Fifth Cavalry or Fifth Column?
Examining Psychiatry’s Role in Our Lives
by Steven Ferry
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 20, 2004



 

What do genocide by the Nazis in Europe, by the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo; suicidal terrorists; shooting rampages in our schools; spiraling crime rates and an increasingly amoral society all have in common? The same group, apparently, that has managed to kill twice as many Americans under its direct care between 1950 and 1990 alone as have died in all the wars we ever engaged in.
 
Although the group is highly visible, it makes itself invisible by engaging in countless activities that are too incredible to be believed. Anyone pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes is usually ignored because nothing could be so off base and yet remain in a position of authority today.
 
Explaining his excesses, Adolph Hitler once boasted that the more outrageous the deed, the less people would want or be able to believe it. We are not, today, devastated by economic collapse as the Germans were in 1933; we do not live in a police state where all the media is controlled by the government. Most of us are blessed with a sufficiently high IQ not to fall for the kind of diatribes expressed by Neo-Nazis and similar groups today. So we can surely think for ourselves and see when the wool has been pulled over our eyes. But supposing the data we have been fed as reasonable, and which we use to reach our conclusions, is actually flawed? Would we then necessarily be able to recognize what may be the greatest hoax in the last eight hundred years?
 
Let’s Be Rude—Let’s Name Names

This group of individuals (150,000 of them around the world) has introduced itself into almost every facet of our lives, changing the way we think and view our selves and life as a whole. It has used billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to finance itself. It uses its own ineffectiveness as evidence that more government allocations are required to combat “the problem,” which itself didn’t exist until this group materialized two centuries ago and stated there was a problem. Their actions have resulted in multiple real problems in society.
 
How many failed launches would the government and taxpayers allow before they told NASA that enough was enough? Yet this sacred group, known collectively as “psychs” — psychiatrists and psychologists (and their cousins, mental health workers and counselors) — has had nothing but failed launches since it started. Before anyone rejects this notion, and for the sake of argument, let’s just suppose that psychs had taken a wrong turn right from the get-go? Suppose man isn’t just an animal that can be cured of ills with chemicals and Pavlovian coercions? Wouldn’t that be something to consider, bearing in mind how deeply these subjects and their practitioners affect our lives? If this notion turns out to be true, then it might explain why psychs are hard put to achieve the improvements in man’s condition that one would expect from a science of the mind.
 
As you consider the information that follows, keep in mind words of wisdom from Schopenhauer, the 19th Century German philosopher: “All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”  Maybe by the end of this article, you can skip straight to the third stage.
 
A Pretend Science

From the moment Wilhelm Wundt, professor of psychology at Leipzig University, Germany, declared the study of the spirit (psyche-ology) a futile endeavor in 1879, the rest of the world has been led to believe by psychs that man was no more than an animal responding to stimuli from the environment—in other words, a victim. Although it shocked the religious majority at the time, who believed that man had a spiritual dimension and was responsible for his own actions, the idea was far from new. Materialism had been on the rise for two centuries. A pivotal change occurred in 1865 when a Swiss psychiatrist, Wilhelm Griesinger, asserted that, because most nerve cells were in the brain, all mental problems must be brain problems. In other words, the mind was the brain and the software was really hardware.
 
The concept of a field of study that denies the validity of the very field itself, is a challenging position to hold, akin to an auto mechanic denying the very existence of the combustion engine. It is certainly an interesting approach to formulating a science. The nebulous nature of things spiritual and mental, however, lends itself to a trusting acceptance of any who would stand and say, “I am an Authority.”
 
Thus it was that Wundt’s experimental psychology, followed in the late 1890s by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, began a largely unchallenged “science” that has moved into every facet of our society today. Freud, whose claims that man’s behavior was the result of sexual repressions and that man’s neuroses were caused by his morale codes, was instrumental in popularizing and forwarding the new “science,” as he called it. He also rejected religion as “obsolete,” a collection of superstitions and the “universal obsession neurosis.” Unfortunately, he neither conducted experiments nor published his findings, two critical requirements in any science.
 
Freud did publish six case histories during his fifty-six years of psychoanalyzing. He falsely claimed each patient had been cured. The cocaine that he sniffed, injected and smoked could have influenced Freud’s thought processes. He claimed cocaine cured his depression and he promoted its benefits to others. Freud suffered from psychosomatic illnesses and was what psychs today call “paranoid” about his competitors harming him. His theories (many of which he lifted from others without credit) were so complex that his followers relied upon him for interpretation. Anyone asking for proof of his theories he dismissed as psychologically impaired for “resisting” his ideas. Incidentally, eight of his associates killed themselves. Freud, hailed as the grandfather of psychology, continues to be a model for psychs today.
 
Whatever Freud was doing, it was not a science. Physics is a science. There is only one theory of gravity, for instance, amply demonstrated in fact and with no dissenting opinions. Today, the “science” of psychiatry and psychology has grown into no less than two hundred and fifty different theories about the mind, each one reportedly better than the other and none able to cure anything according to the practitioners themselves. What a mess our cars would be in if the million mechanics around the country each had a differing opinion about how to fix a blown gasket. And if the National Association of Mechanics claimed blown gaskets were not susceptible to any remedies, but that another government grant of $50 billion was vital for research purposes, if cars were to continue on the road.
 
Assuming, however, that the good German professors had chanced upon the real nature of man—an animal without spirit, in whose brain resided the entire capabilities of the mind—then over a century of hard work by hundreds of thousands of psychs should have wrought some significant improvement in man’s mental health and general condition.
 
Strange, therefore, that psychs are claiming that 48% of people today between the ages of 15 and 54 have some mental illness. The figure used to be 0.1% of all ages, in the mid-1800s, before psychs started to manufacture the myth of mental illness. If a police chief offered crime statistics like this, he would be out of office, together with the mayor.
 
