The following statements are true, but they don't set well with some people. You can discover for yourself that they are true.
There is no test for mental illness, there are only behavioral checklists. It is all subjective. Unlike real disease, which has a specific pathology, (an exact source and cause), psychiatry does not have this criteria. This is not medicine.
Psychiatry relies simply on the “opinions” of its practitioners. There are thousands of different views and ideas and opinions in Psychiatry, but no actual fundamental natural laws or axioms or organized body of stable datums. This is very observable. Any individual can directly observe this if not clouded by fixed ideas. Yet, psychiatry is called a "science" which imparts a prop to give it credibility.
An example: There is no biochemical imbalance in the brain. This is just a theory. Even the head of the American Psychiatric Association admits this in the July 11 issue of People Magazine. This rumor has been perpetuated by the drug companies. The FDA issued warnings about antidepressants and suicide in children last year. As recently as last week, they issued a similar warning about antidepressants and adults. The psychiatric community has worked hard to suppress such warnings, offering the dubious argument that this will scare people away from treatment.
So, psychiatry does not have a criteria on what constitutes mental health.
I will say this as my opinion. Mental health is similar to physical health in that it can always be improved upon...there are lots of shades of gray. Being able to "look" and observe on a more self-determined and uninfluenced level is a healthy aspect. Relying on the opinions of psychiatry as your basic criteria is an unhealthy mental aspect. The subject is too polluted and mentally unsound.
Here is some history.
If you are willing to "look", then read on.
First, just take a look at a point in history when a world view was changing. The first World War had just ended. It is the decade of the 1920's with "modernism" [Flapper girls, Picasso, dadaism, Einstein and also Quantum physics, Art deco, Jazz] Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin then Stalin were swiftly coming to power. There was American fear of the "new negro" with race riots, the Ku Klux Klan had about 2 million members in 1924 (very big in the north and both coasts). The "Red Scare" resulting from the new USSR and fear of foreign born citizens led to incredible injustices. The majority of city workers at that time were foreign born.
In the 20's, these people were also popular: Madison Grant, Freud, Jung, and some other psychologists.
Madison Grant Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the "racial history" of the world. This early racialist work expositing Nordic theory was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power in Germany, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant, "The book is my Bible".
Grant also was an avid eugenicist, advocating the extermination of "undesirable" traits and "worthless race types" from the human gene pool.
Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920's America.
Grant advocated restricted immigration to the United States through limiting immigration from East Asia and Southern Europe; he also advocated efforts to purify the American population though selective breeding.
He served as the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League from 1922 to his death. Acting as an expert on world racial data, Grant also provided doctored statistics for the Immigration Act of 1924 to set the quotas on immigrants from less-desirable countries. Even after passing the statute, Grant continued to be irked that even a smattering of non-Nordics were allowed to immigrate to the country each year.
A quote from Grant “A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”
EUGENICS is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through social intervention. Proposed means of achieving these goals most commonly include prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, selective breeding, In vitro fertilisation, and genetic engineering. Critics argue that eugenics is a pseudoscience. Historically, eugenics has been used as a justification for coercive state-sponsored discrimination, and severe human rights violations, such as forced sterilization and even genocide.
This practice of eugenics and sterilization in the US has continued very, very close to recent times in prisons and mental facilities.
