Chuck Ruby, Ph.D., Psychologist

Earlier this month, Dainius Pūras, M.D., was interviewed by Awais Aftab, M.D., of the Psychiatric Times. Dr. Pūras was asked about his experiences as a United Nations Special Rapporteur from 2014 to 2020. In that role, he was charged with assessing the human rights aspects of mental health¹ systems across the globe and reporting his findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

A primary concern of Dr. Pūras' was his dissatisfaction with the traditional separation of physical health and mental health. He believes this separation causes stigma and discriminates against people who seek mental health services. He further thinks that combining them under the same rubric of health and medicine is the solution to achieving mental health parity, the end of stigma and discrimination, and the advancement of human rights for those seeking mental health services.

In addition to merging physical and mental health, he proposed that both systems deemphasize the biomedical approach, asserting that psychiatry and mental health professions are in a position to remind the rest of the medical world that medicine is fundamentally a social science. In other words, health and illness are largely affected by social determinants, such as poverty and other social inequities, and the field of medicine should be addressing these social determinants and not just the defective biology of patients.

I agree that the discrimination and stigmatization of those seeking mental health services are due to separating it from the rest of medicine, and I am glad to see Dr. Pūras objecting to the excessive biomedicalization of human living. However, I disagree that the solution to this problem is to merge mental and physical health.

Doing so would strengthen the medical industry's domination over individual lives, and solidify its role of morally judging the appropriateness of distress and behavior. Notwithstanding the importance of addressing social factors that impact health and illness, the study of medicine is primarily a chemical, mechanical, and biological endeavor. It is not suited for providing expertise in making judgements about how we should respond to the emotional challenges of living.

So, instead of combining physical and mental health, I suggest keeping them separate, but in a fundamentally different way. The solution to stigma and discrimination, and the subsequent threats to human rights for those seeking mental health assistance, is to realize that the essence of mental health care is not literally about health and illness. It definitely isn't about using chemical, mechanical, and biological knowledge and skills to correct dysfunctional physiology.

Instead, the term "mental health" is a figurative description of social challenges, personal meaning, emotional distress, and one's responses to these things. Therefore, it is in a domain completely separate from the study of medicine and the literal idea of health and illness, not a different type to merge with the physical type.

Of course, as with all human activity, there is underlying biology at work. This fact, however, is not the same as claiming the biology involved is defective or malfunctioning. It doesn't even mean the biology causes those human actions any more than it could be said the actions cause the biology to occur.² For example, when we walk or talk, there is biology that allows for walking and talking. Does biology cause walking and talking? Or, does walking and talking cause the biology to occur.

The same goes for when we think, feel emotions, and take action of any kind. There is biology always at work. Yet this fact doesn't mean that biology causes those things, and it clearly doesn't mean those things are disorders or illnesses caused by defective biology. Even when those human actions are very problematic, it is not logical to conclude they equal illness and lack of them equals health. If I walk in front of a bus and get injured, the decision to walk and the act of walking are not illnesses. Instead, the subsequent injury is the illness.

Having said this, the field of medicine does have an important, but limited, role at the intersection of physical health and mental health matters. Specifically, medical intervention can serve three purposes: 1) it can alleviate the negative physiological correlates of personal actions and distress (e.g., gastric damage, injuries); 2) it can identify and treat physiological defects, the results of which mimic mental health problems (e.g., poor nutrition, urinary tract infections); and 3) it can offer chemicals to those who choose, with full informed consent, to subdue their experiences of distress (e.g., Valium, Zoloft) just like it does for people who want to numb arthritis or headache pain.

This limited role is inherent in the fact that mental health problems are based on a definition that is void of any physiological ailment that medical specialists can diagnose and treat. More importantly, in situations where there is a physiological affliction, psychiatry (or the other mental health professions) would not handle it; the appropriate medical specialty would step in. Psychiatrists and psychologists don't treat gastric damage, broken bones, vitamin deficiencies, or urinary tract infections.

So, Dr. Pūras has good reason to be concerned about the separation of physical and mental health and the stigmatization and discrimination that come from it. However, it must be remembered that the mental health system created this problem in the first place in its definition of mental disorder. The DSM-5 defines it as a disturbance in thinking, feeling, or acting that is caused by impairment in mental functioning. Setting aside the circular nature of this definition, it makes mental disorder sound like a matter of dysfunction in a person, just like with physical illnesses.

But the main problem with this definition, and the reason it necessitate the separation of physical and mental health matters, is that such impairment in mental functioning cannot be identified without using moral judgments. It is not identified with an examination of chemical, mechanical, or biological dysfunction.

This is why DSM diagnoses and their criteria are developed out of the wrangling and consensus of committee members and not evidence of impairment. They are based on an aggregate moral judgment: what should we be distressed about, how much distress should we feel, how long should we feel distressed, and what should we do about the distress. In stark contrast to this, physical health matters are defined as actual bodily defects that threaten a person's physiological viability. No moral judgment is involved in identifying or theorizing about physical illness.

Therefore, it appears clear that the only way to eliminate the stigmatization and discrimination of those seeking mental health services is to eliminate this medical-moral model of mental health. Otherwise, those seeking services will continue to be seen as suffering from a mixture of medical and moral problems, which is why there is such popular fear and derision of those said to be mentally ill. It is also why they are stigmatized and discriminated against, and why their human rights are frequently violated.

By continuing to conflate physical health and mental distress, and anointing medical professionals as experts in the latter, the mental health system will always be prone to stigma and discrimination, opening the doors to involuntary and forced treatment. The resulting irony is that while we frequently see such coercion within the mental health system, we rarely see it with physical health. People who are diagnosed with physical health problems, such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease are rarely treated involuntarily, against their will (unless, of course, they are judged mentally ill and, thus, not able to make "wise" choices).

In this way, the mental health professions have taken on a medical-moral role in identifying inappropriate (i.e., wrong, abnormal, bad, "sick") personal conduct and experiences, portraying them as the result of something impaired in the person, and seeking various ways to muzzle them. There is no way to medically correct the alleged impairment because there is no identifiable impairment to correct. All too often, the conventional methods of treatment are merely physical, chemical, and electrical restraint. Talk therapy, or psychotherapy, can also be a form of restraint in the form of scolding people for having these inappropriate experiences and persuading or coercing them to change their conduct. None of these are forms of medical treatment. They are forms of control.

Dr. Pūras' international efforts to ensure the right to mental health is a very worthy effort, but it means different things depending on the definition of “mental health” as explored above. If it is defined as in the DSM, then that right hardly applies to the person so affected. This is because, by definition, the affected person’s thoughts, emotions, and actions are the product of a dysfunction. Therefore, that person’s decisions and choices are not to be valued or honored because they are the tainted product of that dysfunction.

If, however, the right to mental health is defined as one’s right to decide how to resolve personal challenges, what to do about emotional distress, and what actions to take to resolve those challenges and distressing feelings, including which services of the conventional mental health system to take advantage of, then we’re really talking about respecting human rights.

In fact, Dr. Pūras was adamant that we should work toward eliminating all forms of coercive treatment and base our services on individuals' preferences and desires, even in cases where they are considered psychotic. But I don't see how this can possibly happen without abandoning the medical-moral model of human distress that defines mental health problems as something impaired in the person.

In his further emphasis on respecting individual choice, Dr. Pūras, pointed out the importance of democratic systems for the promotion of good mental health and adherence to human rights. But how can the right of mental health exist if the mental health system itself is not democratic, and instead mirrors the many totalitarian and authoritarian regimes that devalue the desires of its citizens? He lamented that mental health professionals and academics frequently block attempts to change the status quo, making the right to mental health impossible, since it prevents fully informed consent and it allows human rights to be routinely violated.

