Are we all going mad, or are the experts crazy?

"It is not a sign of a healthy mind to be well-adjusted to a sick society."
- RD Laing

"Psychiatric treatment is infamously impotent to address serious mental conditions because the psychiatrists, as fully enculturated elite members of society, are constitutionally unable to call into question the cultural assumptions in which they are so deeply invested. Their investment blinds them to the underlying rightness and fundamental sanity of a patient's reaction to a world gone wrong.

The teenagers in their idealism and their defiance, the depressed in their rejection of the lives offered them, the anxiety-ridden in their sense that something is not right... all are quite sane. Any psychiatry that doesn't recognize this is doomed from the start." - Charles Eisenstein

"Mainstream Western psychology has limited the definition of mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban-industrial society. All that lies beyond the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance - too frightening to think about." - Theodore Roszak

"Mental-health professionals in the West, and in the United States in particular, create official categories of mental diseases and promote them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses." - Ethan Watters

Psychiatric researchers recently estimated that half of the American population has had or will have a mental disorder at some time in their life.

A generation ago only a small percentage of the American population was considered mentally ill. Why are Americans going mad?

Sigmund Freud * started this. Sigmund Freud suggested human behavior was potentially rife with psychopathology (perhaps only the people whom he was acquainted with exhibited psychopathological behavior). As a neurologist, Sigmund Freud used the medical language of pathology to suggest that the demands of imperial Christian/Zionist social culture on our fragile human nature were such as to make all of us somewhat neurotic.

The current psychiatric 'sacred' text published by the American Psychiatric Association, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, continues this tradition of making us all crazy.

There are no biological tests, markers or known causes for most mental illnesses, who is counted as ill depends almost entirely on frequently changing checklists of behaviors that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders considers as symptoms of a mental disorder.

Estimates of mental disorders continue to increase partially because the American Psychiatric Association keeps adding new disorders and more behaviors to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The original diagnostic manual appeared in 1952 and contained 107 diagnoses and 132 pages. The second edition burst forth in 1968 with 180 diagnoses and 119 pages. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association produced a 494-page tome with 226 conditions. Then, in 1994, the manual exploded to 886 pages and 365 conditions, representing a 340% increase in the number of diseases over 42 years.

The American Psychiatric Association has been inventing mental illnesses for the last 50 years or so.

"A survey published in the early 1970s found that whereas a majority (59 percent) of people who had visited a professional psychotherapist for mental distress reported having been “helped” or “helped a lot” by the consultation, much larger majorities of people who had consulted a clergyman (78 percent) or a physician without specialized psychological training (76 percent) or - get this - a lawyer (77 percent) reported the same thing." - Scott Stossel

“Effective psychotherapy seemed to require little more than a willing patient and an intelligent and understanding counselor who met and spoke regularly and in confidence.” - Jonathan Engel

Since 1979 some of the new disorders and categories that have been added include panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, gender identity disorder, tobacco dependence disorder, eating disorders, conduct disorder, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, identity disorder, acute stress disorder, sleep disorders, nightmare disorder, rumination disorder, inhibited sexual desire disorders, premature ejaculation disorder, male erectile disorder and female sexual arousal disorder.

"In psychiatry no one knows the causes of anything, so classification can be driven by all sorts of factors." - Edward Shorter

The American Psychiatric Association is obliging in adding new orders for which new treatments can be found. For a pharmaceutical corporation to be able to manufacture and market a drug a clearly defined medical diagnosis with measurable characteristics is required to facilitate credible clinical trails.

