What We Are Not Being Told About Suicide And Depression

Shouldn’t researchers examine societal and cultural variables that are making us depressed and suicidal?

By Bruce E. Levine / AlterNet

February 15, 2015

For nearly two decades, Big Pharma commercials have falsely told Americans that mental illness is associated with a chemical brain imbalance, but the truth is that mental illness and suicidality are associated with poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration. And the truth is that American society has now become so especially oppressive for young people that an embarrassingly large number of American teenagers and young adults are suicidal and depressed.

In November of 2014, the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) issued a press release titled “Nearly One in Five Adult Americans Experienced Mental Illness in 2013.” This brief press release provides a snapshot of the number of Americans who are suicidal, depressed, and mentally ill, and it bemoans how many Americans are not in treatment. However, excluded from SAMHSA’s press release—yet included in the lengthy results of SAMHSA’s national survey—are economic, age, gender, and other demographic correlates of serious mental illness, depression, and suicidality (serious suicidal thoughts, plans, or attempts). It is these demographic correlates that have political implications.

These lengthy results, for example, include extensive evidence that involvement in the criminal justice system (such as being on parole or probation) is highly correlated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness. Yet Americans are not told that preventing unnecessary involvement with the criminal justice system—for example, marijuana legalization and drug use decriminalization—could well prove to be a more powerful antidote to suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness than medical treatment.

Also, the survey results provide extensive evidence that unemployment and poverty are highly associated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness. While correlation is not the equivalent of causation, it makes more sense to be further examining variables that actually are associated with suicidality, depression, and serious mental illness rather than focusing on variables such as chemical imbalances which are not even correlates (see AlterNet January 2015). These results beg questions such as: Does unemployment and poverty cause depression, or does depression make it more likely for unemployment and poverty, or are both true?

And the survey results also provide extensive evidence that younger Americans are more depressed than older Americans, that women are more likely to be depressed than men, and that Native Americans and biracial Americans are more likely to be depressed than other ethnic/racial groups. Again, while correlation is not the equivalent of causation, depression obviously cannot cause one to become young, female, or Native American. More rationally, researchers should be asking what is it about American society that is so depressing, especially for young people, women, and Native Americans?

These recent SAMHSA survey results provide a golden opportunity for a scientific and societal shift to reconsider what about American society and culture is resulting in emotional suffering and self-destructive behaviors, especially for certain groups. Below is a summary of some of the key statistics in these buried SAMHSA survey results.

Summary of Buried SAMHSA Survey Results
Involvement with the Criminal Justice System: In 2013, the percentage of American adults with serious suicidal thoughts: 10.7 percent for those on parole or a supervised release from jail in the past 12 months, 9.2 percent among those who were on probation, and 3.9 percent for those not involved in the criminal justice system. The percentage for adults with any mental illness: if on probation was 32.3 percent, if on parole or supervised release, 36.5 percent, double the percentage of adults not involved in the criminal justice system (18.3 percent). The percentage of adults with serious mental illness: if on probation was 9.4 percent, if on parole or supervised release was 13.9 percent, more than triple for those not involved in the criminal justice system (4.1 percent).

Unemployment: Among American adults in 2013, the unemployed were more likely than those who were employed full time: to have serious thoughts of suicide (7.0 vs. 3.0 percent), make suicide plans (2.3 vs. 0.7 percent), or attempt suicide (1.4 vs. 0.3 percent). The percentage of adults with any mental illness: for the unemployed was 22.8 percent, for part-time employed was 20.3 percent, and for full-time employed was 15.4 percent. Among adults with serious mental illness: the percentage for the unemployed was 6.6 percent, for part-time employed was 4.8 percent, and for those full-time employed was 2.7 percent. Among those adults having a major depression episode: the percentage for the unemployed was 9.5 percent, for part-time employed was 7.8 percent, and for full-time employed was 5.3 percent.

Family Income: Among American adults in 2013, serious suicidal thoughts occurred in: 6.6 percent of those from family incomes below the Federal poverty level, 4.7 percent of those with family incomes between 100 and 199 percent of the Federal poverty level, and 3.1 percent of those with annual family incomes at 200 percent or more of the Federal poverty level. Among American adults, the percentage with serious mental illness: for those with a family income that was below the Federal poverty level was 7.7 percent, for those with a family income at 100 to 199 percent of the Federal poverty level was 5.1 percent, and for those with a family income at 200 percent or more of the Federal poverty level was 3.2 percent.

Age: No suicidality results were reported for Americans under 18, however, among American adults having serious suicidal thoughts, the percentage: for those aged 18 to 25 was 7.4 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 4.0 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 2.7 percent. And among adults who made suicide plans in the past year: the percentage for those aged 18 to 25 was 2.5 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 1.3 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 0.6 percent. The percentage of Americans having a major depressive episode in 2013: for those aged 12 to 17 was 10.7 percent, for those aged 18 to 25 was 8.7 percent, for those aged 26 to 49 was 7.6 percent, and for those aged 50 or older was 5.1 percent.

Gender: In 2013, adult women were more likely than adult men to have: any mental illness (22.3 vs. 14.4 percent), a serious mental illness (4.9 vs. 3.5 percent), a major depressive episode (8.1 vs. 5.1 percent), and suicidal thoughts (4.0 vs. 3.8 percent). Among American ages 12 to 17, females were more likely than males to have a major depressive episode (16.2 vs. 5.3 percent) and a major depressive episode with severe impairment (12.0 vs. 3.5 percent).

Ethnicity/Race: In 2013, the percentages of adults aged 18 or older having serious thoughts of suicide in the past year were: 2.9 percent among blacks, 3.3 percent among Asians, 3.6 percent among Hispanics, 4.1 percent among whites, 4.6 percent among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, 4.8 percent among American Indians or Alaska Natives, and 7.9 percent among adults reporting two or more races. The percentages of adults with a major depressive episode: were 1.6 percent among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, 4.0 percent among Asians, 4.6 percent among blacks, 5.8 percent among Hispanics, 7.3 percent among whites, 8.9 percent among American Indians or Alaska Natives, and 11.4 percent among adults reporting two or more races.

Conclusions
The SAMHSA press release states that among American adults in 2013: 10 million American adults (4.2 percent) experienced a serious mental illness, 15.7 million adults (6.7 percent) experienced a major depressive episode, and states that “major depressive episodes affected approximately one in ten (2.6 million) youth between the ages of 12 to 17.” The press release then laments how many Americans with mental illnesses are not receiving treatment.

While these statistics in the SAMHSA press release are troubling, the devil is in the details of the actual lengthy SAMHSA survey results. These results make clear that suicidality, depression, and mental illness are highly correlated with involvement in the criminal justice system, unemployment, and poverty, and occur in greater frequency among young people, women, and Native Americans.

Shouldn’t researchers be examining American societal and cultural variables that are making so many of us depressed and suicidal? At the very least, don’t we as a society want to know what exactly is making physically healthier teenagers and young adults more depressed than senior citizens?

Psychiatry Now Admits It's Been Wrong in Big Ways - But Can It Change?

Wednesday, 05 March 2014 10:05 By Bruce E Levine, Truthout | 


When I interviewed investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in 2010 after the publication of his book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he was not exactly a beloved figure within the psychiatry establishment. Whitaker had documented evidence that standard drug treatments were making many patients worse over the long term, and he detailed the lack of science behind these treatments.

