The Donald Affair: Trump Blasts O’Reilly

Everybody, from highbrow political analysts to unknown bloggers (I may be somewhere in-between) are throwing in their finest political analysis possible to make sense of what I would call “The Donald Affair”, the incongruous rise of a mogul within the party of the elite, threatening said elite but rendered untouchable by their own voters which they can’t now control. It’s a class-war within the GOP.

Trump blasts O’Reilly: Fox News haven for ‘Trump haters’

What makes the ‘Donald Affair’ so fascinating is  that it is the conservative voters, not the progressives, waging a class war against the elite, INSIDE the elites’ own house, the GOP. And the fun part of this comedy is watching the GOP struggling to keep their house from being ransacked by the pitchforked mob in a T-shirt.

That word, class-war, is the one element avoided by the mainstream media, mainly because it is taboo in this nation of ours. They will have you believe that the Donald ‘problem’ is just a manifestation of popular culture gone awry, the love for the ‘famous’, anger about Washington insiders and illegal immigration. But consider the use of the word ‘elite’ by these outraged conservative voters.

The word ‘elite’ has never been dripping from their mouth as much as it is now. Until his run for the presidency,  ‘elite’ was a word used by the ‘liberals’, a sound that produced immediate attacks on them, for it (wrongly) stood, until now and according to the conservatives, for hatred of the wealthy.

Now, the conservative voters, and some democrats, have ‘embraced‘ the word ‘elite’ with a virulence not shown by the ‘liberals’ before them. Heck, the conservatives are showing more hatred of the ‘elite’ than we ever thought them capable of, and more than us progressives because at least THEY are doing SOMETHING about the elite. They are making the elite and the GOP CEOs TREMBLE.  You would have expected this show of ‘disrespect‘ for the elite to come from the democrats, not from the conservative voters. In that sense, I salute ye, conservatives.

But there is more to this ‘Donald Affair”.  Consider that, while there is open hatred of the ‘elite’, that elite is just a word, an abstraction, an elite without a face. As long as it stays like that, the elite is in trouble because it represents a ‘generalized’ hatred, not a particular one against one person. And yet, putting a face to it TODAY is a bad idea too because we have those elitists showing their real hearts: the guy who increased the AIDS pill from $13 to $700, the peanut king incarcerated for 28 years for the crime of ‘greed’, as the judge called it.

People are not blind. They are just tired of being screwed up by the powers that be.

That’s why the Donald has become an icon, an avatar representing that generalized hatred. He represents “hatred against the INSIDERS”, which is another generalization. Who are the ‘insiders’, what does that means, “insiders”, and how does it shows?

The pro-Donald knows what It means: that the elite has bought our misleadership in Congress and the White House with their lobbyists and PAC donations, and it shows in policies harming the middle class and condoning the criminality of the Wall Street and corporate elite. The ‘anti-migration’ focus is just the nerve where all that buying and criminality ends for them: we have illegal immigration because there are no jobs here and the corporations prefer to hire the cheap Mexican workforce. It all comes back to the economy.

The Donald Affair will stay in the annals of political history of this nation as one of the most interesting episodes, the one that promised the beginning of the shaking down by the electorate of the two political parties: the Trumpists and the Bernies.

Good luck to you all. Don’t let your movement be taken like the ORIGINAL Tea Party by the Koch brothers.

Shutter Island: Moral Therapy, Lobotomies and Mental Illness in Hollywood

Shutter Island, the movie (2010 directed by Martin Scorsese, with Leo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley), presents an accurate but superficially treated part of the history of the modern psychiatric institutions. To make matters worse, somehow the public did not catch the importance of that history in the flick, for they were and continue to be thrown off by the question at the end of the movie (is lobotomy a necessary evil?) and about what was DiCaprio’s character real mental state. It is promoted as a horror movie, which it is, thus  the historic part is lost in the mystery plot. I must say parenthetically that this is, in my view, Leo’s best performance, and I have never been a fan of his.

One of the issues treated in the movie is the relation between violence and mental illness. “Treated” is a misnomer, more like ‘used’ to advance the thriller part of the plot. Nevertheless, the correct part of the history of psychiatry is the reference to the two different philosophies of mental illness in the 1800s relating to the treatment of violent people. Each developed its own treatment modality approach, vying to control the emerging business of mental health treatment.

One view, the ‘moral therapy’ approach, is represented in the movie by Ben Kingsley’s character (no spoiler: from the beginning of the movie we know he is a psychiatrist). His character could be a stand for Sammuel Woodward, the doctor who tried to reform the treatment of the mentally ill at the newly created (1833) psych hospital Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts. This is not in the movie. The pro-surgery approach is represented by Max von Sydow’s character.

To better understand this ‘struggle’ of approaches, I recommend you read the book The History and Politics of Community Mental Health by Murray Levine. This is a MOST read book for anyone interested in that topic. You can read about ‘moral therapy’ on pages 16 to 21 in the book. While you wait to get the book, you can try reading  those pages here: (left click on ‘here“) a sampler of the book at Barnes and Noble.

The part that I find superficial in the movie is this:

There is no mentioning that the failure of the ‘moral’ approach in the US (the historical one) was due to the sabotage inflicted by the pro-surgery faction on the work been done by Mr. Woodward, not because the compassionate-humanistic approach failed in itself.

In that battle for the business of mental illness, the pro-surgery attacked any effort that proved efficient without having to torture or submit a person to the cruelty of lobotomies and the new pharma therapies. In the case of Woodward’s work,they flooded the hospital with the most violent patients at a time when the hospital didn’t have the financial resources to deal with the influx. In addition, as we know today, there are ‘different’ levels of mental ‘dysfunction’. Mr. Woodward was focusing first on those who were less ‘psychotic’. The inability to ‘calm’ the aggressive patients led to the pro-lobotomy calling the ‘moral approach’ a ‘failure’.

But in the movie, we see ‘competition’ between them as a fair one, with the pro-surgery literally sitting there waiting watching Ben’s approach fail. At the end, we are left with the feeling that ‘moral therapy’ is a TOTAL failure and that there is no other alternative than to go the way of the scalpel.

The only one who makes the connections in the movie about the ‘competition’ and immorality of the pro-surgical approach is Leo’s character, but it all gets lost in the ‘detective’ story, in the horror itself.

And then there is the question with which the movie ends:

To be or not to be lobotomized, that is the question.

The real question they are asking is about the benefits of psycho-surgery: would you prefer to live as a ‘monster’, a violent mentally ill person, or to be lobotomized and live as a “good man”, i.e., as a zombie? The question actually is one for ‘society‘, not for the individual with mental illness. No one in his or her ‘right or bad’ state of mind would choose to be a zombie: no one on either mental state, PERIOD, especially if it is done without his consent.