Irwin Goldstein* developed the medical diagnostic concept of 'female sexual arousal disorder' on the basis of studies of the genitalia of female New Zealand white rabbits. Dr Irwin Goldstein has developed animal models of 'vaginal engorgement insufficiency and clitoral erectile insufficiency' that, when applied to women, identify those women with 'female sexual arousal disorder.' Once a treatable medical condition, in this case 'female sexual arousal disorder', has been defined then the pharmaceutical corporations can begin clinical trials to determine the proper chemical compound to make trophy women horny - even when around ugly old men with cold hands that use Viagra [sildenafil citrate or
{1-[4-ethoxy-3-(6,7-dihydro-1-methyl- 7-oxo-3-propyl-1H-pyrazolo[4,3-d]pyrimidin-5-yl) phenylsulfonyl]-4-methylpiperazine citrate}].

The pharmaceutical industry's role in helping build the science of this 'female sexual arousal disorder' has been 'paramount,' according to Irwin Goldstein. Asked whether marketing campaigns worth hundreds of millions of dollars may ultimately tend to amplify particular views of sexual difficulties and promote certain therapeutic options over others, Irwin Goldstein said: "I'm an academic clinical doctor. That's a question for some philosopher."

The Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology was
bestowed on Irwin Goldstein for his market creating endeavors of defining female sexual arousal disorder.

So little is known about the causes of most mental disorders, just about any behavior can look like a symptom. Here is a selection from hundreds of behaviors listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, behaviors that signify one disorder or another: restlessness, irritability, sleeping too much or too little, eating too much or too little, difficulty concentrating, fear of social situations, feeling morose, indecisiveness, impulsivity, self-dramatization, being inappropriately sexually seductive or provocative, requiring excessive admiration, having a sense of entitlement, lacking empathy, fear of being criticized in public, feeling personally inept, fear of rejection or disapproval, difficulty expressing disagreement, being excessively devoted to work and productivity, and being preoccupied with details, rules and lists (sounds like the Talmudists, soulless apostate central bankers and the neo-con supporters of a world wide police state). Unlike the rest of medicine, psychiatry diagnoses behaviors that society condemns.
(Behaviors those who practice social control disapprove of!)

For children, signs of disorder occur when they are deceitful, break rules, can't sit still or wait in lines, have trouble with math, don't pay attention to details, don't listen, don't like to do homework or lose their school assignments or pencils, speak out too often or just ask too many questions.

Granted, one momentary feeling or behavior will not qualify you as having a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders mental disorder; it requires clusters of them, usually for several weeks, accompanied by some level of discomfort.

Nevertheless, as Sigmund Freud * suggested, the signs of potential pathology are everywhere.

The vast broadening of the definition of mental disorders has its skeptics, myself included, who are suspicious of the motivations of the American Psychiatric Association and the drug companies that may view the expanding sweep of mental disorders like a lumber company lusting after a redwood forest. But unlike the environment, with its leagues of watchdogs, the medicalization of human foibles has few challengers. That's too bad: The misdiagnosis of mental illness often leaves a lasting trail in medical records open to schools, employers, insurance companies and courts.

Does it advance psychiatry to view an increasing expanse of human troubles as the expression of psychopathology rather than as part of the texture and diversity of life? Psychiatry once focused on the prevention and treatment of serious behavioral problems, of which there are plenty. But based on the metastasizing Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association appears to be caught up in a contemporary narcissistic quest for individual perfection.

The grand American experiment once was an attempt to structure our social and political institutions to create a more civil and just society. Frustrated that we still contend with gross inequality, stinging poverty and rampant political and corporate corruption, control minded Americans now embrace the perfectibility of individuals by attempting to create perfect conforming individuals to serve social institutions as opposed to creating social institutions to serve mankind.

The public is being asked to swallow the opinion that all manner of human troubles - from anxiety, interpersonal squabbles to misbehavior of many kinds - be viewed not as inevitable parts of the human comedy, but as psychopathology to be treated, usually with powerful drugs, as expugnable illnesses.

The implicit ideal - the healthy, normal and truly happy camper - will, properly medicated, harbor no serious worries or animosities, no sadness over losses or failures, no disappointments with children or spouses, no doubts about themselves or conflicts with others, and, certainly no strange ideas or behaviors.