Another oddity is that the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the psychs’ definitive list of mental illnesses, identified 112 of them in 1952; the fourth edition in 1994 listed 370 mental illnesses. One would be justified in wondering how such an exponential rise in insanity could occur within just two generations.
 
Well, each new malady is added to the DSM by a show of hands—who among the psychs at a meeting agrees with the existence of a malady proposed verbally by one of their peers. As Dr. Renee Garfinkel, a psychologist, noted: “The low level of intellectual effort was shocking…. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would choose a restaurant. ‘You feel like Italian. I feel like Chinese. So let’s go to a cafeteria.’ Then it’s typed into a computer.”  Where do the ideas come from? Robert Spitzer, chairman of the DSM-IV committee, thought up “self-defeating personality disorder” on a fishing trip and persuaded his colleagues to include the disorder in DSM-IV.
 
Bear in mind, therefore, when looking for some explanation for this rise in “mental illnesses,” that it is only when a mental “illness” is listed in the DSM that psychs can bill insurance companies for treating the “diseases,” invariably with drugs. What other maladies were added most recently? Try “Math Disorder,” “Shopping Disorder,” and “Disorder of Written Expression.”
 
Psychs are apparently unable to differentiate between an idea and a reality, because they believe that by coining disease-sounding terms, the diseases then exist. In DSM IV, psychs do not distinguish between mental and physical “disorders.” If a child keeps missing the ball and this upsets the child, the parent or the teacher, the child is said to have “developmental coordination disorder” and is administered Ritalin or Prozac instead of being coached.
 
Not all psychiatrists are so naïve as to fall for the DSM, however. In fact, an international poll of mental health experts in London during 2001 voted the DSM to be one of the ten worst psychiatric papers. And medical doctors, most of whom still believe that a thorough physical exam should be undertaken before any assumption is made that irrational behavior is mental in origin, are not impressed with the DSM, either. Dr. Dennis Dorman, member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK, described the DSM as “…nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.”
 
Fraud by Any Other Name

If psychiatry started off on the wrong foot in denying the spirituality of man as its basic premise, then it went seriously awry, beginning in the 1960s, when it encroached on the field of neurology—an actual science that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of physical abnormalities and diseases of the brain. If part of the brain is physically damaged, neurology deals with that as a physical problem. Up to that time, psychiatry was meant to psychoanalyze (and render tractable with its other punishment-based restraining and quieting techniques—see below) those patients who had no physical problems but who were behaving irrationally.

But psychiatrists realized in the 1960s that they could create a vast “market” and achieve their goals of social control (see later) by redefining behavioral problems as physical illnesses resulting from chemical imbalances in the brain (the problem) and offering drugs to bring about balance (the solution). By redefining more and more peculiarities of human behavior as “diseases,” it would be possible to have the entire population of the world buying these drugs—even those who had nothing wrong with them other than a disagreement with this strategy, because they could be labeled as being in denial, having “non-compliance with treatment disorder” and therefore chemically imbalanced.

The pharmaceutical industry was quick to support this new theory that emotional and behavioral problems were diseases of the brain due to a “chemical imbalance.” The problem with this theory being that legitimate medicine requires the identification of physical symptoms to diagnose a disease, and none have been found for any of the 374 Diseases listed in DSM IV after decades of research with billions of dollars of tax payer and pharmaceutical company monies. Additionally, no tests exist to determine the chemical status of a person’s brain while he is living.
 
But this doesn’t discourage psychs from fraudulently misdiagnosing tens of millions of people as having these “diseases.” Or pharmaceutical companies from making psychiatric drugs to treat these made-up diseases.
 
What principle do psychiatrists use to determine who needs these drugs? What principle do they use to determine rational versus irrational behavior? It is called the “normative model,” meaning that majority behavior is considered normal, and anyone who falls short or exceeds this majority behavior is considered abnormal (true, by definition) and therefore unhealthy or insane (an illogical conclusion). So if the majority acts irrationally, then anyone being rational would be irrational. So much for psychiatric logic, but it gets worse.
 
Enter the DSM shopping list, in which everyday issues and difficulties are redefined as mental illness, and we find psychiatrists have managed to create a new majority that is “mentally ill.” Yet majority behavior is sane according to psychiatric theory—so we find psychiatric logic contradicting itself. The better way to determine sanity, of course, as well as mental difficulties, is the use of reason, common sense and ethics—the ability to act rationally in a manner that supports the well-being of the majority involved in any given situation.
 
If psychiatrists resort to abstruse and obtuse logic to justify their actions, they are not shy when it comes to altering the facts when it serves their cause, but is it science? Consider their key claim that a particular neurotransmitter causes a specific reaction and is localized to one part of the brain. This then justifies the industry use of SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors), which they claim to have fine-tuned to a specific location of the brain in order to inhibit a specific function of that brain (let’s just assume that a particular area of the brain determines thought and function, even though it has not been proven).
 
What’s the truth? Brain cells form molecules by combining whatever atoms and smaller molecules they can, and spitting them across the cleft between cells, to stimulate the next cell. In effect, there are thousands of different types of molecules in use, not a handful as psychiatrists claim.

An analogy would be psychiatrists claiming they had discovered man’s natural diet to be chocolate, and insisting that chocolate provides all the nutrients one needs. Then insisting that everybody eat only chocolate and, for good measure, teaming up with the makers of chocolates to produce pricey chocolate in a pill. Or as one student (who abandoned the profession during his grad school training) said more succinctly, it is like trying to “perform delicate microsurgery on a field mouse by flying overhead in a helicopter and dropping machetes under conditions of heavy wind.”
 
For anyone who imagines psychiatric drugs actually do any good, consider the 2002 study by psychologists Irving Kirsch and Thomas Moore published in the e-journal of the American Psychological Association. They reviewed 47 research test-studies submitted to the FDA for approval of antidepressants including Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft. Their study showed that sugar pills produced better results than these drugs. The manufacturers make over $6 billion a year from the American public for these particular sugar pills—which unlike real sugar pills, also create violent behavior, and psychosis with withdrawal.
 
