It’s cheaper to kick somebody’s ass

From the erudite lips of SRK, author of Refusing Psychiatry Without Pissing Off the Neighbors.

“I think the distinction between sociopath and a psychopath boils down to this: If you’re a sociopath, the rest of us will sooner or later gang up to kick your ass; if you’re a psychopath, the rest of us will sooner or later gang up to “treat” you.”

Read the rest here

SRK’s blogger profile: “I became an attorney late in life primarily to advocate for the universal human right to refuse psychiatry.”

Follow him (He’s surely a him based on his taste in movies) on Twitter: @mentalhealthlaw

The deal of the century

I don’t know if Thomas Szasz has children, but for what it’s worth, here’s what he has to say about why so many parents would prefer to see their children as “mad.” I’ve often wondered about the exact same thing. Bearing up heroically under the strain of our child’s “mental illness,” we’ve stupidly handed ourselves and our child a life sentence because we shy away from looking at our own lives as a possible contributing factor to the problem. This quotation is taken from a new e-book, The Szasz Quotationary

Why do so many parents prefer to dispose of their young-adult children as mad rather than divorce them as unwanted? The answer is obvious and painful. Divorce leaves the son free to embarrass the parent, precisely what the parent wants to avoid; it also leaves the parent open to censure by kin and friends for “abandoning” his own child. Psychiatric disposition protects the parent at the expense of the child. The masks of diagnosis and treatment conceal the true nature of both the problem and the solution. It affects the separation of father from son that the father desires; at the same time, it casts the parent in the role of tragic victim, afflicted with a defective child for whom he “cares” with the medical treatment science has to offer.

Comment from an Amazon reviewer:

Tom Szasz’ thought has been an inspiration to me for a lifetime. To me, he is a true philosopher, one whose thoughts help you live. As a neurologist I saw patients with horrendous diseases like ALS and some who did not have ALS but thought they did. What I learned – among so much else – from Dr. Szasz is that I didn’t have to fret about mental illness. I could divide problems into organic i.e. real disease and no disease and not worry about mental illness, a metaphor. No disease means no disease. Fear, anxiety, “voices” (inner speech), depression, alcoholism etc etc etc aren’t diseases, should not be treated with more drugs, the loss of civil rights or the acquisition of money and fame.

His thoughts aren’t just about medicine. They are about thinking logically for oneself.

And they are distilled and organized in this Quotationary by a master of the art, Leonard Roy Frank.

Ten dollars AND it is voice enabled – this is the deal of the century.

John Friedberg, M.D.

The church’s attempts to hide its mental illness

Part II of Personal problems as just another consumer commodity

Thomas Szasz famously wrote: “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”

If a belief in God is evidence of a mental illness, then the church is mentally ill.

I listened to the audio version of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (FAPC) Pentecost sermon entitled Prophets Wanted: Apply Within. The minister was saying that prophets often make the church feel uncomfortable. It became very clear to me just how uncomfortable mentally ill people make the church feel, if the FAPC sermon is any example. There was not one mention, not one, of the mentally ill*, in the list of people the minister was inviting to be prophets. The minster said that prophets were, inter alia, gays* and lesbians, women, people of different nationalities and races. These groups of people may have a welcome, different perspective, but prophets are in a category of their own.

I am hugely ashamed of my church for failing to acknowledge where the real prophets are located. The church continues to play it safe by making sure that its prophets don’t get anywhere near the church to challenge its cherished notion that prophecy was something Biblical, not modern. There they are, these prophets, babbling to themselves in tongues outside the church while inside the church we are treated to sermons about Pentecost. If there was ever an example of mental illness in action, the celebration of Pentecost would fit the bill. “The first scientific study into glossolalia, that is, speaking in tongues, took place in 1927 when psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, while studying schizophrenic patients, linked glossolalia to schizophrenia and hysteria. He observed that glossolalists tended to have more of a need for authority figures and appeared to have more crises in their lives.”

If there is a link between glossolalists, schizophrenia and the founding of new religions, then William J. Seymour (Pentacostalism), L. Ron Hubbard (Church of Scientology), and George Fox (Quakers), are only a few outstanding examples.

So, there is no huge expectation on my part that the church will actually take me up on my challenge to advocate for the mentally ill. I suspect part of the reason is the close association between religion and mental illness, that the church knows about, but finds too uncomfortable to deal with. Real prophets upset the status quo. I am going to go out on a limb and say something as opinion that I have noticed all my life: There are lots of borderline mentally ill people in church. They try to disguise it, as best they can, but the closer you get to the altar, the more fervent and unusual are the people attracted to that sacred ground. It can be manifested as a love of symbols, rituals and reading the Bible. Put another way, these people’s chakras are open at the higher levels. So, perhaps it is no wonder that mental illness frightens the church because it risks exposing the fervent. It is like a politician going out of his way to vilify homosexuality, only to be exposed later as a practicing homosexual.