It appears clear to me that in order to arrive at a truly human rights based mental health system, we have to understand that the essence of mental health is not a matter of health and illness. Therefore, we need to find substitute terms for "mental illness" and "mental health" that accurately describe the very real problems that people endure and what can be done to help them. "Mental health" must not be seen as a different kind of hybrid health split off from physical health, and it must not be merged with physical health. It must be recognized as having to do with personal meaning, distress, and choice.

¹I use the term "mental health" only as a metaphor. I do not intend to imply that it is a literal matter of health and illness.

²See Chapter 12, The Difference Between Brain and Mind in my book Smoke and Mirrors: How You Are Being Fooled About Mental Illness - An Insider's Warning to Consumers. Welcome, MD: Clear Publishing for an elaboration of this conundrum.

Let's Keep ISEPP Scientific and Focused

Chuck Ruby, Ph.D., Psychologist

It is undeniable that officials within the CDC, FDA, and Big Pharma have engaged in corrupt practices and placed profit ahead of science. However, this doesn't mean everything they do is corrupt or unscientific. While skepticism is warranted - it is the hallmark of science - any claims of nefarious intent and action by them must be backed up by robust evidence. Leaping to conclusions based only on suspicion and cherrypicked evidence is conspiracy theory thinking.

Lately, the situation has become even more dangerous. Over the past few years, the political landscape has flipped. Left is right, yes is no, and true is false. The long-standing and generally condoned rhetorical tactics of politicians have been eroded away by insidious rumors, lies, and scapegoating that are so often used by totalitarian leaders to instigate widespread distrust of "elites" and long-respected institutions of information and knowledge. Public trust in critical thinking and science seems to be fading, while suspicion and accusations are overtaking reason as the criteria for truth. The resulting authoritarian effect of this phenomenon will remain with us like a stubborn stench that lingers long after the offending substance is gone.

These dangers are not new to ISEPP. For decades, we have been a passionate but marginal opponent in an uphill battle with an authoritarian emperor who lacks scientific substance for his medical model conspiracy theory of "mental illness" and instead peddles his own version of rumors, lies, and scapegoating. We have fought long and hard to expose this charade by doggedly presenting sound evidence that undermines the emperor. But, ironically, we are the ones who have often been viewed as conspiracy theorists, not the naked emperor and his conspiratorial followers. We are accused of being "mental illness deniers." How can we avoid this and not be lumped into the same category as the climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, and UFOlogists? How can we bolster our message and be taken seriously?

The answer lies in making sure our reason is not blinded by our passion. As a scientifically-minded research and public education organization, ISEPP must stand back from the current political maelstrom and not get drawn into its alluring but fatal depths. If we are to garner and maintain the respect of the public, and be seen as a serious challenge to the orthodoxy, it is essential that we do two things. First, we must prioritize the evidentiary foundations of our critique. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we must keep our focus on the ball and not get distracted by topics that are at best tangential to our mission. We cannot dilute our efforts and tarnish our reputation by joining the many ongoing bandwagons of alarming and hastily constructed theories that are divisive and that have little to do with the ethics of psychology and psychiatry.

Conspiracy theories abound during any crisis, and the current COVID-19 scare is no exception. News about  the development of vaccines and therapeutics for the virus, as well as efforts to determine its origin, have raised the specter of profit-driven corruption and conflicts of interest within government and the pharmaceutical industry. Unfortunately, this has drawn the attention of many in ISEPP who go beyond skepticism and entertain the idea that the crisis is being used by a cabal of powerful people as a "false flag" operation in order to increase and maintain control of the population. Multiple and rapid-fire bits of dubious "evidence" and innuendo have been offered in an attempt to shore up this theory. However, in addition to demanding that any such theory be firmly grounded in science, it is even more important to remember that the reality, origin, and contagion of COVID-19 is not ISEPP's target. We are not an organization that broadly investigates government and industry corruption in matters of healthcare. Instead, we are an organization that exclusively critiques the threadbare medical model of "mental illness" and the corruption that maintains it.

The importance of ISEPP remaining focused and firmly rooted in science was highlighted recently. In the past few weeks, ISEPP social media posts have been identified by Facebook as "abusive." This is very likely due to our challenge to the medical model of human distress and how some people rely on that baseless model for comfort. We are appealing this ruling, but in the meantime, we have to remember that we are making a very unorthodox claim and we will have formidable and well-funded opposition that enjoys conventional trust. So, as we increase our public platform and reach, we are at risk of being belittled as just another among a plethora of dangerous conspiracy theorists, other well-known but denigrated public figures, and organizations whose reputations are damaged beyond repair because of their sensational but unfounded claims.

ISEPP's mission is to educate the public about the orthodoxy's lack of evidence that "mental illness" is a medical matter that is best treated within a medical model, and the many harms that come from that model. It is also to suggest more humane ways that we can help our fellow human travelers as they face the natural but painful parts of living this life. In this campaign, we demand the long asserted, but yet-to-be revealed, evidence that the orthodoxy continues to claim as the foundation upon which the conventional system has been built. In our efforts at chipping away at that system, we hope to remove the trust that has historically been placed with the orthodoxy. This will allow a more humane model to rise up and replace the old. Many have fought long and hard in our struggle, at times to their deaths. Let's honor them by keeping ISEPP on firm scientific footing with a crystal clear focus!

Wayne Ramsay, J.D.

In Part 1 of this essay (8/6/2019)¹, I described several reasons the myth of mental illness persists: (1) the effects of repetition of the myth by many people over time, particularly by opinion leaders, (2) disapproval from others for anyone who questions widespread myths, including the myth of mental illness, (3) support for the myth stated by those perceived as experts — in this case psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, (4) the desire of some people to avoid personal responsibility for their actions and their lives, (5) there being more comfort in believing a myth than in acknowledging ignorance, and (6) drug companies using huge advertising budgets to perpetuate the myth of mental illness and biological theories of mental illness for the purpose of increasing psychoactive drug sales and maximizing drug industry revenues and profits.

Here in Part 2. I will focus on another of the most important reasons the myth of mental illness persists: the inadequacy of rule of law.

“Rule of law” is a sacred concept in American jurisprudence.  On the day she was sworn-in as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor spoke eloquently about how deeply and sincerely she believes in rule of law. With the exception of civil commitment and involuntary guardianship laws, American courts invalidate laws that fail to put people on notice of what is required or prohibited on the ground they are void for vagueness. An example is Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville wherein a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision of lower courts and declared a Jacksonville, Florida vagrancy ordinance unconstitutionally vague.  The Supreme Court said this:

This ordinance is void for vagueness, both in the sense that it “fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute,” and because it encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions.  Living under rule of law entails various suppositions, one of which is that “[all persons] are entitled to be informed as to what the State commands or forbids.”²

Judged by this standard, all laws authorizing civil commitment for mental illness, or involuntary guardianship (of adults), or other loss of rights because of supposed mental illness, are void for vagueness and unconstitutional because they do not allow people of ordinary intelligence to know in advance what behavior or expression of ideas or outward display of emotions may result in losing their liberty or civil rights because of a “diagnosis” of “mental illness” or mental incapacity.