To show how psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies have teamed up to create a cash cow, let’s consider a very SAD story: Social Anxiety Disease was invented by psychiatrists to give shyness a “scientific label” in 1997. Fifty mentions were made in the media of this SAD condition in 1997 and 1998, but in 1999, one billion media mentions occurred. Ninety-six percent of these also happened to say that Paxil was the only FDA-approved medication that could treat SAD. Curioser and curioser, until the Washington Post reported on July 16, 2001 that the manufacturer of Paxil, Glaxo SmithKline had paid Cohn & Wolfe, a public relations agency, to coordinate a multimillion-dollar marketing and advertising campaign to “inform thousands of people who previously did not know they were suffering from the disorder, and spurring many to seek needed help.” Cohn & Wolfe told the media that it was speaking for doctors and nonprofits—not the pharmaceutical company that was paying its bills. Such altruism is not reflected, however, in either Cohn & Wolfe’s annual reports, in which they make it clear they are in the business of marketing, not public health, nor Glaxo SmithKline’s 2000 annual report, in which shareholders read that Paxil had become Number One for new retail prescriptions in the huge SSRI market throughout the US during 2000.
 
This kind of PR, marketing and advertising is false, and the Dutch government at least has started to tighten the screws: The Netherlands Advertisement Code Commission ruled in August 2002 that the country’s Brain Foundation can not claim that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurobiological disease or brain dysfunction, and ordered the Foundation to cease such false claims in their advertising.

When talking fraud, let’s also consider the story of Prozac: In 1978, Eli Lilly, the manufacturer, knew Prozac caused suicidal and homicidal thoughts. The German government refused to approve Prozac in 1984 because trial results showed sixteen suicide attempts (two of which succeeded) in a group of people selected precisely because they were known not to be suicidal. Lilly withheld this from the FDA when it obtained approval for Prozac in the US. Lilly then spent huge amounts of money defending itself over murders and suicides committed under the influence of Prozac because “Lilly can go down the tubes if we lose Prozac” (Leigh Thompson, a chief scientist at Lilly). The FDA’s records show 28,623 adverse reactions reported, 1,089 of which were suicides with a further 1,885 suicide attempts. As the Government Accounting Office estimates between 1 and 10% of adverse reactions are reported to the FDA, Prozac suicides may be as high as 108,900, with attempts at a whopping 188,500. Recent studies estimate Prozac deaths in excess of 50,000 and 7- 10% of individuals taking Prozac experiencing some adverse reaction.
 
In its efforts to hide the truth, Lilly pressured its scientists in 1990 to alter records of physician experiences with Prozac, changing “suicide attempt” to “overdose” and “suicidal thoughts” to “depression.” The company settled most of the two hundred law suits over Prozac out of court, with the terms kept confidential, and in 2002, in promoting its new version of Prozac, stated it would not produce “suicidal thoughts and self-mutilation…one of its more significant side effects”—an admission made only because it would help with sales of the new product. With free, unsolicited and unprescribed samples of Prozac being sent in the mail, Eli Lilly’s motivation and ethic level are plain.
 
Yet even psychologists can see through the fraud: Jonathan Abramowitz, a psychologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who himself worked on DSM IV, warned “social anxiety is not a chemical problem with the brain. I see it as a problem with normal thinking and behaviors that have gone awry.”
 
David Kaiser, one of several psychiatrists with the integrity to blow the whistle on his own kind, stated in 1996 “modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness… Patients have been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and…there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”
 
These marketing strategies may make psychs and psychiatric-drugs companies lots of money, but they also seriously compromise the survival of mankind as a result of physical problems left untreated and the widespread ingestion of toxic chemicals that result in a host of physical problems and mental side effects ranging from stupidity to insanity, violence to suicide. One study showed that 83% of those referred for mental treatment by clinics and social workers were found to have an undiagnosed physical illness. Yet psychiatrists do not conduct searching physical examinations. They merely consult a checklist of behaviors produced by the mental disorders section of the World Health Organization, and label and prescribe psychotropic drugs for diseases they know to have no basis in fact. This violates the informed consent rights of patients and is medical malpractice. Perhaps the difficulties that psychs face stem from a fundamental misconception: Is the software really nothing more than hardware? Is the end user really just hardware? But one thing is certain: Their discipline is based on no science whatsoever. Not one single detectable or diagnosable physical abnormality has been attributed to any one of these mental “diseases.”

When psychs say that Ritalin, Paxil, Haldol or any of the many psych drugs will remedy abnormalities/pathologies/chemical imbalances within the brains of the children who are having difficulties in school, they are implying they have detected such an imbalance and know exactly that it is remedied, let us say, by Paxil. The problem is that no such studies or findings have ever been made. This level of science is the same as that propounded by the purveyors of quack medicine 150 years ago. Some things never change, and we still find people falling for it. What has changed is that (a) the government funds it, (b) it is not just being directed at thinking adults but babies and children, under penalty of law for refusing to cooperate, and (c) the potions are toxic.
 
It is also completely unethical, in that psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical lobbies spend billions to create the illusion that they are the all-knowing scientists working under the mantle of “professional help” while their true motives are personal profit without any regard for the truth, happiness and welfare of those in their care.

It must be frustrating for professionals to invest so many years of their lives into what turns out to be a scam. Such frustration may well have as its root cause a reliance on opinions in the place of facts to build a “science”. It’s the sticky question of results. Take the lobotomy, for instance. This practice originated from one case history, in which a crowbar blew through the prefrontal lobes of Pheneas Gage during a rock-blasting operation in the US in 1847. He survived the accident, it is true, but nowhere in the case history is there mention of any improvement in his condition. On the contrary, he became extremely rude and anti-social.
 
