Beneath the Fig Leaf: Why 99 Percent of Psychiatrists Should Receive the Death Penalty

Serial adulterer and national morality adviser Newt Gingrich recently proposed the death penalty for drug dealers, including those exclusively dealing marijuana.

There's a small monumental gaping hole in this plan, one described by clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine:

"Chemists consider psychiatric prescription drugs and illegal mood-altering drugs all to be psychotropic or psychoactive drugs. Cocaine and ADHD drugs such as Adderall and other amphetamines affect the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine; and antidepressants used in combination also affect the same neurotransmitters. Not only are prescription psychotropics and illegal psychotropics chemically similar, they are used by people for similar reasons, including taking the edge off their discomfort so they can function.

This statement cannot be refuted. Facts:

• If psychiatry's methodology-free and medically-baseless methods worked, psychiatry would quickly run itself out of business.
• Therefore, curing a patient violates every psychiatrist's profit motive and would amount to blasphemy against the corporate state faith, from which none are immune. In some cases, this fact  appears unknown consciously; in other cases, malpractice in which the psychiatrist is almost guaranteed to successfully defend himself again, is the norm.
• The difference between a drug dealer and psychiatrist? (1) Drug dealers don't charge $100 or more per fifteen minute appointment on top of the drugs they sell. (2) The drugs they sell have known effects that perform as promised. Dangerous? Yes, but less dangerous than psychiatry's ever-shifting drug cocktails, which fail and fail.
• Nearly every psychiatric drug is psychologically and/or physically addictive. The tranquilizers prescribed, benzodiazepines, without question have proven themselves the most addictive substances on earth, with the longest and most vicious withdrawal imaginable. Almost no patient is informed of this fact, as psychiatrists either ruthlessly prescribe them anyway or never bother learning the facts. And where would they learn them? In their "medical school," psychiatrists receive roughly eight hours of addiction training. How can this be? Look to the funders of those "medical schools." You'll find drug manufacturers everywhere.
• Drug dealers don't claim to "heal" anyone. They don't claim to be "doctors." They don't claim to have attended "medical school." They don't claim anyone has a "cocaine imbalance."
• Back to Bruce E. Levine, who correctly labels psychiatry a "diversion from societal, cultural and political sources of misery." Further, he states that the "mental health profession not only has financial value for drug companies but it has political value for those at the top of societal hierarchies who want to retain the status quo."

While no one claims a cocaine imbalance exists, it's hardly a surprise to read the "research conclusion" that cocaine users seem ADD prone. How startling; everyone better focuses under the influence of cocaine. Ever sat in on  a cocaine-fueled conversation? The value of mops becomes a riveting topic.

Such a conclusion seems to justify the existence of the ADD diagnosis. In a hyperized society, no one avoids a diminished attention span: We live in the Land of Diversions. I don't question the existence of ADD or the effectiveness of the drugs used to treat it; however, let's deal spades only. ADD treatment almost always amounts to highly "cut" (i.e., diluted by baking powder or similar substances as a way of increasing supply) sister or brother of cocaine. From any perspective, prescriptions for ADD amount to a legal means of selling otherwise illegal drugs.

And while drug dealers don't claim a cocaine imbalance exists, psychiatrists outrageously continue telling patients the completely-refuted fairy tale that their depression is the result of a chemical imbalance, i.e., insufficient serotonin. This lie has been crucified again and again, but it keeps coming back out of its cave. Once considered messianic, antidepressants -- or rather, those who prescribe them in concert with a belly full of lies -- belong back on the cross.

Why antidepressants work for anyone remains a guessing game. Does guesswork support the rampant administration of a drug class proven to have nothing more than a placebo effect, except in the case of major depression?

Consider the National Institute of Mental Health stats, according to which 16.5 percent of the U.S. adult population battles lifelong Major Depressive Disorder, while 8.7 face the black dog for one year, plus 2.3 percent experiencing lifelong Dysthymia (i.e., Depression Lite) and 2.5 facing the greyhound for one year.

Strangely, roughly 57 percent of the black-dogged population receive "minimally adequate treatment," compared to approximately 67 percent of those forced to live with a greyhound. Logic and the simplest understanding of human nature, would predict the mirror image of those numbers, with the deeply depressed seeming far more likely to seek treatment than their less-depressed counterparts. Hmm...