One might argue the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) delineates what is and is not a mental disorder, and hence what speech and behavior is and is not allowed, and that therefore the DSM provides the constitutionally required notice of what the state commands or forbids. However, the “Cautionary Statement” at the beginning of DSM-IV-TR explicitly disclaims the manual provides guidance for legal purposes:

It is to be understood that inclusion here, for clinical and research purposes, of a diagnostic category such as Pathological Gambling or Pedophilia does not imply that the condition meets legal or other non-medical criteria for what constitutes mental disease, mental disorder, or mental disability.  The clinical and scientific considerations involved in categorization of these conditions as mental disorders may not be wholly relevant to legal judgments, for example, that take into account such issues as individual responsibility, disability determination, and competency.³

An introductory chapter in DSM-5, published in 2013, includes a similar disclaimer titled “Cautionary Statement for Forensic Use of DSM-5”:

...it is important to note that the definition of mental disorder included in DSM-5 was developed to meet the needs of clinicians, public health professionals, and research investigators rather than all of the technical needs of the courts and legal professionals.  ...  When DSM-5 categories, criteria, and textual descriptions are employed for forensic purposes, there is a risk that diagnostic information will be misused or misunderstood.  These dangers arise because of the imperfect fit between the questions of ultimate concern to the law and the information contained in a clinical diagnosis.  In most situations, the clinical diagnosis of a DSM-5 mental disorder such as intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder), schizophrenia, major neurocognitive disorder, gambling disorder, or pedophilic disorder does not imply that an individual with such a condition meets legal criteria for the presence of a mental disorder or a specified legal standard (e.g., for competence, criminal responsibility, or disability).  For the latter, additional information is usually required beyond that contained in the DSM-5 diagnosis ...  assignment of a particular diagnosis does not imply a specific level of impairment or disability.  ...  Nonclinical decision makers should also be cautioned that a diagnosis does not carry any necessary implications regarding the etiology or causes of the individual’s mental disorder or the individual’s degree of control over behaviors that may be associated with the disorder.⁴

Even if the DSM is nevertheless accepted as a valid standard for legal judgments, it fails to provide the constitutionally required notice of what the state commands and forbids, failure to comply with which may result in forced treatment or loss of liberty, because the DSM does not state which supposed disorders justify involuntary commitment, or loss of civil rights, and which do not.

In The Manufacture of Madness in 1970, psychiatry professor Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., said, “psychiatry shows an unmistakable tendency to interpret all kinds of deviant or unusual behavior as mental illness.”⁵  When Dr. Szasz wrote those words, homosexuality was an example.  Would it have been appropriate to subject all homosexuals to involuntary treatment prior to the American Psychiatric Association’s vote in 1973 to de-designate homosexuality as a mental disorder? The DSM-II, published in 1968, said homosexuality was a mental disorder,⁶ but it did not say all homosexuals should be treated involuntarily if they refused treatment for their homosexuality.  However, it probably happened to homosexual adolescents whose parents were upset by their homosexuality. Some of those adolescents may even have been lobotomized (yes: lobotomized) as treatment for their homosexuality: In Psychosurgery—Damaging the Brain to Save the Mind in 1992, Joann Ellison Rodgers of The John Hopkins Medical Institutions says in the middle of the 20th Century:

Rapists, pedophiles, homosexuals, exhibitionists, and transvestites were all candidates for lobotomies. ...  Many lobotomies, for example, were performed on the institutionalized mentally ill to stop or limit ‘bizarre’ sexual behavior, which at that time meant masturbation, homosexuality, and for women, almost any overt desire for sexual release.

Similarly, in 2005 Emad N. Eskandar, M.D., G. Rees Cosgrove, M.D., and Scott L. Rauch, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School said:

Psychiatric neurosurgery was first introduced as a treatment for severe mental illness by Egas Moniz in 1936.  ...  despite a lack of objective therapeutic benefit, psychiatric neurosurgery was enthusiastically adopted by practitioners of the day.  At the height of enthusiasm, psychiatric neurosurgery was recommended for curing or ameliorating schizophrenia, depression, homosexuality, childhood behavior disorders, criminal behavior and uncontrolled violence.⁷

Lobotomizing people as treatment for masturbation, homosexuality, or normal heterosexual desire is an example of harm caused by psychiatric “diagnosis” that is based on deviance from cultural norms or values rather than demonstrated biological abnormality.  It is also an example of why I call psychiatry evil.

I have uncovered no 21st Century reports of involuntary psychosurgery, but brain-damaging “medication” and electroshock are given to people over their objection every day in the U.S.A., either of which is capable of inflicting brain damage as severe as occurs with psychosurgery.

LOBOTOMY AS TREATMENT FOR HOMOSEXUALITY?

People are committed involuntary to mental hospitals every day in the U.S.A. because they have “suicidal ideation” despite the fact that neither the DSM nor civil commitment laws put people on notice they are allowed to think about some things but not other things.  Where is it written, even in the DSM, that Americans are not permitted to even think about ending their own lives—and that, if they do, loss of liberty may be the consequence?

This leaves aside the equally important question of whether the there is a right to freedom of thought under U.S.A.’s First Amendment (made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment), similar state constitutional provisions (e.g., Article 1, Section 8 of the Texas Constitution), or constitutional provisions in other countries, that should take precedence over psychiatry’s supposedly diagnostic (but actually only descriptive) classification system and the State’s statutory involuntary commitment criteria.

It should be obvious that one of the purposes of the DSM is to allow mental health professionals to bill health care insurance companies and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid for virtually anything (which is one reason health care insurance premiums are exorbitant, and one reason health care and health care insurance are bankrupting the U.S. government and bankrupts many Americans).  Much normal human thinking and behavior at least arguably falls within a category of mental disorder in the DSM.  The supposedly diagnostic (but actually only descriptive) criteria in the DSM are so broad that many commentators and critics have correctly said there probably is no human being alive who falls within none of the DSM’s various categories of mental disorder, and most people meet the criteria for several psychiatric diagnoses simultaneously.  For example, “In court testimony, under oath, Jay Katz, a professor of psychiatry at Yale, admitted that ‘If you look at DSM-III you can classify all of us under one rubric or another of mental disorder’”.⁸ In his book The Hyperactivity Hoax, board-certified neurologist and psychiatrist Sydney Walker III, M.D., said:

The other major flaw of DSM, related to the first, is that it labels virtually everything as some type of disorder.  Thus, a child who sees a DSM-oriented doctor is almost assured of a psychiatric label and a prescription, even if the child is perfectly fine.⁹

According to Marcia Angell, M.D., Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, in her endorsement on the dust cover of Dr. Allen Frances’ book, Saving Normal, Dr. Frances “was once the most influential psychiatrist in the country, as head of the task force that compiled the last [fourth] edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)”.  Yet even this highly esteemed psychiatrist, Dr. Frances, says he “met many other friends working on DSM-5 who were similarly excited by their pet innovations and soon discovered that I personally qualified for many of the new disorders that were being suggested by them for inclusion for DSM-5.”¹⁰ Dr. Frances cites “a study that found 83 percent of kids qualify for mental disorder diagnosis by the time they are twenty-one.”¹¹ In 2013 in their book Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs, three American professors of social work and social welfare said:

According to the latest American Psychiatric Association methods of diagnosing mental illness, nearly one hundred million people, 25 to 30 percent of the US population, have a mental illness during any one year, and half of the population will have a mental illness during their lifetime.¹²

Similarly, in 2011 Dr. Vernon Coleman, a British physician, wrote that “diagnostic symptomotology is so vague and far reaching that I could, without much difficulty, find some definable mental illness in every person in the UK.”¹³

In 1997 in Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice, Boston University psychology professor Margaret A. Hagen, Ph.D., said:

The newest (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders provides the civil litigant with literally hundreds of possible disorders, each neatly laid out with the necessary symptoms.  It is hard to imagine that anyone could live in today’s society and not be diagnosed with at least one of these many disorders.¹⁴

THE DSM LABELS VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING AS SOME TYPE OF DISORDER

DSM-5 broadens the categories of mental disorder even more than DSM-III, DSM-IV or DSM-IV-TR.  According to Dusan Kecmanovic, professor of psychiatry and political psychology at Sarajevo University, “it will be difficult to be normal after the publication of DSM-5.”¹⁵  (Americans should keep this in mind when considering laws to keep guns out of the hands of “the mentally ill”: Since nearly everyone qualifies as mentally ill under current criteria, such laws could in application be a de facto repeal of the Second Amendment.)  In her book, The Trouble With Drug Companies, Dr. Marcia Angell says, “few psychiatric disorders have objective criteria for diagnosis”.¹⁶  Actually, none do.  The vague, unreliable, unpredictable, and invalid nature psychiatric diagnosis enables and encourages arbitrary “diagnosis” and arbitrary involuntary treatment.  That violates the constitutional standard stated by the Supreme Court in Papachristou.