Based on this one incident, with no case studies, psych Walter Freeman introduced prefrontal lobotomies (hammering an ice pick through the eye sockets and using it to sever the nerves behind the forehead) to the U.S., and 100,000 people have received the procedure since. Still no record exists of anyone being improved by them, quite the opposite in fact, as a vegetative state is the inevitable result. The spirited Hollywood beauty, Frances Farmer, was finally broken after a lobotomy.
 
Yet the lobotomy was touted by psychs as a “miracle cure” in the same way that electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) was promoted in 1938 and psychotropic drugs are promoted today. Prozac is meant to cure everything from weight gain to jealousy and pulling out ones hair—a list that sounds as convincing as the pitch for the potions quack doctors used to peddle a century ago.
 
What if psychs were not as advertised, civilization’s last line of defense against global insanity and barbarism? What if they really were the cause of the craziness around us that they insist governments pay them handsomely for “preventing”? What if they were not the rescuing cavalry but the curse of humanity? What if psychs really were the greatest hoax in the last eight hundred years?
 
The director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, Rex Cowdry, certainly threw his weight behind this conclusion in 1995 when he said: “We do not know the causes (of psychiatric disorders). We don’t have methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” A 1999 Surgeon General report stated “No single gene has been found to be responsible for any specific mental disorder….There is no definite lesion, laboratory test or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify the [mental] illness.”
 
Consider the words of Norman Sartorius, who, as president of the World Psychiatric Association, announced to fellow psychiatrists in 1994, “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future, the mentally ill will have to learn to live with their illness.” If a mechanic made similar confessions, would you leave your car with him?
 
If these two gentlemen are being honest, then we have to assume that the other pronunciamentos in the media by psychs of every color are nothing more than high-sounding language with no substance behind them. Those millions of victims, those billions of dollars and hours on research and treatment—they are all a pretense based on a pretend science.
 
Technology that Quiets or Kills

Relying on the theory that man is an animal without any spiritual existence, whose mind is really his brain, then it is easy to see how this “science” produced the three key technologies that it did.
 
What psychs do today is primarily package any observable behavior, reclassify and label it with words that make it sound like a mental disease, and then prescribe a drug(s) that have many bad side effects listed in the warning labels, symptoms that psychs often use to describe a mental “illness.” For instance, the Physician’s Desk reference includes side effects for Ritalin and Dexedrine of psychotic episodes. This results in more business for the psychs with increased dosages of ever-stronger drugs. For the patients, there is stupefaction, toxicity and brain and central nervous system damage—more people were dying from prescription drugs by 1989 than from street drugs. For society, there is increased crime (560% increase between 1960 and 1991), a drug epidemic, lowered production, and tragedies like the Columbine High shooting.
 
A psychiatrist, Loren Mosher, resigned from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1998 on the grounds that “psychiatry has been almost completely bought out by the drug companies. The APA could not continue without the pharmaceutical company support of meetings, symposia, workshops, journal advertising, grand rounds luncheons, unrestricted educational grants etc. etc…. We condone and promote the widespread overuse and misuse of toxic chemicals that we know have serious long term effects… I want no part of a psychiatry of oppression and social control… Is psychiatry a hoax-- as practiced today? Unfortunately, the answer is mostly yes.”
 
The second technology is the lobotomy, which was replaced partially in 1954 with the introduction of the drug Thorazine, otherwise known as the chemical lobotomy.
 
The third technology is ECT—the application of up to 460 volts to the temples of a patient, who is drugged to prevent bones breaking during the attendant convulsions. ECT is applied to create a grand mal epileptic seizure and permanent brain damage from oxygen deprivation. It results in memory loss, learning disability, disorientation, brain shrinkage, coma, and sometimes death due to hemorrhaging or choking. The “reduction in intelligence is an important factor in the curative process,” according to one American psychiatrist. Dr. Ugo Cerletti pioneered ECT in Italy in 1938 after seeing how pigs were administered electric shock just before being slaughtered. He admitted in 1970 that it ought to be abolished. 110,000 people still receive six to twelve such treatments of ECT each year in the U.S., costing tax payers and insurance companies (and providing psychs with) $3 billion annually. A study of 340 depressed patients by ECT proponent, Dr. Harold A. Sackeim, showed that not one person received any lasting benefit from the treatment.
 
While the latter two procedures have been rejected by most today, they were claimed to be the highly effective during their heyday, with no evidence to show any real benefits for those patients who were administered. Does this sound familiar with regard to the latest psychiatric breakthrough—psychotropic drugs to cure mental “diseases”?
 
What are the typical reactions to psychotropic drugs?

* Minor tranquilizers can cause lethargy, confusion, sexual dysfunction, hallucination, severe depression, insomnia and muscle tremors. Withdrawing cold turkey can result in seizures and death.

* Antidepressants can cause drowsiness, lethargy, difficulty thinking, memory problems, delusions, seizures, fever, liver damage, heart attacks and strokes.

* SSRIs result in withdrawal symptoms in 50% of takers, sexual dysfunction in 60%, and seizures, hearing loss, paranoia and suicide.

These psychiatric solutions all address the “hardware.” But just like any computer, mental issues people face are almost all problems relating to the software, not the hardware. If every time your computer crashed, customer service’s pat response was to send a technician with spare parts, how much use would you have of your computer?
 
Legitimizing and Institutionalizing the Scam

German psychologists introduced experimental psychology into a world that was ignorant of matters of the mind, but which conceived man to have a spiritual component. Like all early movements, psychology had some converts among a majority who considered it either absurd or unscientific. Influential American devotees visited Germany, however, and returned to the United States to introduce the theories into schools. German professors came to the U.S., too, exporting their technology and theories.
 
Ernst Rudin, professor of psychiatry at Munich and director of the Department of Heredity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, for instance, visited the U.S. in 1930. He was praised by the leaders of the Carnegie Foundation and supported financially by a large Rockefeller grant. Rudin was the architect of Nazi Germany’s sterilization law. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute is the place where, until 1990, psychs kept the brains of hundreds of children for psychiatric research—children murdered and dismembered by psychs in the Nazi concentration camps.
 