But as important as that is, is the assumption that you become “a good man” with lobotomy or drugs. The moral judgment about the ‘goodness’ of a person becomes unnecessary when a human being is turned into a zombie against his will, as we see in the movie with the many patients roaming the grounds. That person stops to be a human being without the capacity to judge his or her actions. The question could, then, be seen also as the mentally ill choosing suicide by lobotomy, not by his own hand. There’s no winning with lobotomizing a human being, at least not for the patient.

Psycho-surgery as a solution to mental illness, violent or not, shouldn’t even be a question, not in these ‘modern’ times after the horrific history behind that practice.

The moral question should have been: Is it morally right to dehumanize a person against his will so he or her is not a threat to a few? There are other relevant questions but it would be a spoiler for those who have not seen the movie. For example, can the person who committed the crime be considered “a monster”?

Psycho-surgery is alive and well. With modernization comes the re-packaging of it with ‘new’ tools and ‘research’ to make the ‘appropriate corrections’  for past ‘mistakes’. The tools always change, the attitude remain the same.

I recommend this movie to those of you interested in the topic. Watch it and make your own conclusions. It is a time well spend, the movie is good.

Conservative group trying to mount anti-Trump ad campaign

This is a long article worth reading in its entirety.

This is an extract:

So you can see why the Internet lights up when Donald Trump tosses Jorge Ramos from a presser and tells him “mine’s bigger than yours” (Trump was referring to his heart, but again, whatever). All of Trump’s constant bragging about his money and his poll numbers and his virility speak directly to this surprisingly vibrant middle American fantasy about a castrated white America struggling to re-grow its mojo.

…In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things.

All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

Trump Valued Saving His Mother Very Low

New Yorkers may remember the news about the assault on the Donald’s elderly mother on November 1, 1991. He had to be prodded  by the media to reward the hero who chased the young criminal (the son of a Railroad executive) who left her badly injured during the robbery. How much did the Donald estimated was the value of his mom’s life at that time, with inflation factored in?  A DINNER at the PLAZA!!

He didn’t even pay for the dinner: it probably counted as ‘expenses’. Jeez!

Hey, even I had lunch there in the 90s when I was just a lowly mental health case worker.

Somebody said that

“The value of things depend on our attitude towards them.”

The Donald showed us how much he valued the life of the man (in need of a job) who risked his life to save Mommy Trump, and the price he thought worth for saving her life. The saddest part of the affair is that the hero was so totally blinded by being next to an elitist-god, that he could not notice that his life meant nothing to his ‘patron’ and that the dinner invitation was an act to appease the media, which was demanding for the Donald to reward  the hero. He would have shown no gratitude where it not for the press. You see, we are here to serve the elite, they can’t be bothered with gratitude. Time is gold, and blinking for compassion may cut into the  profits.

If this type of questionable moral attitude from a self-called billionaire (is he really?) towards a person who sacrificed his life out of compassion to save this man’s own mother is not enough to explain his outrageous behaviors today, attacking anyone who gets on his way and women and poor people struggling to survive, we need to check our beliefs about what counts as moral and immoral attitude.

This man has NOT grown a heart for you. It is an illusion to think that he is campaigning to “make America great again”.

He only wants to aggrandize himself and rip bigger profits.

PS: I think there was something about him giving a menial job to the hero after the dinner,  but I can’t find the article. If you find it, please post it here.

Solutions to Mass Murders: The Lone Wolf Theory, Gun Control and the Buddhist sutra 19

https://thebuddhawasoutofhismind.wordpress.com/2015/08/08/solutions-to-mass-murders-the-lone-wolf-theory-gun-control-and-the-buddhist-sutra-19/#more-311

This is from my other blog. The post is related to mental health, it discusses a Buddhist meditation technique to reduce those nasty thoughts of ill will and hatred that tend to show up uninvited. Some can get out of control, which is the point of the discussion. But mostly they are inoffensive, yet a stain in our mind that keep us busy away from good thinking and intentions.

 

U.S. Said to Seek Records of New York Anticorruption Panel

From the NYT, this gem of a quote from our distinguished NY State governor, referring to the commission, as he was addressing (reassuring) our ‘honest’ corporate gurus:

“It’s my commission. I can’t ‘interfere’ with it, because it is mine. It is controlled by me,” he said last month, according to Crain’s New York Business.”

This was part of my comment in 2013 when the ‘commission’ was obliterated:

“Well, the shelf-life of morality keeps getting shorter.”

“NYT: Cost of Being Mayor?” Vs ‘Mayor cost to us?’

This NY Times article, Cost of Being Mayor? $650 Million, if He’s Rich, seems like a eulogy to departing (finally!) NY City billionaire mayor Bloomberg. Mama mia! So much $$$ and wealth thrown here and there for everybody who came in contact with this billionaire man who chose to be the mayor of the financial center of the world for FREE, without personal desires to enrich himself!

Funny thing, how much did it cost New Yorkers to RECIPROCATE such generous handouts? The NYT doesn’t mention that in that article. We know that we lost tons of money in corruption, from Mr. B’s pals in Wall Street (WS). City Time’s is an example. He even said we should continue doing business with Mazer, he protected that man unabashedly.

We know that Bloomberg entered city hall in 2001  with a measly 4 billion dollars. He’s leaving with over 20 billions. He and his billionaire pals of WS  were the only ones who year after year increased their  profits in the city despite the increased in poverty around them.

Political contacts are everything in finance. Consider this:

2–If Bloomberg were publicly traded, its stock likely would have taken a dive this week. … his company, which sells terminals to Wall Street banks and employees in finance on which it delivers its financial pricing data and journalism. There are now two fewer investments banks buying Bloomberg terminals, not to mention the thousands of finance workers who also will lose their jobs–and their terminals–this year.

It probably was good business for him to be the mayor. He didn’t have that contract with WS before he became mayor. As he is leaving, whatever extra he gave WS on the side for doing business with him (the sky is the limit to imagine what they got from our money and resources), it is gone with him. That’s why there are “fewer banks buying his terminals“, because they know the deal will be over with the new mayor. It’s common knowledge that POLITICS makes politicians wealthier, if they know how to play the pawns.

Consider this too: Bloomberg’s quiet investments in Sharia Finance: an ulterior motive in backing Ground Zero’s Victory Mosque?

Thanks to Mr. B, we New Yorkers are poorer. All that wealth seems to have been transferred to him and his pals. Where else could it have gone, it had to go somewhere if the city is getting poorer? Tax breaks for all billionaires by ‘investing’ in philanthropy, sheltering their money in Caribbean islands (Noticing New York) . Mr. B invested in our public libraries, that’s why he can tell them to close whenever he says so. Now he wants to sell the buildings for profit.

If you are ever interested on how mythology and the cult of the billionaire hero is created, study the propaganda that the main stream media (MSM) printed about this capitalist mayor through out those 12 years.

ANyone who believes that a capitalist like  Bloomberg works as a mayor without self-interests, without intentions to enrich himself by using the city’s resources, should read ONLY the MSM articles promoting him. Don’t venture outside the MSM or else your illusions about the goodness of the capitalist will be destroyed. Hold tight to them illusions, dear Bloomberg follower.

