ICSPP Newsletter

International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology

Winter 2005 Issue

A note from Peter Breggin to those who love Kevin McCready

“Light a candle of truth and decency and let those who want to change the way they think come to you.”   Kevin McCready

            Kevin is gone, I’ve been told, and it’s true I haven’t heard from him in a few days.  Yet I feel his continuing presence as if he were larger than ever in my life.

            More than anyone else in our movement, Kevin McCready has led the way in creating drug-free, morally sound, voluntary, effective therapeutic approaches.   His San Joaquin Psychotherapy Center is thriving.  He is funding and guiding the creation of a similar drug free therapy center in San Francisco.   He is doing the most important work of all of us.   He is the least dispensable among us.  And now they tell me he is gone at forty-eight years old. 

            Kevin trained many people.   He educated others.   He established how to run a clinic for others to follow.   He helped keep together the members of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP).   He was leading the Center into the arena of alternative approaches to biological, materialistic psychology and psychiatry.  He was our greatest hope for offering caring therapeutic alternatives.

            If Kevin weren’t still so alive in my heart, this would be a time of crushing disappointment and inconsolable loss.   Instead I feel as if I’ve entered into an eternal discourse with him, not so much about psychology and psychiatry as about life.  This was a man whose enormous spiritual depth was matched only by his whimsical humor.   I’ll never forget the moment in our living room that he informed us that he was suffering from a case of “independent thought disorder.”  It remains impossible for me to think of him without smiling.   Perhaps unalloyed sadness will befall me soon.   I am still basking in his life.

            Kevin was trained as a psychologist and he loved the field.  For many professionals, that becomes their identity—psychologist, psychiatrist, etc.  That typically becomes a person’s identity but for Kevin his identity remains being a man, being a husband and father, being Irish Catholic, being a Boston Red Sox fan, and simply being honorable.  Professional identities can congeal like cement around our feet but Kevin pulled loose and danced free—free to pursue whatever was best for his profession and his patients.  At the same time, he never lost sight of loving his wife, Karin, and their two children, Daniel and Meaghan. 

            Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as threatening to most men and women as risking rejection from their peers, their fellow professionals.  Ordinary people will risk their lives in combat and sacrifice their lives to save victims from burning buildings.  But only a handful of people become willing to pursue what’s right at the risk of their professional identities.  When, as in Kevin’s case, his economic future was constantly in jeopardy, hardly a man alive will stand on truth and ethics.  Except for the support of our group, Kevin often felt he stood alone in his profession.  At times he was openly abused.

            Kevin was one part pure courage and one part pure determination, one part lover of God and one part family man, one part colleague and one part dear friend, one part leader and one part therapist.  I don’t pretend to know how many parts God put into making up the person known as

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About the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. The International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP) is a nonprofit, 501C research and educational network of professionals and lay persons who are concerned with the impact of mental health theory and practice upon individual’s well-being, personal freedom, families, and communities. For over three decades ICSPP has been informing professionals, the media, and the public about the potential dangers of drugs, electroshock, psychosurgery, and the biological theories of psychiatry.

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Kevin while he was on this earth but the sum total was one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever known or loved.

            My wife Ginger worked closely with Kevin when she managed the Journal, the newsletter, the conferences, and the list serve through which Center members communicate as a group by email.   This week she collected some of his gems from the list serve.

            Kevin was one of our most eloquent spokespersons on the limits and hazards of drugs.   He wrote in the list serve:

            I do not need to know details about any psychiatric drug in order to understand that it is neither necessary nor benign.   Emotional problems cannot be treated with chemicals any more than rocks can be cured with love (although I did once cure a ham with sugar).

            It’s like being asked if it is OK to beat your children with an aluminum alloy bat.  I don’t need to know exactly how they manufacture it or the relative size of the bruises it leaves to know that I am not going to recommend it.

            He clearly defined the difference between chemical restraint and treatment:

            What is no good is approaching problems in living via a reductionist, disease model.  Once we abandon this model (or at least orient to striving to abandon it) then the question about whether or not to take a sleeping pill, a drink or a Valium are secondary.  Once we realize that restraint is not treatment we will let people decide fully informed whether or not they want to live their lives intoxicated.  But it will not be called therapy.

            If someone wants to cope with life by taking the risk of ingesting a stimulant or depressant drug I say they are welcome to try. (They are not welcome to impose that risk on others.)  What we have to offer is the opportunity to assist people to work on their emotional lives, their personal conflicts, their behaviors, their souls.  This is incompatible with using drugs that suppress our humanity.  

            Kevin never preached to his clients and his San Joaquin Psychotherapy Center was entirely secular in it orientation but Kevin’s spirituality informed every therapeutic act.   When asked on the list serve his thoughts on the nature of hallucinations, he responded, “I think the fragility of the human ego is of necessity buffered from the direct experience of the divine.   I think psychosis is a state in which either the buffer has thinned or the ‘vox Dei’ is too forceful or compelling.”   On another occasion, he wrote of his psychotherapy center, “We create an environment for the human psyche to grow productively from its suffering.  This is why we have been so successful.”

            Two years ago Ginger and I pulled back at some distance from our years of total commitment to our reform work and ICSPP.  For a time we also withdrew from some of our closest friends including Kevin.   Thankfully we got back together at our October conference.  Only then we learned that Kevin was recovering from a heart attack.   He had long communicated to us his sense that like others in his family he would die young of a heart attack but we hoped that he had dodged the bullet and would move on with his life.   Then came the abrupt and hopefully painless end. 