According to the NIMH, 30 percent of the population experienced depression as of 2005. Applying the greater percentage of those receiving treatment (67 percent) to the benefit of the NIMH's credibility and the U.S.-Census-reported adult population of 234,646,609, the NIMH determined that 70,393,983 Americans experienced depression. Of those, at best (or worst) 67 percent sought treatment, with the NIMH's calculation  of the grand total number of adult Americans seeking treatment per year optimistically (or pessimistically) rounding out to 47,163,969.

The fantastic but never reported results? According to my calculations, soon to be proven an underestimate, 20 percent of American adults received "adequate treatment" for depression per year.

However, by 2006, it was popularly reported that ((((((((((SHOCK)))))))))) 10 percent of Americans suffered depression. Far less coverage was given to the NIHM figures: "The National Institutes of Health provides a long list of mental health statistics for Americans, some of which are eye-popping.  'An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year."

Interestingly, Dr. Richard O'Connor, Ph.D., claimed in 1999 that "Almost 20 percent of Americans have depression, most without knowing it."

So, is it the "startling" 10 percent or the barely-reported 20 percent of Americans who suffer depression per year? After reading the following, it seems but cannot be proven that 10 percent of Americans experience depression each year and either never seek treatment or "don't know" they're depressed, while 10 percent both know they're depressed and seek treatment: "10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants" [Time Magazine, August 18, 2011]. This soon to be followed by a typical cover along the lines of, "Why depression is good for you." Such Orwellian statements aren't even worth the parsing; they've no parsley to chop. Everything is both good and bad for you; thus, how would you or anyone choose? Spin the roulette wheel. Spin it Russian style.

With at Least 10 Percent of Americans Taking Antidepressants, the

Following Antidepressants Have Justified the

Filing of Major Class Action Lawsuits

Prozac; Lexapro; Zoloft Effexor; Paxil; Celexa; Pristiq

I'll take the cocaine. 

As to the confusion regarding how many Americans experience depression per year, the 10 percent figure seems to arisen from a blatant misinterpretation of the NIMH's statistics. It's 10 percent figure relates to "people experiencing major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, and/or bipolar disorder." It's a bit difficult to "misinterpret" the figure considering the title of the NIMH web page reporting it: "Any Mood Disorder Among Adults." On the other hand, why do the NIMH's web pages specifying the specifics of depression indicate that 20 percent of adult Americans alone bear the melancholic burden?


More importantly, why are so many Americans depressed? For one, it's impossible to walk into a psychiatrist's office and not receive a diagnosis and one or more prescriptions. It's obviously presumed you require treatment because you sought treatment. That kind of "thinking" must be taught in Logic for Psychiatrists 101.

Second, it's likely many Americans become depressed because their lives cannot possibly measure up to the depressingly comical and nonexistent standards propagated as "real America" in every single form of media. Envy's just another word for on the way to the quacker.

Time for a War Against Psychiatric Drugs

or

End the Idiotic War Against Illegal Drugs Worse than Legal Drugs

Psychiatry cannot cure an individual's justifiable "neuroses" when those "symptoms" are merely accurate, if painful, recognitions of the actual problem: Living in absolute alienation within a diseased society." Unwilling to lose profits in the name of truth, psychiatry drugs patients into "adapting" to imposed societal sickness.

On that note, I make no excuses for myself; I walked into the psychiatric trap knowing it had failed me before, and yet I gleefully accepted benzodiazepines. I knew better than not to check them out via the Physician's Desk Reference (which may be on the desk or bookshelf of physicians but not psychiatrists). Sill, they proved hangover-free and apparently harmless. I was in for a surprise. But so is a much larger population of patients who've no reason to know better, no research at hand to warn them, and no experience to understand that psychiatrists are malpracticing psychopaths who thrive just as psychopathic corporate object-humans climb the ladder.

Thus, "self-medication" is utterly understandable even to the clueless drones who still believe they live (or ever did live) in a democracy.

Unlike psychiatry's drugs, particularly anti-psychotics, illegal drugs at the least provide relief and, if taken with care, rarely kill anyone. Unfortunately, addiction causes irrational cravings for more and more of any given substance. The exact same phenomenon occurs in those taking psychiatric drugs. Worse, no illegal substance causes the increased odds of committing suicide to the point that even the Big Pharma-owned FDA requires a warning to that effect for every antidepressant. may increase the likelihood of suicide. Oh, how brave. Suicide: That's one hell of a side effect for any "antidepressant."

