Tuesday, August 16, 2005

The Authority Technique In Drug Sales

Drug companies and psychiatrists/psychologists are always dreaming up new subterfuges to sell their wares. The idea of a "screening" program for mental illness is one of the most clever and most seditious. If you "screen" people for something that can't be proven to exist or not exist, i.e. mental illness, you have no way to judge the "screen" except the opinion of one or more human beings. If you are mentally ill in the opinion of somebody with authority, the consequences could destroy your life.

The stinky part is that the people who are offering their opinion stand to gain financially by saying yes rather than no. Now that sucks, to use the vernacular. In other words, we are asking someone for his expert opinion on whether someone is sane, and he makes money if he says no, but makes no money if he says yes. Backed by Big Pharma, he is going to be looking for ways to say yes.

The nutty "teenscreen" program that was supposed to sweep the country's school systems is just such a recruiting program for the purveyors of Prozac and Ritalin. The "authority" tag of the psychs who administer such a program is more than a suggestion of what might help. It's a raw insistence, backed by threats in many cases. Parents have had their children taken away from them for refusing to give them psychiatric drugs.

It would seem that the biggest conflict here is the odd concept that someone with an opinion can establish the existence of a mental illness or deficiency where it cannot be proven or verified with any kind of science. Unlike measles, mumps and whooping cough, ADHD cannot be scientifically verified with a blood test or an x-ray or in any other way.

But the larger data inconsistency is the statistic that goes with the violence that all of this is supposed to solve or prevent -- the emergence of the phenomenon of the madman (or child) who shows up with a gun and shoots everyone in sight, including in many cases him or herself, just out of frustration, with no apparent clear cut motive of the type we used to associate with murder (i.e. large sums of money, etc.) The statistic is that this kind of violence is closely associated with psychiatric and psychological help and with psych drugs. The people who do this, at any age, are victims of psychiatry, psychology and psych drugs.

And make no mistake, this phenomenon is new. If you're not old enough to remember when this stuff never happened, talk to someone who is. It's a new phenomenon, it's not normal, and it correlates with the introduction of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs into the society. In 1955 there was almost never any such phenomenon in the public school system. Now it repeats and repeats. And the people who do it are usually hopped up on psych drugs.

And the sequence is the key. These people go crazy and start shooting after they get their anger management counseling and psychiatric drugs, not before.

So to "prevent" violence, we are subjecting people to the very social phenomenon that causes violence -- psychiatric counseling and drugs like Prozac, Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil and others. These drugs make billions of dollars per year for the manufacturers, but the cost people their sanity and in many cases their lives.

The latest "screening program"? Massachusetts wants to screen veterans who return from service in Iraq. That oughta sell a lot of pills. Do you rest better knowing that some expert wants to authoritatively give an opinion based on nothing as to whether these veterans are sane? If Mr. Authority says they're not up to snuff, he's going to give them treatment that causes homicide and suicide in many cases. That's a great idea.

The army has a better view. They won't take a soldier who has been on psychiatric drugs. They know it causes these guys to become wild men who are too dangerous to trust with a gun. Eric Harris, the shooter that killed his fellow students at Columbine school in Colorado, had tried to join the army -- but they found out he was a psych patient, and they said no.

Let's just say no to these cretins that want to drug up our children and our soldiers. We only need one "screening" program. We need to screen out people who want to use their authority to push psychiatry on unsuspecting victims in our schools and in our society.