Whitaker's sincerity about seeking better treatment options, his command of the facts, and his lack of anti-drug dogma compelled all but the most dogmatic psychiatrists to take him seriously.

For Anatomy of an Epidemic, Whitaker won the 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award for best investigative journalism. This and other acclaim made it difficult for establishment psychiatry to ignore him, so he was invited to speak at many of their bastions, including a Harvard Medical School Grand Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he faced hostile audiences. However, Whitaker's sincerity about seeking better treatment options, his command of the facts and his lack of anti-drug dogma compelled all but the most dogmatic psychiatrists to take him seriously.

In the past four years, the psychiatry establishment has pivoted from first ignoring Whitaker to then debating him and attempting to discredit him to currently agreeing with many of his conclusions. But will Whitaker's success in changing minds result in a change for the better in treatment practices?

I was curious about Whitaker's take on the recent U-turns by major figures in the psychiatry establishment with respect to antipsychotic drug treatment, the validity of the "chemical imbalance" theory of mental illness and the validity of the DSM, psychiatry's diagnostic bible. And I was curious about Whitaker's sense of psychiatry's future direction.

Bruce Levine: In 2013, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Thomas Insel, announced - without mentioning you -  that he agreed with your conclusion that psychiatry's standard treatment for people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses needs to change so as to better reflect the diversity in this population. Citing long-term treatment studies that you had previously documented, Insel came to the same conclusion that you had: In the long-term, not all, but many individuals who have been diagnosed with psychosis actually do better without antipsychotic medication. Was it gratifying for you to see the US government's highest-ranking mental health official agreeing with you? 

Robert Whitaker: Shortly before Thomas Insel wrote that blog, I had posted my own on madinamerica.com, related to a recent study by Lex Wunderink from the Netherlands. Wunderink had followed patients diagnosed with a psychotic disorder for seven years, and he reported that those randomized, at an early date, to a treatment protocol that involved tapering down to a very low dose or withdrawing from the medication altogether had much higher recovery rates than those maintained on a regular dose of an antipsychotic.

I wrote that in the wake of Wunderink's randomized study, if psychiatry wanted to maintain its claim that its treatments were evidence-based, and thus maintain any sort of moral authority over this medical domain, then it needed to amend its treatment protocols for antipsychotics. I don't know if Dr. Insel read my blog, but his post did nevertheless serve as a reply, and as you write, he did basically come to the same conclusion that I had been writing about for some time.

I suppose I took some measure of personal gratification from his blog, for it did provide a sense of a public acknowledgment that I had indeed been "right." But more important, I felt a new sense of optimism, hopeful that maybe psychiatry would now really address this issue, which is so important to the lives of so many people. A short while ago, The New York Times published a feature story on Dr. Insel, noting that he had recently raised a question about the long-term use of antipsychotics, which had caused a stir in psychiatry because it contradicted conventional wisdom. That is a sign that perhaps a new discussion is really opening up.

In Anatomy of an Epidemic, you also discussed the pseudoscience behind the "chemical imbalance" theories of mental illness - theories that made it easy to sell psychiatric drugs. In the last few years, I've noticed establishment psychiatry figures doing some major backpedaling on these chemical imbalance theories. For example, Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times stated in 2011, "In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance' notion was always a kind of urban legend - never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists." What's your take on this?

 

The "disease model," as a basis for making psychiatric diagnoses, has failed.

This is quite interesting and revealing, I would say. In a sense, Ronald Pies is right.Those psychiatrists who were "well informed" about investigations into the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders knew it hadn't really panned out, with such findings dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. But why, then, did we as a society come to believe that mental disorders were due to chemical imbalances, which were then fixed by the drugs?

Dr. Pies puts the blame on the drug companies. But if you track the rise of this belief, it is easy to see that the American Psychiatric Association promoted it in some of their promotional materials to the public and that "well informed" psychiatrists often spoke of this metaphor in their interviews with the media. So what you find in this statement by Dr. Pies is a remarkable confession: Psychiatry, all along, knew that the evidence wasn't really there to support the chemical imbalance notion, that it was a hypothesis that hadn't panned out, and yet psychiatry failed to inform the public of that crucial fact.

The low-serotonin theory of depression has been so completely discredited by leading researchers that maintaining the story with the public has just become untenable.

By doing so, psychiatry allowed a "little white lie" to take hold in the public mind, which helped sell drugs and, of course, made it seem that psychiatry had magic bullets for psychiatric disorders. That is an astonishing betrayal of the trust that the public puts in a medical discipline; we don't expect to be misled in such a basic way.

But why now? Why are we hearing these admissions from Dr. Pies and others now? I am not sure, but I think there are two reasons.

One, the low-serotonin theory of depression has been so completely discredited by leading researchers that maintaining the story with the public has just become untenable. It is too easy for critics and the public to point to the scientific findings that contradict it.

Second, a number of pharmaceutical companies have shut down their research into psychiatric drugs [see Science, 2010], and they are doing so because, as they note, there is a lack of science providing good molecular targets for drug development. Even the drug companies are moving away from the chemical-imbalance story, and thus, what we are seeing now is the public collapse of a fabrication, which can no longer be maintained. In the statement by Dr. Pies, you see an effort by psychiatry to distance itself from that fabrication, putting the blame instead on the drug companies.

Challenging the validity of DSM is, in many ways, potentially much more of a paradigm-changer than are the scientific reports that detail how the medications may be causing long-term harm.

And recently, establishment psychiatrists have even been challenging the validity of psychiatry's diagnostic bible, the DSM. Last year, NIMH director Insel, citing the DSM's lack of scientific validity, stated that the "NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories." And psychiatrist Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-4 task force, has been talking about how the DSM is a money machine for drug companies ("Last Plea To DSM-5: Save Grief From the Drug Companies"), and Frances thoroughly trashed the DSM-5 in his 2013 book Saving Normal.

I think this challenging of the validity of DSM is, in many ways, potentially much more of a paradigm-changer than are the scientific reports that detail how the medications may be causing long-term harm. Our current drug-based paradigm of care, which presents drugs as treatments for the symptoms of a "disease," stems from DSM III. The APA [American Psychiatric Association] and its leaders boasted that when DSM III was published in 1980, that the field had now adopted a "medical model," and thus its manual was now "scientific" in kind.

In fact, the APA had adopted a "disease model," and if you carefully read the DSM III manual, you saw that the authors acknowledged that very few of the diagnoses had been "validated." The APA's hope and expectation was that future research would validate the disorders, but that hasn't happened. Researchers haven't identified a characteristic pathology for the major mental disorders; no specific genes for the disorders have been found; and there isn't evidence that neatly separates one disorder from the next. The "disease model," as a basis for making psychiatric diagnoses, has failed.

We are now witnessing, in Insel's statements and those by Allen Frances, an acknowledgment of this failure. And here is why this is potentially such a paradigm-changer: The foundation of any medical specialty begins with its diagnostic manual, which should be both reliable and valid. If the disorders listed in a manual haven't been validated, then you can't conclude they are "real," in the sense of the disorders being unique illnesses, and the diagnoses being useful for prescribing an appropriate treatment.

