (s)he was not overwhelmed in the process.

Best wishes
Judith Varley ==

Mary Boyle
University of East London

The claim that there exists a biologically based diagnosable disorder called schizophrenia has been the focus of intense and persistent criticism and been shown to be scientifically bankrupt. But the label is also morally problematic. It is imposed on people in the absence of any evidence base and used without their informed consent (informed that is, of the controversies surrounding it). The label also appears to justify drugs as the major intervention as well as a vast and very unsuccessful research programme searching for biological and genetic causes.

But schizophrenia is much more than a label. Behind it lies the medical model – the claim that emotional distress and problem behaviour are pathological symptoms of illness or disorder rather than meaningful responses to serious problems and adversity in people's lives and relationships. The public know (often from their own experience) that people become distressed because of what is happening in their lives. This understanding, however, may be stretched in the case of the bizarre seeming experiences and behaviour which are labelled as schizophrenia and which, we are told, are outside the range of our understanding of ‘ordinary', everyday behaviour and experiences, hence the invoking of a brain disease to account for them. Yet instead of leading us to the conclusion that ‘mental illness is an illness like any other', the evidence points in a quite different direction – that schizophrenic behaviours and experiences are ‘behaviours and experiences like any other' – understandable in the same terms as we understand ‘ordinary' behaviour and meaningful in the context of peoples lives. If we acknowledge this, then we enter a world of ideas and possibilities entirely different from and far more constructive in terms of helping people, than those created through claims about schizophrenia as a brain disease.

Claims about illness and brain disease have been so persistent and plausible not just because psychotic behaviour and experience may indeed be difficult to understand but also because schizophrenia research is so often presented in ways which systematically obscure evidence against it (see www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/Boyle.htm for many examples of this). Not only that, but service users, the public and professionals are rarely presented with alternatives so that ‘schizophrenia as brain disorder' seems all the more plausible simply because there appears to be no other way of thinking.

It is exactly because schizophrenia is not just a descriptive label but an entire way of thinking about people that we need to be alert to the danger that it will be replaced with an equally problematic label leaving intact the language and assumptions of symptoms and illness on which it is based. Indeed the label ‘dopamine disregulation disorder' (which does exactly this) has already been suggested, focussing, again, on what is supposedly going on in people's brains rather than their lives and implying that drugs are still the preferred intervention. What is being called for instead (and is already available) is not simply a different label but entirely different ways of thinking about those psychological experiences and behaviours which have been mislabelled and misunderstood as symptoms of schizophrenia. ==

Lucy Johnstone
Academic Director

Bristol Clinical Psychology Doctorate
Author 'Users and abusers of psychiatry', Routedge 2000.

We have known for a long time that the term 'schizophrenia' is scientifically meaningless. It is not actually a 'diagnosis' in a medical sense, since it is not based on bodily symptoms or signs. Instead, the criteria consist of a ragbag of social judgements about people's thoughts, feelings and behaviour - experiences which actually make sense in the context of people's histories of abuse and deprivation. The people who are so labelled may well have difficulties and be in urgent need of help, but this is not the way to help them.

We used to be convinced that disturbed or disturbing behaviour could be explained by the presence of 'evil spirits'. No one could actually see them, but we knew they were there. We are equally convinced today by the explanation that distressed people are, in effect, possessed by 'schizophrenia'. No one can detect the 'biochemical imbalance' or the 'genetic vulnerability' that is meant to underlie it, but we know the 'illness' is lurking in there somewhere. We know that the reason people suffer 'delusions' is because they have 'schizophrenia'. And how do we know they have 'schizophrenia'? Because they have 'delusions', of course!

Strip away the pseudo-scientific rhetoric and it is obvious where the real delusion lies. Believing in this 'illness' has powerful benefits for professionals and drug companies, and indeed for society at large, which has found it very convenient to conceal the effects of widespread damage and abuse under this ever-flexible label. Perhaps this is why we have failed to draw the moral from the pile of research indicating that this kind of breakdown has a far better outcome in non-industrialised countries that have not come under the influence of Western psychiatry.The people who lose out, of course, are the 'patients' or service users, for whom the diagnosis is often an introduction into a lifetime of dependence on psychiatric services and toxic drugs, alienated from mainstream society by fear and stigma. They would do far better in a village in rural India or Africa . Perhaps this also explains why we have failed to follow more enlightened examples from our own history - moral management, therapeutic communities and so on - or from places like Scandinavia which are moving well away from diagnosis and medication as first-line interventions.

'Diagnosing' someone with 'schizophrenia' is one of the most damaging things one human being can do to another. Re-defining someone's reality for them is the most insidious and the most devastating form of power we can use. It may be done with the best of intentions, but it is wrong. We now have a chance to put some of this right, by abolishing the label - not to replace it with another fake-medical term, but instead to work with individuals towards a true understanding of how and why they come to experience extreme forms of emotional distress.

2008-06-01T17:20:00.001-07:00

http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/Boyle.htm

It's all done with smoke and mirrors. Or, how to create the illusion of a schizophrenic brain disease

by Mary Boyle, University of East London

Reprinted from Clinical Psychology Issue 12. April 2002 pp 9-16

One of the more intriguing aspects of the "schizophrenia" literature is the discrepancy between the strength of the belief that "schizophrenia is a brain disease" and the availability of direct supporting evidence; even those who hold the belief admit that there is no direct evidence for it (e.g. Chua and McKenna, 1995; McGrath and Emerson, 1999; American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

This raises the question of why the belief seems so reasonable and credible. Or, to put it another way, how is the presentation of "schizophrenia as a brain disease" managed in such a way that the absence of direct evidence will not be noticed or not seem important? These questions are important not least because the belief has profound implications for research and intervention. For example, the US National Institute for Mental Health's "next steps for schizophrenia research" focused - in this order- on genetics, neuroimaging, post-mortem studies, developmental neurobiology and clinical trials (Hyman, 2000). In line with this biological emphasis, drugs may be seen as the "natural" and inevitable treatment, with non-physical interventions being seen - to use Tarrier et al.'s ( 2000) own description of their CBT - as "adjunct" therapies. ("Adjunct" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a subordinate or incidental thing".)

In this paper, I shall discuss some of the main ways in which the credibility and reasonableness of the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disease is created and maintained; before I do that, however, it is important to note that this belief obviously implies a prior belief in "schizophrenia" and, since "schizophrenia" is consistently presented as a diagnosable illness which causes bizarre behaviour and mental experiences, the scene is set for acceptance of the idea of schizophrenia as brain disorder, albeit one whose precise nature is unknown. This in itself is perhaps a powerful enough mechanism to account for the credibility of the belief, but there are other mechanisms which are worth discussing, for at least two reasons.

First, those who want to disseminate alternative models of psychotic behaviour and experience may be dispirited by the sheer persistence of the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disorder and want to reflect on some possible reasons for this persistence; second, those who are open to alternative models may still find themselves pulled between these and the apparent credibility of the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disease. One further point should be emphasised. I'm not suggesting that any of the mechanisms I'll discuss are planned or even consciously used. On the contrary, at least some of them might seem simply like "doing science". I would argue, however, that it is difficult to over-estimate the threat presented by criticisms of the biological basis of schizophrenia and of the idea of schizophrenia itself, and that it would be naive not to expect defensive and anxiety-reducing measures to be (consciously or unconsciously) taken.

Creating the Impression of a brain disorder...
...by assertion

One of the most popular and direct ways of making "schizophrenia" seem like a brain disease is simply to assert that it is, leaving us in the awkward position of questioning the judgement of apparent experts. The assertions may be made almost in passing (e.g. "with a brain disease like schizophrenia. .." - McGrath, 2000) or more directly (e.g. "The recognition that schizophrenia is an organic brain disease. .." - Iverson 1997). Alternatively, and more subtly, it may be agreed that there is no direct evidence but with the clear implication that such evidence is bound to appear. What is notable about many of these assertions is the failure to mention any of the detailed and extensive criticisms which have been made of genetic and biological research on "schizophrenia" (see, e.g. Lidz et al., 1981; Lidz and Blatt, 1983; Rose et al., 1984; Bentall, 1990a; Chua and McKenna, 1995; Ross and Pam, 1995; Boyle, 1990; 2002; Sieben, 1999.)

It is difficult to overstate the importance of uncritical assertion in presenting "schizophrenia" as a brain disorder: the claims are often made in secondary sources where readers cannot directly evaluate the data on which the claims rely; and, by failing to mention criticisms, those who make the assertions create an impression of a truth which has never been challenged and is beyond challenge. This silence ; about criticism also deprives readers of information about sources which might offer a different view.

Interestingly, when criticisms or references to lack of evidence are made in traditional sources, they are much more likely to be about biological than genetic research. The most plausible reason for this is that the claims that "schizophrenia" is a genetic disorder can almost indefinitely justify the search for direct biological evidence and make its absence seem relatively unimportant. Criticism of genetic research, in conjunction with the lack of direct biological evidence, therefore presents a much more serious threat to the belief in schizophrenia as a brain disease than does criticism of only biological research. In fact the latter, provided it is accompanied by optimism about the future, might actually help to maintain an aura of scientific respectability without compromising the assertion that schizophrenia is a brain disease.

...by creating apparently meaningful associations

In order to support the assertion that schizophrenia is a brain disorder, researchers must provide evidence that a diagnosis of schizophrenia is reliably associated with particular biological events or processes and that these have a direct causal relationship to the behaviours and experiences which are called schizophrenia. In the face of the lack of such evidence, the impression of a causal association between schizophrenia diagnoses and biological processes is created and maintained in four main ways.

The first involves the generation of large amounts of data on possible associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and many different biological variables. Indeed, Bentall (1990b) has remarked that virtually every known brain region or brain chemical has, at one time or another, been claimed to be linked to "schizophrenia". Not only that, but every technological advance in the study of the brain is quickly recruited for the study of "schizophrenics", although it is notable that this research is largely atheoretical (Ross and Pam, 1995). The resulting trawl for associations unguided by theory is greatly facilitated by computer and other technology, which allows measurement of possible associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and large numbers of biochemicals, brain regions, brain functions and, now, chromosomes, in far less time than it would take to develop a constructive theory of why any particular association might be expected or meaningful. Instead, a spurious impression of meaningful associations may be created by the preferential publication of positive results as well as by the inevitable finding of chance associations.

But it is uncomfortable to rely on the mere existence of correlations between schizophrenia diagnoses and biological variables, important though they are in creating an impression of a biological disorder, because critics can quickly point out that the association may not be specific to "schizophrenia" or attributable to other factors. An important way of obscuring this problem or, at least, of avoiding providing data which would highlight it, is through the use of "normal" control groups. The choice of comparison group is obviously important in any research study because of its role in controlling for potentially confounding variables. In the case of "schizophrenia" it is particularly crucial because those given the diagnosis are "deviant" in many ways apart from their "schizophrenic" behaviour. There is, for example, a strong association between diagnoses of schizophrenia and substance abuse (Kosten and Ziedonis, 1997) and between substance abuse and traumatic brain injury (McGuire and Priestley, 2002). Not only that, but following their diagnosis people routinely receive drugs with profound biological and psychological effects (Day and Bentall, 1996). Those diagnosed as schizophrenic may also have had earlier physical interventions for complaints of anxiety and depression, common precursors to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Andreasen et al.'s (1982) study of ventricular enlargement, for example, reported that 29 per cent of their "relatively young" sample of "schizophrenics" had received ECT. Lader et al. (1984) and Breggin (1990) have also reported a relationship between structural brain abnormalities and the use of minor tranquillizers. It is not surprising that the use of "normal" comparison groups in "schizophrenia" research has been strongly criticised for decades, yet it remains a common practice; more appropriate comparison groups would include those without a diagnosis of schizophrenia but with a history of legal and illegal drug misuse, those who are very socially isolated, those with a diagnosis of severe depression or anxiety, the long-term unemployed, those who had obstetric complications and those with a history of ECT or minor tranquillizer use.

An impression of meaningful association between "schizophrenia" and biological variables is created, third, (and most often in secondary sources) by failing to specify the degree of overlap between "schizophrenic" and comparison groups and by misleadingly presenting group differences in a particular factor, say ventricle-brain ratio or dopamine levels, as if the attribute in question applied to every person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and not to anyone else (for example, by claiming that "schizophrenics have enlarged ventricles"). The data themselves, however, show a very different picture. Lewis (1990), for example, reviewed 20 studies which compared lateral ventricle-brain ratios in people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and "normal" controls and found only eight showing significant differences. Similarly, Andreasen et al. (1990) found that only six per cent of participants with a diagnosis of schizophrenia had ventricle-brain ratios more than two standard deviations outside the "normal" control group mean, and this figure might have been reduced still further had more appropriate comparison groups been used, particularly given the relationship between structural brain abnormalities and the use of major and minor tranquillisers. Similarly, the relationship between schizophrenia diagnoses and obstetric complications - one of the factors used to present "schizophrenia" as a "neuro-developmental disorder" - is not only relatively weak, and even weaker for females than males (Hultman et al., 1999), but there is little consistency in the type of complication suggested as associated with "schizophrenia" or evidence that any association is specific to "schizophrenia".

Finally, if schizophrenia is to appear to be a biological disorder, then researchers need to demonstrate not only a reliable association between schizophrenia diagnoses and some biological factors, but also to demonstrate that these factors are direct causal antecedents of "schizophrenia". (I am using "causal" here in the sense suggested by Joffe (1996): that in the presence of a particular factor the probability of a certain outcome is increased and we have no reason to believe that both are dependent on a third variable.) This point is crucial. For example, there is a relationship between congenital severe facial disfigurement and social anxiety, but we do not consider social anxiety to be a biological disorder linked to neurodevelopmental processes, because we are aware of the complex and indirect relationships between social anxiety and the organic phenomenon of disfigurement.

There is, however, no evidence of a causal relationship between schizophrenia diagnoses and any genetic or biological event or process. Instead, the weak, variable and difficult to interpret associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and biological variables are subtly and not so subtly transformed to apparently causal relationships through language rather than evidence. For example, associations have been presented as progress in understanding the underlying neurobiology of schizophrenia, as support for neurodevelopmental theories of aetiology of schizophrenia, as part of our knowledge of the biological basis of schizophrenia, as reflecting causes active early in life and as part of the "strong case" for placing the beginnings of pathogenesis in the pre- or peri-natal period (Woods, 1998; Hultman et al., 1999; Jones and Tatrant, 2000; Tsuang et al., 2000; Lobato et al., 2001).

Taken together, these mechanisms create the misleading impression of an evidence base which is constantly being "built up" by the findings of new research, which is far stronger than it actually is and whose interpretation is entirely straightforward.

...by managing non-biological associations

Falloon (2000) has remarked that "paradoxically, the evidence for specific pathophysiological factors in major mental disorders is rather weak, whereas the research findings on stress factors such as family stress and life events, are extremely robust" (p.188). Of course, there is a paradox here only if we believe in schizophrenia as a brain disorder; otherwise, the paradox lies only in the large imbalance in attention paid to the two kinds of factors. Nevertheless, Falloon's remark suggests that if "schizophrenia" is to be convincingly presented as a biological disorder, then the "robust" research findings on its association with non-biological factors must somehow be managed in such a way as to maintain the primacy of biology. I'll briefly consider four ways in which this is achieved.

The first is by presenting the association between schizophrenia diagnoses and social factors as consequential rather than antecedent or causal. For example, it is well established that schizophrenia diagnoses are associated with the lowest social classes and most disempowered social groups (Gomme, 1996) Aro (1995), for example, found that the risk of psychiatric hospitalization was usually two to four times higher for the lowest than the highest educated social groups, but that this socio-economic gradient was steepest of all for schizophrenia diagnoses. This well-replicated association, however, has consistently been presented as part of a "downward drift" in which "having schizophrenia" causes people to perform less well in education and employment.