By the ‘30s, Hollywood was legitimizing the wisdom of psychs and by the ‘40s, government was funding psychiatric programs as the solution to controlling the otherwise independent and unruly minds of its more boisterous subjects. The infamous-but-now-forgotten Alaska Bill was just a vote or two shy of passing in the mid-‘50s, which would have given psychs the power to lock up and electrocute anyone in mental health camps in Alaska, without recourse. The CIA used psychs in an attempt to control minds for their own ends, continuing the research undertaken by psychs in Nazi concentration camps. Today, we have Homeland Security edging the Land of the Free closer to such enforced psychiatric-controlled gulags once more.
 
These facts listed above may paint an alarming picture with a broad brush, but the words below of the founders of the World Federation of Mental Health, G. Brock Chisholm and J.R. Rees, show plainly that psychs are engaged in breaking down any sense of social and moral responsibility and creating an ignorant, drug-addicted society that is increasingly in turmoil. The WFMH was established in 1948 and runs National Associations of Mental Health, which in turn set about the establishment of psych facilities, agendas and programs in each country.
 
First of all, the approach psychs were to take was outlined by Rees in a 1940 speech: “Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence…. If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread, we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity…. Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’”
 
This goal was executed subsequently in the U.S. by four psychiatrists (Robert Felix, William Menninger, Francis Braceland and Jack Ewalt), who wrote the basis of a legislative bill that was signed into law mid-1946, creating the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and a national mental health program funded by taxpayer dollars. It was and is the only branch of medicine to have its training subsidized by the taxpayer. NIMH was empowered to carry out psychiatric research, fund psych training and assist states with community-based prevention programs. The three-phase program for world mental health development called for:
 
1.  Setting up psych institutions
2.  Establishing community out-patient centers, one for every 100,000 people
3.  Parental and pre-marital guidance, child and welfare services and the introduction of psych programs into schools.
 
In 1963, Congress authorized $150 million to build the centers and in 1965 a further $735 million to staff them. The price tab for these centers rose dramatically, from $140 million in 1969 to $9.75 billion in 1994—a 6,800% increase. By 1980, 55% of those attending these centers were being prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs.

NIMH has funded the training of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers and nurses, and public health officers for years. Today, we find psychiatric theory and influence at every turn: in schools, hospitals and doctor’s offices, businesses, media and entertainment, retirement homes, courtrooms, and the list goes on. Let’s look, therefore, at the effect of some key psych programs:
 
No Black and White, Just Dirty Grey

G. Brock Chisholm stated in 1945, “The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training…are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.” The introduction and pushing of the “insanity plea” and other psychiatric “illnesses” or “disorders” in the courtroom have redefined criminals as victims of their past, rather than responsible for their own actions.  They have also made it next-to-impossible to control crime. Violent crime in the U.S. increased from one to eight in every hundred people between 1960 and 1995, and thefts from 1,000 to 3,000.
 
Any courtroom with consulting psychs for the prosecution will be fed opinions that counter those of the defense’s psych. The APA itself filed a statement in the US Supreme Court admitting that psychiatric “predictions are fundamentally of very low reliability and…irrelevant” in court. Yet psych mumbo-jumbo, and reference to DSM IV as the authoritative source, still occur throughout the court and prison systems.
 
Psychs counsel the police and criminals both. The result is three hundred police commit suicide each year, 30% higher than the national average. And 80% of criminals end up in prison again—a 1974 study in St. Louis, showed that 82% of those arrested had received psychiatric treatments prior to committing the crime.
 
Turning Schools into Mental Health Clinics

Perhaps more tragic still is the encroachment of psych theories and practices in our schools over the last century, particularly the last thirty-five years.
 
Education was first undermined in the U.S. when psychology courses were introduced in American teaching colleges in 1899. The “Father of American Education,” John Dewey, wrote in his School and Society that same year: “There is no obvious social motive for the acquiring of learning. It is one of the greatest mistakes of education to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of the schoolwork for the first two years. The ultimate problem of all education is to coordinate the psychological and social factors…and schools should take an active part in determining the social order of the future.” Edward Thorndike created Educational Psychology in 1903. In his 1929 book, he stated that the three Rs, phonetics, multiplication tables and formal writing movements were wasteful, with arithmetic, language and history being intrinsically of little value. Psychs also decided to remove the “stress” factors in education, such as academic curriculums, disciplinary procedures and school failure. These leaders de-emphasized academics and focused instead on changing behavior, attitudes and feelings.
 
Values Clarification programs were introduced that have gone under several different names since, most recently being called Outcome–Based Education (OBE). These carefully teach children that morals are defunct.
 
The psychs thereby shifted the emphasis from teaching students to controlling and molding them, thus making it more difficult for the students to learn, and opening them up to being difficult students who then “needed” drugs to be able to learn properly.
 
Psych influence in our schools was assured in 1965 with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, providing the funding for psych programs, testing and personnel in schools. The psychs introduced a plethora of labels to describe typical child behavior (such as fidgeting) as well as redefining difficulty with math or reading (DSM Code # 315.1 and 315 respectively) as “mental disorders” rather than the lack of adequate teaching (because teachers were increasingly being redirected from teaching to controlling). In effect, psychs turned schools into mental health clinics and education into a mental problem that chemicals (drugs) were meant to remedy.
 
By 1969, there were 455 psychiatrists in schools, a number that had bloated to 16,146 by 1992. By 1994, psychs and their cohorts in and around schools almost outnumbered teachers.
 
Pharmaceutical companies have financed “grassroots” groups such as CHADD (Children And Adults with ADHD), who received $1 million from the manufacturer of Ritalin to create an apparent ground swell of public demand for psychiatric drug usage in schools, and so help bring about Title One of the Federal Code, Children With Disabilities Act and the Supplemental Security Income program in 1991. These provided schools with up to $650 annually for each child diagnosed with a “disorder,” giving schools “an incentive to identify more kids with special education needs,” according to an Education Department official.
 