The constitutional law requirement that government must tell you what is and is not allowed before it may do anything to you as a consequence of your failure to act as expected is only fair. That’s why the U.S. Supreme Court has declared it to be constitutionally required.

There is, however, a problem with this constitutional requirement, or said another way, there is a problem with rule of law: We can’t always anticipate and articulate, in advance, everything a human being might possibly say or do that other human beings, upon being made aware of it, will consider unacceptable.

This epiphany came to me in 1992 when I was sitting at a table in a restaurant in Manhattan with the woman I was dating at the time.  Our table was located next to a window on the other side of which was a sidewalk.  A man who looked like he was homeless put his face very close to the window as he stared at us, pointed at us, made funny faces, and did an odd sort of dance. His behavior was distracting and inappropriate, but how would one write a law prohibiting what he was doing?: Don’t look into or get too close to restaurant windows?  Don’t point at people?  Don’t make funny faces?  Don’t dance on the sidewalk?

Similarly, I once saw a man sleeping on the floor in a hotel corridor with his face against a dirty carpet.  At first I thought he might be dead, but after several seconds of observation I could see he was breathing. I advised the hotel front desk clerk who roused the man and told him he couldn’t sleep there and told him to go sleep in his hotel room.

The next day in a Subway Sandwich Shop a patron who looked like he was homeless began singing loudly and vastly off-pitch along with the music playing on speakers in the ceiling of the shop, disturbing everyone in the shop.

Examples abound in the evidence introduced at involuntary commitment and involuntary guardianship hearings.  After I think I’ve heard and seen everything, the behavior or ideas of a proposed patient in an involuntary commitment for supposed mental illness or of the proposed adult ward in an involuntary guardianship trial confronts me with yet another example of unacceptable thinking or behavior I wouldn’t have thought of had I been given the job of writing a state’s criminal code and other laws.  It is largely because of this difficulty that we have the concept of mental illness.

Sociologist Thomas Scheff has defined mental illness as “residual rule-​breaking”: “After crime,” wrote two of his critics, “perversion, drunkenness, bad manners, there are always those diverse grab-bag violations for which the culture has no explicit label—the ‘residual rules’ broken by those deemed mentally ill.”¹⁷ The concept of mental illness allows us, as a society, to impose sanctions, that is, punishment (called “therapy”) on law-abiding people who fail to live in accordance with our expectations about what conduct people should and should not engage in, and what beliefs or thoughts people should or should not express.  As psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz said in 1994, “when I grew up in Hungary—1920s, 1930s—it was very, very clear that psychiatry was essentially a jail function.  There were blue coated policemen and white coated policemen.”¹⁸ In "Mental Illness as Brain Disease: A Brief History Lesson," Dr. Szasz says “The contention that mental illness is brain disease is as old as psychiatry itself: it is an integral part of the grand lie that psychiatry is a branch of medicine and healing, when in fact it is a branch of the law and social control.”¹⁹

Similarly, in 2011 three authors including psychology professor Mark Rapley and psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff call psychiatry “the enterprise of policing human conduct”.²⁰

British psychiatrist Suman Fernando says “psychiatry...from the very beginning...has been concerned with social control.”²¹

In Madness—A Brief History, Roy Porter, Professor of the Social History of Medicine at the University College, London says “To many the psychiatrist seemed to have been reduced to acting as society’s policeman or gatekeeper, protecting it from the insane.”²² 

The role of psychiatrists as police is also underscored by the subtitle of Louise Armstrong’s book And They Call It Help—The Psychiatric Policing of America’s Children.²³

Blue-coated police enforce written laws.  White coated police—psychiatrists and those who work with them—enforce unwritten laws prohibiting thinking and behavior we either didn’t think to write a law against or choose not to (for reasons discussed below) or for which we just can’t find the right words (like my above examples).  Psychiatry’s roles as (1) part of the medical profession and (2) de facto police who enforce society’s unwritten laws are obfuscated and confused, resulting in violators of society’s unwritten laws not having the benefit of the protections that exist in criminal law.  Violating society’s unwritten laws is called mental illness or mental disorder.  The punishment is imprisonment called involuntary hospitalization and psychological and physical misery and brain damage caused by “involuntary medication” or involuntary electroconvulsive “therapy”.

Oddly, violators of our unwritten laws tend to be punished more harshly than those who violate our written laws: Would anyone advocate drug or electroshock induced brain damage as punishment for bank robbery or even murder?

New York (or whatever state’s) Penal Code
Punishment for a Class A misdemeanor shall be involuntary administration of a neurotoxic medication until brain damage and permanent neurological disease or disability including uncontrollable muscle movement (dyskinesia) is achieved.

Such a law would probably be declared a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel or unusual punishment. However, inflicting exactly this on a person becomes acceptable when administered as “therapy” for “mental illness,” and it is commonplace, even though mental “illness,” like crime, is nothing more than violating society’s (other people’s) rules.

Our current approach of calling prohibited thinking or behavior “mental illness” circumvents the difficult task of defining, in advance, what is and is not permitted, and it permits us to impose especially severe punishments.  It is easier to call people mentally ill and incarcerate and punish them with supposed treatment for their supposed mental illness than it is to anticipate everything people might do that is unacceptable and enact laws prohibiting the behavior.

PSYCHIATRISTS AND THEIR CO-WORKERS ARE
WHITE-COATED POLICE WHO ENFORCE SOCIETY’S UNWRITTEN LAWS

Sometimes belief in mental illness, or a pretense there is such a thing as mental illness, is the only way we can impose sanctions for disliked speech or behavior because, if we were to write laws clearly describing what is prohibited, it would be obvious we are violating the constitutional rights of the accused with such laws. For example, people are often forced into psychiatric “treatment”, including involuntary hospitalization, because of what they say rather than because of what they do.  Does this violate the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech?  Does the First Amendment protect only speech other people consider sane or rational?

Refusing to speak when other people think you should is another example. In 2011, I was an observer at an involuntary commitment hearing of a man whose “Selective Mutism” (rarely saying a word to anyone, DSM-IV-TR diagnosis 313.23)²⁴ was his main supposed symptom of supposed mental illness, and at that hearing (after expiration of the time he could be held on a criminal charge) he was involuntarily committed to Kerrville State Hospital. In 1977, in Wooley v. Maynard, the U.S. Supreme Court said, “the right of freedom of thought protected by the First Amendment against state action includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.”²⁵  Texas Jurisprudence, a legal encyclopedia, says, “Liberty of silence is included by the guarantee of liberty of speech.”²⁶  Because it would be unconstitutional, nobody is going to write a law saying you must speak with people. Nevertheless, engaging in normal conversation with those around you is an expectation nearly everyone has.  Therefore, mutism or selective mutism can become “mental illness” motivating involuntary “treatment” and did in this case despite the constitutional right to, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s words, “refrain from speaking at all.”  It is possible to incarcerate a person because he exercises a constitutional right such as refusing to talk if the ostensible or supposed reason is “mental illness” rather than the constitutionally protected action or inaction.