Thus, when Insel states that the disorders haven't been validated, he is stating that the entire edifice that modern psychiatry is built upon is flawed, and unsupported by science. This is like the King of Psychiatry saying that the discipline has no clothes. If the public loses faith in the DSM and comes to see it as unscientific, then psychiatry has a real credibility problem on its hands, and that could prove to be fertile ground for real change.

So do you feel you have accomplished your mission? And can dissident mental health professionals - who have for years been talking about invalid diagnoses, pseudoscientific theories of mental illness, and drug treatments that cause moderate and acute problems to become severe and chronic ones - now have reasons to be optimistic about their profession? Or are you pessimistic that the recent admissions of establishment psychiatry will result in substantive changes in treatment? 

My "mission" would be to see that our society would actually build a system of care that was truly "science" based, particularly in its use of psychiatric drugs.

This is a good question, and I vacillate in my personal response between guarded optimism and complete pessimism. From an intellectual, scientific standpoint, I think psychiatry is facing a deep crisis. There is an understanding, within psychiatric research circles, that the DSM diagnoses haven't, in fact, been validated. And, at the very least, there is a recognition that psychiatry's drug treatments are inadequate. In 2009, Insel wrote an article stating: "For too many people, antipsychotics and antidepressants are not effective, and even when they are helpful, they reduce symptoms without eliciting recovery." And I do think that my book Anatomy of an Epidemic has contributed to an awareness of the limitations of the drugs, and at least a discussion, in some psychiatric circles, that the drugs may be worsening long-term outcomes.

But in terms of accomplishing my mission, well, I guess my "mission" would be to see that our society would actually build a system of care that was truly science-based, particularly in its use of psychiatric drugs. I think this is such an important story for our society and one of extraordinary moral importance when it comes to medicating children and adolescents, none of whom could be said to have really "consented" to such treatment. I turned madinamerica.com into a webzine with the hope that by providing a forum for a community of writers interested in "rethinking psychiatry" and combining their voices with reports of research that provide a foundation for such rethinking, it could become a real force for change. We'll see if that happens, but our readership is steadily increasing.

I should note, as you say, that dissident mental health professionals have been plugging away at promoting such change for a long time. I hope that madinamerica.com is providing that community a forum for voicing their criticisms and making them known to a larger audience.

And now for why I can be so pessimistic. Even as the intellectual foundation for our drug-based paradigm of care is collapsing, starting with the diagnostics, our society's use of these medications is increasing; the percentage of children and youth being medicated is increasing; and states are expanding their authority to forcibly treat people in outpatient settings with antipsychotics drugs. Disability numbers due to mental illness go up and up, and we don't see that as reason to change either. History does show that paradigms of psychiatric care can change, but, in a big-picture sense, I don't know how much is really changing here in the United States.

I think dissident mental health professionals also have to confront this question. Can they be hopeful that their professions will change their ways, and their teachings? I think so, but there is so much that needs to be done.

Any medical specialty has guild interests, meaning that it needs to protect the market value of its treatments.

Is it really possible for psychiatry to reform in any meaningful way given their complete embrace of the "medical model of mental illness," their idea that emotional and behavioral problems are caused by a bio-chemical defect of some type? Can they really reform when their profession as a financial enterprise rests on drug prescribing, electroshock and other bio-chemical-electrical treatments? Can psychiatry do anything but pay lip service to a more holistic/integrative view that includes psychological, spiritual, social, cultural and political realities?

I think we have to appreciate this fact: any medical specialty has guild interests, meaning that it needs to protect the market value of its treatments. If it is going to abandon one form of treatment, it needs to be able to replace it with another. It can't change if there is no replacement in the offing.

When the APA published DSM III, it basically ceded talk therapy to psychologists, counselors, social workers and so forth. Psychiatry's three domains, in the marketplace, were diagnostics, research and the prescribing of drugs. Now, 34 years later, we see that its diagnostics are being dismissed as invalid; its research has failed to identify the biology of mental disorders to validate its diagnostics; and its drug treatments are increasingly being seen as not very effective or even harmful. That is the story of a profession that has reason to feel insecure about its place in the marketplace.

Yet, as you suggest, this is why it is going to be so hard for psychiatry to reform. Diagnosis and the prescribing of drugs constitute the main function of psychiatrists today in our society. From a guild perspective, the profession needs to maintain the public's belief in the value of that function. So I don't believe it will be possible for psychiatry to change unless it identifies a new function that would be marketable, so to speak. Psychiatry needs to identify a change that would be consistent with its interests as a guild.
The one faint possibility I see - and this may seem counterintuitive - is for psychiatry to become the profession that provides a critical view of psychiatric drugs. Family doctors do most of the prescribing of psychiatric drugs today, without any real sense of their risks and benefits, and so psychiatrists could stake out a role as being the experts who know how to use the drugs in a very selective, cautious manner, and the experts who know how to incorporate such drug treatment into a holistic, integrated form of care. If the public sees the drugs as quite problematic, as medications that can serve a purpose - but only if prescribed in a very nuanced way - then it will want to turn to physicians who understand well the problems with the drugs and their limitations.

That is what I think must happen for psychiatry to change. Psychiatry must see a financial benefit from a proposed change, one consistent with guild interests.  

Depression Chemical Imbalance Doesn’t Exist

Depression Chemical Imbalance Doesn’t Exist, Experts Say
by Elizabeth Renter
04/18/2013

What if you went to a crime ridden street corner, suffering from depression, and were told that a certain drug could change how you felt about things? What if you went to your doctor and were told the same thing? While the corner drug dealer and your physician might have different drugs in mind, they are essentially offering a similar solution—putting you in a “drug-induced” state to minimize your negative symptoms. Doctors, the media, and society say there is a chemical imbalance which causes depression, but a depression chemical imbalance doesn’t exist, experts say.

Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, a mental health expert from the department of mental health services at University College in London is taking a quite non-politically-correct approach in characterizing anti-depressants and other mental health drugs as just another dependency.

She says that although doctors, the media, and society in general has latched on to the idea that depression and anxiety, for example, are just evidence of a “chemical imbalance” in the brain, there is no hard evidence to support this.

“Scientific research has not detected any reliable abnormalities of the serotonin system in people who are depressed.”

While many people are convinced this is indeed their problem and therefore are okay with being offered a drug to solve the “problem”, she says the problem is that we are minimizing the seriousness of taking drugs to solve a “mental disorder.”

It is frequently overlooked that drugs used in psychiatry are psychoactive drugs, like alcohol and cannabis. Psychoactive drugs make people feel different; they put people into an altered mental and physical state. They affect everyone, regardless of whether they have a mental disorder or not. Therefore, an alternative way of understanding how psychiatric drugs affect people is to look at the psychoactive effects they produce

She says that these drugs, like anti-depressants, often produce symptoms of other, illegal drugs. The difference—these are prescribed by medical professionals and marketed to the masses in a more acceptable way.

In decades past, there was a stigma associated with mental health drugs. While it’s debatable whether this stigma was justified, there’s little doubt that it did make people think twice about taking medication for depression.

Now, however, we are convinced that these drugs are correcting a defect in the brain. The drugs are correcting an “imbalance.” But the problem is, that imbalance has never been proven.

Sure, you can argue that your medication makes you feel better, but wouldn’t other psychoactive drugs make you feel better too?