The NYT got it wrong in ‘When the Mentally Ill Own Guns’

Ok. Look, it’s December 29. I’m not in the mood for fancy arse commentaries here today. After all, year-in-year out only a handful of internet pedestrians walk by this site, so I can expect less visitors at this time, the end of the year.

So, the only comment I have about that NYT’s editorial, to which readers are not allowed to comment, is the following:

If this is true…

Most mentally ill persons are not violent, though The Times’s analysis of 180 confiscation cases in Connecticut (dealing with people posing an imminent risk of injury to themselves or others) found that close to 40 percent of those cases involved people with serious mental illness.

then logic dictates that it is the other 60%, the ‘sane’ ones, whom you need to deal with. Those are the ones on whom you need to focus to confiscate their guns if any guns are going to be taken away. Why focus on the minority? The 60% sane ones are a “threat to themselves or others”, that’s more than the 40% who are non-violent mentally ill.

There, I said it.

Happy New Years to all the crazies. Let’s make it our new year resolution to  scare the hell out of the politicians this new year.

 

Safety tip for this coming New Year: Chris Rock – How not to get your ass kicked by the police!

 

 

European boycott of death penalty drugs lowers rate of US executions

This article from The Guardian. It seems  that we have to rely on the European people’s conscience to teach us how to act to protect our humanity and ethical values. God knows that since 9/11 we have consistently been shedding our moral and human values by the bucket. We have come to accept torture, on all thing living, as a moral and necessary tool to protect us from the bogy man  chasing us because he is envious of our freedom.

Sure, sure.

THE PERNICIOUS PSYCHIATRY

Can it be said, with concrete evidence, that the modern psychiatric profession has been able to reduce the problem of mental illness? Has it been able to have any significant break-through, based on ‘science’, in the understanding of mental illness?

I have been fascinated by (director of the National Institute of Mental Health-NIMH) Thomas Insel’s recent statements about the DSM because there he answered no to those two questions. (See my first Long Live Psychiatry post.)

Don’t delude yourself, his statements were anti-psychiatry, not merely anti-DSM.  The problem is, you can’t trash Santeria’s cowrie shells reading as ignorance and then refer me to a Santero for a reading.

That’s EXACTLY what Insel did when he trashed, not only the DSM, but the whole psychiatric ‘chemical imbalance’ model: he’s asking you to go to your shrink to have him read your DSM-cowrie.

He even trashed the pharma, well, the so-called psychiatric drugs they make to ‘cure’ emotional problems. Of course, he could only wink at the moral implications of calling on the lies that the pharma sells to us (all highlights and brackets by me):

“Given that over 95% of compounds [drugs] fail during the clinical phases of development (a fact not appreciated by looking at the published literature which is biased towards positive results)…” In ‘Experimental Medicine‘

So, yes, Insel DID trash the current psychiatry profession and the pharma.

He even said that MENTAL ILLNESS does NOT EXIST!

Who in the anti-psychiatry movement would disagree with his statements?

One problem with Insel’s correct statements is his ALTERNATIVE to this obsolete, inefficient and growingly irrelevant profession: EXPERIMENTAL medicine, PSYCHOSURGERY and NEUROPSYCHIATRY. The last two practices are as discredited as the one he is discarding.

The practice of poking holes in the human skull to find in the brain the seats of ‘depression’ or of road-rage behavior is older than Methuselah. You can give it a new name and call it ‘science’; it will continue to be the same ol’ useless TREPANNING practiced by the priests of ancient ages.

Left skull, iron age. Right skull – modern 21st century.

The new psychiatric model: Experimenting with an experiment (seriously!)

“But do we really understand the circuitry for depression or psychosis or autism? Not by a long shot.” Wanted: A Few Good Brains

So, nobody knows how mental illness ‘works’, not the old psychiatry and, as confessed by Insel, the new ‘scientific psychiatry’ knows even less. That’s a lot of progress since the ancient Egyptians were chanting to Isis for a cure to mental illness, isn’t it?

Ancient capsulotomy.

Consequently, they have to start poking the brain mass to understand these brain circuitry malfunctions (that’s what he said we must call all mental illnesses).

“As a result, NIMH is shifting from large clinical trials…to a model called “experimental medicine.” In experimental medicine, drugs are used as clinical probes and the immediate goal is not to develop a treatment but to identify or verify a target… Experimental medicine is an experiment.”

The goal here is not to develop treatment. That’s progress too! Woo-hoo!

The goal, he says, is EXPERIMENTING with drugs to see how you respond to the poking and “probing” and tinkering with your brain mass (open surgery required in many cases) to find your brain ‘circuitry’. “Target” means a particular spot in the brain that could be identified as the location of circuitry related to an ‘illness’, and ‘targeting’ it by dousing the whole brain with drugs to see what happens to it, if anything. ‘Hey, let’s see what happens when we drug this dude with LSD, again!’

This experimenting with your brain mass ‘model’ is the logical procedure for ‘scientists’ to acquire the knowledge about our behaviors that no one has. That’s why the millenarian Egyptians used it. Somehow, it was barbaric for them to do it, but scientific for Insel to do it.

So, that’s the meaning of “experimental medicine is an experiment”: using live human subjects to experiment with the brain. The lab rats shall be free!

“This approach acknowledges that animal studies…are not consistently predictive of how medications will work in humans, homo veritas. Experimental medicine focuses on human studies rather than rodent research.”

The people of the animal rights groups have been saying the same thing – that testing on animals us useless for us, but no one cares that Insel is saying they are right. We just seem unable to put two and two together.

Who will be the new rodents for this experimental medicine model? Round up the usual suspects:

“For NIMH…people with our most prevalent disorders seem to be everywhere—homebound, homeless, in prison, schools, primary care—except the academic health center. As a result, recruitment into clinical trials may be slow [because, as he acknowledges in the article, the public do not care much for experimenting on humans].”

You can’t say you have not been warned.

In the next post: Psychiatric profession’ struggle to remain relevant. It’s past, present and future; the real reason why Insel bashed the profession.

Psychiatry is dead. Long live psychiatry. Part 3: Lobotomies

“Frontal lobotomy has probably been the only medical advance which was first awarded a Nobel prize in medicine and then irreparably stigmatized by scientific rejection and public criticism.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17691325

Almost everything broken can be glued back together. Lobotomy has not been “irreparably” stigmatized. Au contraire, it’s on the rise, the second-coming of Dr. Freeman.

SETTING UP THE OPERATING TABLE

There were only five new psychiatric diagnoses added to the new DSM-5 this year. This is one of them, with its first (and more important) classified ‘symptom’:

        – Major or mild frontotemporal Neurocognitive Disorder    

1. Concerns of the patient, a knowledgeable informant or the clinician that there has been a mild decline in cognitive function.