There has been a 1,100% increase between 1987 and 2001, for instance, in the diagnosis of ADHD in American children, with 20.6 million prescriptions written in 2001. Now compare this to the conclusion the world’s experts in ADHD reached at a 1998 conference: “Our knowledge about the cause or causes of ADHD remains largely speculative.”  In 1996, $15 billion was spent in the U.S. on managing the various psychiatric disorders that children were suddenly manifesting. The same is occurring in other wealthy countries: Germany saw the number of stimulants prescribed to children jump from 7 million in 1995 to 31 million in 1999.  In 1992, 2,000 such prescriptions were written in the UK, and by the year 2,000, 186,000 had been written. This money, of course, goes into psych and drug manufacturers’ coffers.
 
How has this approach to educating U.S. school children affected them? Over six million of our primary-through high-school children are now on mind-altering drugs, compared to one million on street drugs. As one observant parent of one such child noted, “The drugs rob these kids of their personality. They become quiet little robots.” Except, that is, for the 4% of users (80,000 children) that psychiatrist Peter Breggin, author of “Toxic Psychiatry,” reports are prompted to violent behavior.
 
Matthew Cohen, president of Children and Adults with ADHD in Landover, MD has the pat answer to this violence, however:  “The medication doesn't produce the violence. The more accurate thing to say is that the medication was insufficient to prevent it.” Interesting, as the DEA reports 80% of amphetamine use in the US is for ADHD, with production increasing 3,750% between 1993 and 2000, In November 2000, 19 million prescriptions were made out to one-in-five of our school children. Ritalin, which “shares many of the pharmacological effects of ... cocaine” according to a 1995 DEA report, but is longer lasting, goes for $6 a pill on the black market on school campuses.
 
The fact that teen suicides have tripled since the 1960s can be laid squarely at the door of psychiatric drug pushers, as well as their twisted sense of education in providing “death education”—stories of death, murder, suicide, and asking children what they want written on their tombstones.
 
School children murdering others in cold blood have been in the news much over the last few years. No fewer than 1,336 children aged 13-17 years were arrested for murder in 1987. By 1992, the number had risen to 2,829. But what of the less high-profile crimes?

* Between 1965 and 1992, teenage drug arrests rose from 10 to 147 per 100,000 juveniles.

* In 1992, 5,364 rapes were committed by under 18’s, with 2,049 of them by children under 15.

If we look at the purpose the majority of us believe education is meant to have—educating our children—we see equally alarming statistics: Verbal and math SAT scores combined began dropping in 1963, and have fallen eighty points to 890. In the 1930s, three million adults could not read because they had not been to school. In 1990, forty million could not understand what they were reading, or perform simple math calculations, even after a decade in school.
 
The year 2000 National Achievement Tests showed more than two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders were unable to read up to grade level. Was this because they were no longer being taught how to read using phonics, or because they really were “mentally disordered, developmental learning types,” which is what the psychs claim, demanding that the kids be put on psych drugs? For failing school boards, having a biological reason (psych-drug deficiencies in the brain) for an inability to read by students in their charge is easier to face than the idea that they have abandoned workable teaching methods in favor of behavior control and other destructive psych-based systems. So the teachers have been turned into amateur psychologists in pinning labels on their students and turning them over to the psych/pharmaceutical machine that has been built into our schools. Note that the intent is not to target teachers: like everyone else in society, they trusted the psychiatric profession.
 
Weakening the Family

If the psych agenda is really to weaken the individual and make him more controllable, then the last thing one would want is a strong family to bolster his confidence and morale. So it was that G. Brock Chisholm pronounced the following in London in 1948: “The family is now one of the major obstacles to improved mental health and hence, should be weakened, if possible, so as to free individuals and especially children from the coercion of family life.”
 
Today, Social Service bureaucrats in the U.S. have the power to declare parents guilty of child abuse and to take their children away until the parents can prove their own innocence.
 
The result of the psych agenda over the last century in particular, has been more than disastrous for the family:
 
1.  Divorces in the U.S. have increased from 6% to 33% of marriages over the last century, tripling since 1950
2.  Unmarried couples have increased 700% since 1970
3.  15-19 year-old pregnancies increased 310% between 1960 and 1991
4.  Pregnancies in under-15s increased 140%.
5.  666,000 children were born to single girls in 1982, four times as many as in 1950.
6.  Single mums increased 367% between 1970 and 1982.
 
It seems that apart from destroying all concepts of right and wrong and undermining the family as a unit, psychs have introduced sex education into schools that encourages promiscuity and perversion. As the answer to one question about when to engage in sex stated, “Do what you like and when you want. Your emotions are what count.”
 
Parental discipline has been redefined as “child abuse.” Parental concern for the upbringing of their children has been renamed “over-protectiveness,” and an enforcing of outmoded religious and moral values. “Tolerating” whatever the child does is now a positive parental trait. Hilary Clinton stated as much in her book, “It Takes a Village.”
 
Subverting Religion

In keeping with Freud’s dim view of religion, G. Brock Chisholm stated: “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas.” Chisholm and Rees targeted religion therefore for “mental health orientation,” especially through the training of the clergy.
 
Knowing this hitherto hidden purpose, it is ironic yet understandable that we find churches looking to psychs for training on the mind and the “true nature of man.” The result of this trust has been a severe decline in church membership and activity:

* By 1952, 83% of 109 seminaries and graduate theological schools in the U.S. offered one or more psych courses.

* By 1961, 9,000 clergymen had taken psych-based “clinical pastoral” counseling classes. The clergy were referring parishioners to the community mental health centers.

* While in 1960, 42% of parishioners consulted their clergy for help and only 18% went to psychs , by 1991, 38% were going to psychs.

* Church membership dropped 25% in the US between 1961 and 1991.