(Think Equilibrium - "We have created a new arm of the law: the Grammaton Cleric, whose sole task it is to seek out and eradicate the true source of man's inhumanity to man - his ability to feel emotion. Take your Prozium dose now!")

- adapted from Stuart A. Kirk

"Behavior can not be pathological. It can simply comport with, or not comport with, our expectations of how people should behave. Analogously, brains that produce weird or obnoxious behaviors are not diseased. They are brains that produce atypical behaviors.

The erosion of personal responsibility is the most pernicious effect of the expansive role psychiatry has come to play in American life. It has successfully replaced huge chunks of individual accountability with diagnoses, clinical histories and what turn out to be pseudoscientific explanations for deviant behavior." - Irwin Savodnik

"Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology." - Sing Lee

People with schizophrenia in developing countries fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations.

Over time diverse cultures have developed unique ways to deal with someone who is behaving in a culturally non-normative way.

"Muslim and Swahili spirits are not exorcised in the Christian sense of casting out. Rather they are coaxed with food and goods, feted with song and dance. They are placated, settled, reduced in malfeasance." - Juli McGruder

Researchers have long documented how certain emotional reactions from family members correlate with higher relapse rates for people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Reactions such as criticism, hostility, overprotectiveness or constant intrusiveness may cause relapse.

An unfortunate relationship has popped up in numerous studies around the world.

Labeling mental illness as biochemically based creates greater tension than labeling mental illness as a disorder of the spirit - such as demon possession, incorrect thinking or spiritual corruption.

In a study conducted in Turkey those who labeled schizophrenic behavior as akil hastaligi (illness of the brain or reasoning abilities) were more inclined to assert that schizophrenics were aggressive and should not live freely in the community than those who saw the disorder as ruhsal hastagi (a disorder of the spiritual or inner self). Another study, which looked at populations in Germany, Russia and Mongolia, found that "irrespective of place . . . endorsing biological factors as the cause of schizophrenia was associated with a greater desire for social distance."

"We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise. Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species." - Sheila Mehta

"Spirit-possession beliefs had unexpected benefits. Critically, the story allowed the person with schizophrenia a cleaner bill of health when the illness went into remission. An ill individual enjoying a time of relative mental health could, at least temporarily, retake his or her responsibilities in the kinship group. Since the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity." - Ethan Watters

"Mental illness is feared and has such a stigma because it represents a reversal of what Westernized people have come to value as the essence of human nature. Our culture highly values an illusion of self-control and control of circumstance, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be." - Juli McGruder

"Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal. One set of ideas about pain and suffering is being presented as definitive. There is no one definitive psychology." - Derek Summerfield

"Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We've come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.)

The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection - a penchant for "psychologizing" daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and subconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group. Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world's mental distress.

Mental-health ideas we export to the world are rarely unadulterated scientific facts and never culturally neutral. Our biomedical advances are hard to separate from our particular cultural beliefs." - Ethan Watters

"Dear Rod (Rodrigo Munoz, M.D., President American Psychiatric Association);

After nearly three decades as a member it is with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment that I submit this letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. The major reason for this action is my belief that I am actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association.

At this point in history, in my view, 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. Psychiatrists have become the minions of drug company promotions.

Anyone with the least bit of common sense attending the annual meeting would observe how the drug company exhibits and industry sponsored symposia draw crowds with their various enticements while the serious scientific sessions are barely attended. Psychiatric training reflects their influence as well; i.e., the most important part of a resident curriculum is the art and quasi-science of dealing drugs, i.e., prescription writing.

These psychopharmacological limitations on our abilities to be complete physicians also limit our intellectual horizons. No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts rather we are there to realign our patients' neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter whatever its configuration.

So, our guild organization provides a rationale, by its neurobiological tunnel vision, for keeping our distance from the molecule conglomerates we have come to define as patients. We condone and promote the widespread overuse and misuse of toxic chemicals that we know have serious long term effects: tardive dyskinesia, tardive dementia and serious withdrawal syndromes.