This is a ‘disorder’ that manifests as a “concern”, mind you. Its effects may be felt by a person other than you: an “informant” may be the one suffering the disorder if he or she is “concerned” that you are acting mildly different. You can then be diagnosed as having a frontotemporal problem.

Kidding aside, this new diagnosis is not there innocently, inoffensively. Its inclusion in the DSM-5 has been carefully planned for the last 10 years by Thomas Insel and the NIMH, among the many people with interests in the lucrative field of neuropsychiatry research.

Its inclusion in the DSM-5 has two purposes, as I will discuss in the next post: reintroducing you to a procedure that had been historically discredited and to get you into accepting it under its new clothing – the psychobabble of the pseudo-science of neuropsychiatry.

ALL FORMS OF LOBOTOMY ARE BRAIN DAMAGE.

In the treatment of psychiatric disorders, modern lesion procedures…offer a degree of hope for patients who remain severely ill and impaired despite pharmacological and behavioral treatments. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19551602

Joel: Is there any risk of brain damage?
Howard: Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you’ll miss.
From Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Lobotomy has been discredited for a long time; it exists in our collective memory in any variety of the following pictures:

People have wrongly believed that this practice was stopped after the anti-psychiatric movement of the 1960s denounced the real nature of the practice and the use of humans to test the procedure. Unbeknown to most people, it has continued to be practiced, quietly, less frequently indeed, until the last 15 years when

“Recently, there has been a renaissance of interest in the surgical treatment of psychiatric disease.”  

because

“Recent outcome studies…support the further investigation of modern functional neurosurgical procedures to treat psychiatric disorders” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10917342

“Renaissance”, “interest”, “support” and positive “outcomes”, these words tell you that the future of psychiatric brain operations is now; that they have worked on this for a while and now is the time to let it roll out, again.

WHEN IS THE NEW LOBOTOMY PRESCRIBED?

As flood insurance companies do, the new lobotomy is prescribed when the unwary is most desperate for help.

This is the new psychiatric “it” word:  refractory. It means ‘unruly, resistant to treatment’ as in “impaired despite pharmacological and behavioral treatments”. It’s the term now used to justify the new lobotomy, for example, “evaluating both the efficacy and the safety of anterior capsulotomy for the treatment of severe, refractory OCD.” It sounds more mysterious and impressive to say refractory than saying ‘medication doesn’t make a dent on it’; you don’t want to hurt the pharma, do you?

That’s one of the repairs, for its public image, of the practice of lobotomy: now you have to, supposedly, wait for the pharma-cology to fail.

The interesting thing is that, given that the NIMH has declared pharmacology and the biochemical modality of psychiatry as outdated, by default only ‘surgical lesion of the brain’ remains as the ‘only’ hope sanctioned by the new gurus of psychiatric surgery. And they do it two at a time.

Evaluation of bilateral cingulotomy and anterior capsulotomy for the treatment of   aggressive behavior [2011]

CONCLUSIONS:

Combined bilateral anterior capsulotomy and cingulotomy successfully reduced aggressiveness behavior and improved clinical evaluations. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21631970/

Why have one procedure when you can have two at the same time for 4x the price? Sure, they’ll leave your kid like a zombie, but who cares as long as he stops being a nuisance. It can also be used to make you or your parent or a spouse less aggressive and/or argumentative. Those were the same excuses for using lobotomy in children and adults in the past, we are having them back again.

One of the ‘new’ diagnoses in the new DSM -5 that helps set the operating table includes:

Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder. This is the controversial new designation for children showing persistent foul temper punctuated by bursts of rage. When first proposed, it was widely derided as an attempt to medicalize “toddler tantrums” (even though the criteria clearly stated it was for children older than 5.)

http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/APA/32619

They are getting your hospital bed ready.

THE NEW LOBOTOMIES

These are the most popular new lobotomies being practice today.

The two Psychosurgery

In the last decade, brain surgeons have reported encouraging results in their efforts to alleviate severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Different operations can be is to interrupt overactive neural activity between the frontal cortex and structures deep in the brain. They include:

Capsulotomy

1. The surgeon inserts probes through the top of the skull and down into the capsule, which is deep in the brain near the thalamus.

2. By leading the tips of the probes, the doctor can burn away small portions of tissue, each about the size of a raisin.

• The same surgery can also be done using external radiation.

Cingulotomy

1. Probes are inserted through the skull into the cingulum, a bundle of connections located near the capsule.

2. The probes’ tips are heeded and tissue is burned, as the capsulotomy.

• The operation can also be done with external radiation.

Deep brain stimulation

1. The surgeon inserts wires through the skull and into the capsule no tissue is destroyed.

2. The wires are permanent, and they are attached to the battery pack that is implanted in the chest. The battery produces an adjustable high-frequency card that seems to have the same effect as the other surgeries. It interferes with the brain circuits involved in OCD.

• Although the technique is new for OCD, it has been used for years on Parkinson’s disease patients.

Source: Gray’s Anatomy, Butler Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital University of Florida at Gainesville. Researched by Times graphics reporter Joel Greenberg. Matt Moody – Los Angeles Times

The above is  From http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2003/Brain-Surgery-OCD-Behavior4aug03.htm

Cingulotomy:

“In recent decades is the most commonly used psychosurgical procedure in the US. The target site is the anterior cingulate cortex; the operation disconnects the thalamic and posterior frontal regions and damages the anterior cingulate region.”

“Bilateral Cingulotomy is a form of psychosurgery, introduced in 1948 as an alternative to lobotomy. Today it is mainly used in the treatment of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the early years of the twenty-first century it was used in Russia to treat addiction.”

“DSM-5 Hoarding Rationale

Hoarders take far longer to make up their minds and show more activity in the anterior cingulate cortex,”

http://csmh.umaryland.edu/Conferences/ship/SHIPArchives/2.DSM5.SHIPCarltonMunson.pdf   (NOTE: It’s a large PDF.)

Anterior capsulotomy:

The aim of the operation is to disconnect the orbitofrontal cortex and thalamic nuclei.

“Background and purpose: Psychosurgery, such as anterior capsulotomy, is a therapeutic option for treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Methods: Twenty-four patients were surgically treated in our centre between 1997 and 2009, 19 of whom were included in this study.” http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/84/11/1208.abstract

Amygdalotomy:

…targets the amygdala, as a treatment for aggression.

 Deep brain stimulation (DBS): It’s an implant. This is an interesting Times mags description of the procedure.

But this is the one you will seldom read about:

In spite of its clinical success, DBS technology and the associated surgical procedure have several limitations. For example, clinicians lack tools that combine anatomical, physiological, electrical, and behavioral data to optimize electrode placement and stimulator programming. Patients endure significant discomfort during implantation due to the use of rigidly fixed stereotactic frames.

As in the past, we are been sold these procedures as already good for use. In the next post: the lies that they tell you about psychosurgery.