Dr. Moncrieff isn’t suggesting that people take cheaper illegal drugs, since they may have similar effects, but instead wants people to really get real about their anti-depression or anti-anxiety medications– what are they really doing to themselves when they rise each morning and pop the same pill, occasionally having to up their dosage because their body has developed a tolerance.

And with the number of Americans on antidepressant medication estimated to be 1 in 10, perhaps a critical look at this drug trade is warranted.

How America Breeds Mental Illness from Birth Until Death

The over-diagnosis and over-prescription that dominates the mental health care scene in the US contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than fixing them.  
April 10, 2013 | Al Jazeera | By Belén Fernández


In a recent article on the BBC News website, Professor Peter Kinderman - head of the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool - warns that the forthcoming edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual  "will lower many diagnostic thresholds and increase the number of people in the general population seen as having a mental illness".

According to Kinderman, the manual - scheduled for publication in May 2013 - constitutes a dangerous effort to pathologise emotions and other symptoms of human existence and will exacerbate the rampant over-prescribing of drugs that already occurs "despite significant side-effects and poor evidence of their effectiveness".

The practice of attributing emotional distress and other phenomena to alleged cerebral/biological abnormalities rather than to social and psychological causes, writes Kinderman, is particularly problematic: "Standard psychiatric diagnoses… do not correspond to meaningful clusters of symptoms in the real world" and can counter-productively result in "further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion" for their recipients.

Regarding the impending updates to the psychiatric manual, Kinderman notes that "[t]he new diagnosis of 'disruptive mood dysregulation disorder' will turn childhood temper tantrums into symptoms of a mental illness", while relaxed criteria for "generalised anxiety disorder" will turn "the worries of everyday life into targets for medical treatment". Normal grief will undergo conversion into "major depressive disorder". Additional cutting-edge maladies will include "internet addiction" and "sex addiction".

No guidelines are apparently provided as to how to go about diagnosing societies that obsessively pathologise routine aspects of individual life.

Societal diagnostics

Incidentally, the tendency toward over-diagnosis and over-prescription that dominates the mental health care scene in the US contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than rectifying them.

For example, it is not difficult to see how anxiety that otherwise would not be present can be generated by inculcating persons with the fear that something is always wrong with them and that it requires purchase of a substance, service, or gadget to fix - a process aided by ubiquitous advertising for antidepressants.
The profitable endurance of the depression industry in particular is presumably ensured by the very nature of contemporary society - not least by the isolation of the individual who has been conditioned to believe that self-made success and material gains trump inter-human bonds in importance.

To be sure, neoliberal policies dependent on the obstruction of communal solidarity facilitate a mass alienation from human reality and deprive individuals of psychological support networks enjoyed in certain other cultures.

It could be argued that alienation in the US begins at birth, an event too often characterised by scheduled Caesarean sections, the immediate removal of newborns from the vicinity of their mothers in defiance of natural bonding needs, and hospital distribution of infant formula encouraging mothers to simplify their lives by administering expensive and potentially toxic material  to their offspring rather than the free nutrition that is generally located in their own breasts.

And it is pretty much downhill from there.

The "socialisation" process of children increasingly involves fundamentally anti-socialising activities such as video games and other technological distractions, the all-pervasiveness of which renders the proliferation of attention deficit disorder somewhat less than surprising. Of course, this does not stop ADD from being treated by and large as an individual mental defect rather than a societally induced condition.

Energetic children are reformed into automatons via the fanatical prescription of pharmaceuticals with side effects ranging from depression to sudden death, while a cultural insistence on individual triumph and competition over collaboration likely contributes to such manifestations of emotional insecurity as the institutionalised practice of bullying at US schools.

Luckily for drug companies and other entities that profit from mental disturbance, the New York Times reported in February with regard to victims of bullying and bullies themselves that "researchers have found that [an] elevated risk of psychiatric trouble extends into adulthood, sometimes even a decade after the intimidation has ended".

Disconnecting from the human condition

My own personal experience with mental health issues in the US includes a prolonged panic attack I suffered in high school in the late 90s. Convinced for a period of six months that I was on the verge of spontaneous death, I would hyperventilate, unceasingly check my pulse, and hide in bathroom stalls.

After later living abroad for many years in locations less estranged from reality, I concluded that the attacks had been hypochondriac fallout of extreme anxiety over the possibility of stigmatisation by society for exhibiting any indication of physical or psychological weakness - such as anxiety itself.

Of course, the structure and habits of other societies and cultures can also have adverse effects on the human nervous system; however, the position of the US as global superpower means that its acute unhinging from humanity contains worldwide ramifications.

For example, the mass production of isolated persons lacking empathy naturally facilitates the frequent military devastation of populations abroad - a hobby that has been deemed more lucrative than, say, providing health care to US children .

The agricultural imperialism of US-based corporations like Monsanto the devil, patron saint of the genetic modification of food, has also proved an effective means of global population control, facilitating the suicide of hundreds of thousands of farmers in India.

Obviously, a nutritional reliance on modified and artificial ingredients and other materials that do not technically qualify as food does not bode well for biological - and therefore also psychological - processes. The quest for profit at the expense of the functioning of the body is further evidence of the US disconnect from the human condition, which is reinforced by schizophrenic electronic multi-tasking and the general reduction of interpersonal relations to a barrage of mobile phone beeps and Facebook notifications.

In my interview last year with renowned Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra, he commented on the contemporary deterioration of the human essence:

"Our capacity for uncritical love has been expended recklessly in recent years on the free market… This was the false god we were instructed to worship during the era of globalisation and most of us duly obliged, even the least resourceful and economically underprivileged peoples, dazzled by our new goods and gadgets, the routinely updated models of mobile phones… [Now] we can see more clearly how a tiny minority has enriched itself, leaving many others feeling cheated, and exposed to deprivation and suffering."

Professor Kinderman notes in his BBC News article on mental illness that therapy constitutes a "humane and effective alternative… to traditional psychiatric diagnoses".

Any truly effective therapeutic approach, however, would require a thorough examination of the inhumane context in which minds function - and, presumably, a comprehensive systemic rewiring.

"Fuck You CNN": How the Press Got It Wrong on Newtown

By Adam Serwer - MotherJones  | Fri Dec. 14, 2012

In the aftermath of the horrific mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut the immediate question was who had gunned down nearly thirty people, most of them children, before taking his own life.

Early reports, citing Connecticut law enforcement sources, identified the shooter as a twentysomething from Newtown named Ryan Lanza. A Facebook profile fitting that description was easily accessible, and social media users—from professional reporters to online onlookers—immediately assumed they had discovered the Facebook profile of the gunman who had perpetrated the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. News outlets including BuzzFeed, Mediaite, Gawker, and Fox News speculated that the account belonged to the shooter. Journalists from Slate, Huffington Post, CNN, and other news organizations tweeted links to the Facebook profile.

But it was the wrong guy. Press reports are now identifying the shooter as Adam Lanza. Ryan Lanza, identified as Adam's brother, has reportedly been questioned by police. According to the Associated Press, "a law enforcement official mistakenly transposed the brothers' first names." The result was that, for a few brief hours in the middle of the day, based on press speculation about the suspect's identity, social media users brought out the digital equivalent of pitchforks and torches, vilifying the alleged shooter's brother and haranguing Ryan Lanzas all across the intertubes.