The argument, of course, is reasonable: it is difficult to achieve if you are tormented by voices or cannot be bothered to get up in the morning. But the causal argument is also reasonable and has empirical support which is not often mentioned in the literature (Link et al., 1986, Muntaner et al., 1991). Instead, what is notable is the speed and persistence with which the consequential argument was and is advanced, in marked contrast to the tendency of uncritically presenting "association as cause" in the case of biological research. Similarly, there is a well-established association between being readmitted to hospital (relapse) following a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and certain very negative patterns of family interaction, known as high expressed emotion and characterised by overinvolvement and intrusiveness, and negative, hostile and critical comments (Leff and Vaughn, 1981). Following complaints from relatives that they were being blamed for their relative's "schizophrenia", researchers quickly offered reassurance that "high expressed emotion" did not cause "schizophrenia" but only influenced its course. It was also argued that the patients' "schizophrenic" behaviour had elicited these negative behaviours from relatives (Kavanagh, 1992).

There , fact, no clear evidence that such behaviour had suddenly appeared in response to a relative's "schizophrenia", although the argument is not implausible (see Patterson et al., 2000); there was, however, evidence from longitudinal studies (Doane et al., 1981; Goldstein, 1987) that patterns of negative interaction very similar to "high expressed emotion" had long preceded a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Again, what is striking is the speed and enthusiasm with which the non-causal and consequential arguments were adopted, in spite of the lack of evidence which favoured them over a causal argument.

These, however, are just two examples of a phenomenon - consequential thinking about social factors - which is so pervasive in the "schizophrenia" literature that it becomes difficult to think in any other way. Virtually all negative aspects of the lives of those diagnosed as schizophrenic, such as substance abuse, unemployment, social isolation, poverty and disrupted relationships, are routinely presented as consequences of "having a serious mental disorder". Of course the assumption is plausible and partly valid - hence its credibility. But it discourages us from asking in any systematic way whether some of these factors could have caused the "mental disorder" or whether, for example, substance abuse and psychosis might not both be ways of reacting to or trying to deal with very aversive life circumstances.

A second way of managing associations between schizophrenia diagnoses and social factors is through the idea of vulnerability; indeed the vulnerability-stress model of "schizophrenia" is now so popular as to have assumed the status of truth. McGlashan and Johannessen (1996), for example, claimed that "biological vulnerability is necessary for the development of psychosis but it is seldom sufficient in itself' ( p.204).

The vulnerability-stress hypothesis - widely interpreted as implying biological or genetic vulnerability - has proved to be an extraordinarily useful and effective mechanism for managing the potential threat to biological models of "schizophrenia" presented by the association between the diagnosis and non-biological factors. The usefulness of the hypothesis lies partly in its lack of specificity - since the nature of the claimed vulnerability has never been discovered, anything can count as an instance of it. Its usefulness also lies in its seeming reasonableness (who could deny that biological and psychological or social factors interact?) and its inclusiveness (it encompasses both the biological and social - surely better than focusing on only one?) while at the same time it firmly maintains the primacy of biology, not least through word order, and potentially de-emphasizes the environment by making it look as if the "stress" part of the vulnerability-stress model consists of ordinary stresses which most of us would cope with, but which overwhelm only "vulnerable" people. We are thus excused from examining too closely either the events themselves or their meaning to the "vulnerable" person.

The association of schizophrenia diagnoses with non-biological factors is managed, thirdly, by what might be called a double standard of presentation, whereby more critical comments are made about and more evidence demanded for, social than biological theories. Warner (2000), for example, under the heading "Poor parenting does not cause schizophrenia" claimed that "there is no evidence, even after decades of research, that family or parenting problems cause schizophrenia" and that "such theories have seldom been adequately tested" (p.9, 10). By contrast, his discussion of biological research, under the heading of "The brain in schizophrenia" was entirely uncritical and ended with the conclusion (echoing the vulnerability-stress model) that "These findings suggest that in schizophrenia there is a deficit in the regulation of brain activity by interneurones so the brain over-reacts to the many signals in the
environment" (p.l0) .

A final way of de-emphasizing the links between schizophrenia diagnoses and environmental factors is simply to convert the environment to biology. McGorry (2000) has provided a striking example of this process in his argument that "[low] vitamin D also provides a possible explanation for the increased risk of schizophrenia in second generation dark-skinned migrants who have moved to live in cooler climates (their skin is less efficient at producing vitamin D)" (61; parenthesis in original). There is no mention here that these "cooler climates" are peopled with light-skinned people with a long history of subjugating those with darker skins and that "dark-skinned migrants" are often exposed, from birth in the case of the second generation, to high levels of racism and social disadvantage.

This, however, is only one example of a much more general phenomenon. Littlewood and Lipsedge's (1982; 1997) analysis of ethnicity and psychosis provided an important lead in developing alternatives to biological accounts of "schizophrenia"; they acknowledge, however, that little of substance has been achieved (Littlewood and Lipsedge, 1997). One reason for this is that "race" has simply been converted back to a biological variable. A search of recent literature on "race", ethnicity and "schizophrenia" produced very few studies in which "race" was analysed as a social construct which mediates psychological experience. Instead, much of the research focused on biology and genetics (e.g. "race" differences in neuroleptic response; genetic linkage in southern African families). And the trend is likely to continue if the research direction favoured by Lewine and Coudle (1999) is followed. They argued that "despite [National Institute of Mental Health] efforts to facilitate the study of women and minorities in schizophrenia research, there is a significant lack of information about race differences in brain morphology and neuropsychologi4ral functioning in schizophrenia".

...by privileging biology

All of the factors discussed so far can be seen as ways of privileging biology in relation to "schizophrenia", but two further ways of achieving this are worth mentioning. The first is through the manipulation of lists: wherever there is a list, for example of "risk factors" or research directions, then biology will almost always predominate, whether numerically or in word order. For example, in McGlashan and Johannessen's (1996) list of around 55 supposed "vulnerability markers" for schizophrenia, only three could be said to be definitely social or interpersonal. And, as I noted earlier, the NIMH "next steps in schizophrenia research" focused on genetics, neuroimaging, post-mortem studies, developmental neurobiology and clinical trials.

A second way of privileging biology is through the frequent use of medical (and only medical) analogies. For example, "schizophrenia" has often been compared to diabetes, as "a syndrome whose causes are un-known" while discussion of the prevention of "schizophrenia" frequently includes comparisons with the prevention of infectious diseases or lung cancer. The importance of these medical analogies lies not only in their power to reinforce the idea of "schizophrenia" as a companion biological disorder, but in their borrowing of the credibility and success of medicine to create an impression of hope and optimism which would be very difficult to achieve simply through the biological literature on "schizophrenia" itself.

How can these mechanisms be challenged or at least balanced? Two obvious ways are, first, to question biological research much more closely (e.g. What were the control groups? How much did their results overlap with the "schizophrenic" group? What other factors might account for the results?) and, second to produce lists in which social and interpersonal factors predominate or are mentioned first. But we can also take every opportunity to insert causal thinking into discussions of social factors, to point out that behaviour and experience can cause biology as well as the other way round (Harrop et al., 1996) and to highlight the many different ways in which associations between brain and behaviour might be interpreted. For example, obstetric complications may be (weakly) associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia not because of their effects on people's brains but because of their effects on their lives, through their links with social disadvantage, educational difficulties, possible bullying and social rejection, lower employment prospects and so on. In other words, we need to foster accounts of psychosis which do not privilege biology but which do greater justice to the research data and to the reality of people's lives.

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2008-05-31T23:35:00.000-07:00

MORE ON "HEARING VOICES" TO REFUTE THE LIES OF PSYCHIATRY REGARDING "MENTAL ILLNESS"
by Justice Lover

If you tell a shrink that you hear voices he would immediately label you "mentally ill" (most likely "schizophrenic") ,and follow with the next label "psychotic" which would "require medication", meaning one or more of the Antipsychotics poisons, and if you refuse then a CTO would be issued to have you locked up and forced to take the "medication". If you continue to refuse then "ECT" (electric shocks) would be administered to you, and if you still resist then "psycho-surgery" would be performed on your skull to open it and to butcher your brain. This is in a nutshell the gist of the entire psychiatric dogma and practice put together.

It is obvious then that psychiatry is not only a fraud, but much worse - a barbaric and arbitrary torture of innocent people which is legalised and protected by state laws. Hence the importance of telling the full truth so as to warn the public. The following information is serving this need.

Hearing voices is experienced by a great many people, without becoming ill
(exerpts from the June 1st, 2008 issue of the newsletter by Peter Myers, peter.myers@mailstar.net )

Hearing Voices Movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement

Hearing Voices Movement is a philosophical trend in how people who hear voices are viewed. It was begun by Marius Romme, a professor of Social psychiatry at the University of Limburg in Maastricht, the Netherlands and Sandra Escher, a science journalist, who began this work after being challenged by a voice hearer as to why they could not accept the reality of her voice hearing experience. They advocate an approach of using techniques employed by those who have successfully coped with their voices. This can include acceptance and negotiation with the voices.

The movement

The Hearing Voices movement can be said to have been established in 1987, by Professor Marius Romme, a social psychiatrist and Sandra Escher, a science journalist, both from the Netherlands, with the formation of an organisation for voice hearers and others interested in this phenomenon, entitled Stichting Weerklank (Foundation Resonance). In 1988 an organisation was also established in England, with the active support of Marius Romme (James, 2001) entitled The Hearing Voices Network. In the following years, further networks have been established in other European countries including Italy, Finland (1995), Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Germany (1998), Norway & Denmark; and also in other parts of the world including Japan (1996), Israel, New Zealand, Australia and most recently the USA (2006).

In 1997 a meeting of voice hearers and mental health workers was held in Maastricht, Netherlands to discuss developing the further promotion and research into the issue of voice hearing. The meeting decided to create a formal organisational structure to provide administrative and co-ordinating support to the wide variety of initiatives in the different involved countries. The new network was called INTERVOICE (The International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing voices).

INTERVOICE holds annual steering group meetings, encourages and supports exchanges and visits between member countries and the translation and publication of books and other literature on the subject of hearing voices. In 2006 INTERVOICE set up a website and in 2007 was incorporated as a not for profit company under UK law. The president of INTERVOICE is Professor Marius Romme.

INTERVOICE is supported by people who hear voices, relative and friends and mental health professionals including nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists. INTERVOICE members assert that the most important factor in the success of their approach is the importance placed on the personal engagement of the people involved, meaning that all participants are considered an expert of their own experience. They see each other first as people, secondly as equal partners and thirdly as all having different but mutually valuable expertise to offer. This can either be through direct experience of hearing voices or having worked with voice hearers (and/or wanting to).

INTERVOICE is critical of psychiatry in relation to the way the profession generally understands and treats people who hear voices and holds that their research has led them to the position that schizophrenia is an unscientific and unhelpful hypothesis which should be abandoned, (Romme, 2006).

The Hearing Voices movement regards itself as being a post-psychiatric, (Bracken, 2005 and Stastny/Peter Lehmann, 2007) organisation, positioning itself outside of the mental health world in recognition that voices, in their view, are an aspect of human differentness, rather than a mental health problem and that, as with homosexuality (also regarded by psychiatry in recent times as an illness), one of the main issues is about human rights. Therefore by changing the way society perceives the experience, they believe, psychiatry, as it did with homosexuality, will follow.

The Hearing Voices movement is also seeking more holistic health solutions to problematic and overwhelming voices that cause mental distress then what it regards as the generally reductionist, disease based model offered by mainstream psychiatry. Based on their research they hold the opinion that many people successfully live with their voices and that in themselves voices are not the problem. For this reason they are prepared to accept a range of explanations offered by people who hear voices including spiritual ones and assert that recovery (see recovery model) from overwhelming voices can be achieved by seeking to understand the meaning of the voices to the voice hearer.

A detailed and neutral account of the significance of the Hearing Voice Movement entitled "Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?" was published in the New York Times Magazine in 2007, the author Daniel B. Smith noted that the movements "brief against psychiatry can be boiled down to two core positions. The first is that many more people hear voices, and hear many more kinds of voices, than is usually assumed. The second is that auditory hallucination — or “voice-hearing,” H.V.N.’s more neutral preference — should be thought of not as a pathological phenomenon in need of eradication but as a meaningful, interpretable experience, intimately linked to a hearer’s life story and, more commonly than not, to unresolved personal traumas."

Movement history

Baker (2000) in OpenMind in an overview of the challenging new research and practise initiatives, developing across Europe, charts the progress made from a view of voice hearing as bizarre and dangerous towards a recognition of voices as real, meaningful, and related to peoples' lives. This recognises that the experience can be overwhelming and deeply distressing, but also, that the attempt to understand their meaning can be part of a solution.

Leudar and Thomas

In a recent book, Leudar and Thomas (2000): voices of reason, voices of insanity, review almost 3,000 years of voice-hearing history, including that of Socrates, Schreber, and Janet's patient 'Marcelle', amongst others, to show how we have moved the experience from a socially valued context to a pathologised and denigrated one. Foucault has argued that this process can generally arise when a minority perspective is at variance with dominant social norms and beliefs.

Romme and Escher

The work of Romme and Escher (1989, 90, 91, 92, '94, '97, '98, '99) provides a much needed theoretical framework for these new initiatives, and provides much of the impetus for the self-help movement in recent years. They demonstrate:

1.Not everyone who hears voices becomes a patient. Over a third of 400 voice hearers in Holland had not had any contact with Psychiatric services. These people either described themselves as being able to cope with their voices and/or described their voices as life enhancing. ...

5.70% of voice hearers reported that their voices had begun after a severe traumatic or intensely emotional event, such as an accident, divorce or bereavement, sexual or physical abuse, love affairs, or pregnancy. In a recent study, Romme et al (1998) found that the onset of voice hearing amongst a 'patient' group was preceded by either a traumatic event or an event that activated the memory of an earlier trauma. There was a high association with abuse. These findings are being substantiated further in an on-going study with voice hearing amongst children (Escher, 2001)

6.Some people who hear voices, regardless of being able to cope with this or not, may have a burning need to construct a personal understanding for their experiences and to talk to others about it without being 'written off' as mad.

7.A long-term developmental process of psychological adjustment was identified by surveying the considerable range of experience and the negotiation methods that people reported

Romme, (1991, '98) has developed this appoach with several studies showing that hearing voices can be associated with memories of emotionally 'undigested' events, usually connected with key relationships.

Romme et al, (1999) find that these important connections can be addressed using CBT and self-help methods.

Romme describes a 3 phase model of recovery.

Startling. Initial confusion; emotional chaos, fear, helplessness and psychological turmoil.

Organization. The need to find meaning, arrive at some understanding and acceptance. The development of ways of coping and accommodating voices in everyday living. This task may take months or years and is marked by the attempt to enter into active negotiation with the voice(s).

Stabilisation. The establishment of equilibrium, and accommodation, with the voice(s), and the consequent re-empowerment of the person.

Alternative to medical model

The Hearing Voices movement reflects significant disenchantment with the medical model, and the practises of Mental Health services through much of the Western World. ...

Romme and Escher (2000) have developed a method they call "Making sense of voices" to explore the problems in the life of the voice hearer that lie at the roots of the hearing voices experience. This approach was adopted as a consequence of the results of the studies they carried out, that they claimed, showed that to hearing voices, in it self, is not a symptom of an illness, but in most people is a reaction to severe traumatic experiences that made the person powerless, and are in effect, a kind of survival strategy. ...

Summary

The position of the hearing voices movement can be summarised as follows:

Hearing voice is in itself not a sign of mental illness
Hearing voices is experienced by a great many people, without becoming ill.
Hearing voices is related to problems in life history.
To recover from the distress caused, the person has to learn to cope with their voices and the original problems that lie at the root of the experience ...

(3) Intervoice - The international community for hearing voices

http://www.intervoiceonline.org

The international community for hearing voices

The INTERVOICE Network: Information on national initiatives

Working across the world to spread positive and hopeful messages about the experience of hearing voices

If you hear voices (aka auditory hallucinations); if you know someone who does; if you work with people who hear voices; if you want to know about more about this experience. Then this site is for you. ...