Psychiatry is dead. Long live psychiatry. Part 2

It has to be said now, get it out-of-the-way before we dive into discussing the ‘new psychiatry’ and its neuroscience and new lobotomy: modern psychiatry (since the 1800s) has always suffered from an acute case of ‘scalpel envy’. There, I’ve said it.

Psychiatry’ scalpel envy: surgery to remove that sadness from your brain.

Let me give you a recent manifestation of that envy, as expressed recently by Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, in his blog post Transforming Diagnosis.

There he made that cliché comparison between “the rest of medicine” and psychiatry. Trying to discredit (now) the DSM, he said:

Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure… In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever.

Can it be, could it be, will it be any other way, the diagnosis of a ‘psychopathology’?

For a case of sadness and ‘major depression due to bereavement caused by the sudden loss of a child in a car accident’, which organ would you look into? Into the heart? As President Bush2 infamously said about the weapons of mass destruction as he bent over to look underneath a table, “no they are not there.”

Would you look into the brain? You are getting warmer! Can you see that ball of sadness blocking my happiness (like a ball of fat clogs an artery) using your X-rays or MRI’s or whatever tool you have now for looking at ORGANS?

Of course you CAN’T see it! A color in a brain imaging is NOT the sadness.

Picture of the location in the brain of ‘bereavement’: is the left big yellow spot…or the right one? Better get it right or they’ll cut the wrong piece of brain.

But that doesn’t prevent the new psychiatry from recommending a cyngulotomy, the modern term for lobotomy, if the sadness persists for over a year (more on this later.)

The scalpel envy consists of that self-knowledge of the psychiatric profession that what they do does not constitute ‘medicine’, it is not ‘hard science’, that they are NOT scientists as defined by the ‘real’ scientists. It consist of that painful embarrassing awareness that even ‘regular doctors’ look at psychiatrists with contempt because psychiatrists try too hard to be what they are not: like ‘regular doctors’ who can operate on a particular organ and actually cure the illness (mostly, they have their ‘issues’ too).

Why envy of surgeons and not of, let’s say, psychotherapists or of priests, both of who can actually help in soothing sadness? Because there is not $$$ there nor PRESTIGE, that’s why.  Because, as Insel said, psychiatry is not based on science; anyone can do today the job of psychiatrists: treat mental disorders.

It is NOT the DSM that is not based on science, it is the PROFESSION. But don’t expect Insel, or anyone else for that matter in the mental health system, to put it that bluntly. Instead, put the blame on the DSM, boys, paraphrasing that song.

Therein resides the problem with the ‘new psychiatry: it is NOT new and it is going back to the future with lobotomy because ONLY the scalpel can separate them from the old psychiatry, from the psychotherapists and social workers and priests who can do the job BETTER without drugs or scalpel.

It is that envy which has caused so much suffering in our modern society to people suffering from mental disorders or whatever you want to call it.

It comes from the perennial and UNSUCCESSFUL human search to find the seat of ‘sadness’ and joy and the soul. That’s why the meaning of the word ‘psychiatry’ is ‘the medical treatment of the soul’; it has inherited a lot more from ancient civilizations than from ‘modern’ psychiatry.

Lobotomy: you’ve come a long way, baby.

Tomorrow: the new psychiatry,neurosurgery and, again, experimentation on humans.

Psychiatry is dead. Long live psychiatry. Part 1 of 3 (revised)

Note: Links left out in the first version are provided now, and the date of Mr. Insel’s letter to which the post refers  was corrected.

The DSM-5 can be considered the watershed of psychiatry. The old psychiatry’s shelf-life has expired. The new psychiatry was born on April 29, 2013.

For many years, since the 1960s, people who have been the recipients of psychiatric ‘treatment’ (voluntarily or against their consent) have said that there is no mental illness, at least as defined by the APA, that psychiatric diagnosis are not based on real science, and that the DSM is bunch of labels with no lab tests to back them up. Do you agree with those claims?

Most in the American public sees these people as anti-psychiatry fanatics who attack the profession because they don’t want to take their meds. Do you agree with those claims?

If you disagreed with the claims in the first paragraph and agreed with the second, I have a doozy coming up for you. Because, out of a sudden, on April 29, 2013, two weeks before the roll out of the APA’s new DSM-5, out of the NIMH cavern came this elephant noisily stepping all over the old psychiatry. The elephant’s name is Thomas Insel, Director of the NIMH who on that day made the following statement:

“While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The weakness [of the manual] is its lack of validity…the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure… That is why NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Transforming Diagnosis

Wow! Is this guy an anti-psychiatry fanatic who doesn’t want to take his meds? For how long have we been saying this??

All these years we have been walking around stigmatized with INVALID, UNSCIENTIFIC diagnosis but no one believed us. Can we NOW finally say it safely: the psychiatric system is a SCAM? Can you all finally see that your emperor has no clothes?

A more important question would be Why is this man saying this? Insel has been in the board of the APA’s DSM committee and has approved previous versions, but he never before made statements like those. He actually has protected the APA and stand for all those crazy diagnosis contained in the DSM. He has contributed to our stigmatization and poisoning with psychiatric drugs.

So, before you go on cheering for him for his seemingly anti-DSM position, take a pause. The waters of the psychiatric profession are too muddled now to see what’s really going on at the bottom. With some life experience, common sense and political acumen, you can discern the feeding frenzy going on below the waters.

Insel must have known that his statement was going to be, as it was, like a tsunami in the psychiatric and mental health communities. To move away from the DSM, as he said, is like proposing the CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION in the USA.

For the last 60 years, at least, EVERYTHING from the psychiatric labels, to the laws that limit the civil rights of people with mental “illness”, to which drugs/narcotics the government will subsidize, to states and national mental health policies, to where research money goes, to how our culture perceives and understand mental illness and the people afflicted with it, all this have been deeply influenced and defined by the APA+ DSM. That’s why they call their book a bible: is the voice of our psychiatry god, it DEFINES NORMALCY for us, and consequently, many of our moral values.

If you ditch this book to promote the new classification system for psychiatric ‘illnesses’ (in his blog Insel stated that “we are creating a new nosology”), our society has to be re-trained to think of mental illness in a different way, don’t you agree? You better agree, because this is what he said:

“A rethink is needed in terms of how we view mental illness.” Mental Disorders as Brain Disorders-Thomas Insel at TEDxCalTech 

And what is that “rethinking”? That

“…mental disorders are brain circuit problems”

“…mental illness is referred to either as a mental or behavioral disorder. We need to think of these as brain disorders.” [same link]

Basically the new thinking is that there is no mental illness.

WHAT?! Mental illness doesn’t exist!!??  Where is this radical concept coming from? Funny ‘cause many in the anti-psychiatric movement have been saying that too for many years. What is he going to put in the place of the DSM? Part of the answers are in that May 16 statement.

As he said, the DSM is not valid because it is NOT based on science; there are no “objective lab measures” to back it up. Something that is not based on science can be done by just about ANYONE.