Political cartoonist Matt Bors, who was Facebook friends with Ryan Lanza but didn't actually know him personally, was inundated with Facebook messages and friend requests as a result. "I was getting messages from people saying, why are you friends with a monster?" Bors says. Looking at Lanza's page, he saw desperate messages posted denying any involvement in the shooting, and posted them to his Twitter feed. "Fuck you CNN it wasn't me," Lanza's post read. (CNN itself did not post or broadcast the profile, though one of their reporters did tweet it.)

Here's the screenshot from Bors:

Meanwhile, other people named Ryan Lanza with Twitter feeds were deluged by followers and tweets. Facebook exploded with pages devoted to Ryan Lanza with screenshots taken from his profile. Several of them were some variation of this:

Or this:

But these are far from the only ones:

Very far from the only ones:

Lanza appears to have taken down his Facebook page*.

This isn't the first, nor sadly will it be the last time, that journalists and the masses jump to conclusions in the aftermath of a tragedy based on personal details from social media profiles. Shortly after the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, ABC reporter Brian Ross speculated on air that the suspect in that shooting, was the same person who had a profile on a tea party website. It turned out they were two different people who merely shared a common name. Ross was pilloried by left and right alike, and eventually apologized for"disseminating that information before it was properly vetted." Then another mass shooting that captured the nation's attention occurred, and lots of other people made the same exact mistake. The temptation to break the news of the shooter's identity overwhelmed the need to make sure they had the right guy.

*It was down for a while and is now back up.

Monsanto the devil’s Roundup Ready Crops Leading to Mental Illness, Obesity

(I believe that if Monsanto the devil isn't stopped, they will devastate the entire world. They are the most threatening and dangerous corporation on Earth.--jef)

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Crops Leading to Mental Illness, Obesity

Mike Barrett
Activist Post

It seems that the good bacteria found in your gut may actually be destroyed with every bite of certain food that you eat.

While antibiotics typically hold first prize in depleting the body’s gut flora levels, there may be a new culprit looking to take the spotlight which you may know as genetically modified food. 

Monsanto the devil’s Roundup Ready Crops Leading to Decreased Gut Flora

A formula seems to have been made to not only ruin the agricultural system, but also compromise the health of millions of people worldwide.

With the advent of Monsanto the devil’s Roundup Ready crops, resistant superweeds are taking over farmland and public health is being attacked. These genetically engineered crops are created to withstand large amounts of Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide, Roundup. As it turns out, glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is actually leaving behind its residue on Roundup Ready crops, causing further potential concern for public health.

According to Dr. Don Huber, an expert in certain science fields relating to genetically modified foods, the amount of good bacteria in the gut decreases with the consumption of GMO foods. But this outcome is actually due to the residual glyphosate in animal feed and food.

Dr. Huber states that glyphosate residues in genetically engineered plants are responsible for a significant reduction in mineral content, causing people to be highly susceptible to pathogens.

Although studies have previously found that the beneficial bacteria in animals is destroyed thanks to glyphosate, a stronger connection will need to be made regarding human health for this kind of information to stick. 

Poor Gut Flora Means Poor Health

As awareness grows, more and more people are realizing that poor gut flora often means poor health. Without the proper ratio of good bacteria to bad bacteria, overall health suffers and you could be left feeling depressed. In fact, poor gut health has been directly tied to mental illness, which may explain the influx of people being diagnosed with a mental illness. Not only that, but obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome have all been tied to poor gut health.

Ask Not for Whom the Drug Tolls

Wendy McElroy - January 25, 2011
The Freeman

“Fifty years ago, it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases, but it makes no sense to say so today. Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by legislation about the medicalization and demedicalization of behavior. Old diseases such as homosexuality and hysteria disappear. New diseases such as gambling and smoking appear.” So writes the iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.

Almost 50 years ago Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness. It changed the political framework in which mental illness was addressed by laying the foundation for a concept Szasz developed through a series of books, including The Manufacture of Madness (1970). That concept was “the Therapeutic State”—a collaboration between psychiatry and the State through which “undesirable” actions, thoughts, and behavior patterns were suppressed. Thus Szasz not only disputed the moral and scientific basis of psychiatry but also argued that modern medicine was an engine of social control, with pharmaceuticals as primary tools.

A new slate of drugs now addresses a wide range of so-called disorders, or dysfunctions, that former generations considered environmental problems or lifestyle choices: from obesity to attention deficit, from erectile dysfunction to social anxiety (shyness), from menopause to alcoholism. Indeed, laziness is now being discussed as “a neuro-developmental dysfunction” for which drugs are being developed. The current Therapeutic State may be best analyzed as a collaboration between modern medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, and the State.

The debate stirred by Szasz has muted. The medical establishment and mainstream media are now advocates of the Therapeutic State. Similar advocates dominate universities, studies, prestigious committees, FDA hearings, and governmental bodies. Since writing The Myth, Szasz himself has noted that “the formerly sharp distinctions between medical hospitals and mental hospitals, voluntary and involuntary mental patients, and private and public psychiatry have blurred into nonexistence. Virtually all medical and mental health care is now the responsibility of and is regulated by the federal government, and its cost paid, in full or in part, by the federal government.” Problems of everyday life have been medicalized, and people are viewed as having little or no ability to “cure” conditions such as alcoholism or drug abuse through willpower or change of habit. The focus Szasz tried to foster on the individual’s responsibility for his or her own dysfunctions has eroded.

Happily, a backlash against the medicalization of everyday life is occurring. Alas, it is being fought on the wrong ground.

In this regard, a fascinating book has just been published. Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction by Ray Moynihan and Barbara Mintzes is a work of investigative journalism that explores the close financial relationship between the medical experts who define and develop the “science” behind new dysfunctions and the $500-plus billion pharmaceutical industry that profits from treating them. For example, Moynihan examines the makeup of experts on committees that define dysfunctions for the extremely influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); it is from the DSM that “social anxiety disorder” derives. (Revealingly, homosexuality was only delisted as a disorder in 1970.) Moynihan observes, “The DSM has been criticised for the closeness between the expert committees who write the definition of diseases and the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs prescribed to treat them. One study that looked closely at the affiliations of the men and women on those committees found that more than half of them had ties to drug companies. On the committees revising mood disorders, including depression, the figure was closer to 100 per cent.”

In short, he constructs a strong case for endemic bias within the medical establishment in favor of drug companies and the creation of disease.

Another sign of backlash is the emergence of grassroots rebellions against specific “diseases,” such as the currently emerging “female sexual dysfunction,” and against the use of drugs, such as Ritalin, to “cure” attention deficit disorder in children.

A reopening of debate on medicalizing everyday life is to be applauded. But, unlike Szasz, the new critics, such as Moynihan, do not take aim at the Therapeutic State; instead they focus on the therapeutic industry—that is, the flow of money between the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical companies. The culpability of the government in the creation of disease is either marginalized or denied.

Other pharmaceutical dissidents tend to view the State as the solution, not part of the problem. For example, feminist activist Leonore Tiefer works through the World Health Organization to impose new legislation that promotes such “rights” (or entitlements) as “the right to comprehensive sexuality education” and “the right to sexual health care, which should be available for prevention and treatment of all sexual concerns, problems, and disorders.”