Welcome to our site

A message from Professor Marius Romme, MD, PhD, President of INTERVOICE

We are people who hear voices, family members, friends, mental health workers, activists, and concerned citizens.
Find out how we work together here

Did youKnow?

* Studies have found that between four and 10 per cent of people across the world hear voices.

* Between 70 and 90 cent of people who hear voices do so following traumatic events.

* Voices can be male, female, without gender, child, adult, human or non-human.

* People may hear one voice or many. Some people report hearing hundreds, although in almost all reported cases, one dominates above the others.

* Voices can be experienced in the head, in the ears, outside the head, in some other part of the body, or in the environment.

* Voices often reflect important aspects of the hearer's emotional state - emotions that are often unexpressed by the hearer.

Talking to Voices

"Many people who hear challenging voices have found that a turning point in learning to cope with this experience has been finding different ways of talking with and understanding their voices. Learning to understand the motives of your voices and different ways of talking with them can help the relationship to change between the voice hearer and the voices...."

Click on the title above to read the highly recommended article by Dirk Corstens, Eleanor Longden and Rufus May about the methods used by Rufus May in "The Doctor who Hears Voices" shown on UK TV on the 21st April 2008. Over a million people watched it when it was broadcast and thousands of people are now down loading from several Internet sites. It has provoked a strong response from viewers. Many people have been inspired by the film, others more attached to a medical approach to distress have been outraged, read Rufus Mays' reflections on making the film here

Also

We talked about the voices ... Eleanor Longden, a voice hearer, describes her experience of talking to her voices in the UK mass circulation newspaper The Daily Mail, 07/02/2008
I discovered that if I engaged with the voices, they became less frequent. I also learnt to challenge the more threatening voice, refusing to do what it told me and telling myself it was no more than a symbol of my own externalised anger. .. One by one the voices gradually disappeared, until I was only occasionally hearing one... Three years on, I am healthy, happy and perfectly stable.

Talking to Voices DVD: Professor Marius Romme
See Marius Romme explaining the theoretical basis for voice dialoguing, then with the help of a voice hearer demonstrates the voice dialoguing technique. buy your own copy here ...

Angels and Demons

broadcast on ABC in Australia on the 7th April 2008

This well regarded documentary made by Andrew Denton as part of the "Enough Rope" series considers what it is like to hear voices.
You can watch it here
and read the programme transcript here

Well known people who heard voices: Past and Present

http://voices.schublade.org/2006/12/3/examples-of-well-known-people-who-heard-voices

The international community for hearing voices

Page last updated 03/08/2007

Here are some examples of famous people who acknowledged they heard voices, if you know of any more people we could add to this list please let us know.

WILLIAM BLAKE

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. From a young age, William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The earliest instance occurred at the age of about eight or ten in Peckham Rye, London, when he reported seeing a tree filled with angels "bespangling every bough like stars." According to Blake's Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home to report his vision, but only escaped being thrashed by his father through the intervention of his mother. Though all the evidence suggests that his parents were largely supportive, his mother seems to have been especially so, and several of Blake's early drawings and poems decorated the walls of her chamber.

On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them. In later life, his wife Catherine would recall the time he saw God's head "put to the window". The vision, Catherine reminded her husband, "Set you ascreaming."[25]

Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery, and therefore may have inspired him further with spiritual works and pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake's works. God and Christianity constituted the intellectual center of his writings, from which he drew inspiration. In addition, Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels.

In a letter to William Hayley, dated May 6, 1800, Blake writes:

"I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate."

PHILIP K. DICK

Philip K Dick was a science fiction writer, who died in 1982. Eight of his stories have been adapted into films to date, including "Blade Runner", "Total Recall" and "Minority Report".

"In earlier interviews you have described your encounter, in 1974, with "a transcendentally rational mind." Does this "tutelary spirit" continue to guide you?

Dick: It hasn't spoken a word to me since I wrote The Divine Invasion. The voice is identified as Ruah, which is the Old Testament word for the Spirit of God. It speaks in a feminine voice and tends to express statements regarding the messianic expectation. It guided me for a while. It has spoken to me sporadically since I was in high school. I expect that if a crisis arises it will say something again. It's very economical in what it says. It limits itself to a few very terse, sucinct sentences. I only hear the voice of the spirit when I'm falling asleep or waking up. I have to be very receptive to hear it. It sounds as though it's coming from millions of miles away."

Philip K. Dick's Final Interview, June 1982, [source: Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, June 1982

Click here for "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick"

CHARLES DICKENS

The experiences of Charles Dickens were widely publicised by the author himself. He used to tell the tale with relish about becoming so involved with his characters that they actually spoke to him, the best known being the disgusting old ‘nurse’ from his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs Gamp who, he said, would tell him dirty stories in church during Sunday service and make him laugh out loud.

SIGMUND FREUD

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis wrote, “During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city….I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice….”

MAHATMA GANDHI

Mahatma Gandhi, the man who almost single handedly achieved Indian independence from Britain, relied on an “inner voice” for guidance. Toward the end of his life the voice said, “You are on the right track, move neither to your left, nor right, but keep to the straight and narrow.”

ANTHONY HOPKINS

In 1993, in an interview in the News of the World, the Hollywood actor Anthony Hopkins made a remarkable admission, he claimed he heard strange voices in his head, "I've always had a little voice in my head, particularly when I was younger and less assured", he said. "While onstage, during classical theatre the voice would suddenly say, "Oh, you think you can do Shakespeare, do you?" and he added; "Recently, I was being interviewed on television and the voice inside my head said to me, "Who the hell do you think you are. You're just an actor, what the hell do you know about anything". Anthony Hopkins locates the root of his voice hearing experience in the insecurity he felt as a child, he says "I've always had a little voice in my head pulling me down, particularly when I was younger and less grounded...My school days were not always happy and I wanted to get away from Wales and be someone else. I was stupid at school, I just didn't know what was going on. I thought I was on Mars, I didn't know what they were talking about." Many voice hearers share this description of the trigger for the voice experience and a recent survey showed that Hopkins is by no means alone. Social circumstances are related to the onset of the voices and examples of this include unbearable living situations, recent or childhood traumas, conflicts between the ideal and reality of people’s lives and the person's overall emotional development.

JOHN FRUSCIANTE from the Red Hot Chili Peppers

“I had just so many mental problems. It wasn't until I was 28 that my brain actually felt like a spacious place. When I was 18, 19, 22, my brain was just clogged all the time - non-stop voices. I couldn't figure out what was going on. There was a lot of confusion inside me, this flood of voices, often contradicting each other, often telling me stuff that would happen in the future, and then it would happen, voices insulting me, telling me what to do.”

SAINT IGNATIUS (Íñigo) LOYOLA

Caption: "Having sought divine help from the Blessed Virgin he spoke with God and saw the infant Jesus in Mary's arms. All this pleasantly energized him."

Íñigo was born at the castle of Loyola, in the municipality of Azpeitia, 16 miles southwest of Donostia/San Sebastian in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, Spain. The youngest of 13 children, Ignatius was only seven years old when his mother died.

In 1517, Íñigo took service in the army, defending the small town of Pamplona against the recently expelled Navarrese monarchy. Highly outnumbered, the Spaniards wanted to surrender, but Ignatius persuaded them to fight on. One leg wounded, the other broken by a cannonball, Ignatius was returned to his castle by the Navarrese.

Ignatius was recuperating from the battle injury when he had the first of his visions, and a nervous breakdown. His emotional condition, combined with the fictitious stories of the Catholic saints whose lives he studied, resulted in a series of mystical visions, conversations and other encounters with God, Jesus and Mary.

JOHN FORBES NASH

On October 11, 1994, John Forbes Nash, Jr. won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in game theory. Nash was 66 and, for most of his adult life he'd lived with the diagnoseis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Nash began his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1948 - when he was just 20. While he was still only 21, he wrote a 27-page doctoral dissertation on game theory - the mathematics of competition.Nash put a whole new face on competition, and he drew the attention of theoretical economists. They turned game theory into a tool. This young genius brought the field to fruition.

He went on to MIT and for eight years dazzled the mathematical world. He worked in economics. He even invented the game of Hex, marketed by Parker Brothers. He married in 1957. New York Times writer Silvia Nasar tells how "Fortune magazine singled him out in July 1958 as America's brilliant young star of the 'new mathematics.'"

Nash engaged in sporadic same-sex relationships throughout his life, despite having married a woman. As a graduate student, in his circle,his homosexuality was mostly accepted,or at least tolerated. However, upon graduation, homosexuality was less accepted in the McCarthy era government department in which he worked; he was fired from the job after being arrested for "indecent acts" in a men's room at a public park. As an adult,Nash was involved in a serious relationship with a man, which may have contributed to his hesitancy to marry Alicia.

He began hearing voices. He'd once astonished mathematicians with his unlikely results. Now his results stopped making sense, and the dividing line wasn't clear at first. He began looking for secret messages in numbers. He disappeared for days. He could, in Nasar's words, "no longer sort and interpret sensations or reason or feel the full range of emotions."

Throughout his years at Princeton (1945-1949) he believed he had a roommate while records show he lived by himself. He became paranoid and was committed into the McLean Hospital, April-May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild depression with low self-esteem. After a problematic stay in Paris and Geneva, Nash returned to Princeton in 1960. He remained in and out of mental hospitals until 1970, being given insulin shock therapy and antipsychotic medications, usually as a result of being committed rather than by his choice.

From 1970, by his choice, he never took antipsychotic medication again. According to his biographer Sylvia Nasar, he recovered gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his wife Alicia, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted.

Nash's "hallucinations" were exclusively auditory, and not both visual and auditory as shown in the film "A Beautiful Mind". The film also has Nash saying at the time of his Nobel acceptance speech in 1994 "I take the newer medications", when in fact Nash didn't take any medication from 1970 onwards.

Interview with John Nash on his experience of hearing voices

SAINT JOAN

In the preface to Bernard Shaw's play, saint Joan (page 13 14, Penguin Edition) he says of her voices: "Joan's voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove that she was mad, a liar and impostor, a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached show how little our matter of fact historians know about other people's minds, or even about their own. There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure......The inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of genius sometimes assume similar illusions. Socrates, Luther, Swedenbourg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint Francis and saint Joan did.... On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan.... Her policy was also quite sound: nobody disputes that the relief of Orleans, followed by the coronation at Rheims of the Dauphin as a counterblow to the suspicions then current of his legitimacy and consequently of his title, were military and political masterpieces that saved France. They might have been planned by Napoleon or any other illusion proof genius. They came to Joan as an instruction from her Counsel, as she called her visionary saints; but she was none the less an able leader of men for imagining her ideas in this way".

JOSHUA SLOCUM

Joshua Slocum became the first person to circumnavigate the world single handed in 1898 aboard a boat called Spray. He claimed to have been aided by the ghost of Christopher Columbus's helmsman, who guided him safely through storms and bouts of illness.

AIDEN SHINGLER

Aiden is an artist and is also diagnosed as a schizophrenic. He calls himself a schizophrenic artist, one of his pieces of work made up of four crucifixes stamped in indelible ink with his hand and foot prints and on one crucifix, the nails have been replaced with syringes. Aiden says of the work that it "... is about the time I was forcibly injected with neuroleptic drugs. I'd heard a voice within saying I had been chosen and I could feel a halo around my head. This image is representative of the crucifixion of the Christ within me by the clinicians. Instead of the halo there is now a wreath of white flowers."Spingler was hospitalised twenty years ago the first time he experienced visions and voices until his family insisted on his release and since that time he has had eight sustained periods of altered consciousness, lasting from one to six months. He does not regard them as frightening, rather he says of them "there's a wonderful sense of freedom, a great expansion of mind, clarity of thought. Colour becomes so heightened. All the senses do...". He does not regard schizophrenia if it has to be called that as an illness, instead he sees it as a condition, a more colourful way of seeing things. When his doctors told him he was disconnected he told them they should be so lucky, that he was making new, wonderful, poetic connections. Aiden now experiences his episodes of altered consciousness as gentler and less exhausting. Yet for him these epiphanies, the visions and voices are just as inspiring.

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Robert Alexander Schumann (June 8, 1810 – July 29, 1856) was a German composer and pianist. He was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the nineteenth century, as well as a famous music critic. An intellectual as well as an aesthete, his music reflects the deeply personal nature of Romanticism. Introspective and often whimsical, his early music was an attempt to break with the tradition of classical forms and structure which he thought too restrictive. Little understood in his lifetime, much of his music is now regarded as daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form. He stands in the front rank of German Romantics.

Inspired by E.T.A. Hoffman’s mad fictional musician Kappelmeister Kreisler, Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” was one of many musical works written at the urging of the inner voices that alternatively plagued and blessed him throughout much of his life. As long as his mind remained whole enough to organize what he was “hearing,” these voices brought some of his finest work to him, sometimes fully realized and orchestrated. When his mental state began to disintegrate, however, the ghostly music brought him terrible suffering. His wife, the pianist Clara Schumann, described a tortuous night :

“The night of Friday, the 17th, we had not been long in bed when Robert got up and wrote out a theme that, he said, the angels had sung to him; after doing that, he went back to bed and hallucinated all night long, his eyes open and looking to heaven; he was firmly convinced that angels were hovering over him and disclosing the most wondrous revelations, all expressed in glorious music: they extended us their welcome, and we would both be joined with them before the year was past...Morning came and with it a dreadful change! The angel voices had turned into the voices of demons with horrible music; they told him he was a sinner and they planned to cast him into Hades, in short, his condition increased literally into one of nervous convulsions; he shrieked in pain (as he told me later, it took the form of tigers and hyenas tearing at him and trying to grab him) and the two doctors, who fortunately came in good time, were hardly able to hold him. I’ll never forget this moment, I was suffering the very agonies of torture with him. After about half an hour, he was less agitated and said friendlier voices could now be heard giving him encouragement...”

SOCRATES

Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daemonic sign", an averting (????????????) inner voice that Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as "daemonic" suggests that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts.

An Islamic Scholar, Mirza Tahir Ahmad, argues that Socrates experienced what can be called a prophetic revelation. He writes in his book, Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth, that "Socrates seems to have a very personalized and intense relationship with the Supreme Being. His very personality is built on the pattern of the messengers of God.

DORIS STOKES

The late Doris Stokes, the renowned English medium heard the voice of what she regarded as her spirit guide, the guide was called Ramonov, a Tibetan monk. At first she didn't know where he came from until whilst watching a travel film on BBC television, she said "It was all about the Table people. Ramonov said "That's where I come from. Tibet." She first heard the voice of her deceased father when she was 13 years old when she herself met a medium. She always understood her experience to be a spiritual one and became a best selling writer, regularly appeared on TV and had a sell out show at the London Palladium.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic and theologian. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. At the age of fifty-six he entered into a spiritual phase, in which he experienced dreams and visions. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, where he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits. For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758) [4], and several unpublished theological works.

Around 1744 he began having strange dreams. Swedenborg carried a travel journal with him on most of his travels, and did so on this journey. The whereabouts of the diary were long unknown, but it was discovered in the Royal Library in the 1850s and published in 1859 as Drömboken, or Journal of Dreams. It provides a first-hand account of the events of the crisis.

He experienced many different dreams and visions, some greatly pleasurable, others highly disturbing. The experiences continued as he travelled to London to continue the publication of Regnum animale. This cathartic process continued for six months. It has been compared to the Catholic concept of Purgatory. Analyses of the diary have concluded that what Swedenborg was recording in his Journal of Dreams was a battle between the love of his self, and the love of God. [26]

In the last entry of the journal from October 26-27 1744, Swedenborg appears to be clear as to which path to follow. He felt he should drop his current project, and write a new book about the worship of God. He soon began working on De cultu et amore Dei, or The Worship and Love of God. It was never fully completed, but Swedenborg still had it published in London in June 1745.