            I feel truly blessed to have been in communication with Kevin by phone several times in the last few days before he died.   The last time I talked with Kevin shortly before his death, I asked him to remind me about some of his favorite authors and he mentioned C. S. Lewis.  After we heard about his death, Ginger found a book that Kevin had given her, Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.  Kevin had given the book to her as a source of comfort after the death of Steve Baldwin, the British psychologist who was killed in a train wreck in Scotland, another loss of another friend and indispensable person who was much too young to go.   And that reminds me of yet another of our friends and leaders who left us so much too early, patient advocate Rae Unzicker who died after a painful struggle with cancer.  But mostly, Kevin’s loss brings up the recent death of Loren Mosher, the great researcher and therapeutic innovator, the larger than life supporter of any and all victims of psychiatric oppression, whose relatively long and extraordinary active life we celebrated at our most recent ICSPP meeting.  

            I’m told that our next annual meeting will be dedicated to Kevin.  Perhaps then I’ll be ready to cry with my friends and colleagues; right now he still seems alive to me.  

            Kevin you’re not gone; we’re still hanging out with you.   Thanks for still being here for all of us.

              As I’ve said so many times before, “Hi, Kev, what’s doing?”

The ICSPP Conference, October, 2004.

Kate Shannon, M.A., L.P.C., L.I.S.A.C., C.A.D.A.C.

What happened to the counseling profession that anti-depressant and neuroleptic drugs are handed out for “mental illness” as readily as they are at this time?  When I began to study the nature of the mind in the 1970’s there was a sense that the profession could make a difference in the lives of people who felt hopeless, anxious or angry.  A variety of psychologies came out of that era including Gestalt, Rogerian, Jungian, and Adlerian methods.  Pierre Grimes, an instructor who has continued to have a great deal of influence on my own practice of counseling has developed the Socratic Method based on Plato’s Dialogues called Philosophical Midwifery.  I learned, as did many of my colleagues, that change could occur in some very deeply ingrained familial patterns through the use of dialogue and exploration of beliefs learned in childhood and that they continued to reverberate in themes throughout a person’s life unless they were addressed through the skill and art of the ‘midwife’.   We learned that there was always a reason for a particular problem that arose in a person’s life that had to do with early childhood learning and in seeking that reason we could therefore become freed from the feelings and cognitions that bound us to them.

My interest in the study of psychology began in this way.  This was prior to the onset of studies by private pharmaceutical companies whose medications are now the mainstream way to deal with mental health problems.   In the 80’s rush to find the medication that would fix the problem I somehow lost sight of my own excitement and became numbed with the drone of the new medical models of therapeutic interventions.  The outcome of the ICSPP Fall 2004 conference was for me, a re-awakening of the earlier excitement about the study of psychology and the hope that there are others who utilize methods other than drugs to address issues that have their cause, perpetuation and healing potential in the mind alone.   

During the 80’s, the ‘biological’ model of illness grew out of a theory created by the medical community that stated that schizophrenia, alcoholism, depression, anxiety and then later on ‘bi-polar’ disorder all represented brain disorders with genetic causation. The research supporting these ideas were funded by the pharmaceutical companies who were most likely to benefit from a theory stating that emotional disorders had a physiological origin and therefore required medical interventions.  The Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of psychiatry, was based on the premise that mental and emotional illnesses could be classified and depicted as diseases.  This presupposes that the many varieties of depression, anxiety and the like could be traced to an illness which could then be treated and alleviated by medication.

In fact, according to Laurence Simon, PhD, as long as we see mental illness as a genetic or brain problem, we will fail to deal with the psychological and social problems with which we all suffer in varying degrees.  Who asks the question of whether or not suffering is legitimate and a part of living, or an illness to be ‘conquered’ with medication.  He and most of the presenters at the ICSPP conference spoke of the skills that a therapist must have when dealing with complex human problems that have their roots in social, economic and political factors.  All so-called psychiatric diagnoses are but the adaptive responses of individuals living in what for them are desperate circumstances.     The meaning in the life of the person experiencing the problem is difficult to find when the symptom is covered up with medication. 

According to Bertram Karon, PhD, the relapse rate for many psychiatric diagnoses is higher for treatment with drugs than without medications and that psychoanalysis can be demonstrated to be the treatment of choice for even the most serious “diagnostic mental disorders.” Dr. Karon presented case material in a clear, humorous and compelling manner that made a powerful case that psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy be the first treatment of choice for those diagnosed with serious mental disturbances.

Mary Boyle, Ph.D. spoke of the Myth of Mental Illness and proposed that we re-conceive a description of mental disorders without putting them into a medical model.  Since medical language only describes a physiological symptom, a language to succinctly describe and discern the variety of nuances among the mental and emotional problems needs to be developed.  The diagnostic manual now in use does not begin to address these nuances.  For example, there has yet to be found an explanation for hearing of voices.  To lump all people who hear voices into one category of schizophrenia is to treat all people along with these similar behaviors as the same.  We need to discern the meaning of these phenomena in people’s lives such as the thoughts, feelings and experiences within the person who sees them as outside him or herself.  We must explore the underlying cause for having the voices such as the factors that facilitate the voice hearing, the content of these voices and what purpose they provide in the individual’s life. 