It is not within my capacities to buy into the current biomedical-reductionistic model heralded by the psychiatric leadership as once again marrying us to somatic medicine. This is a matter of fashion, politics and, like the pharmaceutical house connection, money.

In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI (I don't remember the members being asked if they supported such an organization) such that the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the champion of their clients the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring. NAMI, with tacit APA approval, has set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring. For the most part we stand by and allow this fascistic agenda to move forward.

The shortsightedness of this marriage of convenience between APA, NAMI and the drug companies (who gleefully support both groups because of their shared pro-drug stance) is an abomination. I want no part of a psychiatry of oppression and social control."

Sincerely, Loren R. Mosher M. D. December 4 1998

"We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of mental health and illness. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.

In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we've been exporting our Western "symptom repertoire" as well.

That is, we've been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures.

Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders - depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them - now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

In the end, what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illness, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness." - Ethan Watters

"I would like to see more psychiatrists live up to their title, which translates as "soul healer." That will never happen except through increased skepticism about the way their profession currently operates." - Nina Wouk

psyched out

Agoraphobics are notoriously resistant to treatment.

Psychologists have found them unusually imaginative, creative and intelligent but extremely uncooperative when it was time to return to the social group.

After spending time with highly articulate, self-imprisoned women, I came to think of them as the canaries in the coal mines of suburbia, the first sensitive casualties in a toxic cultural environment that will eventually affect us all.

I finally found one group of determined agoraphobics who were making slow but steady progress.

Getting out of the house for meetings remained a challenge - any group of Agoraphobics Anonymous would necessarily have a high absenteeism rate - but rage and anger proved sturdy motivators.

Amazingly lasting relief from agoraphobia did not occur by changing the perceptions of the women but by changing the pathology "out there in the social group."

I submitted my article. My editor was furious. "This solution is far too complicated for our readers," she said. "This is a service magazine for women. We don't do politics." Rather than providing a few quick tips that could be tried by next Tuesday, I had confounded "the mental health thing with the political thing." The information I had gathered was "far too depressing," she said. "We want readers to feel happy when they finish our magazine."

This was my first lesson in the valium theory of journalism: Prose should numb the blues without trying to identify the problem.

"Believe me," I told my editor when she warned me against depressing readers with the truth, "your readers already are depressed. They'd be relieved to know they're not alone."

I suspect that many of the stressed out business executives and agoraphobic housewives were suffering from a more pervasive psychological disorder - a disordering of mental processes spawning strange behavior.

Kurt Vonnegut identified it as "a political disease," afflicting people who lack the essential emotional "damping apparatus" that prevents them from "being swamped by the unbelievability of social culture as it really is."

For those of us who are acutely depressed by the collapse of civility; unprecedented homelessness; the acceptance of torture as a viable method of extracting information; competition for scarce resources; preemptive invasions built on lies; unprecedented incarceration rates; toxic wastes fouling the Earth; the glorification of violence, murder and genocide as a viable solution to human social problems - there's not much relief in "a few quick tips."

Facing the truth about the grim political realities behind our personal depression would at least eliminate the paranoia that "it's all in our heads."

"Let us be alert. Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake." - Victor Frankl

Victor Frankl recommended that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast of America be complemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast.

Modern therapy has focused almost exclusively on self, separating an individual's problems from those found in the structure of our social culture. When treatment programs teach disturbed citizens to cope and not protest, to adapt and not rebel, to "work within your situation" rather than "refuse the unacceptable," James Hillman concludes, "therapy is collaborating with what the government wants; docile plebes."

Nobel Laureate Heinrich Boll, after World War II, claimed the most danger flaw in the character of the German people could be stated in one word: "Obedience."

"The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians." – Angelica Grimke

"Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think." – Adolf Eichmann

As Americans, proudly rooted in a heritage of rugged individualism, we do not generally think of ourselves as obedient - and yet, as Victor Frankl observed of American culture, we have followed orders again and again to "be happy."