One explanation why the work was never finished is given in a well known and often referenced story. In April 1745, Swedenborg was dining in a private room at a tavern in London. By the end of the meal, a darkness fell upon his eyes, and the room shifted character. Suddenly he saw a person sitting at a corner of the room, telling Swedenborg: "Do not eat too much!". Swedenborg, scared, hurried home. Later that night, the same man appeared in his dreams. The man told Swedenborg that He was the Lord, that He had appointed Swedenborg to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible, and that He would guide Swedenborg in what to write. The same night, the spiritual world was opened to Swedenborg.[

TERESA of AVILA

1515 - 1582, Birthplace: Avila, Spain

Teresa of Avila was a nun who reformed the order of the Carmelites, an ascetic who had mystical visions and communications from God. Charismatic and controversial, she founded monasteries throughout Spain, and is known by works that include her autobiography and The Way of Perfection. She was beatified in 1614 and canonized in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, and in 1970 was made a Doctor of the Church.

ZOE WANNAMAKER

Zoe Wannamaker, the successful English actress talked about her voice hearing on the radio programme "Desert Island Discs" (BBC, Radio 4), she said: "It's like a little person sitting on your shoulder saying "No that's wrong. Don't do this. Don't do that...It's got in the way when I was working, because my concentration would be tripped by this voice in the back of my head. You think you're concentrating, but the voices were also saying "your not concentrating". I know it sounds like Joan of Arc, but it was a sort of chatter that would be going on while I was on stage." When asked if the voices had gone she said "They come back occasionally and have a good chat."

2008-05-31T03:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.naturalnews.com/023334.html

The ADHD Scam and the Mass Drugging of Schoolchildren

ADHD "researchers" have engaged in yet another round of fraud by claiming brain scans show the brains of children diagnosed with ADHD are smaller and lesser developed. So what's the fraud? As it turns out, all the children tested were on mind-altering ADHD drugs, so the only thing these researchers have really proven is that ADHD drugs stunt the development of children's brains.

The Drugs Don't Work

It was a team of American scientists researching what is called the "Multi-Modal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD" -- MTA for short. They found that the drugs are useless over long-term. The drugs used to treat ADHD such as Ritalin and Concerta are useless. They have no benefits whatsoever after three years and even though they may show some short-term benefits depending on who is watching, and depending on their judgment of the child's behavior, the truth is there is no long-term benefit whatsoever. But here's the most important part.

They found that these drugs stunt the growth of children. "They were not growing as much as other children in terms of both their height and their weight," said the report's co-author, Prof. William Pelham from the University of Buffalo. "I think we exaggerated the beneficial impact of medication in the first study," he added in reference to a study they did a few years ago where they declared that these drugs were helping children.

"We had thought that children medicated longer would have better outcomes. That did not happen to be the case. The children had a substantial decrease in their growth rate," he continued. The second point was that there were no benefits to children taking these drugs whatsoever.

ADHD Drugs Stunt Brain Growth in Children

What they did not say in the results of this study is that the same drugs also stunt the growth of the children's brains. Now this is my assessment of the situation, having studied this issue for several years and knowing that this drug is stunting the development of the children. It is very reasonable to conclude that it also stunts the growth of their brains and guess what? This new study actually proves it, because these MRI brain scans of children's brains that found that these brains were three years behind schedule in development.

80% of the children who were looked at with those MRI scans were on ADHD medications. That's right. All that study did was prove that medication stunts the growth of children's brains. Amazing is it not?

How lousy the science has become out there in the world of ADHD when they are trying to push these drugs on to parents, children and school administrators. They come up with anything. They actually take a bunch of healthy children, they invent a fictitious disease, then they come up with a chemical called "Speed" -- it used to be called speed when it was sold on the street as a street drug. They give it to the children.

It harms the children, stunts their growth, and causes their brains to develop more slowly. Then they stick these children under an MRI machine, run some brain scans, and announce to the world that oh my goodness ADHD children have smaller brains that are behind schedule. How amazing is that? It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is really going on here.

This science is so bad. I remember when I was taking a science course in college one of the first lessons we had was how to interpret statistics and how to watch out for correlations that might not be causations or how to make sure that you do not have mistakes in reaching conclusions with your data. This is a classic mistake.

These drugs are causing the slow brain development. All the MRI scans are doing is proving that the drugs are harming the children. Notice they did not take children who were not on the drugs, put them under an MRI machine, and scan their brains. You know why? Because their brains would be normal. They had to take children who were doped up on speed and put them under the machines in order to get these results.

In addition, notice that they did not do this study before children started being dosed with the drugs. They did not say 20 years ago: "Oh, wow! Suddenly children are having this so-called disease 'ADHD.'" Let's stick them under a machine and see if there is anything wrong with their brains. They did not do that because if they had they would have found there was no difference.

The True Cause of ADHD

Nothing is wrong with these children other than probably their diet, a little too much refined sugar and too many food additives. In fact, that reminds me of the Southampton Study in the UK that showed that additives cause hyperactivity in children within an hour after consumption. That's right -- food additives, especially the artificial colors. Made from coal tar derivatives and synthetic chemicals, you feed these to children and guess what? Within an hour you get hyperactive behavior.

Is there anything wrong with these children's brains? No, there is something wrong with these children's parents, who probably keep feeding him or her chemical food additives. There is probably something wrong with the school administrators who keep dishing out school lunches that contain food items made with toxic chemicals. Maybe those people should have their brains scanned.

As long as we are talking about brain scans, and talking about retarded neuron development I think the only people in this whole study who probably have brains that are behind schedule are the researchers who announced these conclusions.

These people have stunted brain development. There is no question about it because how on earth could they not have realized that the only thing they did with these MRI scans was prove that these drugs stunt neural development in children? How could they not have considered that? They must be on crack or maybe, in this case, amphetamines because that is what they are giving to the children.

Maybe these researchers are really ADHD children who were treated with these drugs, then they grew up with stunted brains and now they have gotten involved in the research. They have drawn these conclusions and made these announcements and, of course, the editors at places like National Public Radio were probably on the same drugs because they ran this story as if it was fact.

They did not question it one bit. No one out there in the mainstream media questioned this. They did not say, "Gee, could it be that the medication caused the stunted growth in the brains of these children? Could that be?" No, they did not question it at all. No skepticism anymore when it comes to psychiatry or Big Pharma and you know why, of course, because they have an agenda to push.

They have to keep pushing these drugs onto more children. They have to keep those parents in a state of fear. That's how they sell more drugs. They have to keep people believing in this fictitious disease. That's the only way they are going to make money. This is an industry that makes money by exploiting the bodies of children, and the evidence is very clear.

Even the NIH is now saying that these drugs stunt the growth of children. That is a scientific fact announced by a mainstream medical research organization. This is not fringe science. This is not alternative medicine. This is not conjecture on the part of some person who has an axe to grind with psychiatry. This is mainstream medicine announcing that this stuff stunts the growth of children. How could it not stunt the growth of their brains?

Why the Mainstream Media Cannot be Trusted

When I was listening to a report on this issue on National Public Radio just the other day, a woman called into the show and she asked a very good question. She said: "I am an adult who has been diagnosed with ADHD, is my brain also stunted in its growth?" Do you know what the reply was?

They had a doctor on that show. One of the doctors that does news reporting for National Public Radio -- kind of the in-house idiot there, who has no training in nutrition, does not understand a thing about health but knows all the disease names and all the chemical names. Do you know what this doctor told that woman?

He said, "Well, researchers are not sure but they suspect that your brain may be behind in its development too and that eventually your brain will catch up and then you will be fine but right now if you have been diagnosed with Adult ADHD your brain growth maybe a little behind schedule."

That is what he said to this woman. I am thinking are you kidding me? Is this person really saying this on the air? You have to be a complete idiot to come up with that.

The research said that ADHD is a disease where children lag behind a few years in developing their brains, and if you read the research they said the brain cortex of children reaches peak thickness at an average of 10.5 years for ADHD children compared with age 7.5 years in normal children.

This person was talking to a woman who is probably in her 40's and he is saying even in your 40's you are probably still a few years behind. Are you kidding me? Where does he come up with any evidence for this -- nowhere, he pulled it out of his hat. He just made that up right there on the air -- just made it up.

He had no evidence whatsoever -- not even any logic behind it and no reason to say that other than the fact that in order to keep up the illusion that this disease has something to do with slow brain development, they had to make an excuse to say "Oh, why are they diagnosing adults with this disease?"

They had to come up with a reason -- another fictitious reason and this was all they could come up with. This doctor on the radio on the spot, this was all he could think of. Oh, well your brain must be behind too.

They are reaching deep aren't they? What will they come up with next? It's like catching a politician in a lie and that politician has to keep the lie going. The lie gets more and more outrageous every time he tells it to a different group in a different city when he is touring around trying to get elected.

The Pharmaceutical Credo: Sell, Sell, Sell

This is what the ADHD industry is like. It is as if they have to carry on this outrageous lie, and they cannot really tell the truth because then the whole house of cards would collapse and everybody would realize this is all one giant fraud.

They cannot tell the truth so they have to keep coming up with new lies to try to market this to more people. First, it was just a children's disorder. Then the drug companies realized they could sell this same speed drug to adults. I mean think about it. Children are only a small part of the total market.

What if we could convince adults that they too have ADHD then we could sell this drug to them also? They came up with a test. That's right -- a paper test to try to convince adults that they had ADHD.

You know what this paper test is made of? It's a few questions like: Do you feel like you are juggling too many things in your day? Do you have too much on your mind or too many projects that you cannot finish? Do you feel like the stresses of modern life are distracting you? Do you have trouble finishing projects or trouble concentrating on your work? These are the kinds of questions they ask.

Well it turns out that virtually everyone has ADHD according to those questions. This is what they used to diagnose adults. See there is no test. There is no blood test. There is no body chemistry test. There is no MRI scan. There is nothing physically wrong and nothing chemically wrong. They just take a test and it turns out that 80% of American adults who take this test end up diagnosed with ADHD -- that is 80% or four or five adults that walk into this room and answer these questions gets slapped with a label. You are ADHD.

What a quick quack diagnosis, is it not? Drag a bunch of adults into a room, tell them they have a disease, and then give them a drug. That is what this industry is all about.

Now they have to back this up and they have to say, "Well, gee, adults must have slow brain development too." They cannot think of any other reason to justify their fictitious disease so they are just dragging the stuff out of nowhere -- out of absolutely nowhere.

'Treatment' as a Marketing Term

Even Dr. Phillip Shaw who is the head researcher on this study at the NIH, said in a quote published on Reuters: "What I would not take away from this study is just sit and wait three years and your child will be okay," he said.

In other words, he is saying that even though his own research shows that the brain development of these children is three years behind, your children will not just grow out of it. He is saying, in fact, they need to be treated with chemicals -- or he is implying that.

He says, "We know ADHD is a real problem for children and their families and the schools and it does need treatment." Now treatment is the word that this industry uses for marketing. When they say "treatment" what they mean is get out your wallet. When they say too many children are going untreated, what they mean is not enough children have bought our drugs -- not enough parents have given in. Not enough prescriptions have been written.

When they say that more children need treatment that is what they mean. They need to sell more drugs. They have managed to change the language. They have managed to phrase all of this so that their marketing campaigns sound like compassionate public health campaigns. Oh, we care about these children so much that we have to sell them our over-priced monopoly prescription drugs that used to be sold as street drugs and would, in fact, get you arrested for a felony if you sold them to a child.

That is how they bypass those signs in front of the schools that say this is a drug-free school zone. They go right over that sign. They jump that fence, get into the administrator's office, get into the heads of the teachers, counselors, get them to start prescribing drugs or pushing them onto those children. Then they come up with this self-reinforcing MRI scan to say that there is a difference in brain development.

Well, of course there is. These children have been on speed. You take a bunch of crack babies and you put them in the same MRI machine, you are going to see something wrong with their brains too. Make no mistake about it. You take a bunch of heroin junkies, you put them in that machine, same thing. You are going to get some strange looking results.

It does not mean that they had some disease that was treated with heroin or crack and that the disease caused the brain problem. No, it means that the drugs they were taking were the most likely cause of these problems.

Flawed Children or Flawed System?

Let us get back to the doctor with the study -- the Multi-Modal Treatment Study of Children. The report's co-author I mentioned earlier is Professor William Pelham at the University of Buffalo. He is the one who found out that these drugs do not help children at all in the long run. He says, "In the short run, medication will help the child behave better. In the long run, it will not and that information should be made very clear to parents."

Dr. Tim Kendall, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (the person who is working on some new guidelines about ADHD for the NHS) says, "A generous understanding would be to say that doctors have reached the point where they do not know what else to offer."

He says, "I hope we will be able to make recommendations that will give people a comprehensive approach to treatment…" there is that word "treatment" again. He continues, "and that will advise about what teachers might be able to do within the classroom when they are trying to deal with children who have difficult problems of this kind. I think the important thing is we have a comprehensive approach that does not focus on just one type of treatment."

Good for him to dare to say that we have to have a comprehensive approach. Well I have a solution for you that is comprehensive. How about nutrition? How about we stop poisoning our children with processed foods and chemical additives in those foods? How about we stop poisoning the brains of our children by dosing them up on speed? There's an idea for you.

We could cure children of this so-called behavioral disorder by doing two things -- making the children healthy and making education a lot more interesting. These children do not have attention deficit problems. You set those young boys down in front of a Wii or an X-box or a Playstation and they can pay attention for about 12 hours straight. They do not even pee or eat.

They sit there in front of that machine on that TV and they can focus and master a game. You go out and find a game called "Guitar Hero," put a 13-year-old boy in front of that game and you got the whole weekend done. Their whole weekend is focused on that one game and that child will master that game with hand/eye coordination.

That child will be a genius in that game by the end of the weekend. He goes back to school on Monday bored out of his mind. Why? Education is pretty darn boring the way it is done today in most schools. I know there are exceptions and my hat is off to those teachers who make learning fun. I had a few of those in my educational experience, but largely most of them were boring as heck.

History is reduced to just a series of names and dates to memorize and regurgitate onto paper so that you can be called smart and to say that you know history because you have memorized a bunch of stuff. Are you kidding me? That is not an education, and that is not interesting. No wonder these children cannot pay attention.

Education needs to be experiential. These children learn in a multitude of ways. It is not just auditory through a lecture or it is not just visual through a book. These children need to learn hands-on. They need to learn in a 3D space. They need to be able to move their bodies as they learn.

That is why "Guitar Hero" works, friends -- because they are moving. They are jamming out on these video game guitars -- the mind/body connection is solid. They are focused. They are learning. They master that game. We need to make public education more fun like that. I mean let's face it.

ADHD Drugs are a Crime Against Children

This is really about the Ritalin game, this is about making students easier for teachers to handle. It is about society not being willing to handle the energy of young children and instead of letting these children express that creative energy in a variety of ways and giving them a useful outlet for that energy, they want to turn our children into zombies.

You would think with a drug called "speed" that it would actually make them more hyperactive, right, but no it has the opposite effect. It is called "speed" but it makes them mellow. You can ask any ex-junkie who used to take that drug and they will tell you the same thing. Now, I remember when I was in the third grade, we had a baseball star come in and give a lecture about being hooked on drugs. He played for the Kansas City Royals.

He had been busted taking drugs. Part of his sentence was community service. He had to go into the schools all over town and talk to the children about how terrible an experience it was being hooked on drugs. He came in and he told us how he was hallucinating, what these drugs did to him, his sleep habits, and how they harmed his life and his health. I was really impacted by that speech but today guess what? You might as well have drug reps going into the schools telling children how good speed is for them.

That is what is going on. The drug reps go in and talk to the administrators, talk to the counselors, they brainwash those people, and then those people talk to the children and say you need these drugs. In one generation, we have gone from telling children "Just Say No to Drugs" to "Just take this pill and then you will be healthy" -- one generation.

Now, we have a new generation of children who are being raised on speed. Worse yet they have been given a label -- a label of a disease. They have been told that they are abnormal. Why? Because they have a whole lot of energy, because they can probably do 50 things at once. It is quite a skill. I have mastered it as an adult personally.

I can do 50 things at once and I do not have any disease. I have incredible creativity. I have fantastic mental focus. I can read a book a day if I want to. I can photo-read ten books a day, and learn multiple languages as an adult much better than I ever could as a child. If I were to walk into any of the psychiatric centers, they would diagnose me with ADHD no question about it. Why? Because I am doing many things at once. It fits their pattern. That is what these children are doing. They can do many things at once.