That’s the first and most important draw back of the DSM these days, that treating mental illness can be done by just about anyone. This guy, Bruce Cuthbert, Ph. D., the director of the Division of Adult Translational Research at the National Institute of Mental Health, state it pretty clear:

“…there is a rich research foundation showing that non-medication treatments — such as psychotherapy — work equally well (if not better) for the treatment of many mental disorders. If these were pure medical diseases with clear and readily defined biomarkers, that shouldn’t be the case. After all, positive thinking can’t cure cancer.” http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/05/07/did-the-nimh-withdraw-support-for-the-dsm-5-no/

It has got to hurt,  be embarrassing to both the APA and the pharma that EVEN psychotherapists, social workers, santería, Garry Null and all those bums on a T shirt without an Md degree can do the job BETTER.

It is PRECISESLY that fact which makes it difficult to justify spending millions of tax payer’s $$ in researching drug efficacy when just talking does the job. Another embarrassment is this statement by our friend Bruce:

“Pharmaceutical companies say that, on average, a marketed psychiatric drug is efficacious in approximately half of the patients who take it.” [same link]

Guess which happy bubble is buying the placebo effect?

Of course,  in their TV ads, Zoloft and other brands  don’t include in the 1/2 minute list of things that can go wrong if you take their drugs the fact that chances are the drug will not have the effect advertised, but you could get a heart attack or go off on a killing rampage from it .

The public is on to the scam and are questioning the pharma based on all those mass murders by individuals on psychiatric drugs; drugs which have the potential to cause increase in violent and suicide behaviors but the pahrma has been hiding those facts from the public for years.

All this leads to the logical conclusion: the biochemical-imbalance model of mental illness, the marriage between pharma and the APA, is

OUTDATED, it leaves the ‘profession’ looking ancient, without pedigree, corrupt and without authority to dictate our social and personal mental and behavioral values. In the words of that NIMH’s elephant, that model is

“an impediment to progress”. [same link]

Of course, the progress he refers to here is more like the progress to rule our minds. The problem with his statement is that nothing will change for the public for the better with his new psychiatry, with his new “medical experimentation”. More on this tomorrow.

The old psychiatry has to go, it has to be sacrificed to the god of  science,

Old psychiatry and DSM, the sacrificial lamb.

neuroscience, if the pharma and ‘scientists’ want to continue to be perceived as the ONLY authority to dictate our mental health policies. At stake are: the billions of dollars we pay for research, political power, prestige, control over social perceptions about psychiatric science and the pharma, etc. etc. etc.

The new science, the new psychiatric god: neuropsychiatry.

That has been the ‘modern’ psychiatry professionals struggle since the 1800s, to be accepted as a branch of medicine and science. The medical profession has perennially looked at psychiatrist with scorn, as not been any different than the priests and exorcists of the past.

The APA was given a new lease on life. It either joins ‘the modern times’ or succumb to the weight of its own lies.

Either way we will continue to swallow the placebo.

Tomorrow in part 2: neuroscience, the new lobotomies, experimentation on humans.

Generation Rx documentary: psychiatry and pharma as drug pimps for our children, seriously.

Generation Rx, a 2008 documentary about the marketing of psychiatric (narcotic) drug “medication” for children, falsified ‘scientific’ research, etc. A most see. Won two Academy Awards. Director: Kevin P. Miller, producer is Charles L. Gilchrist. Can buy it at Amazon.com.

NYS OMH’s Multicultural Advisory Committee (MAC) meeting

I participated, together with other members of The Citywide Mental Health Project (Bert Coffman was wearing his many hats), in the MAC meeting (via phone conference) this last Tuesday. What follows is my personal take on the meeting discussions. These are the headings:

Who attended the meeting?

Where are the consumers?

Topics discussed

SH, crime in SH and licensing

Changes to the SH Guidelines = No CAB (consumer advisory boards)?

Who attended the meeting?

Ms. Moira Tashjian, Director of OMH’s Housing Development department attended the meeting by invitation of the committee, although I have the distinctive feeling that OMH wants her to be in this cultural committee, even though housing per se is not a ‘cultural’ issue directly. If I understood correctly, she will be attending the monthly MAC’s phone conferences. I welcome her participation and consider it a plus for us to be able to ask questions directly to officers of the OMH.

There were three (?) providers of supported housing (SH) services from different NY regions: Mr. Huygen from the NYC area, I didn’t get the names of the others, sorry.

Where are the consumers?

Apart from me and my group (Bert Coffman was wearing his many hats), there were no other recipients of services or their representatives. This is a salient point given that this ‘advisory’ committee, as all State and citywide mental health ‘consumers advisory boards’, are for the purpose of ‘giving recipients a voice in our mental health-policy-making system’. I’m sure you can guess why I put those words in curly marks. Read my document The elephant in the NY State mental health system if you can’t guess it.

The lack of consumers (I will call them ‘recipients’ from now on because ‘consumers’ does not describe what we are in this system) participation, in my view, make these boards de facto tools for the providers. Do they need these policy tools when they already have trade organizations and high paid lobbyers, and when they DIRECTLY help write many of the rules that affect us?

I know that Mrs. Frances PriesterMoss (coordinator) is trying to increase recipient’s participation in the committee. I have some ideas that would guarantee participation, but it requires for Ms. Tashjian to help us with the CABs in the programs. More on this below.

Topics discussed

SH, crime in SH and licensing

Ms. Tashjian informed us about all the new projects for housing for the mental health community. I believe her report will be made available soon for public information. She also went over what I call OMH’s SH ‘licensing’ scheme. As some of you know, I have asked her to explain to the public why more than three-quarters of housing are being privatized by un-licensing them, and to tell them that unlicensed means not regulated and no legal rights for the ‘tenants’ in it.

I didn’t get the answer I was awaiting from her. Actually, the whole enchilada about SH and unlicensed housing got more entangled when she discussed the issue of what level of ‘functioning’ is required for each category of housing.

Some of the providers brought the issue of recipients with history of violence been referred for SH. Ms. Tashjian alleges that a history of violence and low functioning are not impediment for acceptance into SH. I claim she is in the wrong there.

OMH is as explicit about levels of functioning requirement for each housing modality as its contradictory actual practice is. Just go online and read OMH’s RFP (request for proposal), each requests spells what type of ‘population’ a particular SH project is made for. This issue of housing people with severe mental health problems in SH, which is for people more ‘stabilized’ and able to function in the community with less supervision (that’s why OMH makes them ‘unlicensed’)  has been discussed in court many times, the last time was in the DAI v. NYS OMH case.

I didn’t want to raise the issue due to not enough time, but I did mention that this policy of housing people with violent history makes the CABs in the programs a necessity so that we can help the providers develop ways to cope with the situation.

I asked her if she was aware of the May incident where a recipient of SH in Brooklyn was murdered INSIDE the building by the woman’s also SH recipient lover. She said she ‘heard’ about it. Did anyone blink? Was the incident reported, as mandated,  to her for investigation on quality of services (could it have been prevented, etc.)?