Dr Boyle states that when the meaning is uncovered the person then has a chance to make changes based on his new understanding.  Medications never alleviate these problems, they only cover them up. Sexual abuse, sleep deprivation, fasting, intense pain or torture, abnormal sodium levels, extreme social isolation in which the person is preoccupied with the inner world, bereavement, military action or severe personal crisis are factors that facilitate voice hearing.  The work of the therapist is to seek to define what the content of the voice is, the manner in which it is heard, whether or not it issues directions and whether or not it is abusive.  This information can offer insight into how the individual may have been treated in the past and what perpetuates the problem in the present.  The voices may offer positive reinforcement and may offer companionship, comfort or even positive guidance or may be directive or shaming in negative ways.  The purpose of hearing the voices as outside oneself may be to externalize unacceptable thoughts and remove responsibility for these thoughts.  The psychiatric community often seems to be more fearful of voice hearers and the more negative the voices the more likely it is that the patients will be medicated. 

David Healy M.D., author of “Let them eat Prozac,” addressed the problem of research and the criteria of the FDA of allowing new drugs into the market.  The FDA used to put safety first he states, now they get the drugs out as quickly as possible.  89% of prescriptions are ‘off-label’ which means that the drug is not approved for the reason it was originally developed. We don’t know the long-term consequences or the total potential for harm that these drugs can do, according to Healy.  The aggressive marketing of SSRI’s includes a complete withholding of data on suicides and suicidal tendencies. The suicide attempts were misplaced and the information was lost in the published research. Pharmaceutical companies are regularly hiding data from clinical trials as companies protect their profits and shares of the market.  Data suggests that there are higher rates of anxiety and the worsening of depression on SSRI’s. Homicidal behavior on Paxil is 6 X greater when compared to placebo while OCD is 17 X greater.  

According to Toby Tyler Watson, Psy.D. the chemical imbalance theory claims that receptors at the end of the neurons in the brain are responsible for the serotonin imbalance which is believed to cause depression. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI’s) supposedly maintains the appropriate amount of serotonin recycling in the brain. The problem with this theory is that there are hundreds of chemicals in the brain and all but a few have as yet been identified.  We don’t know how many chemicals the drugs are actually blocking because we have only identified a few.  The drugs create an imbalance, in many, if not all of these chemicals shutting the brain down and producing a withdrawal reaction. There is no pervasive evidence that receptors have anything to do with depression.  Watson analogizes that “it is like trying to map the moon with a store-bought telescope.”

All of the presenters agreed that there is no scientific data for the serotonin model and it represents a myth. Peter Breggin, M.D., founder of ICSPP and Executive Director Emeritus of ICSPP, suggested that the drug companies maintain that we should expect to have pain-free living.  By jacking up the brain levels of serotonin by maintaining them in the brain and preventing the release of these chemicals, the brain’s compensatory mechanisms take over, thereby placing the brain in an unstable condition.   There are hundreds of neurotransmitters and dozens of subtypes.  Any nerve cell could produce innumerable amount of neurotransmitters.  In fact, 95% of serotonin is in the stomach and only a small amount is found in the brain.   The act of disabling one of the body’s main systems is over-simplistic and unlikely to produce a positive effect.  No objective testing such as blood or urine samples can be used to determine the amount of serotonin in the system.  Dr. Breggin asks why we focus on neurotransmitters when there are so many other influences to consider and there is no proven correlation between serotonin reuptake and mental health.  . 

Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, M.D. also questioned the medical model of psychiatric diagnoses. There are no diseases he argues, only symptom clusters that we label as diagnoses for mental illness.  Patients are told that they have a disease as if it were an established fact.  The purpose of the disease model is to treat their problems the same as other biological illness with psychiatric drugs. Dr. Glenmullenused the analogy of Hamlet who would be diagnosed as paranoid, psychotic with major depressive disorder.  There are no medical tests to diagnose any mental illness as there are with real illnesses such as diabetes. 

Dr. Glenmullen reiterated what Drs. Healy and others had also contended: drug companies manipulated the trials that were to prove the safety and efficacy of their products. He presented data to show that in the testing of Prozac some subjects responded with anxiety and increased depression and were then removed from the subject pool. Subjects were pre-tested and only those responding positively to Prozac included in the final test trials. Most disturbingly data was removed from the final report that found that kids taking Prozac did not grow at the same rate as did the kids who took the placebo and that those on Prozac had a 25% shrinkage of their testicles.  Where, asked Glenmullen, is the ethical precept that proposes that “first do no harm.” 

Vera Sharav discussed the TMAP Texas Medication Algorithm Program for assessing children for mental illness.  The Bush Administration wants to assess 52 million school children for mental illness.  The state of Texas has adopted these guidelines and now 12 other states are following the drug prescribing recommendations for psychotropic drug prescription to children with perceived mental illness.  The president’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has recommended mass screening for school age children following these guidelines.  Contributors promoting this practice are Pfizer, Janssen, and Eli Lilly who have contributed a combined total of $565 million for TMAP and have recommended drugs such as Zoloft, Risperdal, and Zyprexa to be used on children found to be mentally unhealthy or at risk. In the last two years, 107,000 children in Texas have been prescribed psychotropic drugs at a cost of $167 million to the tax payers. 

