(Author’s note – I’m going through my archives and hope to
share what I think are some of my interesting old articles. This one was
originally published in The American Chronicle on 1/22/08 under the title of Psychiatry, Tom Cruise and Scientology. I’ll include the old links and hopefully not
all are dead, and some are still active.)
Tom Cruise sure has been in the news a lot of late, between
jumping on Oprah’s couch, attacking psychiatry, and Brooke Shields’ use of
anti-depressants, and now with the odd leaked Scientology videos, he seems to
be generating a lot of attention. And
I’ve noticed in the reporting of each incident we are being led to believe that
Tom Cruise is insane or brainwashed or worse.
So I began wondering, why? The
media certainly wants us to see Tom Cruise, he’s everywhere, it’s hard to
escape, but they also want us to believe that he has fallen on the wrong side
of the crazy wall, why? Could it be
what he’s saying? Could it be his
attack on psychiatry?
I’m not a fan of Mr. Cruise and I haven’t been to the
theater in years, but when I heard his views on psychiatry, I sensed he was
telling the truth. But the media has
created a thinking in our nation that if you are against psychiatry and the
accompanying pharmaceuticals, you must be one of those crazy Scientologists. I don’t care if Tom Cruise is a Scientologist,
this is America and we are supposed to be free to believe in whatever belief
system we choose. I choose not to align myself with any organized religion, but
I do understand there is merit in the idea that psychiatry is a suspect
science.
The manual used to define mental illness by the American
Psychiatric Association (APA) is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM) and each new entry into this manual is done by member
vote, versus research and discovery of known pathology. According to psychiatrist Ron Leifer, “So
the DSM is basically an arbitrary classification of thoughts, moods and
behavior decided upon by a committee of psychiatrists who are picked by the
American Psychiatric Association.”
Psychiatrist Colin Andrew Ross states, “It’s bogus that you
can even accurately identify who has the behavior of schizophrenia. It’s bogus that you can tag it to
genes. It’s bogus that you can detect
those genes through any kind of test.
So the whole is basically bogus.”
And clinical psychologist Ty Colbert paints a disturbing picture with
his words, “So we can theoretically find a way to drug every set of symptoms
that’s different from what we think should be normal. So we could have hundreds of different situations in the future
and which we are attempting to drug. So
you just extrapolate that over a couple generations and it could be the fall of
our civilization.” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8705742804699284911&q=psychiatry&total=1725&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2
Dr. Jeffrey A Schaler, a psychologist and professor in the
Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University’s School of
Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., in a acceptance speech for the Thomas Szasz
Award, states, “What do we know that is
true, that the cult of psychiatry keeps telling us is false? First, the idea that there is a known brain
lesion causing mental illness. The
truth is we cannot tell who is mentally ill and who is not by looking at
pictures of their brains or analyzing their blood.” Dr. Schaler goes on to refer to the DSM as a great work of
fiction, clarifying that each disorder in the DSM is invented, whereas diseases
listed in a pathology textbook are discovered.
Dr. Schaler continues, “Mental illness refers to something a
person does, real disease refers to something a person has. Consider this yet another way – It takes one
person to have a disease, it takes two people to have a mental illness. If you are alone on an island you could
develop a real disease like cancer or heart disease, but you cannot develop a
mental illness such as hyperactivity or schizophrenia. This is because mental illness is always
diagnosed on some sort of social conflict, when people do something that others
find objectionable, they can be diagnosed as mentally ill. If the person doing the diagnosing is more
powerful that the person diagnosed, then there’s trouble. In this sense, the diagnosis of mental
illness is always a weapon.” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4857231661511715395&q=dr.+schaler&total=11&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
These are powerful statements by educated people in the
field of psychology and psychiatry, yet the media has sold us on the idea that
if we are depressed it is a chemical imbalance and the medications are simply
balancing our deficit. But the truth is
there is no test to prove that anyone suffers from a chemical imbalance. In a
video entitled “Psychiatry – No Science, No Cures” Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State
University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York, states,
“The actual truth about chemical imbalance is that it’s an actual lie. Nobody has yet measured, demonstrated or
created a test to show that somebody has a chemical imbalance in their brain,
period.”
And psychiatrist Dr. Grace Jackson, states, “There is no
rational science behind what they think is the cause of these symptoms. The medications that are being given to
people are, without exception, introducing chemicals that are altering the
brain in ways which can be very damaging.
And I’ll go a step further and say that in the absence of proven
chemical imbalance, for which the medications are “rebalancing” or fixing, the
medications are in fact, toxic.” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8058160857846500132&q=psychiatry&total=1725&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
I recognize that this is a controversial subject, with
millions of adults and children on these behavior-altering medications, and I
wonder how many understand that these drugs are not curing diseases, they are
only altering our behavior and perhaps, even, our brains. Maybe we are a culture that just likes our
drugs or maybe we like to have an excuse of why we don’t perform as well as we
perceive others as doing or maybe it’s just easier to numb what is bothering us
inside, instead of attempting to fix it.
But the simple truth remains; we are not getting the facts on the
medications we are using to fix our behavior.