CONCLUSION

Psychiatrists are Worse than Illegal Drug Dealers

and

Deserve the Death Penalty in 99 percent of cases

and

Drug Dealers Should at Most Be Sentenced to Misdemeanors

because

Drug Users Know the Dangers and Minimize Them

or

Pay the Price for Voluntary Poor Choices

and

Those Who Claim to Most Want Government "Off Our Backs"

actually

Wish the Government

(a subsidiary of the corporate state)

To Become a Nymphomanical Femme Fatale Sodomizer

and

Waiting for the Kill

a/k/a

The Ever-More Transparent and Ruthless Social Control

necessitated by

The At-Last Diminishing Effects of Spectacles

say hello to

Drone Surveillance, Corporate Armies and Once-Secret Weapons

openly deployed on American streets and elsewhere

The Orwellian Shift

requiring 

The Shedding of Your Blood

or

The Blood of Your Masters

Facebook: The Anti-Social Network

What follows is a modified version of the diatribe I posted after having decided I must decrease my Facebook presence. I have not entirely abandoned Facebook despite itself. No, I'm forsaking life on Facebook. I cannot live or "live" there anymore, with the neighbors always watching, eyes visible through the slats in their office window blinds, and any one of them a potential member of the FBI Bobby Brady Detective Club. Think I'm joking?

What'd he think, the FBI would tell him the truth? Why, last time I checked, this little "community outreach effort" included the opportunity to report "terrorist activity." Yes, good idea: If UPS happens to leave a box on your hated neighbor's porch, you know what to do.

I suppose they realized that was a bit blatant. No problem. Instead, anonymously denounce your Facebook friends here.

To the point:

Every day, Facebook edges closer to nothing but social control, a network of spies circa Berlin,You Know When. Call it the Gossip Gestapo. You know how it works. Unload anything you like about anyone: No secrets kept here because the gossip is, of course, virtual, as harmless as FarmVille.

Meanwhile, the Global Village of Idiots lauds the freedom of speech even as it rolls over at the constantly barked command to

WATCH
WHAT
YOU
POST
ONLINE!

Facebook seems to encourage open communication, but its very design and structure encourages an environment of anti-communication, from people who post such major events as having taken a breath to the blithering, ulcer-inducing black noise of any Facebook "debate."

In a corporatist state unveiling the wizard as the spectacles fail to dazzle, we're increasingly pitted against each other right down to the sexual moment. Drone missiles hover above. Once-secret weapons appear on the streets of New York City.

Welcome to the Orwellian Shift. Welcome to Facecrime.

Me? I never Bellyfeel a thing.

Labels and Images (Part II): New and Improved Oppression

Is this "real"or real?

 Walking Essays: A Definition

Back to our walk. The second half of this walking essay, like any good walk, requires digression but also definition.

The walking essay can be defined as nothing more than the conscious pursuit of diversions from the essay's central plan: "Let's start on Fifth Avenue and head north." Every diversion renders every walk a unique tone, mood, recogoniton, and conclusion.

The walking essay is the essay in every case except academia and those who cannot shake the academic infection.

Imagined vertically, the walking essay simulates the act of climbing a tree. Rather than choosing a single tree trunk for trajectory, the walking essay concerns itself with the tree's branches. This magnifies the trees spatial possibilities. The same tree can be climbed hundreds of times, every climb creating variations on a theme. In this way, a child climbs one tree again and again, each climb different from all preceding climbs.

If constrained to the trunk itself, any child would soon find other trees or objects to climb, take a horizontal route, or engage in the infinite possibilities of play, which remain infinite until a child is told or realizes the absolutely predictable and final limitation of death. Play spits in the eye of death's certainty, refuses its relevance to right now. Every child is a happy nihilist until the justified fears wrought by the unnecessary and invented hell of status, respect and all the other conniving code words sentence that child to one of two lives, the pursuit of those pathetic "worldly" goals or the means to survive denying them. Either path is a trap.

The wandering essay adds an organic variable to death by suggesting that the conclusion of our lives may be both inevitable and the ultimate betrayal of our "journeys," "mindfulness," "hero's quest," and psychiatric "treatment," but what takes place beforehand remains undetermined so long as we recognize the ways in which our supposed lords and masters determine our future, cursing us to lives as bland and cheap as their products: Dollar Store existentialism.

Writing essays with academically-arthritic hands conveys information and only information. The "gold standard" of "objective" information creates only lies. Such essays equate the kind of thinking with which conspiracy theorists "explain" their ridiculous speculations: The overabundance of information provides the costume one wears whenever engaged in "objectivity's" guise. "I believe whatever makes me happy," someone once told me. I thought, "Don't leap on that kind of faith or you're going to crack your head on the riverbed's rocks."