It is possible that critics like Moynihan and Tiefer will accomplish some good. Perhaps they will be able to reduce the widespread prescription of the powerful Ritalin to grade-school children. But without understanding the essential role played by the State in the medicalization of everyday life, critics can never strike at the root of the problem. Indeed, they may well worsen matters by shifting blame and giving more authority to the very agency most responsible for the creation of disease.

The Need for a New Focus

The focus of the reemerging debate needs to shift onto Szaszian grounds, onto an analysis of the Therapeutic State, in at least four ways.

First, it must be clear that government defines the framework for all medical practices within North America. Second, the protection offered to pharmaceutical companies should be analyzed as legal privilege. Third, the relatively new and influential “private-public partnerships”—a marriage between the corporate sector and government institutions—should be examined and exposed. And, fourth, the role government plays in “marketing” drugs through institutions like the public school system and social services must be examined.

Government framework. There is no genuine competition allowed in the practice of medicine or the administration of drugs. Both of these vital functions of society are monopolies that the government assigns to those who meet State requirements and abide by State rules. Thus the American Medical Association (AMA) is able to exert monopoly control of medical care, such as hospitalization, and has a long history of persecuting competitors such as midwives.

But licensing is only the most obvious way in which the State and AMA define medical care. There are many other labyrinthine ways in which the medical establishment partners with authority. In reporting on the AMA’s support of Obamacare, for example, the Wall Street Journal explained last year, “The organization wants to protect a monopoly that the federal government has created for it—a medical coding system administered by the AMA that every health-care professional and hospital must use if they wish to get paid for the services they provide. This monopoly generates income of $70 million to $100 million annually for the AMA. That makes the AMA less an association looking out for doctors and more a special-interest group beholden to Congress and the White House.”

FDA Approved

Legal privilege. All prescription drugs must be approved by the FDA; but, again, the monopoly privilege of being the sole legal drug dealers in society is only the most obvious one granted the pharmaceutical industry and hardly captures the extent of partnership. Moynihan chronicles a less obvious privilege in writing about “one of the biggest healthcare frauds in U.S. history. Pfizer was accused of illegally promoting an anti-arthritis drug for unapproved uses and, so, creating a health risk to users. Pfizer admitted to limited guilt and paid a criminal fine of $1.2 Billion and civil penalties of $1B.” Despite the hefty financial hit, not one executive was held personally responsible; no retribution was sought. The sentencing judge, federal District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock (Massachusetts) commented in his concluding remarks, “This is a case in which no human being, apparently, is going to be held responsible for substantial criminal activity by a corporation.” He notes that Pfizer absorbed the financial hit as a “cost of doing business” and still returned record profits.


Private-public partnerships (PPP). A PPP is a collaboration between government and the private sector in which a venture is funded (in part or in full) by tax dollars and operated through the private sector, or else the private sector raises capital under contract with the government to provide services. Although PPPs are most often associated with infrastructure projects, such as the repair of roads or building of bridges, this sort of ersatz capitalism is rampant within medical research and drug promotion. According to a 2001 study, “hundreds of millions of dollars” have been invested in the United States to promote partnerships around health issues, creating “thousands of alliances, coalitions, consortia and other health partnerships.” That trend has only increased in the ensuing years. Tax-funded research is commonly funneled through nominally private organizations or researchers. Conferences, studies, reports, and such are conducted at taxpayer expense. Arguably, such funding constitutes the greatest barrier to alternative, independent research.

Uncle Sam the Pusherman

Government peddling of pharmaceuticals. It is not merely that private for-profit organizations have used tax dollars to climb aboard the public health bandwagon. The government uses its agencies to create a market base. Just one example is the role of the public schools as a “pusher” of Ritalin—a form of speed more potent than cocaine—to millions of school-age children. Overwhelmingly, it is prescribed to boys who are “unruly” in class. A 2001 report stated, “If Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were in a school in Massachusetts today, they’d be drugged with Ritalin, according to many psychiatrists and other experts.” As a recent September Huffington Post headline asked, “Do 2.5 Million Children Really Need Ritalin?” Dr. Sanford Newmark continued, “What is going on here? Have millions of our children become so hyperactive and unable to focus that they are incapable of succeeding at school or dealing with the demands of normal life? Or are we creating an illness where there is none, calling normal variations in temperament and personality a ‘disease’ that requires the intervention of long term, and extremely profitable, pharmaceutical medication?”

Monopoly, legal privileges, the rise of PPPs, the use of tax dollars to create disease and eliminate competition, the peddling of pharmaceuticals through government agencies—these issues must be prominent in any productive discussion of the medicalization of everyday life. If the discussion focuses on corporate greed, then the Therapeutic State will have merely entered a new phase.

Who Gave You Permission to Notice Crimes by the State?

William N. Grigg - Monday, January 17, 2011

 Among the "warning signs" of  Jared Loughner's derangement, Time magazine instructs us, was his criticism of Federal Reserve Notes as "worthless." According to the custodians of acceptable opinion, this isn't a rational assessment of the intrinsic value of the Regime's ever-depreciating fiat scrip; it's a symptom of "paranoia," just like Loughner's reported preoccupation with government mind control.

Only those who are clinically deranged could harbor such anti-social views about the government ruling us --an institution representing the refined essence of benevolence, administered by beings of infinite competence whose digestive by-products emit the pleasant odor of freshly cut daisies. This is why the State's media auxiliaries (including the right-collectivists over at National Review) are largely ignoring Loughner's sociopathic indifference to the rights of other individuals while focusing tirelessly on his alienation from the government.

Perhaps Judy Clarke, Loughner's federally appointed defense counsel, can help cure him of his paranoid political delusions. Clarke is the go-to public defender for people accused of politically sensitive high-profile crimes.

A Time magazine profile of Clarke describes her as "particularly skilled at working with unstable clients who, without careful guidance, run a high risk of self-sabotage in what is a life-and-death situation." 

Clarke's clients have included Timothy McVeigh, so-called "20th Hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui, and Eric Rudolph. Although McVeigh was executed, Moussaoui and Rudolph are serving life sentences at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado. The same facility houses another of Clarke's notable clients:  "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and wounded more than a dozen others during a seventeen-year parcel bomb rampage.

Clarke persuaded Kaczynski to accept a plea bargain based on "mental defect." Although Kaczynski is said to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, there's compelling evidence that any "mental defect" that afflicts him is the result of his involvement as a test subject in a federally sponsored mind control experiment as a Harvard student in the late 1950s.

By any measure, Ted Kaczynski -- a math prodigy who skipped two grades -- was a brilliant and promising young man. After enrolling in Harvard as a 16-year-old, Kaczynski was lured into acting as a guinea pig in a series of abusive and damaging psychological tests supervised by behavioral psychologist Dr. Henry Murray. 

During World War II, Murray worked with the OSS (which would later become the CIA), developing psychological tests to evaluate potential spies. He also devised methodologies for interrogating POWs. His experiments at Harvard continued seamlessly from his work with the OSS.

Murray's study, which was funded by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Rockefeller Foundation, was entitled "Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men." According to Ted's brother David, this program was not a sterile academic exercise; he describes it as "a conspiracy of psychological researchers who used deceptive tactics to study the effects of emotional and psychological trauma on unwitting human subjects."
 