Gwen Olsen, a former pharmaceutical drug sales rep. and
author of the book, “Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher – God’s Call to Loving
Arms”, spent fifteen years selling specialty pharmaceuticals to psychiatrists,
among others. She left the field after
she felt a moral obligation to inform the public of the policies of selling drugs,
which she felt was a danger to the “American people, at large”. She states that there was “consistent
minimization of side effects” and that it became “less and less popular to give
full disclosure about our drugs, as time went on in my profession, and we were
more responsible for marketing information being given to the doctors, than
actual good medical information.”
After seeing how the lack of full disclosure concerning
prescription drugs was harming and in some cases, killing patients, Ms. Olsen
decided that there was something wrong in the way drugs were being approved and
marketed. “I heard on more than one
occasion people refer to ‘our friends’ in the FDA or ‘our people’ in the
FDA.” Ms. Olsen states that while
selling psychiatric drugs in mental institutions she began to understand that
many of the behavioral manifestations of mentally ill, were actually side
effects of the drugs she was selling.
And Ms. Olsen was instructed to discredit people who were not in favor
of psychiatric drugs by her district manager, who informed her, “Any time
anybody isn’t for psychiatric drugs, if you just label them a Scientologist,
that will discredit them, because everybody knows they are crazy.” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8005785861839485871&q=gwen+olsen&total=23&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
The corporate media has sold us the idea that the only
people who are against psychiatric drugs are Scientologists and they are, in
fact, crazy. But what of the experts,
the scientists, the psychiatrists and psychologists speaking out against
psychiatric drugs, are they also crazy?
The television tells us that a chemical imbalance has been proven, but
the scientists insist this is not proven, that it is a theory at best, or a lie
at worst, and no scientific test has ever been developed to make this chemical
imbalance a reality. Yet, we believe
our televisions and we take the drugs and we give the drugs to our children,
seemingly unconcerned about the potential effects of those drugs on developing
brains.
The history of psychiatry is full of wayward experiments on
patients. The Father of American
Psychiatry is Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813); he was also a signer of the
Declaration of Independence. Dr. Rush
believed that too much blood in the system caused psychiatric and physiological
disorders; this idea was strengthened when he decided that bloodletting cured
him of yellow fever. He also created
the Tranquilizing Chair, which was said to address the fact that “madness” was
an arterial disease, an inflammation of the brain and through being confined in
the chair, which looked much like an electric chair, it controlled the flow of
blood to the brain. He also believed
that another way to ease madness was to repeatedly dunk patients in ice-cold
water. http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/paharc/features/brush.html
Dr. Henry Cotton (1876-1933), medical director at New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, Trenton,
felt that mental illness was caused by hidden infection in various body parts
and the way to cure the mental illness was to remove the offending organs. He began with teeth and tonsils and if no
noticeable change occurred in the patient, he would precede to remove the
stomach, spleen, cervix or colon.
Needless to say, like Dr. Rush, Dr. Cotton’s patients did not do
well. http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW04-05/14-0511/features1.html
Psychologist John B. Watson (1878-1958) believed that
psychology should address “the prediction and control of observable
behavior.” He was such a believer in
experimental psychology that he performed a series of experiments on his
11-month old son, Albert. Watson is
quoted as having said, “Give me the baby, and I’ll make it climb and use it’s
hands in constructing a building of stone or wood… I’ll make it a thief, a
gunman or a dope fiend. The
possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless.”
Interestingly enough, Watson was best known for his
parenting advice in which he stressed the idea of never showing affection to
children. “…Remember when you are
tempted to pet your child, that mother’s love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument that may inflict a
never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a
nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your son or daughter’s vocational
future and their chances for marital happiness.” In 1954 Watson’s son Albert committed suicide, and in 1957 the
APA awarded Watson a gold medal for his contributions to psychology. http://www.mental-health-abuse.org/harmingYouth12.html
And a couple of the legitimate psychiatric diagnoses from
years gone by include drapetomania, a mental disorder existing in slaves who
ran away to freedom. And hysteria, a
very popular diagnosis in the Victorian era as a condition only women suffered,
especially those who rebelled against male domination or who tended to “cause
trouble.”
Some believe the psychiatric communities are working to end
the pursuit of individualism and creativity and site the lives and deaths of
celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Farmer, and Judy
Garland. Others believe it is about
social control, eugenics, and racism.
But unfortunately most believe their television and the marketing of the
idea that we are all suffering under one banner of mental illness or another
and luckily for us, there is a pill for that.
I think all religions hold pieces of truth and perhaps the
piece the Scientologists hold is the fact that psychiatry is a destructive,
non-scientific practice with invented diseases, more of a tool to control the
masses, than cure them. History shows
that torturous experiments were done in the name of psychiatry and ridiculous
assumptions were called fact and those practices have not changed. The only difference now is that the
experiments are occurring with millions of people used as lab rats and the
encouragement to claim our diagnosis and take the pharmaceuticals can be found
throughout print and television media.
The fact of the matter is psychiatry has made mistakes
before, fatal mistakes. Sixty years ago
there were six or seven mental disorders, now, according to the DSM, there are
well over three hundred. Are we, as a
society, growing crazier as each year passes?
Who is in charge of defining what is abnormal or mentally disordered,
versus, simply different? As the long
arms of psychiatry invade all facets of our lives, including our schools,
social services, military, legislations, and churches, perhaps this is a
question we all should be asking.
As always, keep seeking.