The latest pedophile scandal in the United States that has so damaged the Catholic Church can also be laid in part at the door of the many psychs who ran completely unworkable rehabilitation programs on pedophile priests, and who, as a body, have made sexual crimes into mental diseases to be “treated.”
 
Captive Audiences

The elderly with health insurance coverage have been prime targets for the psych industry. Fraud has been rampant, as might be expected, and Medicare finally barred eighty Community Mental Health Centers from serving the elderly and disabled in 1998. It’s too bad that 73,000 elderly die each year from adverse reactions to the psych drugs they are administered.
 
Psychs also have a captive audience in those kept in psych hospitals, usually against their will and often under false pretenses. Between 1950 and 1990, the number of inpatient deaths in psychiatric hospitals in the country was almost double the total number of deaths in every single war the U.S. has engaged in, from the Revolutionary War to the Gulf War. Psychs filled a similar role in Nazi Germany: of the 320,000 in-patients alive in psych hospitals in 1939, only 40,000 remained alive in 1946. The last survivor of the Brandenburg Havel institution, Elvira Manthey, related years later that she and her three-year-old sister, Lisa, were declared feeble-minded and incarcerated by a psychiatrist in 1938. Lisa died in the gas chambers the following year.
 
There’s Money in Them ‘Thar Pills

As Canadian psychologist and author of Manufacturing Victims, Tana Dineen, stated so succinctly recently, psychology is neither a science nor a profession, but an industry that turns healthy people into victims to provide itself with income. From the mouths of Chisholm and Rees, it seems that psychs as a body have set themselves a goal of engineering world government and social control in the guise of helping individuals and society.
 
How much money are we talking about? Mental health expenditures, paid for by every taxpayer, rose almost 800% between 1970 and 1995, to $28.6 billion per annum. As covered above, Federal funds are provided through the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health to state branches for “research” and to community level programs in schools, courts, welfare agencies etc. Federal funds are allotted to finance psych programs in our schools, communities, the armed forces, prisons and courtrooms and the list goes on.
 
For the psychiatric drug companies, life is also sweet: In 1999, the US market alone for antidepressants and “anti-psychotic'” drugs was over $10 billion.
 
As might be expected of a product and service that is based on junk science, psychs create problems in society, they do not solve them. And when the situation they are paid to remedy continues to deteriorate, they say they need more money to solve the problem with more drugs and re-education. Most people, from the U.S. President to the media, have fallen for this line. In the wake of the Columbine High shootings, the gun lobby came under attack. With the exception of a few perceptive writers, such as Bev Eakman in the Washington Times and Alexander Cockburn in the Los Angeles Times, none asked why many school shooting over the last few years had been committed by a child who was on or trying to come off psychiatric drugs with warning labels that include suicide and violence among their side effects.

* Eric Harris at Columbine High was on Luvox when he killed twelve classmates and a teacher in Denver, Colorado.

* Kip Kinkel in Springfield, Oregon was withdrawing from Prozac when he shot 24 classmates/family members.

* Shawn Cooper, a 15-year-old in Notus, Idaho, was taking Ritalin when he fired a shotgun at school.

* 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on Prozac when she shot at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one.

* Mitchell Johnson was taking an unspecified psych drug when he shot at fellow students in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

* T.J. Solomon, a 15-year-old in Conyers, Georgia, was taking Ritalin when he shot six classmates.

* Jason Hoffman was on Effexor and Celexa when he wounded five students at his California high school.

* Cory Baadsgaard was on Paxil when took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage.

Why has nobody asked why these children were on heavy drugs? Because “everyone knows that the problem with so many kids these days is that they are ‘mentally ill’ and we need more drugs to quiet them at a younger age.” If we can just “clean up the entertainment industry and remove all guns,” then what will we have? We will have an entire nation on drugs, seething with an inner rage and finding ways of killing others with whatever weapons are still available.
 
Portrait of a Con Artist

What kind of person is leading us down this sylvan path to the utopia that George Orwell predicted fifty years ago? The average psychiatrist in the US today is one among 42,000 and supported by 12,000 psychiatric hospitals.

* He or she makes in excess of $130,000 each year (1993).

* While they make up only 8% of the medical profession in 1985, over 18% of physicians suspended from U.S. health insurance programs for fraud were psychs.

* 40% of them are sued for malpractice in the US

* 221 received criminal convictions in 2001—an increase from 100 in 1998—53% for health care fraud and 26% for sexual crimes against their patients, often being children.

* The largest health care fraud suit in history (for $375 million) involved the smallest sector of healthcare—psychiatry. Fraudulent schemes have included billing insurers for therapy given to people already dead, for having sex with patients or letting them watch TV or play bingo. Between $20 and $40 billion in such fraudulent billings by the mental health industry occur in any given year.

* Two-thirds of psychs are seriously mentally ill, according to one study—10% attempting suicide or abusing drugs.

* Psychotherapists manifest up to three times as many incidents of inappropriate behavior as the people they are meant to be treating.

One-in-four psychiatrists worldwide admits to sexually abusing his or her patients. Yet 65% of patients tell their psychiatrist they were sexually abused by their previous psychiatrist. In one study, 150,00 patients were found to have been sexually abused by their psychiatrist. 21,000 of these patients subsequently tried to kill themselves while 1,500 succeeded.
 
The medical profession advanced to the degree that the responses of practitioners were standardized and each practitioner had a professional attitude toward his or her patients. Having psychs assume the mantle of a professional caregiver only serves to degrade the medical profession as a whole.
 
The psych scam is so solidly in place that everyone from National Public Radio to the White House pushes the psych lines, championing such as the mental health parity and ignoring the real cause of the school shootings. Yet these issues pale in comparison to what happens when psychs are given free reign to operate in totalitarian states, such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and even modern China. As stated already, the powers the US government has taken unto itself since 9/11 has moved the country further away from the constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms that would protect us from such government control of our lives.
 
A Docile World Population That Can’t Just Say “No!”