As a mother of a son who got labelled “schizophrenic,” I sure could have used the help of the church early on to see so-called mental illness in a positive light. The church is a potential ally, given what it is built upon. I’m not talking about the rock that the early Christian church is supposedly built upon, I’m talking about the church’s intimate affiliation with prophecy/mental illness/spirituality. Everywhere I turned when I was most in need, psychiatry and public ignorance ramped up my fear. I began to catch on relatively early that the church was merely echoing psychiatry because it is convenient for it to do so. Psychiatry practices social control. (I’m beginning to sound more like Thomas Szasz every day.) The church should ask itself if it is helping psychiatry practice social control when it advocates for supportive housing instead of supporting the individual in his quest to get answers to spiritual questions.

Shouldn’t the expectation of society be that “mentally ill ” people become well again and resume their rightful place in the community? Statistics for the mentally ill population show a different picture, that their numbers are increasing and their illnesses are becoming chronic.

I ‘m of the opinion that the tragedy that is playing out daily on the streets and in the current housing solutions, is connected to psychiatry’s insistence up until now that favors medication over understanding. Harvard professor Marcia Angell raises doubts about these drugs: “And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising ?”

In addition to doctors and hospitals, there is a vast network of social service housing projects that oversee management of the mentally ill. The mentally ill who reside outside of the influence of doctors, hospitals and projects, meaning, on the streets, either cannot or will not take their medication. As it happens, recent research is on their side. The medications are increasingly being challenged as ineffective, and their grotesque side effects are evident. But, who actually listens to the “mentally ill?” Apparently not the church.

We, as a society uplift freedom of choice, except for the mentally ill. We say “the customer is always right,” except when it comes to the mentally ill. We are supposed to value a person’s opinion, except when it comes to the mentally ill. We instead put down the mentally ill by saying that they have agnosognosia, the inability to recognize that they have a mental illness.

Mental illness is understandable if you view it as a response to psychic pain or trauma. The problem is, psychiatry has abandoned getting to know its supposed customers in favour of the much more lucrative diseased brain model of mental illness. You hear the mantra everywhere: Medications will help the mentally ill. Except, by and large they don’t. The side effects overwhelm any supposed benefits the drugs are supposed to deliver and lead to a life span that is twenty-five years shorter on average**. The false claim that medication is the best way to treat mental illness has been exposed on many fronts, most recently in Robert Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Psychiatrists has been so focused on pretending they are real doctors (able to prescribe) that they hardly even pay lip service to psychotherapeutic interventions.

If the church really wants to help the mentally ill, a positive perception about what mental illness is may go a longer way to helping the mentally ill than cleaning up the streets and putting people in housing where medication is mandatory. I am asking the church to re-examine whether institutional solutions are helping or hindering recovery of the individuals who are sleeping on the church steps.

There is an old Chinese saying, “Be Careful What You Wish For,” which means that what you get may be exactly what you didn’t want to happen and/or have unintended consequences. Churches profess to help the mentally ill in ways that can more cynically be interpreted as wanting the mentally ill off the streets as a social service to everybody else. They have convinced themselves they are doing God’s work, but are they? In the case of the mentally ill, it may never even occur to the church that the mission they were really put here to do is to listen to and uplift their own, which today would include the so-called mentally ill. Ask any minister, priest or rabbi how many mentally people they come across on a yearly basis who are lurking around the church entrance or creating disturbances in or around the building. They’re there because they are on a spiritual quest. When my son Chris was wandering around the streets of our city, looking dishevelled, fully medicated, living with his family and attending a psychiatric program, he often was seen hanging around a different church than the one we go to. Street prophets like Chris have not been welcomed at church since organized religion began to stamp out pagan beliefs and issue edicts about how the Bible is supposed to be interpreted.

Churches should rethink where their real expertise lies. Rather than align itself with mainstream psychiatry today, which it is doing by supporting the institutions over the individual, the church could be a leader as an advocate for the dignity of each individual.

The Village Voice has a sad story about two individuals who live together in a privately run adult care home for the mentally ill in Coney Island, New York. Churches, if you are reading this, ask yourselves, are you helping the people or are you helping to clean up the streets for the rest of us so we don’t have to pick our way over vagrants on our way to church? Put yourself in their shoes. If they are there because they refuse to take medication, then they have a point that needs to be listened to. If they are there because the family has abandoned them, then help families to appreciate and support their family members. Does it ever occur to someone to ask the customer what he or she would like? I doubt their solution would be a warehouse for the mentally ill in Coney Island. A great way to help would be to become the people’s advocate, to advocate along with the therapy and skills that they need to lead independent lives.