Finally, George Albee, Ph.D. presented a paper that demanded that we professionals realize that the prevention of mental disturbance is the only really effective way of dealing with these problems. He suggested that reducing poverty, increasing equality for women, increasing family planning so that all children are born wanted, fighting the myth of biological causes of mental disturbance and creating a just and fair society where every child is guaranteed an excellent education would do much reduce the stresses that are the real cause of so-called mental illnesses.

Some final points made during the conference are worth mentioning:

·        Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in this country.

·        There has been a 49% rise in the use of drugs for ADHD, a 71% increase for autism and a general increase of 369% in psychotropic drugs prescribed for children and adolescents. 

·        16 million Americans are newly introduced to these drugs annually.

·        30 million people take an antidepressant annually.

·        Placebo pills have performed as well or better than the antidepressant drugs in clinical trials.

·        Studies have shown that with no drugs the individual was least likely to relapse on depression.

·         The average depressive illness is self-limiting and lasts 12 to 16 weeks without the use of anti-depressant drugs. 

·        Eric Harris, one of the boys involved in the Columbine High School massacre took Luvox one year prior to the shootings.  This drug has been known to create hostility, anxiety, agitation, mania and panic disorders.

·         Drugs may alter human behavior but can’t improve it.

·        225 thousand people die from medical treatment each year.

·        106,000 per year die from drugs alone.

Conclusions:

I have been a counselor for over 17 years and have studied the workings of the mind for over 30 years.  My specialty is in the area of addictions counseling.  I have come across no research that brought out the information on anti-depressant and neuroleptic medications such as the studies presented at the ICSPP conference I attended this year in N.Y.  In fact, I only found the organization after diligent search following the death of my daughter, Nadine from a medicine that she was prescribed to relieve her problem. It has always made sense to me that environment and learning, rather than biology, was the cause of emotional and psychological problems.  This conference has confirmed this suspicion.

The medical model is rampant and regurgitated by all but a very few in the field.  The serotonin reuptake model has been oft repeated and I am sorry to say, that some of my own referrals for psychiatric evaluation ended with the person on medication.  The reason for this fixation of belief without the support of scientific research requires a study in itself.  Partly it may be due to the assumption that authorities have the answer for all of us and it is easier for us to believe than to question them and come to our own conclusions. 

While working at one noted treatment center for addictions, I overheard the women talking about which new drug was on the market, how to get it and which doctor to ask for it.  This sounds to me like the same old theme of addictions with a new name.  The average man and woman on the street are taking and recommending the latest medication that offers happiness and serenity and the advertising on television is promising peace and joy from the newest pill. The healthy and normal feelings of distress that indicate to us that something needs to change in our lives are diagnosis of diseases and we are rapidly becoming a culture of addicted and numbed people.  How we could allow ourselves to be so fooled with so many terrible consequences is a real question worthy of research.  Our complacency makes us all culpable in the damaging effects of the latest ‘cure’ out of the pharmaceutical corporations.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE:
PSYCHIATRY’S NEGLECT OF THE VIETNAM VET

Paul Rubenfarb

In fall 1974, the U.S. humiliatingly surrendered and evacuated Vietnam; brought to its knees by a small Asiatic country; and withdrawal speeches by Ford and Kissinger stated that the 15-year war (leaving 60,000 GI corpses and a million native corpses) had served ‘no meaningful purpose’. There are newsreels of GIs in Vietnam strumming and singing the Dylan songs ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and ‘Masters of War’.

The motivational theses fed the troops before marching off to create corpses were contrived and changed with the weather - paralleled in today’s Iraqnam. The Viet troops were told they were upholding democracy. But from Diem to Ky and Minh to Thieu, a succession of dictators was the Saigon government U.S. fighting bolstered. Desertion became diluvial. When Ford offered an amnesty just before wars end, some 100,000 GIs came out of hiding to accept amnesty, but an equal number of deserters never returned from Denmark, Sweden and Canada.

Hundreds of thousands of Viet Vets were badly wounded, tens of thousands became the amputees, blind and paraplegic we see everywhere. The Viet Vet mental disturbance rate is over 70%, reflecting the famous sleepless Viet Vet guilt of creating endless charred corpses with flamethrowers, phosphor bombs (that crystalize flesh into calciferous mummies) and Harvard University’s prize invention, napalm - for what Kissinger called ‘no meaningful purpose’. Postwar years have understandably shown the Vets having difficulty washing the peasants’ blood off their hands or forgiving their own guilt. Viet Vet expectations of receiving forgiveness or absolution of guilt from the American public were utopian because Vietnam War guilt is a miasma plaguing the Vet and also the country that sent him to battle.

To re-evoke the 1975 climate, it must be remembered that America had no inclination to bestow parades on the returning Vets whom neocon jingos had little difficulty derogating as losers, weaklings, cowards. America averted its gaze (and has never really gazed levelly at the Vets - their hurt little eyes which never grew up) plagued by Freudian self-hatred at having irreparably traumatized a whole generation of 18 and 19 year old youth; haunted by the million Vietnamese corpses produced purely to enrich the military industrial complex which syphons off 51% of every federal dollar, prostituting to bombs, missiles, current wars (and future planned wars) most of America’s wealth.

