Conspiracy?

As has been pointed out before, it is kind of like the word "cult". Both are incitements to disregard something.

The attraction in conspiracy theories is that it provides simple answers to life's imponderables without making demands upon a person's cognitive energies.

Some guy on youtube is basically spreading the idea that Thomas Szasz and John Breeding are a part of some eugenics conspiracy.

Most important in understanding why what is going on is going on is the role of an interlocking directorate that shapes and dictates mental health care according to the logic of their own interests. The relevant government agencies, lobby groups, the community itself, organizations like the APA, the pharmaceutical industry, organizations that regulate practitioners, the legal system, form the locus of control, and whose interests are often profoundly inimical to those of the patients, and who despite their protestations to the contrary of having the best interests of the patient at heart, are self-interested.

Also of importance is the fact that state psychiatrists and nurses, other mental health workers, and people who are part of the bureaucracies of mental health, aren't autonomous agents and aren't free to think and conduct themselves as they please. They operate in an atmosphere where thought and expression are circumscribed. They are members of certain kinds of communities which exact conformity with the dominant ideology of their group through the intolerance of deviationism, whose job is contingent upon the adoption of the prevailing mental health ideology, who must adapt his/her thinking and practice as is expected in order to cement their place within the community and advance their careers, and who must internalize the idea structure of the institution they are a part of.

If they are directly involved in abusing patients, in an ostensible hospital setting, then they must learn to adapt psychologically and emotionally to such an environment and the exigencies of the situation by the uncritical acceptance of the meanings that structure life in that institution and that allow for the unhindered functioning of it and those who are enmeshed in it. They have to learn to accept the disease model, stereotypes of the mental patient, and to cultivate the habit of vilifying and demonizing the patient (albeit in ways that often escape recognition) as a means of reducing cognitive dissonance, and spinning and refining an assortment casuistries that allow them to function with the approval of conscience.

TBC

Such people who become initiated into such abusive environments and classes of people as are found on these wards might at first entertain reservations and object to what they see, but unless they get out quick, they will slowly be inculcated with the ethos of the community and become desensitized to the suffering and misery they see, and may even revel in the humiliation and abuse of the patient depending upon the disposition of the individual and the character of the interpersonal relationship with the individual patient.

As for those who don't work in direct contact with patients, this only facilitates obedience, the spatial and emotional distance serving to insulate such people from the human implications of their actions. Out of sight, out of mind.

On top of this, you also have the self-righteousness of the oppressors. The road to evil is paved with self-righteousness. Throughout history oppressive classes of individuals have had pretensions to moral righteousness, which is of course one of the things that makes such people impossible to reason with, because they have bought into their own propaganda.

On top of that, many people have just inherited the prejudices and secular superstitions of their age and culture, prejudices and superstitions that, because they come with the imprimatur of the experts operate under the auspices of the scientific and medical establishment, as well as recieved wisdom, are easily accepted by those incapable of exercising their critical faculties when confronted with the outer trappings of expertise.

Ethnocentrism is also a problem. People, as Szasz once felicitously pointed out, like to moralize with a backward gaze as if they were the generation that corrected former mistakes. The history of psychiatry, much like the history of the human race itself, is like a bunch of cockroaches going round and round a table seemingly convinced they are moving in a linear fashion (and this isn't dehumanization, but merely based on an observation of cockroaches when they go around a table, taken from a Tarkovsky movie).

Do u know what I think may be a bit of a conspiracy? the fact that Scientology promotes anti psychiatry and critical of psychiatry. I mean what better way to discredid thos psych survivors and peer movements that are coming up all over the place saying psychiatry is harmful, its abusive and a human rights violation than to get a big *strange* cult to promote it and make it look absolutely ridiculous. Yes I know Thomas szazz started up cchr (and I think he was trying to help) but there are big multinational players out there with invested interest , especially the big pharma industry. Who would very much like to discredid so called anti psychiatry and actually and critique of psychiatry and I guess what better way to do this is to get a cult who believes in aliens to promote the same thing , so everyone starts associating psych survivors, activists critical of psych, with this *weird* scientology group.
Ive seen it all over the internet, psych survivor groups being called 'scientologists' and ridiculed by this, even though they are not scientologists.
Any other opinions? These are just some thoughts I have. I believe there are ppl capable in powerful positions to do stuff like this. Anyone agree? Disagree? why? etc.

I just read this quote from this page, an article relating to a critical psychiatrist from australia (she is a psychiatrist) but questions the harm done by psychotropic drugs at this page:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/threa ... icle=11394

Predictably someone (anaminx) has raised the Scientology spectre.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which was jointly founded by Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, makes many valid claims criticising psychiatric drugs and relationships between psychiatry and drug companies. Many critics of antidepressants (myself included) would agree with many of CCHR's evidence-based claims. But most critics of antidepressants (myself included) are not, have never been, and never will be Scientologists.
[b]Robert Whitaker, author of 'Anatomy of an Epidemic', has suggested that the pharmaceutical industry may have encouraged Scientology to criticise them, in order to tarnish perceptions about critics collectively. I think he is probably right[/b].