Dr. Murray, who died in 1988, "was known for his brilliance and grandiosity" in his professional life, continues David Kaczynski. "In his personal life, according to his biographer, he displayed sadistic tendencies. His research on college men bears a certain resemblance to his research on prisoners of war." 

Most of the pertinent details of Murray's experiments are inaccessible: Harvard sealed the files in 2000, insisting that this was necessary in order to protect the "integrity" of the project. There is cause for suspicion test subjects may have been given LSD or other mind-altering substances, given that the CIA had conducted experiments of that kind with other Harvard students. Whatever happened to Kaczynski and Murray's other subjects was sufficiently degrading and harmful to wring a guilty expression of regret from one of the doctor's assistants.

At age 17, the future Unabomber was one of 22  students who were required to submit to Dr. Murray a detailed description of their upbringing, their everyday routine -- including intimate details involving sexual fantasies and toilet functions -- and a description of their "philosophy of life." They were informed that another student would be invited to discuss and debate their moral values and opinions with them. 

Each of the subjects was taken individually into a white, over-lit room, placed in a chair in front of a one-way mirror, and tethered to EEG machines and other monitoring devices. The atmosphere, according to one subject, was akin to what one would expect in an execution chamber. Rather than having an amicable debate with a fellow undergraduate student, each of the test subjects -- perhaps "victims" is a more suitable description -- was subjected to lengthy, abusive harangues by a law school student who had been given a detailed psychological battle plan by Murray. The spectacle was captured on camera, and each victim was required to relive his humiliation on film.

This was sadism in the service of ideological ambition. The specific focus of Murray's academic research, points out environmental journalist (and fellow Harvard alum) Alston Chase, was to develop a science of personality "transformation." Murray "advocated implementing the agenda of the World Federalist Association, which called for a single world government," Chase noted in a detailed survey article published ten years ago in The Atlantic. 

In a letter to his friend and counselor Lewis Mumford, Murray wrote: "The kind of behavior that is required by the present threat [of nuclear war] involves transformations of personality such as never occurred quickly in human history." Through the marriage of psychiatry and sociology, Murray hoped to beget a hybrid discipline that would eventually create a New World Man suitable for citizenship in the World State he envisioned.

It is indisputable that Murray's Harvard experiments were a continuation of his work with the OSS.  Substantial evidence suggests that Murray's program was part of the CIA's MK Ultra program, in which test subjects -- often college-age men -- were used in experiments involving "sensory deprivation, sleep learning, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and hallucinogenic drugs to study various applications for behavior modification," recalls David Kaczynski. "One project was designed to see if subjects could be programmed to kill on demand. Experiments were conducted in penal institutions, mental institutions, and on university campuses." 

A 1967 internal CIA assessment documented that hundreds of professors on more than 100 college campuses were involved in clandestine experiments connected to MK Ultra.

For drawing a link connecting Ted Kaczynski's crimes with what he suffered under the ministrations of Dr. Murray, David Kaczynski might be accused of engaging in special pleading on behalf of his brother, who admitted to murdering three people. 
 
The same cannot be said of Sally Johnson, the forensic psychologist hired by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to evaluate Ted Kaczynski during his 1998 trial. 

While Johnson doesn't directly implicate Murray's experiments, she did conclude that Kaczynski's self-appointed mission as an apostle of "revolutionary violence" was triggered by something he experienced at Harvard. 

A psychological evaluation of Ted Kaczynski conducted prior to his experiences under Dr. Murray found no signs that he suffered from schizophrenia. It's reasonable to surmise that the "mental defect" invoked by his defense counsel was induced, rather than innate. 

Furthermore, there was nothing defective in Kaczynski's perception of the malign nature of the system as he had experienced it. His frequently expressed concerns "about the possibility of mind control," as Chase points out, were not "paranoid delusions. In view of Murray's experiment, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in an experiment that had treated human beings as unwitting guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally."

Murray's program was discontinued in 1962, the same year that Kaczynski graduated from Harvard. That year was a busy one for those employed by the academic wing of the Military-Industrial Complex, as they continued to toil away at various esoteric projects exploring the use of applied psychology to build the Total State.

At Yale,  Stanley Milgram was conducting his notorious  pseudo-electroshock experiments on obedience to authority. At MIT, Lincoln P. Bloomfield finished a report -- funded by the US State Department on behalf of the Institute for Defense Analyses -- entitled A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations: A Preliminary Study of One Form of a Stable Military Environment. (Bloomfield's report didn't envision a foreign takeover of the United States through the UN, but rather the creation of "supra-national institutions, characterized by mandatory universal membership and some ability to employ physical force" -- something akin to the vaguely UN-centered "coalition of the willing" approach used by Washington it is war against Serbia in 1999 and in its continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) 

Bloomfield's report contained the provocative and telling observation that building the world order he described would require "a grave crisis or war to bring about a sudden transformation in national attitudes sufficient for the purpose.... [T]he order we examine may be brought into existence as a result of a series of sudden, nasty, and traumatic shocks." This would have meant subjecting the population at large to the same  kind of "transformative" psychological trauma that Dr. Murray had prescribed to create the New World Man on an individual basis. 
 

Three days after Bloomfield submitted his report, General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, filed a memorandum for Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara outlining "Operation Northwoods." That document outlined the use of various potential false-flag terrorist incidents that could be used to provide a pretext for war with Cuba. In his book Body of Secrets, intelligence analyst James Bamford observes that the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify the Vietnam War was a variation on the Northwoods strategy.

The Northwoods memo offers a variety of potential provocations involving staged terrorist attacks.

"We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)," wrote Lemnitzer, casually spit-balling proposals that would result in the death of  innocent people. "We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots ... would be helpful." Lemnitzer's most audacious proposal -- which is especially noteworthy in the post-9/11 era -- involved the staged shoot-down of a civilian jetliner.

 The Northwoods memo was a battle plan for psychological warfare against the American population -- a menu of options for inducing the "sudden, nasty and traumatic shocks" necessary to bring about a desired political transformation. This was just one of several projects of its kind underway at the time. And Ted Kaczynski was just one of hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of people whose minds were being weaponized by the CIA's academic assets.

"The CIA's mind experiment program was vast," notes investigative reporter Alexander Cockburn. "How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded, with the precipating agent never identified?"

Interestingly, Gen. Lemnitzer helped ensure that those questions wouldn't be answered. In 1975, six years after he retired from the military, Lemnitzer was appointed by Gerald Ford to participate in the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, commonly known as the Rockefeller Commission. That body -- like its ancestor, the Warren Commission, and its descendant, the 9/11 Commission -- was intended to filter out any consideration of the most important questions, thereby banishing them from polite conversation. 

Whatever its clinical definition might be, the term "paranoid" as employed by the custodians of polite opinion refers to someone who notices things without official permission. People meeting that description might take impermissible notice of the curious fact that the same defense attorney who quietly ushered Ted Kaczynski off the stage is now being called on to perform the same service with respect to Jared Loughner -- and be prompted by that fact to ask some similarly unacceptable questions.