Many Americans are having trouble being happy without a reason to be.

Our nationwide politically created depression is not likely to lift until American lives are again grounded in reality.

Most politically created depressions are suffered not by the perpetrators, rescuers or victims in a social order but by those who occupy the role of observer, those who do not draft social policy, those who have no voice in social policy and yet are subject to it. In any given social crisis, only the observers are likely to have enough time to take note of cultural conditions - everyone else being to busy issuing orders, running soup kitchens or just staying alive.

The first task of the observer is to acknowledge reality.

The keen observer can then determine whether what is considered "normal" in the culture is in reality normal.

If Americans bravely confronted the reality of American social culture, it would soon be apparent that Americans are culturally depressed, fragmented, megalomaniacal, delusional and immersed in denial. We are one nation of split realities: One fact in the newspaper - 200,000 acts of televised violence an American child sees before turning 18 - has one meaning for Arnold Schwarzenegger, an actor with made-up wounds in fake wars who supports real military aggression, and another for "Eddie the Loop", a dismembered veteran from a real war who now leads an unimaginable life under a Manhattan bridge.

Whose reality is the authentic one?

Either most of us are crazy, or there is no such thing as "the real world."

Perhaps as the late physicist Frank Oppenheimer once said, "We don't live in the real world. We live in a world we made up."

Computer science would call these fantastically imagantive systems we make to fill that world - our government, our global economy, two-party politics, the military, sexual identities, race relations, religious practices, popular culture - "virtual realities," because they represent what is the truth to the individuals trapped within them.

Confusion and harm occurs when these imagined virtual realities are mistaken for reality itself.

The Cold War seeped into the personal relationships of men and women, fathers and mothers, the psyches of young children.

The baby-boom generation was permanently imprinted with the image of the mushroom cloud.

Secret decisions made behind closed doors in Washington had a direct impact on my kindergarten finger-painting 2,000 miles away, as air-raid sirens drilled terror into my head.

The mushroom cloud provides a riveting clue to the etiology of my generation.

After spending our school years crouched between the wooden runners of our desks, ears pounding and minds squeezing with dread that this could be it, we later latched onto the rungs of corporate ladders with a frenzied, irresponsible compulsion to "eat, drink and be merry."

Indulging the need for immediate gratification to historic excess, we entered the job market guided by the slogan appearing on T-shirts in the 1980s: "Whoever dies with the most toys wins."

Reversing the political formula Walter Lippman proposed for national security and world peace after the devastating lessons of World War II - public interest first, private interest next - we instead let Wall Street plundered America with merger mania creating vast middle class unemployment with leveraged buyouts while polluting the environment through deregulation. These unrealities were accomplished under such amorphous explanations as "market forces," "supply and demand" and "economic competitiveness," as though our mortal economic arrangements were acts of God or scientific laws.

Philosopher and social reformer Bertrand Russell once declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, "Sir, you did not give us enough information."

For compassionate people to survive in a culture where raw suffering and the threat of violence is felt daily, our lives have to be "purged of feeling." Although observers reeling from cultural traumas might find temporary relief in emotionally distancing themselves, this tactic eventually aggravates, rather than cures, a political created depression. By default or by design, an observer's passive behavior during social crises, as Americans have been taught to look away, can result in unchecked aggression.

Even before we knew the specific details of ruined gloabal economies and environmental devastation that are being revealed today, as secret files and secret papers from the Cold War are opened up around the Earth, rumors abounded.

We already 'knew' the truth in general, unspoken terms.

How did we know?

A crazed patient hospitalized in Oak Ridge, Tennessee cries out during nightmares and then disappears.

Karen Silkwood is killed in a car accident, and the briefcase of papers she had promised a reporter cannot be found.