You say they cannot calm down. Of course they can't. They are too excited to be alive. They have stuff to do, stuff to learn, stuff to touch, hear, feel, taste, experience, stuff to categorize in those brains. Those brains are working and if you take them off those junk food additives those brains will work even better.

We have to start looking at the gem of what is in these children's heads. That brain is a gift and that brain needs to be cultivated, not shut down with drugs. This is a disgrace to the next generation what we are doing to our children. This is disgusting. In fact, I have often described it as a crime against humanity.

That is what I really believe it is. I believe to be a type of chemical castration to these young children that we are damaging their brains and now the MRI scans prove it, we are damaging their brains. We are stunting their growth. We are creating a generation of mutants because we are putting them all on speed. The industry has said, "Well we are not treating enough of them." They have said, "There are children still out there that do not have treatment. We must treat them all."

How the Drug Game Works

I read an article recently where the estimates were that only one-third of the children who have ADHD are currently "receiving treatment." The implication in this article was that they needed to put three times as many children on these drugs as there are now.

Think about that -- that would put the number at well over 10 million children in the United States being put on speed. A nation of drugged children -- stunted growth and what other side effects might we learn about this in the years ahead?

Nobody knows -- the researchers certainly don't know. This is all one giant experiment using our children as guinea pigs. This is a giant marketing experiment designed to generate profits, to scare people into believing in a fictitious disease, to label children with a fictitious disease name that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. Make them a victim of a system of medicine that has no purpose other than to extract profits from bodies.

ADHD will not be the only label they will get. No way, perhaps the side effects of these drugs will cause liver damage and then they will get another disease name -- liver disease. Then after liver damage is in place for a long period, they will have toxicity in their blood and that might cause heart disease. It might cause sleep disorders. It might cause depression and guess what? Big Pharma has a drug to treat all of those too.

What are the odds? Just imagine a lifetime of popping pills. One side effect after another and it all starts with a fictitious diagnosis based on nothing but the opinion of a psychiatrist who has most likely been bribed by the drug companies himself or herself.

Try to find a psychiatrist practicing today who is not taking money from Big Pharma. Just try to find one. Try to find a decision-maker at the FDA who is not financially involved with the pharmaceutical industry. The situation is so bad that the FDA recently announced they were going to limit the amount of bribery allowed by the panel members who make the safety decisions for the FDA.

You see before there was no limit to the amount of bribery allowed. The FDA believed two things. They believed (1) that there should be no limit and (2) that none of this should be made public. In other words, no one needed to actually declare any conflict of interest nor declare how much money he or she had been receiving from pharmaceutical companies.

These are the people sitting on the boards making the decisions for the FDA about which drugs to approve or reject. Of course, all the high profit drugs were approved. Well, now the FDA has decided to clean up its act a little bit and limit the amount of bribery to $50,000 a year per person sitting on the panel. How is that for integrity? This is an agency so corrupt, so steeped in dishonest practices that it believes integrity means limiting bribery to $50,000 a year per person sitting on these panels These are the people making the decisions on drugs like Ritalin.

The Grand Experiment

Here is another fact you probably do not know: Most drugs that are prescribed to children have never been tested for either safety or effectiveness in children.

Anti-depressants, for example, are commonly prescribed to children. There are millions of children in this country who are on anti-depressant drugs -- SSRI's they are called -- Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. They are the ones that have been linked to suicides, to violent behavior, violent thoughts. Many of these have been banned for use in children in other countries including the UK, but here in the United States it is perfectly okay to prescribe them on children even though they have never been tested on children -- never! Not one shred of evidence that they are safe on children -- not one.

This whole system of medicine that the FDA claims is the "Gold Standard of Medicine" -- this whole system is a sham. There is no real evidence behind most of what goes on and the evidence that you do see? A lot of it has just been fudged. It has been fraudulently created in order to achieve some level of cover so that the corrupt officials who have been bribed making decisions at the FDA can go ahead and put their rubber stamp on that drug. They can then approve it and release it into the marketplace.

That is when the grand experiment really begins. That is when we start seeing what happens when you unleash this drug onto a population that has never really been tested for? We are just now starting to learn the answers to that question. One of the answers that we just learned is that these drugs for ADHD stunt the growth of children. We know that now. What else might happen?

Might it cause them to be unable to reproduce down the road? What if it stunts the growth of sperm development, as these children become men? What if it interrupts the development or the release of eggs in the ovaries? What if it causes reproductive problems? What if we are, in fact, creating a generation of children who cannot reproduce?

We do not even know if that is the case or not. We will not know for many more years because this is a grand experiment. No one knows. No one can tell you what is safe. No one can tell you that the scenario I just described cannot happen because they do not know. It has never been tested.

Psychiatric drugs only have to be tested for a few weeks -- sometimes as little as six weeks before they are released onto the public and can be prescribed for a lifetime. That is right. This is true. You can Google this and find it yourself. The FDA has rules about this and the rules state that psychiatric drugs -- even those for schizophrenia -- only need to be tested for a few weeks and then they can be released to the public and prescribed for years or decades.

How do they know that these drugs are safe for use over a period of years or decades? They do not know. No one knows. If you allow your child to be put on these drugs then you are giving up your power and you are in a sense playing the role of a servant to this industry. You are giving up your money. You are compromising the health and safety of your child.

Diet Affects Behavior

You may say "Well, my child has behavioral problems, he is difficult in school," or "The teacher has told me that I should put him on Ritalin. What do I do?" It is very simple -- change the child's diet. Take all the processed foods out of his diet. Take away the food additives -- the artificial colors, artificial flavors and processed sugars. Take all that out and fill his diet with wholesome foods -- fresh produce, super food nutrients.

Emerald Balance has another product made for children called "X-Balance." It is chocolate flavored. Children love it. It is loaded with super foods. You can blend it up into some chocolate milk or some kind of super food drink. Give your child one of those every day. It will change his life.

Symptoms of ADHD will vanish usually within just a couple of weeks once you change their diet. This is not difficult stuff. Take the Aspartame out of their diets. Stop feeding them soda and diet soda. Put wholesome foods and nutrition back into their diets and they will change. They will do better in school and they will resist infection. They will be far less likely to ever be diagnosed with diabetes, cancer, or heart disease. You will in fact be creating a very positive future for that child by changing their nutrition today.

That is how you eliminate so-called behavioral disorders for the most part -- 80% success rate with a couple of weeks just by changing what they eat. It's very simple. This is not complicated. Here is why.

Food as Fuel

The brain is a physical organ. The brain needs blood, it needs oxygen, and it needs blood sugar to operate. In fact, the brain uses up a whole lot of oxygen and blood sugar. The brain burns up some calories. It is that big CPU on top of those shoulders.

The body invests some real resources in keeping that brain active because, of course, the brain is our main advantage. That is why our species has flourished -- at least by some measures. We have at least been able to populate the planet. We have not really taken care of it but we have been very successful at spreading and we did that because our brains worked better than the other animals -- the other mammals on this planet with which we were competing. The brain takes a lot of energy, many resources. Well the brain runs on what is in your blood.

The blood is pumping fuel to your brain and the blood is removing metabolic waste materials from the cells in your brain, right? The brain is a physical organ and that means whatever is in your blood is affecting the functioning of your brain. It makes sense, right? You drive up to a gas station to put fuel in your car. You have three grades of fuel to choose from.

You have your regular, your premium and your super premium. The difference between those grades of fuel is performance. You put in a higher-octane fuel you are going to get more mileage per gallon out of that car because there is just more energy in that fuel. Well you would not drive up to a gas station that had budget fuel for your car.

Budget fuel is 50% water and 50% gas. Would you put that in your car's gas tank and then expect to drive away and have great performance out of your car even if that gas were say half the price of all the other gas? Of course not, no one would do that but what do we do with our children?

We feed them junk food -- cheap processed junk food that lacks the nutrients the brain needs to operate at a high performance. It is like putting water in your gas tank and then expecting the car to work correctly. It will not work that well.

How to Feed Your Brain

You have to feed the brain the nutrients that it needs. It needs essential fatty acids. It needs DHA. It needs Omega 3 oils, vitamins, minerals, and all of these plant-based phytonutrients from things like berries and micro-algae such as spirulina and chlorella. All of these super foods -- even cacao. The brain needs these nutrients if you want it to run at high performance. It only makes sense. Do you want a child's brain to work correctly? Feed the brain right.

That means getting the right nutrients into the blood, and you know the human body has a very cool system for getting the right nutrients into the blood. It is called "digestion." It is called eating it or drinking it. Get that stuff down your throat -- all that good nutritional stuff, high-density super foods and guess what? The digestive system will take those nutrients.

It will pull them out of those foods. It will put them into the blood stream, and then the heart will pump that blood right to the brain. The brain will absorb that and whoa, wham. The brain is working. Suddenly it is working right.

This is not rocket science to figure out. This is kind of common sense. Common sense that is completely missed by the whole system of organized medicine today -- psychiatry has no clue about the link between nutrition and brain health. They imagine it does not even exist.

They think that all behavioral disorders are a result of some kind of brain chemical imbalance that has to be corrected with an artificial, synthetic chemical put into the body. It's ridiculous! Your brain has everything it needs to operate perfectly and so does the brain of every child born in this country.

It has everything it needs to operate perfectly -- barring, of course, some bizarre birth defect where they were born without half a brain or something. That is the rare exception. Maybe one in a million -- everybody else has everything they need. They just need to feed that brain correctly. Give it the nutrients that it needs and stop poisoning the brain. Stop poisoning it with toxic food additives that you find in manufactured foods. Stop poisoning it with all the toxic chemicals that you find in personal care products today.

Stop poisoning it with environmental chemicals. That is the key. You want to keep the brain healthy. You want to see it work. Give it the nutrients it needs. Stop poisoning it with toxic chemicals and for goodness sake give it some water. You know the brain is at least 75% water. Many of these children are just dehydrated. That is why they cannot think because the brain does not have the liquid in there. It needs the water. The neurons will not work right without the water.

ADHD and the Standard American Diet

Instead of drinking water, they are chugging down processed juices, sodas, sugary drinks -- stuff like Ensure and Slimfast -- and those infant formulas that are made with about 50% sugar, and I am not exaggerating. I saw one that is 42.6% corn syrup solids plus 10.5% sugar. You put that together that is over 52% refined sweetener. This is a baby formula sold at Wal-Mart and it is half sugar. That is unbelievable.

This is what parents are feeding their children too. They are guzzling down the Gatorade. It is sugar water with artificial colors and some salt in it. That is what Gatorade mostly is.

Why are we feeding our kids this stuff? Girl Scout cookies contain partially hydrogenated oil, which contains trans fatty acids that promote heart disease. Read the labels on this stuff folks; you will be shocked to find out what is in it. Once you do, you will know then the real reason why children might have some behaviors that someone could interpret as a disease.

Their diets are messed up. Their nutrients are atrocious. They are not getting enough water and they certainly are not getting right nutrition. If you turn that around -- you turn around the health of these children.

What they definitely do not need is speed. They definitely do not need amphetamine drugs on top of their malnourished state. You take a child that is dehydrated, that is suffering from numerous nutritional deficiencies and then you feed that child amphetamines of course you are going to see stunted development of their brain on an MRI scan.

Of course, why would you expect anything else? You would have to be insane to expect anything else. Of course, it is going to harm those children. Why has it come to this in this nation? Do you ever wonder that? How did it get to the point where our children are now guinea pigs being drugged up instead of being fed correctly?

Why is it that these companies are pushing infant formula made with sugar but they denounce breast milk? Why is that sunlight is being discredited? It is these companies that sell sunscreen want you to coat your children with sunscreen chemicals rather than to allow them to have decent exposure to the sunlight? Sunlight, which would generate vitamin D and improve brain function, improves immune function, prevent cancer, improve blood glucose metabolism to help prevent obesity and prevent Type II diabetes and so on.

Selling Out the American People for Profit

Why has it come to this? There is one answer to all of this. It is the common thread that runs through everything I have said here and that is the profit motive of corporations. These corporations are out of control and they are behind all of this. They are the drug companies and the food companies and sometimes it is the same company.

They want to exploit the bodies of your children just to make money. That is all there is to it. They don't care who dies, who is harmed. They don;t care about ethics. They don't care about the environment. They don't care what happens when these drugs are eliminated from the body, get flushed downstream, and enter the aquatic ecosystems of our planet. They don't care about that. They don't even think about that. They are not concerned.

They do not care about any of the impacts of what they do as long as they can keep people alive long enough to make sure they keep buying their drugs and that is it. They will market these drugs to anyone -- infants, children, adults, senior citizens. They will market them to people who do not need them.

They'll even just invent diseases and market those diseases and they will buy off anybody they need to buy off. They'll buy off the psychiatrists. They'll buy off FDA officials. They'll buy off the media with advertising money.

They will pay money to anybody they have to pay to get this message out and get this propaganda cemented in the minds of the American consumer. Once that happens they know they can push these drugs for at least a generation before someone will finally catch up with them and expose this whole sham for what it really is. You see Big Pharma is a lot as Big Tobacco used to be.

They are selling a product they know harms people. They are distorting all the science to try to cover it up. They are buying off everybody to keep this gimmick going for as long as they can. They're buying off the lawmakers. They're buying off the regulators. They're buying off the media. They're buying off scientists and the ones they cannot buy off they intimidate. We have documented numerous cases of that kind of intimidation of scientists on our website, www.NaturalNews.com. That is where I encourage you to go to learn more about this issue.

False Media vs. Independent Media

Stay informed, stay empowered, and stay skeptical. Do not believe what you hear in the mainstream media. It is all influenced by this corporate agenda because the media takes money from these companies.

How do you think they pay their bills and their salaries? They take money from pharmaceutical companies who are pushing these drugs onto children. You cannot trust their information. You can only now trust information from independent sources. That is it.

Sources like the Environmental Working Group Online or the Organic Consumers Association or sites like www.NaturalNews.com. That's where you can get information that you can trust because I have nothing to sell you here other than ideas, I do not sell nutritional supplements. I do not make any money on nutritional supplements. I do not sell drugs.

The only thing I sell is information. You can buy books on my website. You can buy audio programs if you want, but guess what? Those same audio programs are also available free. The only thing I have to offer you are ideas and information and I hope you have enjoyed this information. I hope you found value in it. I feel passionate about this.

I think what is going on in America today is a crime against our children and I hope that the justice department will round up a bunch of law enforcement officers and march into the offices of these drug companies and start making arrests. These people should be tried for their crimes against the children of this country.

There should be a massive public hearing and a prosecution attempt against the CEO's of these drug companies and the corrupt officials at the FDA and the people in psychiatry who are committing these crimes or allowing them to happen. These people should all be held accountable for their actions in harming our children. We do not even know what the final cost of this is going to be down the road.

If these drugs stunt the growth of these children right now and cause their brains to develop more slowly than normal children what will be the long-term consequences here? We do not even know. Maybe some day we will find out.

Maybe some day there will be prosecutions, maybe even convictions against some of these people but first we have to have the will to move in that direction as a society. We have to stand up and say what is going on today is wrong -- that turning the bodies of these young children into chemical profit centers is morally wrong, ethically wrong. It is wrong in terms of health policy. It is wrong in so many ways that even this hour is not enough to talk about them all. We have to be willing to do that in society.

I have a six CD course available at www.TruthPublishing.com that is very reasonably priced for these Health Ranger reports because I want to give you the opportunity to listen to these in your car while you are commuting or while you are driving your children to the naturopath. I hope that you are not driving your child to a conventional medical doctor or a psychiatrist. As you are taking them to a naturopathic doctor, you can listen to these programs in your car. You can find those at www.TruthPublishing.com.

Parents Must Protect Their Own Children

I hope you agree with most of what you have read here and I hope you remain skeptical with everything that you read. I hope you check this out. Go to Google. Start Googling this information. Teach yourself the truth about this issue. Find out the truth.