The reflexive call for fewer liberties

By Glenn Greenwald - SALON.com
Wednesday, Jan 12, 2011
 

 

William Galston -- former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow -- has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty:  namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties.  The lesson of the Arizona tragedy, he argues, is that it's too difficult to force citizens into mental institutions against their will.  This, he says, is the fault of "civil libertarians," who began working in the 1970s on legal reforms to require a higher burden of proof for involuntary commitment (generally: it must be proven that the person is a danger to himself or to others).  As a result, Galston wants strict new laws imposing a litany of legal obligations on the mentally ill, their friends and family, and even acquaintances, as well as dramatically expanded powers to lock away those with mental illness (with broader definitions of what that means).

Listen to what he proposes:  "first, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual’s mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance"; those reporting obligations should apply not only to family and friends, but extend to "school authorities and other involved parties."  And "second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others"; instead, involuntary commitment should be imposed whenever there is "delusional loss of contact with reality."  He concludes on this melodramatic note:  'How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?"

There's so much warped reasoning embedded in this argument that it's hard to know where to begin.  Galston seems to be unaware of this, but what motivated the reforms in this area were the decades of severe, horrifying abuses which those with mental illnesses -- and even those who had none -- suffered as a result of permissive involuntary commitment standards and prolonged forced incarceration.  Those who suffered mental illnesses were locked away for years and sometimes decades despite having done nothing wrong and despite not being a threat to anyone, while countless people who simply exhibited strange or out-of-the-ordinary behavior were deemed mentally ill and similarly consigned.  The psychitaric social worker Alicia Curtis provided just one example:  "There is also a large history of the forced treatment of homosexuality as mental 'illness'."  Indeed, involuntarily committing people in mental hospitals is a time-honored way for stifling any individuality and dissent; see this 2010 New York Times article on how China uses that repressive tactic.

Then there are the factually incoherent claims Galston makes.  He harkens back to some sort of Golden Age of the 1960s when thousands of people were incarcerated against their will who did nothing wrong -- as though that era were relatively free of political assassinations because all the "crazies" were where locked up where they belonged.  Of course, the opposite is true:  there were far more violent attacks on political figures back then (MLK, JFK, RFK, George Wallace, Malcolm X, etc.) than there have been during the relatively peaceful time beginning in the 1980s when involuntary commitment became much more difficult.

Worse, Galston assumes, without offering any evidence, that there is a significant correlation between mental illness and violence, but the reality is the opposite:  the vast, vast majority of people with mental illnesses never hurt anyone.  Writing two days ago in Slate, Vaughn Bell decried "the fact that mental illness is so often used to explain violent acts despite the evidence to the contrary," and documented:

Of course, like the rest of the population, some people with mental illness do become violent, and some may be riskier when they're experiencing delusions and hallucinations. But these infrequent cases do not make "schizophrenia" or "bipolar" a helpful general-purpose explanation for criminal behavior. . . . your chance of being murdered by a stranger with schizophrenia is so vanishingly small that a recent study of four Western countries put the figure at one in 14.3 million. To put it in perspective, statistics show you are about three times more likely to be killed by a lightning strike.

Yet Galston, pointing to Arizona, wants to lock all of them away.  The harm that would come from forcibly consigning thousands and thousands of people have done nothing wrong is so much greater than the harm from the once-every-20-years attack on a political official that the excessiveness of his solution is self-evident.

But that's the key point.  What Galston is doing here is what the American political class reflexively does in the wake of every tragedy:  it immediately seeks to exploit the resulting trauma and emotion to justify all-new restrictions on basic liberties (such as the right not to be locked away against one's will in the absence of a crime or a serious threat to others) and all-new government powers.  Every traumatic event -- in the immediate, emotionally consuming aftermath --  leads to these sorts of knee-jerk responses.  The 9/11 attack immediately gave rise to the Patriot Act, warrantless eavesdropping, a torture regime, due-process-free imprisonment, and ultimately an attack on Iraq.  High-profile, brutal criminal acts have led to repressive measures such as three-strikes-and-out laws and minimum sentencing guidelines, causing the U.S. to maintain the largest Prison State in the world.

And when the so-called Underwear Bomber unsuccessfully attempted to detonate a bomb in an airplane over Detroit at the end of 2009, there were immediate calls -- including from the DOJ -- for loosening Miranda requirements and the right to be brought before a judge, and even a bipartisan bill to deny legal rights even to U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil and accused of Terrorism:  all because of that one episode.  In response to that reaction, I wrote:

"Even now, every new attempted attack causes the Government to devise a new proposal for increasing its own powers still further and reducing rights even more, while the media cheer it on.  It never goes in the other direction. . . . every new incident becomes a pretext for a fresh wave of fear-mongering and still new ways to erode core Constitutional protections even further. . . . We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights."  

It's Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine applied to non-economic matters.

What lies at the core of this mindset is desperate pursuit of a total illusion:  Absolute Safety.  People like William Galston believe that every time there is a violent or tragic act, it means that the Government should have done something -- or should have had more powers -- in order to stop it.  But that is the reasoning process of a child.  Even if we were to create an absolute Police State -- the most extreme Police State we could conjure -- acts like the Arizona shooting would still happen.  There are more than 300 million people in the U.S. and, inevitably, some of them are going to do very bad and very violent things.  Thus has it always been and always will be.  The mere existence of bad events is not evidence that the Government needs to be more empowered and liberties further restricted.  Just as there are serious costs to things like the Arizona shootings, there are serious costs to enacting the kinds of repressive systems Galston envisions, yet people like him never weigh those costs.

Having people do bad things is the price we pay for freedom.  There is a cost to all liberty.  Having to hear upsetting or toxic views is the price we pay for free speech; having propaganada spewed by large media outlets is the price we pay for a free press; and having some horrible, dangerous criminals go free is the price we pay for banning the Police from searching our homes without a warrant (the Fourth Amendment) and mandating due process before people can be imprisoned (the Fifth Amendment).  The whole American political system is predicated on the idea that we are unwilling to accept large-scale abridgments of freedom in the name of safety, and that Absolute Safety is a dangerous illusion.  There is a new report today that a police officer in Tuscon stopped Jared Loughner's car for speeding shortly before his rampage, but was unable to search his car because he lacked probable cause to do so.  Obviously, that's regrettable -- if you're a family member of one of his victims, it's horrifying -- but the alternative (allowing Police the power to search whomever they want without cause) is worse:  that's the judgment we made in the Bill of Rights.

It may very well be that it's too difficult in some states to have a person involuntarily committed even when they're a threat to themselves or others.  That's a fair debate to have.  But that's not the case Galston is making.  Instead, he's just drowning in his own TV-generated emotions -- or trying to exploit those who are -- to usher in an amazingly oppressive scheme whereby citizens are required to inform on one another if they suspect someone is a bit mentally off, and the Government is empowered to put them away for a long time even in the absence of any threat they pose.  That's neither rational nor sober; it's hysterical fear-mongering of the kind we see after every incident like this.  It's why American liberties have inexorably eroded.  At the very least, there ought to be a voluntary moratorium on calling for new government powers in the wake of tragedies like this until the emotional intensity dies down and rational discourse can prevail.

UPDATE:  Several people made the point in comments that even had the police been able to search Loughner's car, that would likely not have changed anything, since the firearm he was carrying was legal.