If the full details of the Iran-Contra affair are ever released from legal blockades at the National Archives, if the gag orders in the settlement of critical medical suits are ever lifted, we will not be surprised by the compromising secrets they contain.

We already know and feel them, they show up in our cynicism about politics.

Certainly, future historians studying the arms race, global pollution and our immune-system dysfunctions will think it odd we didn't "know" what was going on.

Before any radioactive or toxic wastes can be dumped in our deserts and oceans, they must first pass through millions of minds: Secret plans have to be discussed, secret orders have to be issued, secret papers have to be typed, secret cargo has to be transported, secret destinations have to be reached. All this work must be done by people without anyone wondering, anywhere along the route to the North Pole, "Say, what's in this stuff?"

As Robert Bellah and his colleagues point out in "The Good Society," the homeless were not dropped on our streets by a deus ex machina; they arrived through human actions and social choices: "the market driven conversion of single-room-occupancy hotels into upscale tourist accommodation, government urban-renewal projects that revitalized downtown while driving up rents and reducing housing for the poor, economic changes that eliminated unskilled jobs paying enough to support a family, the states deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and reduced funding of local community health programs."

Each of these anonymous "systems" is composed of individual people.

The homeless, the hobo camp inmates of our cities, had to pass through the thoughts of real estate brokers, economists, CEOs, human resource personnel, mental health experts, state legislators, county judges, voters and taxpayers, my friends, your friends, you and me, while none of us "knew" what was going on. Nearly all of us are guilty of indifference.

Breaking the habits of secrecy and denial is no small chore.

What if these current disorders are not due to an inability to express our feelings?

What if we simply can not talk about what we have done and are doing?

Every day there are stories, reported and not, of social injustice.

Is our speechlessness another symptom of our politically created depression, a silent testimony that our lives must be "purged of feeling"?

The virtual reality we live in has infected every fiber of our beings, every tendril of our psyches.

We must strive to accomplish two essential tasks.

We must seek true knowledge to reconnect us with reality.

We must actively resist indifference by allowing ourselves to feel empathy.

Our political system is directly responsible for much of the pathology citizens experience.

Political systems that force individuals to conform to industrial roles and dehumanizing lifestyles create individual suffering on a massive scale.

"A social order that glorifies war, rewards hypercompetitiveness, restricts resources, promotes isolation and punishes those who "fail to measure up" requires the therapist to "stop using therapy sessions" to fix up the people so the system works better and start fixing up the system so the people work better. One must gain whatever resources are necessary to remove one's self from a condition of oppression and to affect not only one's own circumstances but also more general circumstances outside one's intimate surroundings." - Thelma Jean Goodrich

Reforming a civilization is a daunting endeavor for a culture under military control for over half a century.

The cure itself requires extensive internal effort, uprooting old lies and grafting real truth onto the way we each individually conceptualize reality.

As Frederick Douglass warned the observers of slavery, "Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did. It never will."

- adapted from Mary Kay Blakely

Insanity is properly defined as repeating the same actions over and over and expecting a different outcome than those already experienced.

"If we think we can change anything using the same old useless tactics, then we are closer to becoming extinct than we know." - Anthony Bevilacqua

mental health in modern a
military-industrial-corporate-entertainment (M I C E) social culture

The concept of "mental health" in our modern military-industrial-corporate-entertainment social cultural system is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the M I C E social cultural system and does so without showing signs of stress.

Our modern M I C E social cultural system does not exist to satisfy human needs.

For our modern military-industrial-corporate-entertainment social cultural system to function
human behavior has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.

Among the abnormal conditions present in the current M I C E social cultural system are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the break-down of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village and the tribe.

Modern M I C E, the human components of the military-industrial-corporate-entertainment social cultural system, are strapped down by a network of behavioral rules and regulations, and their fate depends on the actions of persons remote from them whose decisions they cannot influence.

This is not accidental.

The modern M I C E social cultural system must regulate human behavior closely in order to function.

The degree of personal freedom that exists in any society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government.