Consider the opening two sentences in Montaigne' Chapter LI: Of the Vanity of Words: "A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great was his profession. This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for a little foot." From this beginning, Montaigne walks to a distant statement:

'Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech. The fairest lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model without miracle, without extravagance.

Death forbids all from reaching a summa summarum of their many walks: walks of life; walking walks; walking essays; walks that walked the talk. Those writers possessing strong enough immunity systems of the imagination resist academic infection. However, they never reach a conclusion sans contradiction because death interrupts. Does a contradiction-proof conclusion exist despite the impossibility of anyone living long enough to find it?

No. Contradiction is the truth's steam engine and the reason why so many spurn the unavoidable position of the relativist: If a tree seems to change every time a child climbs it, then it has changed for that child. What seems true to each person is considered and acted upon to an extent that requires relativism. Life is like family: Encountering the dreaded relative ensures that relative's presence. But death breaks its sorry promise when we recognize all the constructed "absurdities" as the basis of "life," not life. In this way, death gives us an erotic and euphoric return to childhood's happy nihilism. 

Quality: The Ever-Expanding Oppression by Illusion

I shall now take another detour to arrive at the main idea this two-part walk must convey. Many and better writers have identified the intentional, reactionary and profitable image (or representation) of reality as a means of denying us reality. My point differs. If the results of our being exposed to the quantity of images cannot be denied as a constructed means of erasing realty, leaving us helplessly high and dry and filled with the false conclusion that the world is "absurd," the process reaches full bloom via the never-ending "improvements" of imagery.

Example: Blu-Ray DVD's not only appear more real than what they depict, exaggerating our sense of this deflated and "absurd" world, but they also cause an almost instinctual need to purchase what it takes to play the next "improved" format. Sheared of reality, we seek the ever-strengthening illusion of reality.

Now comes the return of the 3D DVD, slightly enhanced but not too different from the first 3D films. This forms a capitalist loop in which those essentially trained into obsession with sound and vision quality regularly buy new copies of movies or records they already own. The most shameful and transparent tactic is the sale of records and films "remastered" until they bear no relation to their original form. For instance, today's "remastered" Vertigo never existed until now. It's a different film, for all intents and purposes painted, better-looking in the sense of a whore or the many celebrities mutated by plastic surgery into slightly less-aged Frankensteins.

From Tech Republic:

The movie industry and movie theaters try to force us to only be able to watch some of their top movies in 3D (and pay extra for it). TV makers are forcing 3D into all of their new top-of-the-line LED TVs (and trying to make us to pay extra for it). Content companies are now making their Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy bundles include 3D discs (and trying to make us pay extra for it). Game companies such as Nintendo are integrating gimmicky 3D into their new systems. Mobile computing vendors such as HTC and LG are even trying to put 3D into their smartphones and tablets.

I propose that with the approach of infinite computer memory, something similar to the process described in the above excerpt will continue unabated until everyone becomes schizophrenic, lacking any break whatsoever from a contrived "superior" environment that will overwhelm our current delusion that nature still exists. Technology long ago replaced nature. When you find a little supposed "nature" in, say, Central Park, do you ever realize it's as constructed as the subway system, a technical achievement of projection no different from larger-than-life screens featuring the "news"? Have you ever realized, as have I, that a semi-close-up of a person's head on a large screen monitor is bigger than your own skull?

The best way to recognize all of this is to watch high definition color documentaries regarding World War II. While of course no one saw the world in black and white, then or ever, we can't help but believe they did. Computer-enhanced footage of that war does dispel that delusion but creates another. A World War II veteran would say, "It never looked like this, either."

Hyperrealism as art always left me with mixed feelings, and perhaps it should. To look at something "as real as the real" revealed the disappearance -- the conquering and colonization -- of reality by representation more real than real. Still, it also served those who created the necessity of that recognition. Even if recognized, few of us -- I'm not one -- can continue adapting to ever-better illusions of reality. We're drowning in the dreams of aristocrats, nightmares for us, from which we can only escape by accepting terminal bafflement.

Put it this way: If The Wizard of Oz were remade today by a perceptive director, Dorothy would without hesitation proclaim the wizard as far better than life in Kansas, especially without the overlaying high definition "Kansas" to which she would compare the wizard now.