Here’s what the church can do to advocate for the mentally ill. I’m not asking it to do anything other than begin to change its perception of what mental illness is:

Read the words of the prophets and then ask why those guys were different than these guys today.

Ask how come Jesus cured the demon possessed, and yet psychiatry claims there is still no cure for schizophrenia or bipolar, only management.

Ask yourselves who you are serving.

Respect what the supposedly mentally ill person is telling you.

Learn more about mental illness by reading books written by people who disagree with the status quo. Do not take the view of mainstream psychiatry at face value. They are not your constituents.

Challenge the cosy relationship between pharmaceutical companies, doctors and research institutions through letter writing campaigns and other means.
_________________
*From Wikipedia: Following controversy and protests from gay activists at APA annual conferences from 1970 to 1973, as well as the emergence of new data from researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, the seventh printing of the DSM-II, in 1974, no longer listed homosexuality as a category of disorder. But through the efforts of psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who had led the DSM-II development committee, a vote by the APA trustees in 1973, and confirmed by the wider APA membership in 1974, the diagnosis was replaced with the category of “sexual orientation disturbance”.
**http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/psychiatric-drugs/death/mortality-in-people-with-mental-disorders/view

Remember the JetBlue guy?

Ex-JetBlue flight attendant pleads guilty under plea deal

Steven Slater pleaded guilty to second-degree attempted criminal mischief, a felony, and fourth-degree attempted criminal mischief, a misdemeanor. Under terms of the plea deal, he must enter a year long mental health program. During the program, he must take assigned medications and not get arrested. If he does not comply, he could receive between one and three years in jail.

He is yet another example of the myth of mental illness. He’s not mentally ill. His actions went well beyond the norm and, in this case, are a threat to the State. Psychiatry is a handmaiden of the State, as the last sentence in the following paragraph about Thomas Szasz explains.

“Mental illness” is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as schizophrenia, as an “illness” or “disease”. Szasz wrote: “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”[8] While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, and that may resemble a disease process (pain, deterioration, response to various interventions), this does not mean they actually have a disease. To Szasz, disease can only mean something people “have,” while behavior is what people “do”. Diseases are “malfunctions of the human body, of the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brain” while “no behavior or misbehavior is a disease or can be a disease. That’s not what diseases are” Szasz cites drapetomania* as an example behavior which many in society did not approve of, being labeled and widely cited as a ‘disease’ and likewise with women who did not bow to men’s will as having “hysteria”[9] Psychiatry actively obscures the difference between (mis)behavior and disease, in its quest to help or harm parties to conflicts. By calling certain people “diseased”, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents, in order to better control them.

___________________________________
The above quote is taken from Wiki.

*Drapetomania is a clinical term coined in the 19th century. “Though a serious mental illness, drapetomania, wrote Dr. Cartwright, was happily quite treatable: ”The cause, in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented.” (From the New York Times: Bigotry as Mental Illness Or Just Another Norm)

Political correctness just another form of social control

Kris Ulland’s recent post on Scientology involvement with Thomas Szasz’s Citizens Commission on Human Rights has been generating a lot of interest. I made a remark in one of my comments to her post that politics makes strange bedfellows. Organizations and politicians may disagree vehemently with another’s policy planks, but when their interests occasionally coincide they are more than happy to get into bed together to further a common goal.

Szasz’s reputation as an anti-psychiatrist is built on his disagreement with the idea that mental illness is a disease. I have come to the same conclusion myself, based on my observations of my son’s behavior. It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, but it is not a duck. It looks in many ways like a physical illness (slow and odd movements, incoherent speech, etc.) but it is not a physical illness. It didn’t really matter if Chris was on drugs or off drugs, the behavior was the same. I am glad to report that this is not the case now.

Wikipedia on Thomas Szasz:

While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, and that may resemble a disease process (pain, deterioration, response to various interventions), this does not mean they actually have a disease. To Szasz, disease can only mean something people “have,” while behavior is what people “do”. Diseases are “malfunctions of the human body, of the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brain” while “no behavior or misbehavior is a disease or can be a disease. That’s not what diseases are” Szasz cites drapetomania as an example behavior which many in society did not approve of, being labeled and widely cited as a ‘disease’ and likewise with women who did not bow to men’s will as having “hysteria”[9] Psychiatry actively obscures the difference between (mis)behavior and disease, in its quest to help or harm parties to conflicts. By calling certain people “diseased”, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents, in order to better control them.

Szasz, in his later book, The Manufacture of Madness (1970) writes:

The best, indeed the only, hope for remedying the problem of “mental illness” lies in weakening – not in strengthening – the power of Institutional Psychiatry. Only when this peculiar institution is abolished will the moral powers of uncoerced psychotherapy be released. Only then will the potentialities of Contractual Psychiatry be able to unfold — as a creative human dialogue unfettered by institutional loyalties and social taboos, pledge to serving the individual in his perpetual struggle to rise, not only above the constraints of instinct, but also above those of truth.