Freedom of thought is restricted by psychological control of which most people are oblivious.

Many people's ideal of what constitutes freedom is governed more by social convention than by real needs of individual people.

In our modern M I C E social cultural system an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community - such as co-workers, neighbors and family.

If the internal loyalties of small-scale communities are stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.

It is therefore necessary for our modern M I C E social cultural system to break down traditional values - values that create allegiance to and between individuals as opposed to allegiance to M I C E social cultural system.

Our modern M I C E social cultural system must force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior.

Remember - your first loyalty must be to the M I C E system - not to other M I C E!

Most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that directly affect their lives.

Our modern M I C E social cultural system tries to "solve" this problem by using propaganda to make the M I C E want the decisions that have already been made for them.

All M I C E social cultural institutions use some form of propaganda to manipulate public opinions and behavior.

Propaganda is not limited to advertisements - the content of ‘entertainment' programming is a powerful form of propaganda.

Those that are unable to adapt - unable to wholeheartedly accept the propaganda as truth and the needs of our modern military-industrial-corporate-entertainment social cultural system as their own needs - have been declared to be M I C E with "mental health issues".

neurotransmitters

"Humans are "infovores."

The human eye makes three fixations a second on the world around it.

The human gaze is drawn to items that have something new to tell us.

Without new information to assimilate, humans experience a highly unpleasant state - boredom.

Cognitive neuroscience - the science that seeks to explain how mind emerges from brain - is beginning to unravel how this works.

The explanation involves opioids, one of many neurotransmitters which are molecules that the neurons in the human brain release to activate or inhibit neighboring neurons.

The effect of opioids is pleasurable, the same neural receptors are involved in the high from opiate drugs, such as heroin or morphine.

In the past opioids were believed to exist primarily in the spinal cord and lower brain centers where they reduce the sensation of pain.

A gradient of opioid receptors has been discovered in a region of the cerebral cortex, humans' enormous outer brain layer that is largely responsible for perception, cognition and emotion.

In the areas of the cortex that initially receive visual or auditory information, opioids are sparse. But in "association areas," where the sensory information triggers memory and taps into previous stored knowledge, there is a high density of opioid receptors. So the more a new piece of information tickles that part of your brain where you interpret the scene or conversation, the bigger the opioid hit.

Staring at a blank wall will produce few mental associations.

Gazing at something that leads to a novel interpretation spurs higher levels of associative activity in opioid-dense areas.

We are thus thrilled when new insights tap into what we have previously learned.

Once we learn this truth we seek ways to feed our opioid desires.

Why do we pursue novelty?

The first time our brains take in a new perception - a scene, a movie, a literary passage, a new experience - there's a high level of activity in which a few neurons are strongly activated as connections to our memories and previous knowledge are made.

Then we "return to reality," the connections to our memories and knowledge have already been made, the strongly activated neurons produce less opioids reducing overall activity and opioid pleasure now that we have absorbed the information. " - adapted from Irving Beiderman

This fits perfectly with the theory of the Hedonistic Thermostat and what any introspective person already knows - old information and repeated experiences do not give us that opioid hit that we so desire.

This also helps explain the altered realities of heavy opium users like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, William Blair, HP Lovecraft(syphilitic insanity), Edgar Alan Poe(pedofile),

"The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully effected. Buildings, landscapes, &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience." - Thomas De Quincey

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Down to a sunless sea
...
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"While I was sitting at tea, I felt a strange sensation, totally unlike any thing I had ever felt before; a gradual creeping thrill, which in a few minutes occupied every part of my body, lulling to sleep the before-mentioned racking pain, producing a pleasing glow from head to foot, and inducing a sensation of dreamy exhilaration similar in nature but not in degree to the drowsiness caused by wine, though not inclining me to sleep; in fact far from it, that I longed to engage in some active exercise; to sing, dance, or leap...so vividly did I feel my vitality - for in this state of delicious exhilaration even mere excitement seemed absolute elysium - that I could not resist the tendency to break out in the strangest vagaries, until my companions thought me deranged ... before my entranced sight magnificent halls stretched out in endless succession with galley above gallery, while the roof was blazing with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was tinged with strange, gigantic figures, like the wild possessors of lost globe...I will not attempt farther to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of 'brown gum' had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words that I can command would do justice to its Titanian splendour and immensity..." - William Blair