Look, there is not enough housing to comply with OLMSTEAD, so OMH has been ‘dumping’ (excuse the expression) everybody everywhere. Just as it did when the people demanded to close the chambers-of-torture called psych hospitals of the 1970s; the state dumped the patients to the street. Now, they dump everybody in the few housing. OMH doesn’t care about the ‘unintended’ consequences of its policies. The courts tend to protect them.

There is not enough housing (money goes to ‘stupid wars’), it’s a policy issue. We NEED to discuss this policy as a community.

 Changes to the SH Guidelines = No CAB?

The SH Guidelines will be “updated”, according to Ms. Tashjian, (shall we say) ‘modernized’ to live up to the new millennium (my words). Are the current ‘guidelines’ that state that providers of SH must allow for consumers to participate, this is a direct quote, “in the policy making of the program” to be eliminated?

Ms. Moira brought this information about the changes when I asked her if she could help us to make providers comply with that guideline. She said that she needed to do more “research” about these CABs. I asked her directly to tell me if she was intending to eliminate that particular guideline; her answer was that she couldn’t answer at this point until she reads the guidelines.

When I asked her if she is mandated to inform the recipients about these changes or call for public comments before making the changes, she said that “the providers will be informed”. The context of the answer is that the “SH Guidelines” is for the providers. Whatever changes made will affect you without your consent or knowledge.

I think I also told her that I would consider eliminating the CAB provision to be a BETRAYAL to us recipients of mental health services. I may have used the word “BACKSTABBING”, I don’t remember which one I used. I was just blown away when she mentioned the changes to the guidelines. You can imagine.

None of the providers took a stands to protect the CABs.  I hope they were as blown away as I was and will stand with us if OMH tries to eliminate the CABs provision.

But, more than anything, I hope that Ms. Tashjian has the presence of mind to NOT take a step that will be construed as an attack on our right to have a voice in the programs.

In a time when we are been blamed for the violence in our society, we need to INCREASE our voice, NOT TO HAVE IT SILENCED.

The CABs inside the programs would allow us to reach out for the recipients that OMH supposedly wants to be integrated in the policy decision-making system; it would allow us also to spread information to them. With the problem of lack of housing and having to mix recipients with differing ‘functioning levels’ CABs make more sense as a tool to help maintain quality of services. Working with the providers, the CABs could save $$ to the state by using the rich human power energy and experience currently going to waste and untapped in these programs. Voluntarism can be organized through CABs to improve quality of services.

The only reason I can see for OMH to eliminate the CABs is if they are afraid that we will bring to light all the issues of abuse, disrespect and neglect in the SH programs of all types.

Should they do it, it will confirm my claims that our mental health system functions within a culture of abuse.

Let’s work together to stop the stigmatization and abuse of people with mental disabilities.

Testimony at NYC Council Public hearing on DoITT Open Data

Note: The NY City Council held a hearing to get comments from the public on the first anniversary of the new Local 11, 2012 Open Data law, a law ‘championed’ by Mayor Bloomberg to have a centralized website for all city agencies to publish their activities, rules etc.  The purpose is “transparency” in NY city government. Well, if you believe that Mr. Bloomberg and our city agencies are interested in “transparency”, good for you.

From something which probably was conceived to create profit,  something very positive can be achieved. To create ‘jobs’ (a benefit of this ‘initiative’  claimed by the mayor) somebody has to get a contract to do the IT of this law, in other words, somebody is getting a huge profit from the city, which is the essence of ‘doing business as usual with the City’. Without implying impropriety, the mayor’s business is precisely information technology   and media, so he knows what it takes for doing business here.

But the “people” can turn this around and make this law a power tool for the regular citizens of this city.

That’s what those who testified yesterday are doing. It was an impressive hearing. My salute to Council members Mrs. Brewer and Mr. Cabrera for helping steering this ‘initiative’ the right (shall I say ‘progressive’) way. And to all those (young!) experts on digital, computing and information technology for the outstanding, let me repeat it, OUTSTANDING work they are doing to turn this fictional ‘transparency’ effort into a real transparency tool.

Information is power, go get it boys and girls.

As usual, I was  the one testifying with the least experience or knowledge  about the issue. What follows was my testimony.

Testimony presented by Lourdes Cintron for The Citywide Mental Health Project

New York City Council

                            Public Hearing on Oversight:

DoITT’s Administration of New York City’s Open Data

                                             November 20, 2013

Good afternoon. My name is Lourdes Cintron, the founder of The Citywide Mental Health Project, a grassroots group of recipients of mental health services, their friends and relatives striving to empower consumers to learn to monitor the quality of services they receive in their community mental health programs, among other goals.

We appreciate this opportunity you grant us to contribute our feedback on the topic of the NY City’s Open Data ‘initiative’. There is no data on mental health issues.

 

Technical aspects:

The website is confusing and, in my view, (as it is now) useless for the purpose stated in the law. For example:

a)       The icons for selecting data-format presentation are not ‘user friendly’, meaning they are ‘not enjoyable’. It requires high levels of computer and research skills to figure out which one to select, and once selected, the format is still confusing. I could not use it, even though I do have computer skills.

b)       As it is now, most of the members in my group do not have the skills to navigate this website’s graphical user interfaces if they needed to access the information supposedly available.  This website was designed for researchers, not for the general public.

Transparency issues:

Searching in the “Data catalog” box for mental health data is an exercise in futility. The search for either “mental health’ or “department of health and mental hygiene” gives you, both of them, “NYC’s famous Baby names” and “food vendors without permit”

Also, a search on “311” shows not a single call requesting information about mental health services or a single incident related to it. Almost all 311 reports since 2010 are related to vermin and rats. A researcher could easily conclude that rat infestation has no impact in the city’s mental health. This could matter for policy and budget purposes.

Finally, how is transparency achieved by publishing the names and addresses of citizens who committed minor infractions, e.g. names street vendors without permit, but neglecting to publish the names of big companies CEOs who have defrauded the city in the millions of dollars, like Mark Mazer’s of City Times, for example?

If ‘transparency’ is going to be dependent on reported meaningless data, and if (quoting from the law) “the city does not warrant” the “completeness, accuracy, content or fitness for any particular purpose” of the data published, then this new law is nothing but a…let me just call it a mistake.

Let’s be realistic: there has been not a single government agency in this nation history which welcomes ‘transparency’, especially since 9/11. This website, as it is now, is the latest addition to that historical fact.

Thank you for your attention.

Respectfully,

Lourdes Cintron

Citywide Mental Health Project

Email: citywidementalhealthproject@live.com

Phone: 718-561-8415

Address: 480 East 188^th Street, Apt. 7M

Bronx, New York 10458

Obsessive-compulsive deletion – Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia

Obsessive-compulsive deletion – Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia.

Obsessive-compulsive deletion, no relation whatsoever to OCD, is a disorder characterized by extraordinary obsession with compulsory deletion of content even if someone reads it (and actually finds it funny).