We could enact criminal laws against mutism, or unconventional religious or philosophical beliefs, or converting to a religion your family abhors, or loudly expressing nonreligious beliefs most people disagree with, or being grandiose or obnoxious, or revealing oneself to be excessively unhappy (“depressed”), or talking aloud to oneself with others present, or admitting to thinking about suicide, or attempting suicide.  We don’t, because writing such laws wouldn’t seem right.  In many cases such laws would be an admission of how narrow-minded, intolerant, authoritarian, and even despotic we sometimes are, including in nations like the United States of America where freedom is frequently touted as the reason for American patriotism. Frequently, such laws would be impossible to reconcile with America’s First Amendment guarantee of freedom in thought and expression or similar guarantees in other democracies and Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression;  this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media...

State and federal laws authorizing civil commitment for mental illness in the United States of America and other nations routinely violate this right to freedom of opinion and expression.  Freedom of thought, opinion, and expression is respected in the U.S.A. if a person thinks Jesus is the Son of God but not if he thinks he is the Son of God, or if he thinks others are persecuting him (and others disagree), or if he thinks his life is not worth living (and others disagree), or if he has other thoughts other people consider crazy or bothersome.  As psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz wrote in 1973: “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”²⁷ We on the Western side of what was once (prior to the breakup of the USSR) called the Iron Curtain like to think of ourselves as freedom-loving people who uphold human rights.  The concept of mental illness permits us to violate our professed values about freedom and disregard the principal of rule of law without admitting to ourselves this is what we are doing.  It permits us to violate what the American Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 says are the God-given and unalienable rights of all men (and women): “...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”  The myth of mental illness permits us to deprive law-abiding people of their supposedly unalienable right to liberty and pursuit of happiness, and because of fatal effects of psychiatric “treatment” such as sudden death caused by neuroleptic “medications” effect on the heart, or neuroleptic malignant syndrome, or electroshock, or physical restraint (causing asphyxiation), sometimes even their right to life, by pretending we are “treating them for their mental illness.”  Ron Leifer, M.D., a psychiatrist, said it well in 2000:

The problem is that society demands a greater degree of social control than law allows.  The public wants to be protected from unconventional, threatening, and dangerous behavior.  There is, thus, a public mandate for a covert form of social control which supplements rule of law.  Medical-coercive psychiatry, in alliance with the state, performs this function disguised as medical diagnosis and treatment.  ...  involuntary, coercive psychiatry serves society by providing a supplemental form of social control which, because it is covert or disguised, preserves our national pride by giving us the appearance of being a nation of free individuals under law.  On the other hand, when the covert is exposed it can be seen to violate the honored values on which this nation was founded.²⁸

An example that was prominently featured in news reports in New York City in 1987 was the use of the concept of mental illness to get homeless people off the streets and out of the public parks of the City.  A New York Times article called it “a Koch administration program to involuntarily hospitalize severely mentally ill homeless people living on city streets.”²⁹ Rather than admit the real motive was getting rid of these people whose presence was irritating to other people, New York City Mayor Ed Koch asserted the purpose was to get them “hospitalized” (involuntarily, of course) for allegedly needed “mental health” treatment.  It was a classic case of oppression disguised as benefaction.  New York lawmakers could have created a law making it illegal to be homeless or to sleep on park benches, sidewalks, or in subway stations and swept homeless people into detention facilities of some kind.  But they couldn’t or didn’t want to accept the moral implications of such a choice and therefore preferred to use mental illness as an excuse to justify incarcerating homeless people.  This was intellectually dishonest, because the real reason was disapproval of or annoyance with homeless people, and because imprisonment does not become benign merely because it is called hospitalization.

Even if it were possible to anticipate everything people might do that we as a society want to prohibit, and even if we didn’t care if writing such laws clearly and explicitly reveals we are violating human and constitutional rights with such laws, in many cases it would be impossible to write a statute that would prohibit the behavior we want to prohibit without encompassing other behavior we do not want to prohibit.  An example is crying in public.  A person who cries in public too often, or for reasons with which few others sympathize, or for reasons others don’t understand, bothers other people.  Few would advocate making it illegal to cry in public, because there are circumstances in which most people think crying in public is understandable and acceptable and shouldn’t be prohibited.  People are expected to intuitively know when it is okay to cry in public and when it isn’t.  A person who cries in public for reasons with which others are unsympathetic or at times others dislike, or more often and more loudly than other people think is appropriate, is breaking a residual rule of behavior, that is, a rule that isn’t written anywhere but which people are nevertheless expected to know about and abide by.  Violating this unwritten expectation may result in punishment called involuntary psychiatric treatment, including involuntary “hospitalization” for major depressive disorder or some other supposed diagnosis.  How and when and how loudly to express one’s anger, even verbally and without threatening others with physical harm, is also the subject of residual rules of conduct the violation of which might result in involuntary psychiatric “treatment”, including involuntary “hospitalization” or an involuntary outpatient commitment court order compelling a person living in his own house or apartment to appear at a clinic for bi-weekly or monthly injections of a long-acting drug intended to treat a supposed mental illness such as inappropriately expressed anger.

THE CONCEPT OF MENTAL ILLNESS PERMITS US TO VIOLATE OUR PROFESSED VALUES ABOUT FREEDOM AND RULE OF LAW WITHOUT ADMITTING TO OURSELVES THIS IS WHAT WE ARE DOING

In a letter dated October 14, 2009, I proposed the above ideas to retired psychiatry professor Thomas S. Szasz, who I had shortly before visited in his home town of Manlius, New York:

I believe the reason the myth of mental illness continues is not only or even mainly because people do not understand its scientific invalidity, although that is of course a factor.  I believe one of the most important reasons the concept of mental illness continues to be accepted legally and otherwise is it is impossible to write into criminal codes and other laws all commonly held expectations of behavior—and people’s desire to enforce these unwritten expectations. Mental illness is the rationalization used to punish people who violate unwritten rules—with punishment called involuntary hospitalization, and with torture inflicted as punishment but called treatment for the supposed but actually nonexistent “mental illness”.  ...  I think overcoming this problem is an important challenge facing people like you and me who want America and other nations to be governed by rule of law rather than arbitrary after-the-fact determinations of what behavior was right or wrong.

With my above letter I gave Dr. Szasz a tape recording I had made of the speeches including his own at the Thomas S. Szasz Tribute Dinner I had attended in Manhattan in 1990.  Dr. Szasz’s reply in an e-mail on October 19, 2009 was “Dear Mr. Ramsay, Many thanks for the tape - and your letter, with which I agree completely.  Marginal rule violation and its punishment is the name of the game.  Best wishes, Thomas Szasz”