Of course it is a conspiracy. Pharmceuticals are a scam just to make money. Psychiatrists, FDA, and drug companies all work together. People are just ignorant and uneducated so they don't know. They assume they have a diesease or chemical imbalance that needs to be treated with a drug.

can't believe I haven't already commented on this, thought I did. can't really6 make this up to my standard in talking about psychiatry but I just wanted to say hi, and yeah it is a conspiracy, a very shady one that nobody can really know what is behind it, maybe its archetypal or part of sociological engineering, maybe its about eugenics and the ongoing NAZI agenda as the psychiatrist got of war crimes because its typical for people to turn a blind eye to oporations of psychiatry, it goes unrecognised for what it really is...its a lie and that is tantamount to it being a conspiracy.

anyway I am not sure I am clear like the whole world is baffled into stupidity by psychiatry even existing, what is psychiatry? maybe nobody really knows they are shrouded in such indecent arrogance and ignorance...they claim to be acting for the health but will ignore the dangers of their drugs.

The pharmaceutical induatry and conflicets of interest is in the picture to how it can be so deceptive....funny enough talking to clinincians about the pharma industry they get confused and think I mean something completely different coz they see me through a lense see, it distorts everything I say to mean its part of a mental illness.

social control is a big agenda of psychiatry, they implant $#%^ on the media making mentally ill out to be homicidal....maybe some people will be pushd around enough that they want to strike out against the oppressors, I would direct it at stupid psychiatry.

do they even know what they are doing, they worship the drug industry sponsored teachings and go on their way practicing what they think is medicine.

Its a conspiracy as much as oil companies and the elite making the world how they want through greed and power, the craziest of intent on the world and shaping it

I used to talk about how the rockefellers are linked up to psychiatry and the NAZIS and all that, drug companies thaata are offshoots of IGFarbin who made the gas to kill the mentaally ill and jews, I think they actually tested it on the mentaally ill.

There is a lot we don't know and are not in a position to thouroughly investigate, its shroudedd in so much secrecy and occupies a dominant ignorance and passing people off to the shrinks and thinking they do a good job to keep unsettled people from going to astray from family etc.....we are dumbed down bhy the powers that be to really objectively understand the power structures at work here

yeah maybe it goes higher then we expect or it is a manifestation of something lower like fear of the extraordinary and different that everybody has to an extent, psychiatris there to forcebly change then into something different again and mold them into a medical label


I hate medicine in general western medicine and the $#%^ stirring that needs to be done to get alternatives on the map, there is a monopoly thaat exists with executives of the drug indsustry, a monopoly on the media and over our lives and we have been engineered to accept it and the media doctors etc as fact when all they are doing is the pharmacuetical industry dirty work.

sorry I couldn't say it any better

-- Sun Aug 25, 2013 1:38 pm --

My writing is $#%^ on here lately...think I done a better job writing to a psychiatrist that assists victims of crime and explained the crime of the clinic I want transferred away from, but it ends up like 6pages long and don't know if anybody would read it....

sorry for my trash talk

we are dealing with a pharmaceutical monopoly, whoever has vested interest in selling drugs and this is many powerful elite....psychiatrists arre too dumb to realise what they are doing, yet sometimes I think they should kknow better in determining insight into other peoples behaviour around them.

I believe that the psychiatric industry is borne of several things swirled up into one entity. I think also that there is a contiuum of thought/perspective and paradigm on the subject.

The following "ingredients" go into this "soup":

1. Iatrocapitalism: to "present a problem" medically and thus make a profit off of "management." If you don't "cure" the illness, you make money off of it. This is where Big Pharma comes in.

2. Eugenics-Not just the Nazi's but an entire school of people--believe that those called mentally ill are "unfit." Yes! The Nazi ideology DID FILTER into the psychiatric picture.

3. From Nazis and the medical models today, we get idiots like E. Fuller Torrey WHO by the way looks just like that character in "Blade Runner" who made the Replicants. EFT makes my skin crawl. "Mananagement" is the "gentler version" of the Nazi b.s.

4. Social Controls-as you have said. Some of this is inoccuous. As spaces get tighter and tighter, as more "soft" careers are borne, like more civil service jobs, as people get more and more tired of the economy and stressors and act out, as "security" gets tighter and tighter and outside influences control people rather than parental discipline, the meds "calm and direct" the person's behavior.

On a more serious note, paranoia, for example, is an anxiety that is instinctual. Perhaps the object of the paranoia isn't directly a danger, but the person having the paranoia KNOWS that there is something wrong with the world.

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I often think of the Controller in "1984" who keeps all of the old relics of the previous society and speaks of how efficient mankind is with their class systems and "soma." I think that many social controllers don't actually mean the evil that they dispense, but think that they are "helping."

Often things like ADD are a response, imo to the mind as it was back when we hunted and that ADD and ADHD is not "suited" to the "current thought patterns of today." The military is probably filled with folks who have learned to direct their ADD and ADHD into a "sublimated" direction.

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Now, I will say that some people "need" the meds because they simply cannot cope with the strongholds in place. Societies where there is a shamanic paradigm or where things go more slowly and there is "room to breathe" dont' have as many problems with people because things go naturally and not so much "cookie cutter" and urban as what we have today.

Some mental health professionals do mean well and do think that they are helping others, and I do think that some folks need extra support, like the Soteria House model. BUT I think that mental hospitals are dangerous. We need to change the entire system. Sometimes, if a person is in serious trouble, then I ask that they go to the hosptial, but only in extreme emergencies.

CHorn
Icarista