The Viet Vets, suffering already more suicides than died in Vietnam (the highest suicide rate in any major statistical group in recorded history) have been referred to as the ‘lost generation’ who have been emotionally murdered. Returning Vets, battle-shocked and disoriented, were hurt by the scarcity of psychiatrists willing to see them. Psychiatrists harbored the same subconscious resentment complexes towards the Vets as the general public, and were often reluctant to make therapy appointments for a group surrounded by controversy in the community.

Comprehending psychiatry’s ongoing inadequacy towards Viet Vets requires perusal of the basic exegesis of 20th century psychiatry, how it gravitated further and further from ethical parameters to its present most prevalent mercenary’s role and function to browbeat patients into the ‘sanity’ of abject adjustment. While this downward ethical trajectory is outlined in further pages in wording primarily referring to psychiatry, it nevertheless applies also to the lamentably large therapist stratum that emulates and parallels psychiatry, however misguided.

Woodrow Wilson abetted the 20th century’s bacchanal in blood, saying in 1917 when he entered WW1 and plunged America into a political economy of perpetual militarism that, once the slaughter begins “we will never again know what fairness and humanity are.” WW1’s obscene profits had made America’s 60 banking-class owning-class militarist plutocrat families truly ruling class and, after the war, they geared up their colossal manufacturing corporations for maximum profit.

It was the postwar 1920s that saw psychiatry’s debut as a ponderous national magnitude, as the plutocrat factory owners installed industrial psychiatrists to emotionally engineer worker motivation for treadmill monotony under mononucleosis-causing 40-hour weeks along with heart-ruining speeded-up assembly lines, productivity and profit. A worker’s lagging workpace was diagnosed by productivity psychiatrists as ‘labor non-competitiveness disorder’ landing the heretic worker in weekly ‘work competitiveness’ therapy sessions, where he was breastfed with Darwinist society’s ‘triumph of the strong’ rat-race ‘work ethic’.

The ruling class soon saw the profitability of procuring psychiatry’s guidance for each workplace and school to indoctrinate the Darwinist system’s remunerative cannibal-competition ‘ethic’ and egotist rat-aggression motivation. Mercenary psychiatry oversees the inculcation of Darwinism in all age brackets - monitoring the veriest nursery school; specifying curriculums featuring nursery ‘competitive games’ which award gold stars to 3-year-olds assimilating superior rat aggression to defeat the frailer rat. Psychiatry orchestrates the nursery toddler’s first forced ingestion of dog-eat-dog sadism and learned cruelty, the initial hollowing out of his humanity with the ‘moral philosophy’ of cannibalism.

The Vietnam genocide in its later years was psychiatry’s crime. During Viet battles the psychiatrist was the morale fix-it-mobile, sweeping about entrenched troops administering ‘bravery enhancing’ mood pills. For troops breaking down in anguish over the barbarous gore, close to awol or desertion, psychiatrists administered guilt medication, enabling any beheading or village-burning to be committed guilt free, like diet snacks. Many millions of psychiatric pills drugged up a simulacrum of morale in the GIs years after belief in the slaughter had evaporated, and were it not for this mass chemical mind-tampering by psychiatry, they would have stopped fighting years earlier, saving 1/2 million Vietnamese and 30,000 GIs.

At war’s end Vets returned in bad shape to army hospitals and bases scarcely welcoming and cynically intimating and attributing undeservingness to the Vets (e.g. the Viet Vets were denied by army and congress the free college offered to WW2 Vets) and army psychiatrists conjoined this cynical ‘lesson teaching’ with the relentless circuses and subterfuges of misfiled diagnoses and misrouted records that harassed and humiliated many hundreds of thousands of Vets out of disability pensions desperately required for survival by their debilitated condition.

A high percentage of the homeless derelicts and prison populations (40% of which are seriously disturbed) consists of Viet and Gulf War Vets, tricked by the V.A. out of disability, whose ‘vietnam syndrome’ (a variety of schizophrenia featuring: apathy; collapse of belief in people or things; and loss of self-respect, motivation, libido and identity) was a condition worsened by psychiatry’s coercing on the Vets tons of brain-cell ruining psychotoxic pills. These lobotomizer pills permanently lower IQ, metabolism, peristalsis, heart rhythm, potency (effecting chemical emasculation) vocabulary, memory, problem solving, individualism and sociability - neurotoxic pills causing, even in moderate users, a high incidence of the irreversible morbid neurospastic diseases of tardive dyskinesia, akinesia, dystonia and dozens more.

Psychiatry’s criminal blueprint for emotionally engineering entire generations of livestock youth into self-destruction as GI cannon fodder and personality moulding vast populations of industrial mass-man proles into cog-like premature-aging 40-hour workweeks is its DSM IV (diagnostic and statistical manual). DSM IV virtually mandates for all acquiescence and satisfaction (happiness) complying and collaborating in the militarist corporate state’s ubiquitous injustices and atrocities by diagnosing as disturbance questioning viewpoints, disagreeing mentation and dissent - pathologizing as ‘mental illness’ all individualist expression, iconoclasm and critical inquiry outside of absolute conformity.

For example, the soldier questioning militarism’s authority to march him to strafe and. torch villages is diagnosed under DSM IV section 301.7 with ‘anti-social personality disorder’. Likewise student questioning and dissatisfaction (unhappiness) with rote and parrot-learning mass education or with curricula containing 25% valid knowledge and 75% ideological rationalization (of the emotional unviability of U.S. Darwinian economy’s cannibalistic cruelty) is diagnosed by DSM IV as ‘oppositional disorder’. Happiness has become mandatory to win psychiatry’s tyrannical ‘stamp of sanity’ - prerequisite for economic survival - essential to enrollment, promotion, hiring, diplomas, licenses, etc.