MARGINAL RULE VIOLATION AND ITS PUNISHMENT IS THE NAME OF THE GAME

We as a society and as citizens of democracies would be more honest if we discard the myth of mental illness, repeal our civil commitment laws, and in their place enact a criminal law that openly acknowledges legislators are unable to anticipate and write a law against every act that should be prohibited.  Such a law might be titled “Criminal Conduct NOS."  It seems the majority of psychiatric diagnoses in involuntary civil commitment for mental illness I have seen end with the letters NOS, e.g., Personality Disorder NOS or Psychotic Disorder NOS.  In his book Hippocrates Cried: The Decline of American Psychiatry in 2013 psychiatrist Michael Alan Taylor, M.D., says “upward of a third of psychiatric patients end up being given the label NOS (Not Otherwise Specified).”³⁰  Even with the ever-increasing number of supposedly diagnostic categories with each new edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM, resulting in each edition being a bigger book with more diagnoses (or descriptions) than the last, psychiatrists continue to find it necessary to use “NOS” diagnoses. If we are going to incarcerate people on the basis of a supposed diagnosis ending with the letters NOS, why not have a criminal law with a name ending in NOS that does the same thing?  Criminal Conduct NOS might be defined as “an act not mentioned in this Penal Code but which the defendant knew or if he was a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence would have known he should not have performed.”  Replacing civil commitment law with a criminal or penal code provision such as Criminal Conduct NOS would represent a constriction of the power of families and government to incarcerate and punish people for (otherwise) lawful but bothersome behavior, or what Dr. Szasz called marginal rule violation, compared with today’s laws authorizing civil commitment for supposed mental illness, for these reasons: To obtain a conviction for Criminal Conduct NOS, the prosecution would be required to prove the defendant was guilty of specific past act rather than allowing imprisonment (called involuntary “hospitalization”) and corporal punishment and psychological torture (called involuntary “medication” or involuntary electroshock) for an alleged, arbitrarily and often vaguely defined state of mind such as depression or schizophrenia or bipolar or personality disorder, or predicted future conduct—“dangerousness.”  The “clear and convincing” standard of proof permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court in civil commitment for supposed mental illness in Addington v. Texas³¹ and employed in many states of the U.S.A., would be replaced with the more stringent standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that applies in criminal cases. Most Americans have a right to trial by jury in civil commitment for mental illness, but many do not.  If civil commitment laws are repealed and Criminal Conduct NOS is added to each state’s criminal code, the defendant’s right to trial by jury would be respected to the same extent it is in other criminal cases, because legislators and judges would no longer be playing word games or employing deceptive semantics to avoid respecting defendants’ constitutional rights, including the right to trial by jury, by calling the proceedings “civil” or “special” rather than criminal.  The judge or jury would be required to find the defendant not only did the act alleged but also at the time knew what he did was wrong or that a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence would have known what he did was wrong.  To avoid convicting a person who lacked the mental capacity of a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence of a “criminal” offense, the judge or jury would need to be empowered to find the defendant did the act alleged, that a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence would have known the act was wrong, but that the defendant lacked the mental capacity of a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence, withhold adjudication of a “criminal” offense, and sentence the defendant to a type of incarceration or program deemed educational or therapeutic.

Some will object to this approach because it does not allow intervention to prevent future acts.  My response is we can’t predict a person’s future conduct reliably enough to justify incarceration as a preventive measure.  In the words of a clergyman whose Sunday sermon I saw on C-Span on January 1, 2012, “The only evidence of what a person will do in the future is their record of what they have done in the past.”³² A person’s future conduct cannot be proved by any burden of proof, not even “preponderance of the evidence”, unless perhaps he says he is going to do something, or he has a long history of similar acts in the past.³³

Substituting a criminal law titled Criminal Conduct NOS for current civil commitment law is only a partial solution, because sometimes people’s behavior is bothersome but does not justify criminal prosecution, including Criminal Conduct NOS.  Enforcement of private property rights that give property owners authority regarding what can be done on their property may be the best solution in some situations.

Because there is no credible evidence of any so-called mental illness being caused by biological abnormality, so-called mental illness is definable only as thinking or behavior that is considered unacceptable.  Without a biological abnormality proved to be the cause of the behavior or supposed symptoms, a supposed mental illness does not qualify as true illness or as true disease.  The word “mental” implies non-physical: A person can no more have “mental illness” than he can have mental cancer.  It is possible to have brain cancer but not mental cancer.  For similar reasons, it is possible to have a brain disease but not a mental disease.  Likewise, it is no more possible to have a “mental” illness than it is possible to have a “religious illness” or a “political illness.” Mental illness exists only as a concept in the minds of people who believe in mental illness. Involuntary psychiatric “therapy” is punishment for thinking or behavior people dislike, not health care as people like to think and as legislators and judges assume.  If the so-called professionals in what we call mental health allowed themselves to use only the term brain disease (not “mental illness”) and refused to believe a brain disease is present unless true physical, biological (not merely mental, emotional, or behavioral) evidence is found, most if not all psychiatric and psychological “diagnosis” (confusing values with health) would cease.  But then, as psychiatrist Ronald Leifer pointed out (above), we as a society would be stuck with rule of law, and “the public will be deprived of an extra-legal means of maintaining domestic tranquility."³⁴

Belief in mental illness continues for all of the above reasons, none of which are valid from a logical or scientific or legal and constitutional standpoint.

¹Wayne Ramsay, J.D., “Why the Myth of Mental Illness Lives On (Pt. 1), ISEPP Bulletin July 2019, https://psychintegrity.org/why-the-myth-of-mental-illness-lives-on-part-1
²Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 at 162 (1972), citations omitted
³Diagnostic and Stastical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, text revision (DSM-IV-TR, American Psychiatric Association 2000), p. xxxvii
⁴Diagnostic and Stastical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association 2013), p. 25
⁵Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., The Manufacture of Madness (Harper & Row 1970), p. 68)
⁶Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — Second Edition (American Psychiatric Association 1968), p. 44
⁷Emad N. Eskandar, M.D., G. Rees Cosgrove, M.D., and Scott L. Rauch, M.D., “Psychiatric Neurosurgery”, neurosurgery.mgh.harvard.edu, accessed February 5, 2014, underline added
⁸Prof. Jay Katz, quoted in Thomas Szasz, Insanity—The Idea and It’s Consequences (Syracuse University Press 1997), p. 57
⁹Sydney Walker III, M.D., The Hyperactivity Hoax (St. Martin’s Press 1998), p. 23. Italics are Dr. Walker’s.
¹⁰Allen Frances, M.D., Saving Normal—An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (HarperCollins 2013), p. xvii
¹¹Id., p. 177: Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry: “Cumulative Prevalence of Psychiatric Disorders by Young Adulthood: A Prospective Cohort Analysis from the Great Smoky Mountains Study”, Vol. 50, No. 3, (2011) pp. 252-261, available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049293/
¹²Stuart A. Kirk, et al., Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs (Transaction Publishers 2013, p. vii
¹³Vernon Coleman, MBChB, D.Sc.(hon), Do Doctors and Nurses Kill More People Than Cancer?, (European Medical Journal 2011), p. 32
¹⁴Margaret A. Hagen, Ph.D, Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (ReganBooks 1997), p. 250
¹⁵Dusan Kecmanovic ,“DSM-5: The More It Changes The More It Is the Same”, Psychiatria Danubina, 2013; Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 94-96
¹⁶Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About Drug Companies—How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It (Random House 2005), p. 88
¹⁷Rael Jean Isaac & Virginia C. Armat, Madness in the Streets (Free Press/Macmillan 1990), p. 49
¹⁸“Thomas Szasz on Socialism in Health Care”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC9r3Gs8XuU, at 1:24:42
¹⁹Thomas Szasz, M.D., “Mental Illness as Brain Disease: A Brief History Lesson”, http://www.szasz.com/freeman13.html, accessed September 16, 2020
²⁰Mark Rapley, et al., Medicalizing Misery, Palgrave Macmillan 2011, p. 4
²¹Id., p. 50
²²Roy Porter, Madness—A Brief History, (Oxford University Press 2002), p. 186
²³Louise Armstrong, And They Call It Help—The Psychiatric Policing of America’s Children (Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. 1993).
²⁴DSM-IV-TR diagnosis code 313.23 appears on p. 125
²⁵Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 at 714 (1977)
²⁶9 Tex.Jur. Constitutional Law §91, p. 525
²⁷Thomas Szasz, M.D., The Second Sin (Anchor/Doubleday 1973), p. 113
²⁸Ron Leifer, M.D., “A Critique of Psychiatry and an Invitation to Dialogue”, Ethical Human Science and Services, December 27, 2000, available at www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/critique.htm
²⁹Josh Barbanel, “New York Ordered to Find Care for Homeless Woman”, The New York Times, November 25, 1987, p. B3
³⁰Michael Alan Taylor, M.D., Hippocrates Cried: The Decline of American Psychiatry (Oxford University Press 2013), p. 39
³¹Addington v. Texas, 441 U.S. 418 (1979)
32Rev. Bill Tvedt, Jubilee Family Church, Oskaloosa, Iowa
³³See Is Involuntary Commitment for “Mental Illness” or “Dangerousness” a Violation of Substantive Due Process?, www.wayneramsay.com/due-process.htm
³⁴Ron Leifer, M.D., “A Critique of Psychiatry and an Invitation to Dialogue”, Ethical Human Science and Services, December 27, 2000, www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/critique.htm, accessed March 9, 2013.