Do not just get your information from some doctor who has been taking money from the drug companies and certainly do not get your information from the mainstream media because they are taking money from drug companies left and right.

No one in their right mind trusts the FDA anymore except, of course, the drug companies because the FDA is doing their bidding. So remain skeptical, remain informed and please do everything in your power to protect your children from these dangerous drugs and these evil corporations.

Protect your children. That is the best way that you can thank me for putting forth this effort to get you this information and to keep www.NaturalNews.com going is to just protect your children. Help me make a difference. Spread this information around.

I do not want to see more children stunted in their growth and harmed by these dangerous drugs and in fact, I would like to see this whole industry overturned. This whole sham of psychiatric medicine should come crumbling down real soon now. It can only do so if people like you -- intelligent consumers like you continue to stay informed and continue to voice your concerns.

Speak out! Take a stand! Do not be rolled over by these dangerous corporations -- these powerful entities who seem to be in control in society today.

They will not last much longer. Trust me because the truth is coming out about these issues and as this truth comes out that house of cards is going to come falling down. Stand up, voice your truth, and protect the health of your children.

This article is a transcript of Health Ranger Report #7, entitled The ADHD Scam and the Mass Drugging of Schoolchildren, which is available free of charge as an MP3 download at: http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Podcasts.html

2008-05-28T00:21:00.001-07:00

IS THERE ONE SINGLE SHRINK ANYWHERE THAT CAN BE TRUSTED ? REBECCA MERHAV'S KNOCK BACKS, AND HER FATHER'S ON HER BEHALF PROVIDE A NEGATIVE REPLY !

by Justice Lover

The so called "good psychiatrists", namely, those who claim to oppose the psychiatric atrocities, and have been honest enough to expose psychiatric deceptions and the subservience to Big Pharma, are only 90% honest. Therefore, no shrink can be fully trusted.

Take, for example, the top of the 90% honest shrinks : Dr. Thomas Szasz and Dr. Breggin. The first established the CCHR which is an arm of the Church of Scientology, and consequently subordinated to its diktat. Also, as is well known, Szasz has been for many years a tenured Professor of psychiatry, until his retirement, and consequently obliged to train new shrinks who would perpetrate the same psychiatric atrocities which he has exposed and condemned ! He refused to offer any help when Rebecca's father appealed to him, neither did the CCHR of which he still is the head !

Breggin too did not reply to any of the many appeals for his help emailed to him by Rebecca's father. Instead, he has been busy extending his influence on other shrinks. He has been busy making plenty of money too out of people's trust in him, as is correctly pointed out in the brief article below.

Rebecca's father failed to get the support of the knaves who run the organisations which claim to represent the interests of survivors of psychiatry, their members. Could it be that the 90% honest shrinks are behind that refusal too ? Or is it perhaps the long arm of Big Pharma that bought them over ?

A lawyer on behalf of the local shrinks has threatened by a letter to take both civil and criminal actions against Rebecca's father if he won't stop complaining against the 30 years of psychiatric torture of his daughter ! The letter also demnands that he should stop "inciting" other people to
protest her compulsory torture !

Here is the article by Dr. Dan Edmunds :

http://danledmunds.blogspot.com/2008/05/peter-breggin.html

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

PETER BREGGIN

I was recently asked by colleagues about my thoughts in regards to Peter Breggin. While some of his books have opened the door to discussions about humane psychiatry, I have a number of issues with Breggin.

First, he is out of touch. His clients have been the rich and elite who can afford his extravagant fees. He does not truly know the issues of disadvantaged children because he does not see them in his practice. In a phone conversation with Breggin where I asked him to simply see a foster child once to help with withdrawal from stimulants, he asked for $500 before he would do anything.

Second, Breggin is intellectually dishonest and profits highly for being a critic. Much like the biopsychiatrists he claims to oppose, he will distort information if he is paid the right fee.
I do not believe this is the way the cause for a humane psychiatr should be. We should not turn any way who need help and we must always be persons of ethics and principle.

Dan L. Edmunds,Ed.D.
www.humanepsychiatry.info

2008-05-27T14:50:00.001-07:00

MORE ON THE "HEARING VOICES" PROP OF THE PSYCHIATRIC DOGMA

by Justice lover

There are many groups and internet sites run by people who "hear voices" and consider it a helpful phenomenon. See for example this international

organisation : The international community for hearing voices, http://www.intervoiceonline.org/ where I

found the following quotation :

Many voices can be unthreatening and even positive.
“It’s wrong to turn this into a shameful problem that people either feel they have to deny or to take medication to suppress.”
Professor Marius Romme

Yet according to the psychiatric dogma "hearing voices" is an auditory hallucination which is the main sign of of "the mental illness schizophrenia". Bearing in mind that the entire theory of mental illness is the figment of the shrinks' imagination
(delusions ?) , as it has no scientific basis whatsoever, surely that "hearing voices" prop of the psychiatric dogma is one of the many lies of psychiatry.

However, the Antipsychotic drugs, which the shrinks force their victim-patients to take, are themselves the cause for all kinds of bad hallucinations, yet they keep denying that, as they continue to prescribe the poisons under the cover of "medications for treatment" to avail themselves of Big Pharma bribes, and to suppress their victims' resistance.

The following articles on the subject by a survivor of psychiatry point out further the fraud of psychiatry, and the scandalous legitimacy and power accorded by the state to this fascist quackery.

Hearing Voices and Creativity

The voices I hear and perceive, are female voices, and some of them are positive, educative, friendly, and supportive. I'm glad that I hear these voices, because they are very much a part of my true nature, they improve my knowledge, social skills, and communication, and keep me in touch with the creative and learning spirit.

All voices are in a sense all aspects of every human being, as we all internalise our social and interpersonal experiences to some extent, but they are also very real and definitive differences in society, and which can become internalised by the individual voice hearer to meet his or her needs and requirements.

Some of my female voices can act as a muse, who are able to both inspire, respect, and appreciate the emotional and intellectual skill and ability of a voice hearer. The very strange, but very beautiful, hypnotic and trance-like receptivity of some of my female voices, filters, transforms, and reciprocates the social and interpersonal experiences of other people into the mind, social interaction, and creative imagination.

Whether the fact that I have intellectual discussions and debates with my female voices, means that I'm not being adequately stimulated or represented intellectually in my social life is an interesting point. In some ways this is very true. From my experience, interaction, and observation, I think that a lot of psychiatrists in particular, are jealous of the knowledge and creativity of psychiatric diagnosed people, and very envious of the fact that we have a spiritual and creative realm of our personal and social experiences, which are not controlled by church and state, and which psychiatrists cannot adequately experience, accept, nor understand.

I was very interested and intrigued by what a hearing voices group facilitator said about a member of her local hearing voices group, who also had female, helpful voices, but that the voices eventually said goodbye to him when he was engaged to be married. This raises the question of whether hearing voices is caused to a great extent from love and relationship deprivation. On the one hand, I think this is true, as most members from my local hearing voices group - including myself - are single and very much need and would like relationship partners in our lives, although obviously, some people in satisfactory social relationships hear voices too.

A friend of mine who also hears voices, recently said to me that a person can still be alone in a crowd, and that maybe when he was surrounded by other people in the nineties that he was isolated after all. He added to this, agreeing with this article after reading it, by saying that he doesn't think that voices do develop through isolation at all. Whilst having a love relationship with two people in the nineties, my friend said that he heard lots of voices, and when he was very mentally unwell at the start of the nineties, he was living with friends with whom he used to party quite a lot, and he still heard voices then too. It was when he became more solitary in the last 6-7 years that his voices stopped.

I think it is a mentalism, and a very common misconception amongst a lot of mental health workers and hearing voices group facilitators, to believe that voices develop solely through emotional, intellectual, and social isolation, because whilst there is obviously a lot of truth and accuracy in this, this rather reductionist viewpoint, can also fail to understand the necessary interaction between inner and outer experiences in order to love and learn, and it can also deny and invalidate a persons inner and outer experiences of their past and present life in general.

It can also deny and invalidate the unique processes, experiences, knowledge, wisdom, and culture of psychiatric diagnosed people, and deny the healthy and creative interaction between inner and outer experience and which is required to learn, share, and exchange knowledge and love, and to function in society to our satisfactory or full potential.

It also fails to acknowledge and realise the social interaction strategies, actions, and behaviours, which are oppression, and which can be coerced and enforced upon peoples lives without our individual and general choice, agreement, consensus, or consent.

In my mental health articles, I try to write concisely and with a flow, much like a piece of music or a song, and I write in a manner that reveals glimpses of light, reveals some of my ideas and findings, but which also subtly encourages and inspires people to think for themselves. I don't by any means reveal all of my own social and interpersonal knowledge and findings, as I don't want my knowledge and findings to become elitist and institutionalised.

One difference between psychiatric diagnosed people and other people in society, is that we are often more emotionally assertive and receptive, and struggle to be more emotionally free or liberated. Because of emotionally repressive English culture though, we often have to suppress our emotional expression and receptivity with psychiatric drugs, and which reduces our imagination, creativity, emotions, desire, thinking, consciousness, and awareness.

Peter H. Donnelly

2006

***

Hearing Voices and Public Awareness

Public awareness is both a political and a mental health phrase and concept. It is also a psychological one. Whilst public awareness and social consciousness are usually described as something external to the individual mind and objective, there is also an internal and subjective experience of public awareness, and which is absorbed and exists in a dialectical relationship to the intellectual mind, feeling, and thinking.

I sometimes have discussions and debates with my positive voices, and one main function of these voices, is that they ask me questions about things that is based upon common sense and public thinking, and which I would otherwise not think of asking myself. The positive voices, critique and ask me to clarify some of the things I have written in my mental health articles, for the benefit of both subjective and objective public and intellectual understanding.

The questions the positive voices ask me, are unlike intellectual thinking, not of an individual nature, but are much more of a collective way of thinking, and when I am asked these questions by my positive voices, I am asked by a group of many positive voices, and these questions are then asked or represented individually by one, two, or three voices at different intervals.

As an intellectual, I am a lateral and not a common thinker, but I need this inner public awareness in order to think more in terms of how the actual public might or could respond to my ideas, discoveries, and writing, and to both bring knowledge to the public, and to bring some of my thinking, consciousness, and awareness more down to earth.

My positive voices often ask me very common sense but very relevant questions, and which again, I would otherwise not think of asking myself. Ideally, I need this kind of public debate in my actual social life in response to what I experience, think, and write, but I find that the actual public are usually not willing to debate intellectually at all, or not willing to debate with intellectual people.

It is sometimes assumed by medical psychiatry that hearing voices is due to low intelligence, or due to a lower form or level of consciousness. In my experience of my own voices, and my experience and understanding of other voice hearers, I think that hearing voices can be due to both a higher and lower form of consciousness and awareness - simultaneously, and at different times.

Whilst politically in mental health, we are often told about raising public awareness and social consciousness, and whilst I very much agree with doing this, I think we also need to be realistic about it, and to realise the higher process and dialectical interaction of higher and lower consciousness psychologically and socially.

I find that I have to lower my intellectual consciousness and awareness, in order to think in terms of common sense, and to debate and discuss with my positive voices, and which are like the voices of ordinary people. As a result of this interaction between my intellectual thinking and feeling and a common sense form of debate, I am able to once again raise my consciousness and awareness and come up with more intellectual thinking, discovery, and ideas.

Peter H. Donnelly

2005

***

Hearing Voices and Social Isolation

We need a new model of treatment, and a new way of thinking, with regard to social isolation and hearing voices and/or so-called schizophrenia. There’s a tendency for social workers, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, to bully people who hear voices and/or who are diagnosed with schizophrenia, into socially interacting more with others. This stems from two major misconceptions.

Firstly, whilst it’s true that voices can be in part caused by social isolation, to simply say that voices are caused completely or mostly by social isolation, is false, ignorant, and misleading, and it leads to a lot of harm, neglect, and abuse. Voice hearers and people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia have a different way of socially interacting, and which reciprocates much more the inner and outer experiences. Non voice hearers and the non-diagnosed keep their inner and outer experiences more intact, except perhaps when they are asleep and dreaming.

Having more reciprocity between inner and outer experiences, may in fact be a much more healthier way to think, feel, and socially interact. So it is simply not true to say that people who hear voices don’t socially interact, aren’t socially interacting enough, or are disabled in this way. It may just be that voice hearers and diagnosed people need a certain amount of solitude to filter and transform their experiences of social interaction, and that the social interaction that voice hearers do have is experienced differently. This is the new model of treatment and way of thinking which is required towards hearing voices and diagnosed schizophrenia.

Secondly, it is the case that for many people, hearing voices actually counteract social isolation. Our voices befriend us and are like imaginary friends. This does not mean that we need to be bullied into socially interacting more, nor that we have a disability to socially interact, it just means that we have a different way of counteracting social interaction, but which is just as effective for us.

A friend of mine says that when he gets depression, the voices can lessen the impact of the depression because they reframe the experience into something more open ended. This opens up the possibility for new social interactions as I see it, but does not necessarily close the possibilities. The view that hearing voices can help prevent social isolation is quite a radical one, but a very valid one nonetheless. Voice hearers have a more complex model of social interaction.

My friend Luke mentioned that this also has a strong link to theater, and the voices are like a "dialogue sense" - an extra module in the mind. In the book The Master Game, the author Robet de Ropp explains a concept called "Inner Theater", and which is like a dialogue sense that enables spiritual growth by modeling others and mapping the highly complex structures of interaction. This may also have some similarities to what voice hearers are experiencing.

Peter H. Donnelly

2006

***

How I cured myself of Negative Hearing Voices

I first started hearing voices when I was 23. At least that was when I started hearing negative voices, as I have vague memories of being lonely as a child of 5 years of age, and of sitting outside and talking to a positive and friendly female voice in the sky who responded to me. If I thought hard, I could hear a positive female voice, and to me this was like a trick I could achieve with my mind. I didn’t think that the voice was God/Goddess or any supernatural force.

The voices I first heard when I was 23, were brought about and triggered by abuse, harassment, and stress, and after I had been using cannabis quite heavily, and I heard negative voices, one of which was a junior school teacher who used to pull my hair and shout at me for no reason. I took Stelazine for the hearing voices, but it didn’t do much to alleviate them. When I told my social worker that I was hearing voices, she said that I was lying. Then when I did convince her that I heard voices, she said that I was psychotic, and she told me to go onto a very high dosage of Stelazine, and which I did for a few years.

There were no hearing voices groups available at that time, although if there had of been they would have been a great help to me. Some years later, I wrote my voices down to analyse the content and structure of them. One negative voice was of another child at secondary school who used to bully me. Previous to experiencing this I’d had counselling, and the negative voice existed alongside two positive voices, and which were of the counsellors standing up for me and defending me against the child who bullied me.

After writing the voices down, I was able to separate the negative from the positive voices in my mind, and after this I only heard positive voices. I’m not sure exactly how this process worked for me, but it did work. I achieved it mostly by ignoring the negative voices, and talking with the positive ones and developing good loving and respectful relationships with them. Maybe this was my way of achieving good self esteem, or of establishing good relationships with the opposite sex, and which didn’t exist in my social life in terms of having love-relationships.

Now I only hear positive voices, and which are always one, two, or three female voices. The voices don’t have names and wish to remain anonymous to me in that respect, but they are very intimate and friendly with me. One female voice is quite assertive, although not domineering, but a bit questioning and sceptical, and another female voice is softer and more receptive and reassuring, but they all make suggestions and ask questions. The voices speak both separately, and in unison at the same time.

What is interesting to me, is that the positive voices are intelligent, but not intellectual voices, although they are more down to earth and pragmatic, and they ask me more practical questions in terms of my thoughts, writings, and articles. Maybe this is a side of me which is unconscious, or which I have suppressed with my more lateral and intellectual thinking.

I received a year of psychotherapy from two different female counsellors, and their voices became internalised and which I heard as positive voices too. This is why I am convinced that positive therapeutic relationships, with professionals or non-professionals such as family, friends, or lovers, are essential to changing voices from negative into positive. Good friendships and relationships are essential to some kind of recovery.