The returned Vet, in conjunction with labor rehab programs, alongside civilian youth, experienced psychiatric testing to implement the military-industrial economy’s personality-sorting and channeling into industrial and commercial labor pools - the great multitude being steered into coglike trades and categories of workplace mentality and monotony. Already by age 13, psychiatry has largely pre-channeled the entire future life’s drone itinerary of most students through ‘voc-tracking’ - commodified like livestock herding according to labor market projections. Such creative employments as photojournalists braving the gorges of Everest to create illustrious photos, or designers of art deco wonders such as the Chrysler Building, are utopian dreams materializing for the minisculest fraction of the work force.

THERAPEUTIC PERSPECTIVES FOR THE VIETNAM VETERAN

The 20 Century’s most extensively published analyst (after Freud), Erich Fromm, helped formulate analysis of sufficient breath to meet the unprecedentedly complex Vietnam type of schizophrenia, by drawing on the philosophic insights of such existential visionaries as Dostoyevsky, Marx, Kafka and Proust. In his seminal 1961 book Marx’s Concept of Man (Ungar Pubs NY) Fromm cited the corollary between Freud’s exposure of regimented society’s repressed libidinal aspiration to create, and Marx’s enucleation of this society’s epochal alienation of man from his potentialities. In this book (pg 77) Fromm observed how “Marx criticized capitalism precisely because it destroys individual personality...”. While Marx’s later life was overwhelmingly bound up in his predominantly economic work Das Kapital, it was in his more philosophical pre 1855 works that Marx set forth his fullest explication of exploitative industrialism’s brutal alienations and absurdities.

The validity of Fromm’s thesis that the underappreciation of philosophy by so many analysts detrimental analysis becomes apparent when we discern that half of the dilemmas plaguing immeasurably complex modern man (epitomized by the Viet Vet) are ultimately philosophical. Such a dilemma whose complexity requires supplementing analysis with reading and contemplation of philosophy, is that faced by the maturing adolescent. He is still a child, but if he stops maturing he continues on as his parents’ perpetual child. If he matures and develops and ventures forth as an adult to make his own life, he leaves an empty nest hurtful to his parents. The too frequent mechanical advice from middle brow analysts for patients to ‘leave philosophy to philosophers and let common sense solve these life dilemmas’ is--sterile. Indeed the enlightenment crucial for Viet Vets and other patients in these dilemmas is most fruitfully sought by consulting the existentialist philosophers, who carried forth and applied to dilemma-ridden modern man the threads of classic philosophy handed down from antiquity.

Dostoyevsky’s life among famed early Russian revolutionaries Herzen, Chernoschevsky and Plekhanov (who foreshadowed bolshevik 1917) inspired his existential masterworks The Possessed and The Underground Man where, long before Freud, he decried the naivete of Marx’s equation of socialist transformation with human emancipation. Dostoyevsky foresaw how liberation of man’s potential requires not just effectuating his deep libidinal need to make revolutions, but also requires man’s exploration of the sexual, melancholic and other emotional constellations inhabiting his unconscious - a vital self exploration later vastly propitiated by Freud’s discovery of analysis.

Franz Kafka’s existential works Letter to My Father and The Hunger Artist exposed the bureaucratic-sadistic state’s vain arrogations of sanity, rationality and superior importance over the inferior-worth misbegotten mass man who is to be pitied and blamed for his triviality. Kafka, by contrast, exculpated mass man, who he cast as victim: thrown arbitrarily on the globe and ‘sentenced to live’ in a sadistic emotionally unviable society; then ordered to fulfill a thousand responsibilities by a society he never asked to live in - his drone life entirely done to him. Kafka’s ego-collapsed prole-man poignantly mirrors the emotionally stunted Viet Vet.

In his trilogy Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust (who never grew up or left his boyhood room with its toy chest and teddy bears) extolls the salubriousness and therapy of melancholy (an emotional constellation and libidinal drive as important as the sexual) of dwelling in the nostalgic scenes of youth. Embracing Proust, the Viet Vet would, via daydreams, depart today’s rat-race aggression (trebled by overpopulation’s poisonous smog) where there is no longer enough love to go around. He’d dream back to pre-war birthday scenes, when he was cared about in 1950s art deco Miami and Coney Island with prodigious doo-wop and rock&roll - final decade of America’s golden age of urban civilization, before war nihilism and overpopulation sprawl demolished its architecturally immortal and classic downtown urban hearts.

Nostalgic Vets and like patients find escape from today’s hopeless rat race only by selecting the happy nostalgic scenes - with their parents’ smiling optimism for them - before bayoneting and machine-gunning turned them into disappointments. They need to embellish past scenes to make their parents more magical (as a watercolorist heightens the green of a pond or the pink of a sky) as when they visit parents in the cemetery, they realize they lacked time to cherish them enough - in consequence of nuclear-family-apostle psychiatrists browbeating patients into moving away from origins into exalted ‘independence’ as regimented proletarian labor units in the corporate-totalitarian mega-state.