Lloyd Ross, Ph.D.

According to the research I have read and my experience as a therapist, when people take SSRI anti-depressants their emotions are blunted, especially the emotions of guilt, shame, and conscience. They don’t care about things that they would have cared about had they not been on SSRIs. Some people would define that as feeling better.

If you take normal puppies and remove them from their mothers, like pups of most species, they will frantically scream. If for a while you feed them SSRIs, they will not react when they are removed from their mothers. Many call these drugs “well whatever” drugs. A “well whatever” drug enables normal pups to not be upset when they are removed from their mother.

A colleague who took an SSRI medication so he could relax during a vacation became alarmed after he returned because, when he was listening to patients talk about their problems, he kept thinking, “who cares.”

Many children with whom I work whose mothers are on SSRIs have said to me that they wish that their mothers were not taking those pills. When I ask them why, they invariably say, “they just don’t seem to care as much about me.”

If “get better” means to feel better or not feel so bad because the patient has taken a medicine that dulls his feelings, he or she is getting in the way of a finely tuned mechanism that has been evolving over 200 million years to help human organisms protect themselves, avoid threats, and get what they want. That’s a big price to pay for “feeling better.” And, of course, that is what all psychotropic drugs do - including alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, sedatives and stimulants – they help people avoid their feelings. That’s why the majority of men who beat up their wives are drunk when they do it.

And the idea that the SSRIs are correcting some kind of chemical imbalance in a very precise, carefully honed way is an illusion. A patient being given a drug that will dull his reaction to what has been upsetting to him will approach it very differently than a patient given a different spin, that the drug is treating a chemical imbalance that is causing his ailment. They will give drug treatment a second thought if warned that SSRI anti-depressants might affect their judgement. These drugs are totally misnamed. They are neither selective in their approach, nor do they cure depression. They merely create a feeling of “apathy” or “well whatever” along with some unpleasant side effects.

And what about the 1 out of 4 people who develop suicidal or homicidal ideation and agitation (akathisia) after taking SSRIs. This also happens at the same rate in subjects who have never been depressed. And keep in mind that SSRI anti-depressants are associated with a much higher relapse rate than is therapy. We have to approach problems in living, not use a reductionistic disease model. Restraint is not treatment, especially since these drugs suppress our humanity. And how about reinforcing the notion that the way to deal with uncomfortable feelings is to take a drug that makes them go away? What do you say to your kid who is smoking dope?

David Walker, Ph.D.

This is a reprint of an email I sent to NPR after they published an article about ecstasy and PTSD. The article showcased a woman who felt she benefited from this novel "treatment." In response, I wrote a brief blurb to NPR characterizing the story as “bullshit.” I was surprised to receive a note back asking if I could move beyond harsh language to explain my objections. This was my response.

NPR Public Editor
Re: My Complaint

Dear Elizabeth:

As I did not expect to hear back from NPR, I did not elaborate on the use of my term, "bullshit," in relation to the recent article on MDMA for PTSD. You may be surprised to hear that I was not just emoting but applying the word in deference to Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurter’s description of any system that refuses to explain itself while trying to circumvent or overpower its skeptics. Specifically, Dr. Frankfurter called bullshit “a greater enemy of truth than lies.” In 2016, Australian critical psychiatrist Niall McLaren elaborated on this same idea in his article, “Psychiatry as Bullshit” for Ethical Human Psychiatry and Psychology, a journal for which I serve as an advisory editor. So what I said is what I meant.

Over the last decade, fractures have developed in the bio-reductionist ideology that dominates the U.S. mental health system. I can summarize them to you as follows: challenges to SSRI antidepressant and psychiatric drugs generally in regards to efficacy and linkages to violence and suicide; poor science across the entire realm of biological psychiatry and behavioral genetics; and the frequent use of psychiatric taxonomy to explain itself.

Shortly before the DSM-5 was released in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association, the National Institute of Mental Health announced it would no longer use DSM labels like PTSD, ADHD, Bipolar, etc., in its research. The public was not sufficiently advised by the media, including by NPR, that this was a fracture in this system. In truth, this shift had to do with the exceptionally poor scientific validity and reliability of psychiatric labels - labels that continue to this moment to stigmatize, limit employment, housing, and self-worth for millions of Americans.

That NIMH made this move in the hopes of further isolating some sort of underlying brain pathology or chemical process, using its ample dollars by which to substantiate the very old mythologies of psychiatric icon Emil Kraepelin, is a chimera biological psychiatrists have been allowed to chase for over sixty years at public expense without result. The DSM-IV, for example, was positioned by its authors as “Neo-Kraepelinian” in its underlying philosophy.

NPR may be unaware that in 2013 the British Psychological Society and over fifty mental health organizations across North America and around the world objected formally to the DSM-5. At least this was never a topic your reporters chose to cover.

“Trauma” at the brain level is entirely a cultural metaphor. The “traumatic stress” identified in brain scans to which your reporters so often refer is, in reality, “diffuse stress” we would see in anyone experiencing violence, loss, or hardship. It is not “abnormal,” and it is entirely non-specific in relation to PTSD or Bipolar or any other psychiatric label. In fact, most DSM labels correlate with activity at the brain level when a person is under stress, a finding which is completely unsurprising.

No DSM label can be specifically depicted through neural research or any other biological research – except, of course, conditions brought about by substantiated brain diseases like the dementias or toxin exposures such as alcohol, amphetamine, or psychiatric drugs themselves. The “HPA axis,” the amygdala, being “triggered,” the fight-flight response, are simply a cultural language for intense emotional pain, defined subjectively.

The historical roots of PTSD go back to American psychiatry’s complicity in marginalizing and segregating people considered “moral imbeciles” with “psychopathic constitutions.” It is in psychiatry’s best interests to maintain its charade of locating the “weak” and susceptible as a target “population” for its “treatments,” as Smith Jeliffe and William Alanson White did back in 1910, in finding them among the classes “of the juvenile delinquents, of the recidivist type of criminal, of the paupers and prostitutes, of the ne’er-do-wells, the black sheep of the family, and at the higher levels, of erratic half-genius, half-crazy persons with brilliant spots here and there, but without continuity, whose efficiency is materially impaired and who live often a more or less wandering existence.”

What I mean is that the soldier who suffers due to voters electing hawkish leaders who put him or her into combat will be blamed as “disabled” for reacting emotionally to war’s brutality and hardship, just as women who are raped, first by a violent perpetrator and then again by a justice system that fails to hold perpetrators accountable, will carry in their bodies the emotional stigmata of American society’s unwillingness to protect them, children facing epidemic sexual abuse in this country will be asked to do the same, and Katrina survivors will hold the original lack of accountability of the Army Corps of Engineers in managing Louisiana levees aimed at poor people.

