by Rick Winking

We received word here at ISEPP that one of our favorite members had passed. Ben Hansen, alias Dr. Bonkers, ended his struggle with bladder cancer on September 14th. He was 60 years old and fought the good fight until the end, refusing any medication and dying pain free and peacefully at home with the help of Hospice of Michigan.

We all know that psychiatry is a joke. We know that scientifically, they don’t have a leg to stand on. It was Ben Hansen and his Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research that really helped put this in focus for us. He used past ads for medications from psychiatric journals to point out the absurdity of psychiatry's past. He used current ads and articles to show that nothing has really changed in the past 100 years…..old wine in new bottles or as they say in the military, “SSDD.”

I have been a student and critic of psychiatry for over twenty years and thought I knew a lot. Then along comes Dr. Bonkers. I found myself marveling at some of the stuff he dug up and thinking to myself “Wow! These guys have a history of this that is even crazier than I thought.”

Thorazine for Hiccups? With Partnership for a Drug Free America getting psychiatrists to look for drug abuse in their patients and help stop America’s drug problem? Drugs for deviant sexual behavior? Dr. Bonkers found all of this.

Noam Chomsky defined Anarchism as “A tendency in the history of human thought and action which seeks to identify coercive, authoritarian and hierarchic structures of all kinds and to challenge their legitimacy – and if they cannot justify their legitimacy, which is quite commonly the case, to work to undermine them and expand the scope of freedom.”

Using this definition, Ben was one of my all-time favorite anarchists. I would refer doubters to the Dr. Bonker’s web site and their response was usually one of “These ads and articles can’t be real!” …..and another hole was poked in the psychiatric Zeppelin. He did not live long enough to see the Zeppelin crash and burn but he most assuredly poked some major holes in it. I was informed that the site will stay up in the future. Let’s keep sending the doubters there.

 Let’s do it for Ben!