Dostoyevsky’s auspications of deep libidinal revolutionary drives inhabiting man’s unconscious alongside the sexual and melancholic drives were touched on by Fromm and Freud, but more thoroughly explicated in noted analyst Robert Lindner’s book Must We Conform (Praeger 1960). The genuine revolutionaries subsequent to Dostoyevsky’s time are remarkably few - countable on two hands - and it is fundamental in beginning to understand them, to dispel the low slander disseminated by psychiatry and its patron militarist ruling class, that revolutionaries are a variety of failed misfits or declassed lumpen. Revolutionaries were consistently the gifted minds of their generations.

Marx, Lenin, Karl Liebknecht and Castro had law degrees; Trotsky was a linguist and noted historian; Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg held advanced degrees in economics and Che Guevarra was a physician, etc. As Fromm and Lindner intimated, analysis for the schizophrenic such as the Viet Vet benefits by patients’ grasping the revolutionary nuances infecting the very air of modern life. Man’s deep libidinal need for revolutionary expression has been sadistically repressed by societal and psychiatric bullying more even than his sexual aspirations. Revolutionary Thomas Jefferson stated that a revolution is needed every 40 years to dislodge society’s intrinsically accumulating ossification.

ANALYTIC PROSPECTS

The superficiality of non-Freudian psychiatry’s band-aid cures is poignantly revealed in the situation of Vietnam schizophrenia’s real or perceived loss of worth, loss of deservingness to receive love, attention, etc. Non-Freudian psychiatry’s deliberate prioritization of ‘treating symptoms’ inevitably fails to scratch the surface of this profound existential crisis of worth. Historically only analysis has worked, has meliorated disturbance in decadal parameters, because it alone emphasized patience to probe the labyrinthine unconscious etiologies that underlie such perplexing symptoms as absence of worth.

The fact that the Viet Vet, with a 70% disturbance rate, failed (was indelibly set back in life) generally yielded fewer accomplishments than characterized non-veteran contemporaries, and this exacerbates analyst efforts to re-establish worthfulness, since the prevailing Darwinist society specifically valuates the individual according to flat materialist criteria. It has often proven difficult for the Vet to procure engagements, marriages and friendships, as the Vet is less sought after because possessing less desireability and worth as they are understood in materialist society.

Frommian analysis, drawing on the brilliant existentialists (renaissance minds of encyclopedic erudition; synthesizers of the entire learned tradition of philosophy’s evolution who each suffered the devastation of mass wars and specifically fashioned their existentialism to discover hope for their own predicament) provides the uniquely cosmopolitan and sophisticated direction to facilitate the derepression and analytic progress of the Vietnam Veteran.

PERSPECTIVES

Perspectives don’t belong to lifeless void spaces.

You can compare yourself to lifeless emptiness,

but that comparison is your perspective.

You can’t escape having perspectives –

     You are not in an empty void or dead yet…

     and after death, is there lifeless void?

You don’t know and you do have perspectives.

Are perspectives linked in universal consciousness?

Love, hate, morality, sin, Heaven,

beauty, and ugliness –

     are defined differently in different perspectives.

Do truth and reality exist only in perspectives?

You exist in mine and I exist in yours.

Do Gods exist in ours and do we exist in Gods’ perspectives?

Can science…time or space…atoms and subatomic particles…energy…exist in the absence of perspectives?

Who you really are is according to you.

You can be anything that you imagine.

Are universes infinite and finite depending on your perspective?

If you are happy and there is no suffering in the universe;

then that is your perspective.

One thing can be a contradiction in terms of conflicting perspectives.

I can be happy according to my perspective,

but sad according to yours.

The same relationships can be loving, caring, and joyful,

or loveless and sad.

Perspectives!

July 6, 2002

By Harry Bentivegna Lichtenstein

2531 Hone Avenue

Bronx, New York 10469

(718) 231-0021

International Center for the Study of

Psychiatry and Psychology

Now Available on DVD

15% off for ICSPP Members

  The 2003 Seminar Conference

TREATING THE DIFFICULT CHILD: ADHD, BIPOLAR AND OTHER DIAGNOSES: CHALLENGING THE

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Peter Breggin, M.D.

“The Biological Basis of Childhood

Disorders:The Scientific Facts”

David Cohen, Ph.D.

“New Research on the ADHD Drugs:

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Brian Kean, M.A.

“The Dangers of Diagnosing Children:

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Robert Foltz, Ph.D.

“Bipolar, ADHD and Conduct Disorder:

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2004 CONFERENCE

CRITIQUING DISEASE MODELS OF PSYCHOSOCIAL DISTRESS AND IMPLEMENTING PSYCHOSOCIAL THEORIES AND INTERVENTIONS

Vera Sharav

Screening for mental illness: The merger of eugenics and the drug industry.

David Healy, M.D.

Manufacturing consensus in psychopharmocology: the end of psychiatry as a  Science?

Peter R. Breggin, M.D. ,

Violence induced by psychiatric medications: cases, questions and contradictions

Brian Kean, Ph.D.

The Risk Society and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD):A Critical Social Research Analysis Concerning the Development and Social  Impact of the ADHD Diagnosis

Pam Otis, M.D.

A Pediatric practice using no labels, no psychotropic drugs, and teaching peers

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Toby Tyler Watson, Psy.D.

The four false pillars of biopsychiatry: examining the scientific facts about the underlying assumptions of biopsychiatry, i.e. chemical imbalances, inheritance, genetics, and adoption studies.

Laurence Simon, Ph.D.