The list goes on and on, and PTSD - which originated out of Post-Vietnam Syndrome, and was feared as a label by many vets for its potential to take a morally sick society off the hook while blaming the veteran - has become just that and is now widely applied where once we had Rape Syndrome and Battered Child Syndrome. At least those labels depicted a point of origin for personal anguish… but this has never been the actual goal of contemporary psychiatry. Instead, this guild has actively sought to obscure the true sources of emotional pain and upheaval coming out of social conditions by cooking them down into alleged “brain disorders” and “chemical imbalances.” And NPR has moved unquestioningly along with the psychiatric guild and its propaganda for as many decades as this effort has been underway.

So when I turn to the recent MDMA article, I find NPR colluding with psychiatry once again in redefining the horrific violence, loss, and tragedies faced by a young woman as a problem of her overactive amygdala. The drug itself is positioned as a “treatment” that “allows” her to speak of her painful experiences to a trusted professional who adds another “treatment” consisting of words and support. That MDMA “tamps down activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that processes fear” leading “to a state characterized by heightened feelings of safety and social connection” is a very elaborate way of saying it’s a sedative.

Thus, what the article is really saying is that taking a sedative so as to be able to talk about terrible events in one’s life might make it easier – but of course, we’re dealing with the need to obscure the language by using pseudoscientific brain research metaphorically. Thus, PTSD, a metaphor in itself, goes into “remission” through the use of MDMA, which through its sedating properties, miraculously allows people to talk more easily about the kinds of violence in their lives that American society ignores, stigmatizes, or responds to unjustly.

The only thing required of the “PTSD sufferer” is accepting the ideological reality of their alleged “lifelong condition,” allowing themselves to be labeled and stigmatized, and submitting their bodies to psychopharmacological experimentation. Fortunately, “unlike street drugs, which may be adulterated and unsafe, researchers use a pure, precisely dosed form of the drug.” In other words, they sell better MDMA than what you can get on the street.

Heavy sigh. In my own practice as a psychotherapist, I deliberately seek to avoid the bullshit inherent in this kind of language. This is because the clients seeking my collaboration are often struggling with trying to climb out of various self-medicating behaviors and addictions, street and psychiatric, your MDMA article promotes. They’ve often been duped by psychiatry’s promotion of so-called “anti-psychotics,” “anti-depressants,” and “anti-anxiety” drugs – and they are dealing with intense withdrawal syndromes, drug-related emotional syndromes, sexual dysfunction, and other issues. Ah, but these are not topics you choose to cover.

That is, they are often dealing with a greater enemy of truth than lies – a system that refuses to explain itself while trying to circumvent or overpower its skeptics.

NPR has acted as a lackey for this system for many years now. I hope my complaint is better explained to you now. Your journalistic irresponsibility has duped and hurt many people. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

David Edward Walker PhD
Seattle WA

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 61.

Niall McLaren, “Psychiatry as Bullshit,” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 18, no. 1 (2016): 48–57, doi: 10.1891/EHPP.18.1.

Smith E. Jellife and William A. White, Disease of the Nervous System (Philadelphia, PA: Lea & Febiger, 1935), 910–11.

Baying at the Moon: ISEPP's Struggle with Psychiatry's Perfidy

Joe Tarantolo, M.D., Psychiatrist

See my letter below I sent to the ISEPP Board after our Philly conference in 2012 (edited for easier reading)

Reflections By the Chair, ISEPP Conference, Philly, 2012

To the Board of Directors:

THE “GREAT” ORGANIZATION SYNDROME

First, let me remind you, I am privileged to be your Chair. Also, you give me comfort when I fear I am isolated with this non-Bio model.

IDEAS: response to the conference, MindFreedom, Karon’s PSPP talk and our Board discussion of “Where do we go from here?”

We are not a great organization; we are ,however, worthy.

In 2009, as we went through our wrenching breakup with Peter Breggin, I wrote him a personal letter about which I’m told by reliable sources, he hated. I warned him of what I call the “Great Man” syndrome. It affects most men, and increasingly, more and more women. It’s rooted in early life experience, around the age of seven after reading our 1^st Superman comic ( Batman, Cap Marvel, Wonder Woman, etc.) and we secretly identify with their great powers, powers we lust after for the rest of our lives. It is driven, of course, by a deep sense of shame-ridden inadequacy. It plagues us because no matter our accomplishments, they never measure up, we never meet the Superman measure.

This dynamic affects organizations as well, oh yes whole nations too, US exceptionalism!? I note a despair when we decry our puny membership numbers and not-at-all-enough conference attendance. The problem with this syndrome is, not only does it generate sadness, despair and a lack of celebration at small successes, it also is out of touch with reality.

The reality is, and here I must cross over the aisle to my Republican friends, we are only 1 of a 1000 points of light that have begun to shed light on the terrible murderous nature of much of psychiatric practice. (Note that Grace Jackson needed 100’s of research papers, 1000’s perhaps, to make her excellent power point presentation. She did none of the research herself. She is just a small part of the big picture.) If you don’t like that metaphor, how about our being a splash-piece of a giant wave. We don’t have to be grand leaders in this march (a 3^rd metaphor), we are just one of many worthy groups not only trying to accomplish something but also trying to discover something.

Bert pointed out in his talk that the Nazis killed off virtually all of their schizophrenics between 1940 and 1945. After the great WW2 conflagration, guess what, the incidence of schizophrenia in Germany was the same as before the Eugenics cleansing. (BTW, the Eugenic movement originated here in the US in the late 19^th century and was then exported to Europe.) Bert was using this little epidemiological tidbit to demonstrate how absurd is the notion that schizophrenia is a genetic disease. What he didn’t address though, is given they got rid of all the schizophrenics, regardless of the etiology, why was there still that 1% of the population that is nuts?

This is how I explain it: not only is schizophrenia not a disease and not a neurological problem, but rather that that process of craziness, eccentric painful thinking, has survival value for the culture at large. We create schizophrenia because we need it. There is a fine line, perhaps no line, between delusional thinking and creativity. I suspect we need to have 1% thinking about the world in absurd and disturbing ways to counter a tendency towards uniformity, sterility, and inhibited problem solving. While I’m at it, we need 5% of the population to be gay with a smattering  of transgender because our sexuality is so important for the survival of the species, it must constantly be tested, however discomforting.

I recommend : 

1-We stay small, and like it.

2-We limit our conference to 300 participants: (“REGISTER  SOON., LIMTED NUMBER OF OPENINGS”  (300 is roughly the size of my church and  the school where my 2 daughters went to between Pre-K and 8^th. They both went on to ivy league schools by the way)

3-Consider limiting membership to 400-500 paying members, with a waiting list of course. Donations will be accepted by non members.

The $5 million Vision Fund which Al is starting shall be used to connect the dots (oh god, another metaphor) to bring together a confederation of points of light to illuminate a New Mainstream of mental health. I suspect this new mainstream will spill over into political, spiritual, and the general medical scheme.

It is hard for me to define this Stream. It has something to do with Freedom and Placere (to serve) and healing and learning. Bert was cute in this area: “Wouldn’t it be horrible to go 24 hours without learning something?” However excellent was Kirsch’s presentation, he did not emphasize the biological & spiritual reality that ALL ORGANISMS TEND TOWARDS  HEALING THEMSELVES. We are all on a course of healing & learning. When you listen to master therapists such as Karon what you invariably hear is not their know-it-alls. You hear about their ignorance. They become the student; the patient becomes the teacher.

Best to all of you,

Start cracking about next year’s conference,

Sincerely,

JT, Chair