I worked for many years in politics at both the national and state levels and directly for a couple of political parties. I have a certain sympathy for Scientology, not because I am a member, which I am not, but based on the experience of being the brunt of political correctness when the going gets down and dirty in politics. The party in perpetual power where I worked, would float all kinds of accusations against the party I worked for – racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism are the big three that generally make middle of the road people, tempted to shift allegiances, scurry right back to their comfortable center line. Do I want to be a Scientologist? No, but that doesn’t mean that I disagree with everything they have to say. Their stance on psychiatry (anti-drugging and anti-coercion) is one of the things they stand for that strikes me as appropriate.

Thomas Szasz suffers from the same political problem as any person or organization whose opinions are not held by the mainstream. He is politically incorrect by North American standards. I may be stepping on a lot of Hungarians’ toes here (hi, Tibor!), but Hungarian’s (like many of their European counterparts) are more often than not politically incorrect. Europeans have a long history of being at the mercy of the state and of those who enforce state control. Who are Szasz’s critics? Institutional Psychiatry, of course and those who are under its power.

I began to really appreciate Szasz when I was looking for something positive to believe in about my son’s prospects. Institutional Psychiatry was hinting that Chris was a lifer. It is odd that this psychiatrist, who mainstream psychiatry kept insisting was a heretic, was actually a psychiatrist who seemed to put the rights of the individual first. He seemed very much on the patient’s side. From my limited experience with institutional psychiatry at the time, I never got the feeling that it understood (had empathy for) the patient.

Szasz believes that the label of schizophrenia is like being persecuted for being a witch.

A direct line of progresion can be traced from the witch’s marks to the so-called stigmata of the hysteric, and, most recently, to the signs which schizophrenics are made to reveal through projective psychological testing. Each of these “diagnostic” findings is used to incriminate the subject — as witch, hysteric, or schizophrenic; each is then used to punish him — by means of theological, medical, or psychiatric sanctions.

He then goes on to say that “While some witches may have survived dunking, no “madman” survives psychological testing.” (Read Szasz for dark humor, too.)

The figure of the psychotic or schizophrenic person to psychiatric experts and authorities, according to Szasz, is analogous with the figure of the heretic or blasphemer to theological experts and authorities. According to Szasz, to understand the metaphorical nature of the term “disease” in psychiatry, one must first understand its literal meaning in the rest of medicine. To be a true disease, the entity must first, somehow be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in scientific fashion. Second, to be confirmed as a disease, a condition must demonstrate pathology at the cellular or molecular level.

A genuine disease must also be found on the autopsy table (not merely in the living person) and meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association.

The above quotes are from taken from Wikipedia and directly from Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness, Random House, 1970.

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Roughly speaking, institutional psychiatry is imposed on you, perhaps by force of law, while contractual psychiatry is when the individual seeks out a psychiatrist and retains complete control over his participation with the expert.

The trouble with institutions, Part I

In late January 2004, when Chris was first hospitalized, Chris’s treating psychiatrist wrote that although Chris had a good initial response to the treatment, his condition had worsened over the past week to the point that he was in danger of harming himself. Chris had become disoriented while on a pass with a group of people and had returned to the hospital an hour later. Although no physical harm had befallen him, with the temperature outside hovering around –30ºC, he would not be going out again without one-on-one nursing support. Given the state his mind was in and the need for supervision, Chris was formally asked to withdraw from his university courses. This prompted his rapid descent into a deep depression. He stopped eating and drinking, believing that the world was going to end and resigning himself to his fate.

According to his doctor, his nihilistic beliefs had reached the point that he did not grasp that he had an illness that could be treated. The hospital made him an involuntary patient and deemed him incapable to make treatment decisions. He asked that either Ian or I be the decision-maker for treatment decisions, although Chris had a right to appeal these decisions. Chris had become preoccupied with a number of religious and existential themes and the doctor believed that he could benefit from speaking with his college priest since they had shared a strong relationship in the past. He added that Chris was challenging the finding of his incapacity to make decisions, so no new treatment could be initiated until a hearing took place, which could be as early as the following week.

Years later, reflecting on the psychiatrist’s request to bring in a priest, it occurred to me that this psychiatrist or another psychiatrist should have been the logical first person with whom Chris could discuss his religious and existential themes. What the heck was he a psychiatrist for, if not to deal with a patient’s religious and existential themes? What had become of the psychiatric couch and the empathetic psychiatrist well versed in religion, mythology and psychoanalysis? In Thomas Szasz’s view, he has become the prescription writer for the state. Unfortunately, in a psychiatric institution, the patient and his family give up freedom of choice. The institution operates on a one-size-fits-all mentality. If we wanted something tailored to our specifications, we would have to search for it outside the walls of an institution.