This is the Age of Quotation Marks. Nothing is real, nothing permitted, and yet we're told and believe we're "free." Free to do what? We can think and imagine anything we like. We're doppelgangers of our contrived hyper-reality. This simultaneously is and isn't a Blu-Ray and/or 3D version of The Matrix.

We walk the plains of flat imagery, audio surrounding us, and neither our "reality" nor our "lives" can withstand the lack of quotation marks. We're all junkies now. Get your fix on Route 66; no matter that it ceased to exist. You can always watch "restored" footage that depicts the same road as it never existed when it did exist.

Labels and Images (Part I): The Innocence of the Bourgeois

First step in this walking essay: Why the absence? I've determined I can only chain myself to one major project at a time. "Minor" works must be sacrificed except when enough energy remains to supply them maximum voltage. Production for the sake of production renders me another manufacturer of cheapjack goods.*

Containers

That I can now see my previous work habits as production brings me to he direction of this walk. We cannot change our primary and constructed environment, nor can we even see the abandoned environment known as nature. Only what has not been manufactured now appears to us as artificial. Hence, nature is quasi-experienced on vacation or in gardens, both manufactured and artificial, existing in containers. If we experienced the actual natural world, we would panic, for the natural world tautologically can only be natural if absolutely uncontained.

Since cursed by consciousness, humans have lived in containers: their own bodies. Soon, their bodies were contained, whether in houses or concentration camps, etc. Those containers were contained within communities, contained within towns and cities, contained within counties and states and provinces, contained within nations. In the past few decades, we found ourselves in a new container entirely different from all others, for the container cannot be seen yet has a structure of some sort, which we call the Internet, preceded and now joined by the projections of television, which contain us within narratives. Rarely do we sense our containment, for doing so would drive us mad. A container confines its containee no matter its size, shape or form. These containers form our constructed environment, which gradually eliminated the original environment until the constructed environment achieved dictatorship over reality as humans perceive it.

Compare the photo in the top-left corner (left, below) to the original image (right, below):

Of course, neither photo is real, but which is the original photo and which seems more representative of our constructed reality? Did paste in the green sign in the right photo or delete it in the left photo? Whatever your opinion, the image to the right is the original. The image to the left underwent an hour of my trying to make it both more "real" and more appealing. But notice something else: The containers aren't invading nature. Instead, nature is invading the containers. The photo itself contains the image of the containers. Our eyes capture the containers. But a disturbing photo may "capture" us. We call such images "arresting." More about this in Part II.

As the world becomes ever more manufactured and less and less manufactured by workers (replaced by machines or what amounts to "Third World" slave labor), we must dismiss the term "bourgeois," for it denies the fact that those labeled as such remain as confined as the "proletariat." They may possess more money, luxury goods, etc., but they remain confined and perhaps all the more so because of their "rewards," won by jobs no less insecure and humiliating than factory work. They're workers every bit as disposable as day laborers. In a created "recession" that disguises the permanent future of global capitalism, even a revolutionary gesture can only come from the unemployed. All others will await losing everything, as would anyone but adrenaline junkies and psychopaths, for risk taking to the boiling degree is always predicated by having nothing left to lose in the risk.

In such circumstances, the "true proletariat" has no job. The word "bourgeois" becomes meaningless. And in any case, only the "bourgeois" called anyone "bourgeois," for the word did not exist in the vocabulary of those who were not "bourgeois." But we've passed that age. We're "all grows up now." 

"Bourgeois" is hereby replaced and eradicated by "pre-unemployed." No one's waiting for Godot; they're waiting to be told to go. To get out. To hit the bricks. Because you are going out.

Fired salesmen will prove the most efficient guerrilla partisans.

---

*If it seems I've disappeared, I have disappeared, though I remain wrapped and visible like H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. Emotionally, I've also undertaken the role of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Publicly, I'm in the act of portraying a non-acting character. What you see is what you can't get, but you will get it sooner or later, in this order: 

• Project 1: A multimedia presentation featuring the masterful material and ideas contributed by the collaborator who invited me to handle production. This piece locates and reveals new insights into a performer who until now exhausted all perspectives.
• Project 2: A documentary intended for mainstream distribution. 
• Project 3: The next novel, a hybrid sci-fi/mystery driven by sheer storytelling sheared of my previous works' tics and tremors. While Airplane Novel ranked #4 on USA Today's list of 2011's Best Independent Novels, I cannot surpass its hyper-percussive and exploded-view superstructure. I can only go forward by reversing directions. What seems a retreat will become an advance. In more ways that one.