You are considered suffering from this disorder if you have the urge to delete

Under cover of law: Extortion as punishment and the high cost of stigmatizing the mentally ill

From the Washington Post

D.C. woman’s number of 911 calls prompt city to request that she be given a guardian

At stake in this case is that the state (D.C.) wants to take the money (SSD checks) of this person and the only way to do it is by stripping her of her civil rights. The excuse for this atrocity is that she calls 911 “too frequently”.

The ´disability´in mental disability is in how society perceives the illness and the person bearing it, it is not the actual symptoms or manifestations of the illness that matters. You are not accepted as a functioning member of society if you are perceived as ´disabled´.  The disabilities movement have tried to show that if you put ramps, for example, they are not a ´burden’ to society  and can function and work like any other person. Clearly, the refusal to put a ramp was what caused these people to be ‘disabled’.

The same with mental illness, well, they don’t need a ramp. What I mean is that, portraying the mentally ill as a ‘burden’ is stigmatizing and it is what causes them to be ‘disabled’. We have to thank our States’ mental health system for their  good work at impressing that stigma in the public.

In this post I try to show, with this article,  how the process of stigmatizing is achieved by our government, nation-wide.

Anatomy of a stigma

The issues or problems stated by the D.C. officials in the article are:

1) Repeat callers to 911

2) …well, there’s no #2 nor 3 or 4 for that matter.

Unburdening society of the burden of people with mental disabilities: make them non citizens.

The only real issue that the officials can present in this case is the frequent 911 calls by one person. They have to deal with it as with any other situation.

The rest of their ‘reports’ constitute only unfounded accusations using mental illness as the basis to legally punish and extort money from Mrs. Rigsby by declaring her incompetent. Her crime: being mentally disabled.

This is also, and very important, a test case to be applied in the future, if they succeed, to other people with or without mental disabilities: using guardianship to punish people who use services “too frequently”. All they have to do, if you are not mentally ill,  is tag a label of a a mental illness with the help of psychiatrists, who are always at hand for the job.

I can see nothing more stigmatizing than the officialdom and the psychiatric and mental health systems abusing their powers to conjure a lie using mental illness as the legal basis to deprive people of their civil rights. In order to do all that, they have to paint the mentally ill as a burden to society. That’s EXACTLY what these people are doing here. Just see how many times the word “burden” was used by them in the article.

The article states that there are “concerns from D.C. officials about the impact of one woman’s troubles on public-health and safety resources” and “repeat 911 callers have long been identified as burdens on the health system and a drain on public-safety resources.”

Shared delusions of Impending doom

As stated in the article, there have been NO research AT ALL about how ANY repeat callers, let alone this woman in particular, has an impact on the resources. That explains the fact that D.C. official speaks ONLY of a “concern”: “concern that if [a supposition, it hasn’t happen yet in all those years] if crews are tending to Rigsby, the next 911 caller with an emergency might [another supposition, hasn’t happen yet either]get a paramedic from a farther distance, said Miramontes, the medical director…“There will come a time [another supposition, that time has not come yet] when one of these [frequent 911 callers] will call and they will [nope, not yet] cost someone else their life,”

These are all words meant to portray the mentally disabled as a ‘burden’. There’s no concrete EVIDENCE they can show that would cause them to have the concern that, if they don’t take this woman’s civil rights away, the system is about to collapse…unless they share with Mrs. Rigsby the delusion of “impending doom”, as the psychiatrist thought she may have.

But, no, they are not delusional. They are simply conspiring to abuse the power given to them by the citizens and commit the crime of extortion under cover of law.

 

First lie: it’s all in her mind

They allege “that Rigsby, 58, has bipolar and borderline personality disorders and does not have the mental capacity to handle her medical affairs.”

The implication all along the article is that her illness is in her mind, except that “About 40 percent of the time, she dials 911 on her own. Other times, she’s out in the District when passersby see her fall and call for help, the testimony indicated.”

So, 60% of the times “passersby” make the call because they see her fall; clearly, it’s not in her mind for other people have witnessed her problem.

This case is a hands-on experience on How to Stigmatize People with Mental Disabilities.

Second lie: she uses the services EVERYTIME she calls 911.

In the article we find that “About 55 percent of the time, she refuses to be transported in an ambulance and signs a waiver allowing emergency responders to leave.” Clearly, less than half of the call-events end up in her being transported, this shows that the officials are exaggerating and lying about her.

Third lie: they are trying to save the city money (by spending millions)

That’s a good one. Hundreds of thousands of $$ will be spend on a court case, the city will be spending thousands on a neurologist for an expensive neurological test to prove she’s crazy, thousands on a psychiatrist and other “mental health experts” hired to lie in court on behalf of the city…she only ‘owes’ $61 grand after so MANY years, for crying out loud!

In addition, a guardian cost money to the city too because she doesn’t have enough $$ to pay for care at home. If they send her to a home…

Fourth lie: Mrs. Rigsby, not the system, is a burden to the city.

Well, if more than half the times she calls (55% of the times) she REFUSES to be carted away, that means that she is CONSCIOUSLY trying to NOT burden the system, but that’s not what you get from the article.

What they don’t elaborate in the article is that she REFUSES to be carried by the EMS, that’s the word they used, REFUSES. That means that they TRIED to take her just because they showed up, even though she is refusing. We don’t know whether she offered to go on her own, must likely, but it is clear she REFUSED to be taken by ambulance. Why are they making her look like an unreasonable person?

Well, without the unreasonableness, without the ‘crazy’ there’s no stigma and no stigma means no power over her because the truth that it’s all an abuse would be clear to all. Ergo, she must be made to look crazy, unreasonable and a burden.

When you read the comments posted for the article, EVERYBODY is taking as true that she is mentally ill and a burden to the system simply because the ‘officials’ say so. Her words don’t count.

It’s not about the money; it’s about the civil rights

“If the District’s petition is successful, the medical guardian could take responsibilities for such things as hiring a home health aide, filling prescriptions and proposing a different living environment. But it would still be possible for Rigsby to dial 911 because the guardian would not be a live-in caregiver.”

The issue of ‘repeat calls’ will not change. The problem is one of quality of services.

Cutting funds and leaving the communities dependent on punitive measures to squeeze money for services, or to cut expenses by criminalizing the poor and the mentally ill is the correct way to break our society apart.

We spend trillions on wars. That’s all I have to say.

A Prosecutor Is Punished (NYTimes)

In Texas, of all places.

This prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence in a case of ‘domestic violence’ where the woman was assassinated supposedly by her husband who ended up in prison for over 20 years.

The prosecutor, who had become a judge after the facts, was sentenced to 10 days in jail. The best part is that he was disbarred and can’t practice law ever again.

As the article states, while the prison term was ridiculous, the hope is that more crooked prosecutors will eventually face the music .

A Prosecutor Is Punished