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age." - HP Lovecraft

chemical synapses

One of the most important features of chemical synapses is that they are the site of action for the majority of psychoactive drugs. Synapses are affected by drugs such as curare, strychnine, cocaine, morphine, alcohol, LSD, and countless others. These drugs have different effects on synaptic function, and often are restricted to synapses that use a specific neurotransmitter. For example, curare is a poison which stops acetylcholine from depolarising the post-synaptic membrane, causing paralysis. Strychnine blocks the inhibitory effects of the neurotransmitter glycine, which causes the body to pick up and react to weaker and previously ignored stimuli, resulting in uncontrollable muscle contractions. Morphine acts on synapses that use endorphin neurotransmitters, and alcohol increases the inhibitory effects of the neurotransmitter GABA. LSD interferes with synapses that use the neurotransmitter serotonin to cause hallucination. Cocaine blocks reuptake of dopamine and therefore increases its effects.

dopamine

Dopamine has many functions in the brain, including important roles in behavior and cognition, motor activity, motivation and reward, regulation of milk production, sleep, mood, attention, and learning. The phasic responses of dopamine neurons are observed when an unexpected reward is presented. These responses transfer to the onset of a conditioned stimulus after repeated pairings with the reward. Further, dopamine neurons are depressed when the expected reward is omitted. Thus, dopamine neurons seem to encode the prediction error of rewarding outcomes. In nature, we learn to repeat behaviors that lead to maximize rewards. Dopamine is therefore believed to provide a teaching signal to parts of the brain responsible for acquiring new behavior.

serotonin

In the central nervous system, serotonin is believed to play an important role as a neurotransmitter, in the regulation of anger, aggression, body temperature, mood, sleep, vomiting, sexuality, and appetite. As with all neurotransmitters, the effects of serotonin on the human mood and state of mind, and its role in consciousness, are very difficult to ascertain.

psychedelic modulation of serotonin

There exist many recreational drugs that innately modulate the serotonin system in such a way to produce alterations in perception, emotional response, and thought process. These include psilocin/psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, LSD, MDMA (ecstasy), MDA, MDEA and ibogaine.

endogenous opioid peptides

There are three well-characterized families of opioid peptides produced by the body: enkephalins, endorphins and dynorphins. An enkephalin is a pentapeptide involved in regulating pain and nociception in the body. The enkephalins are termed endogenous ligands, or specifically endorphins, as they are internally derived and bind to the body's opioid receptors.

Endorphins resemble the opiates in their abilities to produce analgesia and a sense of well-being.

Endorphins are "natural pain killers." Other drugs may increase the effects of the endorphins. The term "endorphin" implies a pharmacological activity as opposed to a specific chemical formulation. It consists of two parts: endo- and -orphin; these are short forms of the words endogenous and morphine, intended to mean "a morphine-like substance originating from within the body."

The term endorphin rush has been adopted in popular speech to refer to feelings of exhilaration brought on by pain, danger, or other forms of stress due to the influence of endorphins. Dynorphin is a class of peptides which has some opiate-like activity.

The dynorphins, which include dynorphin A, dynorphin B, alpha- and beta-neoendorphin, and big dynorphin, are all the products of a single gene, 'preprodynorphin'. Dynorphin functions primarily as a kappa opioid receptor agonist, meaning that it acts mainly at kappa opioid receptors. Other opioid peptides include beta-endorphin, met-enkephalin, leu-enkephalin and endomorphins.

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This website defines a new religious ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate crime.”

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American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

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