Therapy as civics; the patient and therapist as citizens

David B. Stein, Ph.D.

Parenting and treating difficult teens without drugs or make believe disease.

Dominick Riccio, Ph.D.

The role and therapeutic function of the father in the treatment of difficult and acting out children

Matt Irwin, M.D.

Treatment and reversal of schizophrenia without neuroleptics.

GEORGE W. ALBEE, Ph.D.

A Radical View of the Causes, Prevention, and treatment  of   Mental Disorders

NADINE LAMBERT, PH.D.

The contribution of childhood ADHD, psychostimulant

exposure and problem behavior to adolescent and adult substance abuse

CELIA Brown

David oaks

The continuum of support: Real alternatives and self-help approaches

Robert Whitaker

Anatomy of an Epidemic: the astonishing rise of mental illness in America

James B. Gottstein, J.D.

Psych Rights Legal Campaign Against Forced Drugging and How You Can Participate

Raymond DiGiuseppe, Ph.D.

Is anger adequately represented in the DSM?

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2000 CONFERENCE

PSYCHOSOCIAL SOLUTIONS VS PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS:

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   Your Psychiatric Drug May Be Your Problem

                                                  Presenters:      Peter R. Breggin, MD  (Chair)

                                                                           David Cohen, Ph.D.

Psychiatry, Malpractice, & Product Liability Issues

                                                   Presenters:    Peter R. Breggin. MD   (Chair)

                                                                           Pam Clay, JD. 

                                                                           Donald Farber, JD

                                                                           Danny McGlynn, JD

                                                                           Michael Mosher, JD

 The Treatment of Deeply Disturbed Children & Adults Without Resort to    

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                                                   Presenters:     Peter R. Breggin, MD   

                                                                           Kevin McCready, Ph.D

                                                                           Loren Mosher, MD

                                                                           Tony Stanton, MD

Children In Distress: ADHD & Other Diagnoses

                                                     Presenters:           Peter Breggin, MD

                                                                                   Ron Hopson, Ph.D.

Working With Very Disturbed & Traumatized Children

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What Is Wrong With Psychiatric Diagnoses: Biopsychiatry & The DSM

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Drugs In Psychiatry As A Socio-Cultural Phenomenon

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Why We Shouldn’t Label Our Children ADHD or Learning Disabled                                                                          

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Psychotherapy Vs. Drug Therapy With Children

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New Legislation, Children, and Medication Abuses

                                                       Presenter:             Hon.. Marion Crecco

And They Call It Help:  How Psychiatry Has Failed Our Children

                                                       Presenter:             Louise Armstrong, Ph.D.

Reclaiming Our Children

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                                                                                       Jake Johnson,Ed.D.

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OVER THREE DECADES OF ICSPP ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Stopping the worldwide resurgence of lobotomy and psychosurgery on adults and children, and all psychosurgery in federal and state institutions.

• The creation of a federal Psychosurgery Commission by Congress (1970's)
• Alerting professionals to the dangers of tardive dyskinesia in children (1983). Tardive dyskinesia is a potentially devastating neurological disorder caused by neuroleptic or antipsychotic drugs.
• Alerting professionals to the dangers of dementia produced by long-term neuroleptic drug use (1983).
• Motivating the FDA to force the drug companies to put a new class warning of tardive dyskinesia on their labels for neuroleptic drugs (1985).
• The withdrawal of a large multi-agency federal program to perform dangerous invasive experiments in inner-city kids in search of supposed genetic and biochemical causes of violence (the violence initiative) (early 1990's).
• The initial cancellation and later modification of a potentially racist federally sponsored conference on the genetics of violence (early 1990's).
• Alerting the profession to danger of down-regulation and dangerous withdrawal reactions from the new SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil (1992-4).
• Monitoring, and at times modifying or stopping unethical, hazardous experimental research on children (1973-present).
• Encouraging that NIH Consensus Development Conference on Diagnosis and Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to raise serious concerns about "ADHD" and stimulants for children.

While each of these critiques and reform projects was initially considered highly controversial, and while each was frequently opposed by organized psychiatry, most are now widely accepted as rational, ethical, and scientific. For example,

Psychosurgery is no longer widely practiced and not at all in state or federal institutions or on children in the United States; the multi-agency federal program aimed at using invasive biological procedures on inner-city children has been disbanded; the conference on the genetics of violence was delayed and then vastly modified; all experts now recognize the dangers of tardive dyskinesia in children; many researchers have confirmed that the neuroleptic drugs produce dementia, and experienced doctors now recognize the potential for dangerous withdrawal effects from the SSRIs.

      Become a member by mailing a $25 check or money order (U.S. funds) ($35 U.S. dollars if mailing address is international). Check or money order should be made out to ICSPP. An additional tax-deductible donation can be added, and would be deeply appreciated.

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ICSPP owns and edits Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry published by Springer Publishing. A subscription to EHPP is $52.00 and can be ordered by clicking on “Journal” on our website (www.icspp.org). However, if you subscribe simultaneously with your dues payment the total of dues and subscription is $90.00 ($110.00 outside of the USA), a savings of $12.00. EHPP is vital both to those who seek to read, write, and publish on issues critical to institutional psychiatry as well as to the life of ICSPP as a scientific and educational institution. If paying by check please indicate that your payment is for both dues and subscription as well as any donation you care to make. Thank you.

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