For a few years, I actually stopped hearing voices altogether. This was not a good thing for me though, as my voices care for me and help me to think about things more practically and clearly. Without positive voices I would be devastated. So I had to focus my mind, in order to re-create the voices. I still don’t know exactly how I did this, other than setting up a dialogue in my mind, and talking to my own thoughts, and then imagining hearing them (like thinking of a tune or music), and then I could hear them with my ears, and they became somewhat independent of my conscious thoughts. Thus, I combined my thoughts and integrated them with my imagination and senses.

I would like to know more about how the mind creates hearing voices, and more importantly teach others how to hear positive voices, because I believe that hearing positive voices is a gift, and that it is hugely beneficial to having good thinking and good mental health.

Peter H. Donnelly

2007

2008-05-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

MORE ON THE DANGEROUS,ARBITRARY ,VICIOUS, DESTRUCTIVE AND ABUSIVE POWER INHERENT IN THE PRACTICE OF COERCIVE PSYCHIATRY
by Justice Lover

The articles below were sent to me by the author,Peter H. Donnelly, a survivor of both child abuse past and of subsequent abuse by the shrinks. One by one the author exposes and invalidates some very common practices by the shrinks, so common that not only the shrinks consider them valid and acceptable, even the public at large does the same.

Having read the articles some immediate questions beg the reader for urgent answers, such as : why have the shrinks got away so far with their horribly unjustifiable stigmatisation of their victim-patients, to the point of complete destruction of the victims' lives ? Why are psychiatry and its practitioners allowed to falsely and fraudulently claim to impose "treatment" as a "medical specialty"on their victims when the opposite is true, namely, they impose torture, destruction and death rather than healing and help ?

Even without the deadly poisons of Big Pharma, and without the electric shocks, and without the "psychosurgery", the mere psychiatric terminology can destroy any person, and turn life into hell, and it does, so why allow such terrorism to be imposed on the public ?

Here are the articles :

Reality Testing and Reality Assumption

There are many reasons why I am critical of the term and label "psychotic". Firstly, because it is a term, or similar term, sometimes referred to in an argument to invalidate or suppress another person's point of view or perspective. The term or label of "psychotic", could therefore be used simply to deny and suppress other persons' valid point of view or perspective, personally, interpersonally, socially, politically, and so on.

The label of "psychotic" is therefore a perspective controlling machine, and like a machine, it often operates mechanically, and without it’s own true or unique perspective or consciousness.

I am also in some ways critical of the meaning of the term and label "psychotic", which means, "out of touch with and not corresponding to reality".

There are many different philosophical, political, and theological interpretations of reality, but where psychiatric social and mental health is concerned, anything which differs from the professional medical psychiatric and social or mental health perspective, can therefore be deemed to be out of touch with and not corresponding to reality, and therefore "psychotic".

In fact, this mentalist labelling of "psychotic", is in itself exclusive, and is in itself out of touch with other interpretations of reality - which are just as corresponding to reality - and just as realistic. Thus, the absence of the knowledge of the mentalism of the term, process, and label "psychosis", could itself be said to be "psychotic" in some ways. It is "psychotic" in the sense that it is trying to suppress another point of view or perspective, as in this way, it is out of touch with and not corresponding to another person’s living reality.

The other main reason why I am critical of the term "psychotic", is that whilst I accept that a person can be hallucinating and having delusions of people, things, and forces which are unreal and untrue, on some deeper level of social interpretation their ideas might fit reality in a different way, and their ideas might make a lot of sense, in context to the person’s past and present social and life-experiences, and in context to the voices social and cultural meaning.

Reality testing, can also often make assumptions about another person’s grasp of reality, in order to feel superior and to feel more in touch with reality. The main assumption this makes, is to assume that just because in some part of the person’s brain, the person is hallucinating voices or whatever, then to assume that whole person’s brain and consciousness must be out of touch with reality and therefore hallucinating.

From personal experience, I know that is possible to be both hallucinating voices, and agreeing or colluding with some of the delusions of those voices, and yet to still to be in touch with reality, and still be in touch with the knowledge and awareness that the voices and their content are not real. This complex configuration is very difficult for psychiatrists to grasp and understand, partly because medical psychiatry - which is a very linear thinking - fails to grasp or understand dialectical thinking, and which can operate differently, and somewhat paradoxically, on many different levels.

In order to understand madness, it helps if you have experienced it, or experienced something similar to it. There is indeed a point which the delusions of hearing voices, can take over completely, as in the throes of a mental breakdown, but otherwise it is quite possible to experience both delusion and reality at the same time.

This dialectical thinking is in some ways much better than the exclusive reality perspective, because it can grasp reality and have a firm grip on real people and things, and yet it still has the creativity and imagination to receive other interpersonal, social, and cultural meanings of things. The voice hearer can therefore sometimes be an interpersonal, social, and cultural filter, which takes interpersonal, social, and cultural meanings, and places them together in different patterns, in order to have a much wider dialogue and understanding of society and reality.

Peter H. Donnelly

2005

***

Am I Normal?: Spirituality

In this TV programme, shown on the 28th of April, 2008, on BBC 2 at 9 p.m., as part of the documentary series Am I Normal?, Dr Tanya Byron explored what some consider the fine-line, between religious devotion and so-called psychiatric disorder. She began the programme, by asking what place does religious belief - which depends not on rational thinking and scientific proof, but simple faith - have in the modern world? She asked, are people who devote their lives to something that can never be proved, wasting their time?, and is the very idea of religious belief, evidence of flawed, or even demented, thinking?

Tanya Byron spoke to a street preaching born-again Christian, who when asked if he ever wondered that people might think he’s crazy, said that people who say this are crazy themselves, and trying to push their craziness and negativity onto others. She then spoke to a nun, who said that monastic isolation helped her to face her inner demons. The nun said that she knew her beliefs in God were true, but it was not something she knew with her head, but more similar to something a person knows with their heart.

Tanya Byron then said, that a lot of mental health professionals, say that a high percentage of people with diagnosed schizophrenia have religious beliefs, but that this helps them with their problems and life in general. A psychiatrist said that religion has had a bad press in psychiatry. Because of religious delusion, the psychiatrists tend to see spirituality as something that needs treating. The shrink continued by saying, that this prejudice about the religious beliefs, of people with mental health problems, stems from the fact that religion and science have been separated, in the history of psychiatry, and that we need to bring science and religion back together.

Former MP, and newspaper columnist, Matthew Paris said that he had no problem with many Christians, but that he got irritated with laziness of mind, using bad arguments, and finding comfort in something, that they know in some part of their brain just isn’t true.

Tanya Byron then mentioned that it has been said, that if you talk to God, then you are religious, but if God talks back to you, then you are a schizophrenic. Richard Benthal, the author of Madness Explained, said that we all have an inner voice, and that it’s well known in child development, that at age 2 we all start talking to ourselves. He said that diagnosed mad people are treated as another species, and considered that they are deluded, out-of-touch with reality, and that others have a privileged access to reality, and diagnosed mad people are seen as not responsible for their actions and need controlling.

Tanya Byron then said that, what if people who hear voices are not mad, but are just unhappy people who have had bad experiences in their lives, and that they need to be listened to, and not labelled as mad and feared. She attended the Manchester Hearing Voices group, who are working with the University of Manchester’s new research, to look at hearing voices in a new way.

Peter, from the Manchester Hearing Voices Group, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and been in a out of psychiatric hospitals, said that his negative voices, were taken over by more positive voices, of his mother and grandmother. He said that psychiatrists trying to suppress the experience of hearing voices, were not helpful, because we need to not fragment the voices, but integrate them - have a relationship with them - get to know the voices and understand them. Tanya Byron concluded the programme, by saying that we need to accept the spirituality of diagnosed mad people, and not label this as part of their diagnosed mental illness.

I thought it was a good programme, but I have one major criticism of it. It’s not a simple matter of religious belief on the one hand, and rational thinking on the other, or religion and science, and simply bringing the two together. It’s a slightly more complex matter, of the dialectical relationship between the two, and that they can be connected or related, and yet still remain very separate. As a writer, and experienced person on mental health matters and creativity, I am basically a rationalist and a scientist, but I also believe in creativity, and realise the importance of things like spirituality too, in order to further the rationalist and scientific quest.

As a voice hearer, I hear positive, educative, friendly, caring, and supportive voices, which are female. I need to have these hearing voices experiences for my own well-being, and to create and think fully and effectively, and I would be depressed and devastated without them. I often initially have to create the voices with my mind, by setting up a basic dialogue with another in my thoughts, and then the voices have some autonomy from my conscious thoughts, and engage in discussion and debate with me.

When I am not hearing the voices, I know that they are not real, and are just an extra function of my mind or brain, but whilst experiencing them as autonomous, and relating and engaging with them, I have to suspend rational thinking and belief, and believe that they are real people, otherwise I would not hear or experience them, and otherwise I would not be able to come up with new knowledge and findings, and write about them.

This means, that the rational belief aspect of the mind has to be suspended, for a different modality of thinking and feeling to take place, and in order for new rational and scientific thinking to occur. Even though this involves temporarily believing in things which do not exist, it is not laziness of mind, or bad argument, as Matthew Paris simply put it. It is often a much more complex, and more deeper way of thinking, which is a more dialectical thinking, and a different mode of consciousness.

Peter H. Donnelly

2008

***

Paranoia-Inducing, Projection, and Internalisation

To begin this article on paranoia, I first want to say something about paranoia-inducing, paranoia projection, and the internalisation or introjection of this. Some people in power and society, will try to induce paranoia in people diagnosed with mental health problems, because they get a kick out of it, it makes them feel superior in terms of power and awareness, and it makes them feel and think that they have a better grasp and understanding of reality.

For example, whilst it may be argued that the drug cannabis induces paranoia, there is also the reality of the discrimination against the drug and its use, because it is illegal, and which can also induce paranoia.

By persecuting, terrorising, and hounding individuals, this can be a way of making the victimised person feel frightened, angry, paranoid or upset, and which are all ways to control and label the person, as having symptoms of so-called mental illness. This may also be a projection of paranoia - perhaps a mass paranoia - upon individuals or small groups. This projection of paranoia, can then become internalised by the person, but could also be an awareness of what could happen, if this discrimination and abuse to induce paranoia, became extended to actual or more violence, became more extreme, and got out totally of hand.

There is also the matter of sensitivity with paranoia. Some people who are labelled as paranoid may have a sensitivity to their local surroundings, and be sensitive to some aspects of social and cultural animosity, that others cannot see or admit to about themselves, or are not as aware of. Paranoia can be a more social way of thinking, because it is connecting to others, albeit in a negative way.

One opposite of paranoia, is the denial of power abuse, repression, and oppression in society and reality. A normal person may be tolerant towards some abuse and oppression, whilst the so-called paranoid person is aware of it and protests against it.

Paranoia can also be part of a creative process, where a detail or details get enlarged or exaggerated for atmosphere and effect, whilst there is some corresponding so-called delusion thinking, although once the blocks or delusions have passed, and the person can see the whole picture, this can then be part of a personal, cultural, social, or political critique.

Paranoia labelling can simply be a denial of rights to protect persons and people from persecution, discrimination, abuse, and oppression. On the BBC TV programme The Doctor Who Hears Voices, a female member of the Manchester Hearing Voices group, said that she was frightened that aliens were going to take her away, remove her eyes, and blind her. This might mean, that she is frightened that she could be sectioned, or incarcerated, in psychiatric hospital, if she told others about the voices, and that she could become alienated, and have her perceptions and thoughts about the experiences of the voices, taken away from her by psychiatric incarceration and drugs.

What is curious and interesting, is that in my experience, paranoia can be taken as a general personal criticism by another person - particularly a parent or other family member - even though the critical aspect of the paranoia is not directly about that person. Again, this might be because the paranoia is warning people of what could happen, if things became extreme or out of control, because it highlights the so called sane person’s denial or tolerance of abusive power and repression, and because it is in a way seen as mad, irrational, and delusional. It is at the least, an extension of the so-called sane person’s intolerance against another person having a different opinion or experience.

Paranoia that exists alongside or are also delusions, can stem from the fact that harm, abuse, and bullying has been done to the person in the past, and that events are somewhat overlapping in the mind. What the person needs is to understand are that the events are separate, but that they are also somewhat interconnected and interrelated.

Paranoia can also be about the person needing love, reassurance, and protection, and about his or her way of expressing that need. Paranoia can also stem, from the way that children or young people can be threatened or told that bad things will happen to them if they misbehave. This can induce paranoia in the child or in later life.

Peter H. Donnelly

2008

***

Stream-of-consciousness

Stream-of-consciousness (SOC) is accepted as a sane, literary style, if it is written, but it is sometimes perceived as madness if it is spoken by people in everyday conversation or communication.

Some psychiatric-diagnosed people, use SOC in their speech or communication, because they see life events as being in some way very much interconnected, whether through some religious notion such as Karma, or from some more social or personal notion. SOC is used in a person's speech or communication, because it adheres, in some ways, to how people see life-events, along with their beliefs and values.

The interconnectedness and over-lapping of events, plays a big part in our influences, dreams, and subconscious, and can tell us a lot about our present experiences and behaviour. SOC can also be used because a person's life events may seem fragmented, and streaming is seen as a way of linking and reconnecting events and experiences in the mind.

In literature, SOC is used to describe a character’s actual thoughts-patterns, and their responses to external stimuli in their environment, but it is questionable whether stream-of-consciousness actually represents objective reality, as it is a more subjective approach to expression, learning, and understanding.

Another reason SOC might be used in speech or communication, is because if the mind is releasing a lot of ideas in one go, then there may be more possibility of another person connecting to these ideas, if the other person can keep up with the density or pace.

A psychiatric-diagnosed person I used to know, would talk very fast in streams, and then if you responded with a word or statement, he would then ask you what that word meant and was all about. This was his way of trying to encourage the other person to think in streams of ideas, and suspend their critical faculties, but he was also anticipating a rational approach being used against his streaming, and so he would anticipate this or assume, that the other person was going to ask him what he meant, as a way of the other person controlling his consciousness, thinking, relating, and communication.

SOC is sometimes used if a person is stressed out, and can be a form of so-called brainstorming. Brainstorming is where the mind uploads ideas on a given subject, usually within a group, so a person can get many ideas on paper in a short space of time. This can also be a way of releasing stress and anxiety. Another reason why some psychiatric-diagnosed people brainstorm, is because they may have a problem with memory and connecting their ideas and thoughts together.

A person may be half-way into a conversation, and then forget what they were going to say, but by brainstorming and releasing a stream of ideas, the person can then think associatively, and possibly reconnect to what they were trying to say beforehand. This is a way of overcoming short-term memory blocks. On the other hand, the person might just fly off into another direction, and reconnect to something completely different, suspending all rational, critical, and structuring faculties.

Peter H. Donnelly

2008

***

Abuse Survival, Speaking Out, Professionals and Society

The whole subject of child abuse is a very complex one, especially if one is to come out as an abuse survivor to social work and mental health professionals or to the public.

I am a child abuse survivor, but I have now understood and forgiven the person that abused me, because I realise that although they wasn’t abused as a child by their parent or parents, they grew up in a very emotionally hard, and a very socially and economically poor environment. Also, since being a very bad parent towards me as a child, they have been very good to me as an adult, and I am absolutely convinced that there is now mutual respect and love between us.

Most people in some ways have been oppressed or abused by the system. Whether this involves oppression and bullying by parents, teachers, or from other children, or oppressed and bullied in work, people in general have more or less suffered from some sort of abuse. However, it is still important to make a distinction between actual child abuse, and abuse by the system against people, although I make the comparison because it relates to when and how a person speaks out about being abused, and what responses they can receive from professionals or society.

Whilst there are some very good reasons to come out as a child abuse survivor, there are also some very good reasons for hiding this information until the appropriate time. From my experience and knowledge, it can be unwise to come out as a child abuse survivor, to some social work and mental health professionals, as this can make them feel guilty, because they are part of a system that should have prevented the abuse. This guilt can turn defensive and aggressive, and involve the professional insulting and attacking the abuse survivor verbally, or even justifying the child abuse as being part of tradition, discipline, or family values. Child abuse can also be justified as being seen as a form of protest, whilst the child abuse survivors protest for change gets denied and ignored.