The genocide we have witnessed this past century has its roots in psychiatry. It was initially touted as racial hygiene. A Nazi psychiatrist summed it up neatly when he stated, “Only through the Führer did our dream of over thirty years, that of applying racial hygiene to society, become a reality.”
 
Then again, if you were wondering about the parallels between the old Nazi and the new Serb agenda in the 1990’s, look no further than psychiatrists Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic.
 
Or for the real force behind the al Qaida, consider that chief advisor to Osama bin-Laden is/was psychiatrist Dr. Ayman al-Zawhariri, and that psychologist Ali A. Mohamed trained bin-Laden’s men.
 
As G. Brock Chisholm stated, psychologists and psychiatrists had to become leaders in the “planned development of a new kind of human being.” It seems that George Orwell only had the date wrong.
 
How so? Because less than two decades after the date set by Orwell, the legal, and psychiatric elements are finally in place, including a populace being at a point where it will accept the conditions for a compliant society controlled by psychiatric drugs. A country that has been dumbed down with a false education cannot think for itself when bombarded with false information about how the mind is a physical object susceptible to drug deficiencies. According to the UN’s International Drug Control Board, 330 million doses of Ritalin are taken each day in the U.S., compared with just 65 million in the rest of the world. The criteria for diagnosis are so general that virtually anyone would qualify for a prescription.
 
By forcing or sneaking through Federal and/or state laws, psychiatrists now have the right to examine and determine which babies may be a threat to society and so add mint-flavored Prozac to their formulas. As the millions of children diagnosed with fake labels and forced onto drugs will testify, they and their parents were cajoled or forced to take them when they ran into trouble at school. This despite Article 33 of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child stating that children have the right to protection from the “illicit use of psychotropic substances.”
 
Yet the use of psychotropic drugs on 2-to-4-year olds tripled between 1991 and 1995. A recent study at the Michigan State University in East Lansing revealed that both Ritalin and Prozac were being prescribed to toddlers between the ages of 1 and 3, even while Ritalin manufacturer, Novartis, states: “Warning: sufficient data on the safety and efficacy of long term use of Ritalin in children are not yet available.”
 
The Oregon legislature passed into law a bill that provides $25 million for a “preventive mental health” screening program to identify and pre-treat newborns who are determined to be at “psycho/social risk.” 3,400 one-year-olds have been prescribed psychotropic drugs in France.
 
The Mental Health Parity efforts over the last two years are an effort to provide unlimited funding for psychotropic drug usage throughout the country. It is pushed heavily by The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a psych front group with strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
 
This parity legislation encourages doctors to assign a code from DSM IV to their patients, so they can be paid for psychiatric drug prescriptions. With the passage of the euphemistically named “patient confidentiality” law in 2002, an individual (and his heirs) has no right to see his own medical records, even though a label of some “mental problem” will stigmatize him forever. If he is ever arrested, applies for a sensitive job, or sues for damages against a doctor or a drug company over unwelcome side effects, his credibility will be compromised. Worse, he will become an easy candidate for “civil commitment,” as in Florida’s Baker Act or California’s Code 5150.
 
Civil commitment is carried out by a police officer, emergency medical services worker, a pastor, the principal of a school or by any medical doctor, psychologist, social worker or probation officer (etc.), to forcibly take an individual into custody in a mental ward or mental hospital for treatment and/or observation of a “mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder” as found in the latest version of the DSM of the American Psychiatric Association.
 
Not so long ago, President Reagan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. It was the political entity in which citizens who disagreed with the government were labeled mentally aberrant and imprisoned in mental institutions until their thinking had been adjusted by psych drugs and conditioning. It is still being done in China, where members of the peaceful Falungong spiritual group are imprisoned in mental hospitals. In 2004, $20 million was provided by the House Appropriations Committee to begin the implementation of a plan drawn up by the “New Freedom on Mental Health Commission.” The plan requires the screening of all Americans for mental illness and the prescription of psychotropic drugs for those found to be mentally ill when compared to DSM IV.
 
Obviously you weren’t consulted, but is this vision of a new human being something you really want? Is your concept of the ideal human being an amoral, promiscuous, criminally-inclined drug addict who considers himself just one animal among many, with some animals less equal than others? Maybe this is what G. Brock Chisholm and his ilk see when they look in the mirror, but are the majority of us really like that?
 
Eight hundred years ago, the secretive Assassins ruled Eastern Europe and the Middle East—arguably the biggest scam before psychiatry, and how similar their methods! The fanatics would stuff young men full of hashish (named after Hashshashin or Hasan ibn-al-sabbah, founder of the secret cult) and have them awaken in a veritable Garden of Eden with rivers of honey, fountains of milk and buxom wenches to fulfill their every wish. After a few days, the controllers would tell the young men they could return to “heaven” only if they killed (a political enemy) and died in the process. What did the assassins gain? An early death, while the manipulators enjoyed complete social control and wealth—just mentioning to the local caliph that the Assassins would be paying a visit unless he parted with all his spare gold, and it would be produced faster than he could say “Allah.”
 
What eventually happened to the Assassins? After three hundred years of holding sway, they were butchered by Timurlane the Great’s troops after one boy scaled the rock face below the assassin’s hitherto impregnable fortress, climbed its walls and opened the front gates to the Mongol hoards.
 
Instead of hoards of sword-bearing Mongols to put an end to the psych butchery, fear and quackery, maybe it’s time we shone the bright light of truth on the hitherto invisible fortress of psychiatry in our midst. Maybe we should quit supporting the scam with our tax dollars and cease deferring to the better judgment of an Authority made so by virtue of its own claims, rather than its ability to obtain useful and desirable results. Maybe we should bring psychs back under the law of the land, laws that cover perjury, fraud, treason, conspiracy, antitrust, mayhem, and, yes, even murder.

Steven Ferry is an educator and author of more than 15 books who also writes and photographs for US corporations and publishers of various stripes. He can be reached at: steven@words-images.com.
 

HOME