1920’s: Controversies and publications in psychology over Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and Herman Rorschach (“inkblot” test). These fellows are popular in the 20’s. Ideas of other psychologists mixed with eugenics started to evolve and infiltrate as ideas into society. Freud, did bring home a point which was: “there is a part of the mind which affects a person adversely without the person being aware of exactly what it is that is affecting him.” Freud’s precept that ‘something unknown, hidden from view, adversely affects an individual’ is correct. But Freud (who liked his cocaine) digresses with an emphasis on sex and comes up with some weird ideas like “in love with your mother”. Freud saw the church as an enemy. Wilhelm Wundt had previously founded psychology in Germany prior to WWI. Ideas emanated from this school of thought which dehumanized man and viewed man as a soulless creature. This set the stage for later atrocities. Man was considered more of an animal, a beast without a spirit, that man did not have a higher consciousness. Man was considered a stimulus-response piece of meat. This made it more justifiable in the wholesale slaughter of peoples and “inferior races” as Hitler took control. Ivan Pavlov came out of this German school. [Pavlov is the guy who ‘rang the bell to make dogs salivate’. Man is an animal type approach.] In 1921, Lenin of the USSR gave Pavlov unlimited scope. From the infiltration of these dehumanizing ideas came many gross experiments at controlling people. It helped to “justify” man’s inhumanity to man in Stalin’s USSR. By the 50’s, the US was covertly using pain/drugs/hypnosis mind-control experiments for cold war military operations, ideas which had emanated from the earlier German and Russian concepts. From the inception of these early ideas came barbaric psychiatric practices such as electric shock treatments or prefrontal lobotomies (ice picks in the brain) or drugs. As recently as a few years ago, a Texas mental institution was administering strong, high-voltage electric shocks to a juvenile’s testicles “to prevent him from masturbating.” These insane psychiatric ideas have led to the development of LSD and Extacy. Currently, remnants of this false idea that man’s behavior is animalistic, all biological, is seen with the proliferation of psychiatric drugs in the marketplace – a billion dollar industry. Yet, even the FDA (which is often corrupted) discounts this biological/chemical aspect. The hoax of “mental disorders are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain” is just a rumor...even the FDA won’t approve that lie. A “chemical imbalance in the brain” is a psychological / drug marketplace rumor.
...and the subject psychology/ psychiatry is still today loaded with weird theories and odd-ball ideas and made-up illnesses which change like “fads” every decade or so. Psychiatry has no true axioms. Actually, the subject is lists of observations and studies and experiments; complex lists of advice; thousands of different people’s ideas or odd-ball theories which come and go as “fads”; and a huge financial and vested interest backing. It is politically and socially incorrect to speak against the subject of psychiatry even though it is a bunch of bunk.
Psychiatry and psychology has this “bent”, this underlying perspective which treats man as a beast or a stimulus-response creature. Here is one story of many. In 1970 the New York Times Magazine hailed Dr Jose Delgado, a Yale professor, in a cover story. Delgado had pioneered that most unnerving of technologies, the
brain chip—an electronic device that can manipulate the mind by receiving signals from and transmitting them to neurons.
“Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain."
Dr Delgado put this on record February 24, 1974.
Our government thinks a lot of this kind of evil. He was honored by Representative Sam Farr (California) on July 25, 2005 in the House of Representatives Congressional Minutes.
I feel for students having to take psychology courses. They are being duped.
Let’s face it. If you take any psychology classes, you will be presented with countless pieces of advice. The subject lists thousands and thousands of tiny pieces of advice on “how to live”. Also, you will be presented with lots of studies. Many of the studies might have some interesting data. That is fine. But what often follows is somebody’s brain-child idea or theory. So, the subject ends up with countless theories and ideas.
Comments
Scientologists are his source: http://www.answerbag.com/a_view.php/24242 http://www.answerbag.com/a_view.php/24243
by Anonymous on July 7th, 2005
self-determined / uninfluenced = uninformed and subjective. All sciences are works in progress and open to true improvements
by Grandma Roses - my avatar is my real dog on September 25th, 2005
by Rollerskates on April 24th, 2006
This answer would seem to prove quite well that there is indeed such a thing as mental illness.
by Anonymous on June 19th, 2006
Put down the crack pipe.
Mental illnesses are physical ailments (biochemical imbalances) whose symptoms display in behavior. Depression is as real as diabetes.
Tip: People Magazine and Scientology are NOT good sources of knowledge.
by snorkytheweasel on August 18th, 2006
There is a chance of increased suicidal tendencies soon after starting an antidepressant(AD) regimen. No responsible physician would put a patient on drug therapy for ANY illness, without some kind of followup built into the regimen. AD is no different.
by snorkytheweasel on August 18th, 2006