I spoke to a fellow child abuse survivor recently, and she said that people who haven’t been abused as children don’t understand. I replied to her, that whilst it’s true that they don’t understand, it also true that they just don’t care, because they don’t know the degree of suffering of being abused as a child, and because they also believe that they too have suffered from some sort of abuse by the system, and in a way believe that they have suffered more. Unfortunately, we have no means of measuring who suffers more in society, although experience, intelligent common sense, and knowledge, tells us that abuse survivors suffer more as children from the rest of society.

There’s also a tendency amongst some abuse survivors and professionals, to believe that only men abuse children, and that all abuse is only sexual. Some women abuse children too, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and in some cases can be accomplices to child sexual abuse.

It’s important to come out as child abuse survivors at some stage, as we can start to try and change things for the better, and defend children's rights and welfare, and there is less likelihood of ourselves becoming abusers if we don’t repress our anger, hurt, conscience, and loving and caring emotions. People who indefinitely hide the fact that they’ve been bullied or abused as children, tend to become abusers in some ways, like some social workers and mental health professionals who have power over other child abuse survivors.

We need to come out about being abuse survivors at the appropriate time, when we can protest and survive together, otherwise it can be used against us by a repressed, misunderstanding, and uncaring society, and by some social work and mental health professionals.

Peter H. Donnelly

(Emphasis by Justice Lover)

2008-05-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

MORE ON THE INSANITY OF THE "MENTAL HEALTH" SYSTEM

by Justice Lover

For the informed person the reality of the current "Mental Health" system is shocking enough.What the politicians have imposed on us is an arbitrary, irrational and very dangerous system under the pretext of medical "treatment", managed and perpetuated by psychiatry and its practitioners ,for the benefit of Big Pharma (in collusion with the entire ruling class, of course ).

Not less shocking is to witness the majority of the medical profession members in complicity with these ongoing crimes against humanity perpetrated by psychiatry, which is itself no more than a fascist quackery devoid of any scientific grounds whatsoever !

The following article is by Dr. Dan Edmunds (PhD in eduction), founder of The International Center for Humane Psychiatry.
However, can psychiatry ever be humane ? Can it be reformed ?
The history of psychiatry, the failed attempts to reform it , as well as its domination by Big Pharma, provide only negative answers, and emphatically !

http://danledmunds.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-we-can-do-about-system-gone-mental.html

WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT A SYSTEM GONE 'MENTAL'

A PLAN FOR TREATING THE INSANITY IN THE MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM- WHAT WE MUST DO

First, we must stop looking through the eyes of a medical model, where we see children as broken and disordered and attempts are made to attributing their behaviors and emotions solely to a malfunctioning brain.

There is no evidence supporting the psychopathology of a number of disorders. The linkage between the pharmaceutical companies and psychiatry needs to be evaluated as well as the information that is disseminated via the research and materials provided by pharmaceutical company money.

One such example is CHADD, the 'support' group for parents of children diagnosed with ADHD that has received a great deal of his funding from the pharmceutical companies. The goal should be to examine the underlying factors of a child's behavior, looking at the child with dignity and respect, and seeing the child as one in conflict rather than a person who is disordered. Such stigmatization remains indefinitely, and labels can often become a self fulfilling prophecy and will follow our children for years to come and shape the way that they view themselves and also the way others view them, particularly the educational system.

We cannot look to solely the most cost effective solution when our children's lives are at stake. Indeed, providing a prescription may control aspects of behavior and be though to have a 'therapeutic effect' but never gets to the root cause, and whereas it is far less expensive to medicate than to provide ongoing psychotherapy, it is appropriate and compassionate counsel that will make the difference.

Second, the realm of psychotherapy must return to its orginal roots. The word psychotherapy literally means the healing of the soul. We must return the soul to therapy, encouraging therapists to instill within themselves the principles of compassion and empathy that are crucial for any therapeutic relationship to blossom forth. Therapists need to be compassionate and creative, and willing to give additional time and effort to see that a child's needs are met and to also provide community linkages and ongoing support within their environment and to encourage the least restrictive setting for our children.

The coercion of parents and families into forced 'treatments' needs to be eliminated.

Third, the educational system must be willing to accomodate to meet the various learning styles of children and not seek to place them in a box of rote learning or limit them to one particulat style. Some children may falter in a visual setting and need a hands on approach, whereas others may need other methods of encouraging their effective learning. We must return time, attention, and individuality to the classroom.

Fourth, parents need to continue to take an active role in the lives of their children, providing ongoing guidance, validating emotions and not taking a dismissive, disapproving, or hands off approach. Rather, parents must be involved in helping the children develop their own sense of being, and being able to assess themselves. Parents need to avoid nagging their children and becoming entrapped in the propaganda that their children are disordered and need drugs to function. Fifth, our society must change in it attitudes.

We are a society where we try to find our answers to ailments within a simple pill. We are a society that has unfortunately lost sight for the welfare of our children. We are a societry where we are prosperous, yet greed often blinds us. Such disorders such as ADHD can be looked upon as a social construct. 90% of Ritalin sales are in the US. This tells us that there is something to be examined within our society that needs correction. Somewhere along the line we have failed our children.

This is not to lay blame on any particular individual but to understand that our children are in crisis, and it is up to all of us to take the steps for change.

We need to rely less on psychiatry and its devices to solve our problems and more on what we can do within ourselves- to take a holistic approach, to understand the child as a whole person- physical, emotional, and spiritual, and to examine in each of these areas where there may be difficulties that can be alleviated. We need to rely less on others dictating the course of our own and our children's lives and develop workable plan within our own family structure. Nothing will ever be perfect, but even in the most serious disturbances, love and compassion can heal much.

We must realize that in some situations within society and within our own lives, we may never be able to evoke complete change. This is the cause of much distress, not problems themselves but how we respond to them. To battle those things beyond our control can lead us to emotional distress, but if we seek live as principled individuals, we can make a difference. What we model to our children and to others has a lasting impact.

Dan L. Edmunds, Ed.D.
www.DrdanEdmunds.com
www.HumanePsychiatry.info

(Emphasis by Justice Lover)

2008-05-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/mental-illness-or-social-sickness/

Mental Illness or Social Sickness?

by Susan Rosenthal / May 19th, 2008

(Susan Rosenthal, MD, is a veteran American physician - Justice Lover)

When you are sick or injured, you want to know what’s wrong and what can be done. You want a diagnosis. A correct diagnosis reveals what is wrong, what is the preferred treatment and what is the likely outcome. For example, a diagnosis of pneumonia indicates a serious lung infection that can usually be cured with antibiotics.

While medical diagnoses are based on science, psychiatric “diagnoses” are not at all scientific. They do not reveal what is wrong, what is the preferred treatment, and what is the likely outcome. Nor are they reliable. Different psychiatrists who examine the same patient typically offer different “diagnoses.” Moreover, psychiatric “diagnoses” move in and out of favor, depending on a variety of social factors.

Psychiatric “diagnosis” is actually a labeling process, where the patient’s symptoms are matched with a grouping of symptoms listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM). As we shall see, this psychiatric “bible” was developed and is maintained by financial and political interests.¹

Sigmund Freud

Who decides what is normal or healthy and what is deviant or sick?

Before the 20th century, life stresses were generally seen as spiritual problems or physical illnesses, and people turned to religious advisors and physicians for help. Medical doctors treated “hysteria” and “nerves” as physical problems. Psychiatry was restricted to the treatment of severely disturbed people in asylums.² The first classification of psychiatric disorders in the United States appeared in 1918 and contained 22 categories. All but one referred to various forms of insanity.

In 1901, Sigmund Freud revolutionized psychiatry by breaking down the barrier between mental illness and normal behavior. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,³ Freud argued that commonplace behaviors — slips of the tongue, what people find humorous, what they forget and the mistakes they make — indicate repressed sexual feelings that lurk beneath the surface of normal behavior.

By linking everyday behavior with mental illness, Freud and his followers released psychiatry from the asylum. Between 1917 and 1970, as psychiatrists cultivated clients with a broad range of problems, the number of psychiatrists practicing outside institutions swelled from eight percent to 66 percent.⁴

The social movements of the 1960’s opposed psychiatry’s focus on inner conflict and emphasized the social sources of sickness instead. Dr. Alvin Poussaint recalls the 1969 convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

“After multiple racist killings during the civil rights movement, a group of black psychiatrists sought to have murderous bigotry based on race classified as a mental disorder. The APA’s officials rejected that recommendation, arguing that since so many Americans are racist, racism in this country is normative.”⁵

Growing the industry

In 1980, the APA overhauled the DSM. The Task Force established to create the new manual declared that any disorder could be included,

“If there is general agreement among clinicians, who would be expected to encounter the condition, that there are significant number of patients who have it and that its identification is important in the clinical work it is included in the classification.”⁶

In other words, the new DSM was not based on science, but on the need to maintain existing patients and include new ones who might seek help for any number of problems. A profitable and self-perpetuating industry was born. The more people could be encouraged to seek treatment, the more conditions could be entered into the DSM, and the more people could be encouraged to seek treatment for these new conditions.

By 1994, the DSM listed 400 distinct mental disorders covering a wide variety of behaviors in adults and children. Significantly, racism, homophobia (fear of homosexuality) and misogyny (hatred of women) have never been listed as mental disorders. In 1999, the chairperson of the APA’s Council on Psychiatry and the Law confirmed that racism “is not something that is designated as an illness that can be treated by mental health professionals.”⁷ Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder until activists campaigned to have it removed.⁸

The women’s liberation movement condemned labeling symptoms of oppression as mental illnesses. In They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal, Paula Caplan explains,

“In a culture that scorns and demeans lesbians and gay men, it is hard to be completely comfortable with one’s homosexuality, and so the DSM-III authors were treating as a mental disorder what was often simply a perfectly comprehensible reaction to being mocked and oppressed.”⁹

Caplan describes efforts to prevent “Masochistic Personality Disorder” from being included in the DSM. This disorder assumes that women stay with abusive spouses because like to suffer, not because they lack the resources to leave. Despite protest, “Masochistic Personality Disorder” was added to the 1987 edition of the DSM, although it was later dropped.

The inclusion of “Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder” (PMDD) in the DSM also raised a protest. According to Caplan,

“The problem with PMDD is not the women who report premenstrual mood problems but the diagnosis of PMDD itself. Excellent research shows that these women are significantly more likely than other women to be in upsetting life situations, such as being battered or being mistreated at work. To label them mentally disordered — to send the message that their problems are individual, psychological ones — hides the real, external sources of their trouble.”¹⁰

As soon as PMDD was listed in the DSM, Eli Lilly repackaged its best-selling drug, Prozac, in a pink-pill format, renamed it Serafem, and promoted it as a treatment for PMDD. By creating Serafem, Lilly was able to extend its patent on the Prozac formula for another seven years.

A marketing gold mine

The DSM is a marketing gold mine for the drug industry. The FDA will approve a drug to treat a mental disorder only if that disorder is listed in the DSM. Therefore, each new listing is worth millions in potential drug sales. Most of the experts who construct the DSM have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, and every new edition of the DSM contains more conditions than the previous one.

Once the DSM lists a new mental disorder, drugs for that disorder are heavily marketed for everyone who might fit the symptom checklist. (Doctors are also encouraged to prescribe these drugs for “off-label use,” which means to anyone they think might benefit.) Not surprisingly, the numbers of people “diagnosed” with a mental condition rise rapidly after a drug is approved to treat that condition.

In 2005, a major study announced that “About half of Americans will meet the criteria for a DSM-IV disorder sometime in their life…”¹¹ How is this possible? Has it become normal to be mentally ill, or has the definition of mental illness expanded beyond reason? Both could be true.

Capitalism damages people in many ways. It’s also true that the more people can be labeled as sick, the more profits can be made from selling them treatments. In Creating Mental Illness, Alan Horowitz warns,

“…a large proportion of behaviors that are currently regarded as mental illnesses are normal consequences of stressful social arrangements or forms of social deviance. Contrary to its general definition of mental disorder, the DSM and much research that follows from it considers all symptoms, whether internal or not, expected or not, deviant or not, as signs of disorder.”¹²

Most people know the difference between normal behavior (such as grief over the death of a loved one) and abnormal behavior that could indicate an internal disorder (such as prolonged grief for no apparent reason). However, the DSM does not consider what happens in people’s lives. With one exception (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), the DSM lists and categorizes symptoms outside of any social context. As a result, DSM-based surveys artificially increase the numbers of people suffering from mental disorders and, therefore, the market for drug treatments.

DSM-inflated rates of mental illness are typically accompanied by the warning that not enough people are getting treatment.¹³ The question of whether or not they are actually sick is never raised.

Social control

Psychiatry has a long history of medicating the oppressed, including children, for social control.¹⁴

Using DSM criteria, at least six million American children have been diagnosed with serious mental disorders, triple the number in the early 1990’s. The rate of boys aged 7 to 12 diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder more than doubled between 1995 and 2000 and continues to rise.

A 2007 survey of 8- to 15-year-olds discovered that nine percent met the DSM criteria for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The survey found that fewer than half of these children had been diagnosed or treated, “suggesting that some children with clinically significant inattention and hyperactivity may not be receiving optimal attention.” Noting that poor children were least likely to receive medication, the authors of the study recommend “further investigation and possible intervention.”¹⁵

Instead of addressing the stressful social conditions that agitate children, psychiatry imposes conformity through medication. To force compliance with this oppressive system, access to insurance benefits, medical care and social services depends on “having a diagnosis.”

The psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry treats illness as strictly individual and internal — the result of faulty genes or chemical imbalances. In reality, human problems exist in a social context.

Most of the symptoms listed in the DSM describe human responses to deprivation and oppression (anxiety, agitation, aggression, depression) and the many ways that people try to manage unbearable pain (obsessions, compulsions, rage, addictions). Depression is strongly linked with poverty,¹⁶ and alleviating poverty can lift depression.¹⁷

Under capitalism, addressing the social causes of misery is politically risky and unprofitable. So psychiatry extracts the individual from society, splits the brain from the body, severs the mind from the brain and drugs the brain.¹⁸

A sick society

Capitalism is a system that requires the majority to have no control over their lives and to believe that this condition is normal. Therefore, all reactions to inequality and deprivation must be viewed as signs of personal inadequacy, biological defect, mental illness — anything other than reasonable responses to unreasonable conditions.

During slavery days, experts argued that Black people were psychologically suited for a life of slavery, so there must be something wrong with those who rebelled.¹⁹ In 1851, the diagnosis of “drapetomania”(runaway fever) was developed to explain why slaves try to escape.²⁰ Not much has changed. Today, exploitation and oppression are considered normal, and those who rebel in any way are considered to be sick or deviant and in need of medication or incarceration.

What’s the diagnosis for a sick society? We know what’s wrong. Most people are kept in sick social conditions so that a few can maintain their wealth and power. What is the treatment? Putting human needs first would eliminate most human misery. Who will deliver the medicine? The majority must organize to take collective control of society.

I don’t expect this diagnosis to appear in the DSM anytime soon.

(Emphasis by Justice Lover)

Kirk, S.S. & Kutchins, H. (1992). The selling of DSM: The rhetoric of science in psychiatry. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. #
Horowitz, A.V. (2002). Creating mental illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. #
Freud, S. (1901/1991). The psychopathology of everyday life. New York: Penguin #
Shorter, E. (1997). A history of psychiatry: From the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley & Sons. #
Poussaint, A.F. & Alexander, A. (2000). Lay my burden down: Suicide and the mental health crisis among African-Americans. Boston: Beacon Press, p.125. #
Spitzer, R.L., Sheeney, M. & Endicott, J. (1977). DSM III: Guiding principles. In Psychiatric diagnosis, (Eds). Rakoff, V., Stancer, H. & Kedward, H. New York: Brunner Mazel. #
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