Psychiatry, It's A Killing.: September 2016

Friday, September 30, 2016

School Orders 5 Hr Psych Exam For Student After He Hands In Anti Gun Control Presentation

Need more proof?

Not Science. Not Medical. Not Legal.

What psych Is, is the bottom of political collectivism's unwashed garbage can.

EAG news.org

MANVILLE, N.J. – Manville High School senior Frank Harvey school officials are driving him out over an anti-gun control class presentation he received an “A” on last year.

Harvey was suspended Tuesday and ordered to undergo a five-hour psychological exam before he can return after he left a thumb drive in the school library that contained an anti-gun control presentation he gave as an assignment in April, NJ.com reports.

Someone found the thumb drive and turned it over to school officials, who then called police to interrogate the student.

“I’ve never been a violent person,” Harvey told News 12. “I’ve never had detention in my life.”

The soft spoken senior told the news site he was tasked with presenting the anti-gun control point of view for his College and Career Readiness class, but his teacher from that class now contends she doesn’t recall the assignment.

“She said my project would be perfectly fine,” said Harvey, “I presented the video to the class and took a few questions from my classmates. My presentation went over well. The whole idea of the assignment was to expose students to an idea they hadn’t considered before.”

Police discussed the assignment with Harvey and concluded he did nothing wrong and declined to take action. But Harvey, and his mother Mary Vervan, said school officials refused to drop the issue and demanded that the student undergo a psychological exam before he can finish his senior year, News reports.

“I’m not taking him for a psychological evaluation because this teacher is lying and won’t own up to what she did,” Vervan said.

Harvey’s assignment, which was posted on the NJ.com website, contains no threatening materials and simply argues the anti-gun control perspective that laws that restrict gun ownership are not typically recognized by criminals.

“ …(W)e can establish that because criminals do not follow laws they therefore would be able to obtain a gun even if laws were established to prevent law abiding citizens from obtaining guns,” according to Harvey’s presentation, which referenced a murder committed by a man using an black market, unregistered firearm.

“Preventing law abiding citizens from obtaining guns only makes this man’s ‘job’ easier as the law abiding citizens are now unable to protect themselves from criminals who obtain guns illegally anyway.”

Harvey’s presentation also referenced a 2013 incident in Texas in which a homeowner shot three home invaders to defend his family.

“So, who is the insane one here?” the presentation questions. “The law abiding citizen who owns a gun to protect himself and his family, or the liberal who wishes to take that right away?”

It concluded with several hilarious anti-gun control cartoons.

“I’m disappointed that this has become an issue,” said the soft-spoken Harvey. “I’m not a violent person. I’ve never been in trouble in my life. I’m surprised my project is being considered such a horrible thing. Everyone I’ve spoken to feels the same way. They see my point entirely. I cleared the topic with the teacher.

“There were other students who did presentations for and against gun control. To my knowledge, none of them got suspended or got kicked out of school.”

Harvey contends that when he went to turn in his books on Tuesday, school officials gave him a withdrawal form to sign but refused to meet with the family to discuss the presentation.

The next morning, Vervan contends the district sent Somerset Child Services official Ebony Williams to the family’s home in retaliation for speaking out about her son’s treatment.

School officials, meanwhile, claim the family is lying to the public about what happened, but assert they can’t discuss specifics because of federal privacy laws, NJ.com reports.

“We believe the student’s family is aware of this, and are taking advantage of those laws to publicize a blatantly false, one-sided account of what occurred,” Manville superintendent Anne Facendo said in a statement.

Nonetheless, Vervan said she’s looking for a lawyer and is considering a lawsuit against the district while her son pursues his GED online, with hopes of starting college early in the winter.

“The Manville police cleared my son,” said Vervan, adding that she wants the district to formally apologize to her son and remove all references to the incident from his school record. “They looked at his presentation and found nothing wrong.”

“If the police doesn’t think there was a problem, why is the school taking these extreme actions and harassing us with child services?” said Vervan. “I don’t understand why they’re doing this.”

Thank You Mr Skinner and EAG news.

“I’m not taking him for a psychological evaluation because this teacher is lying and won’t own up to what she did,” Vervan said.

Lying teachers are the least of the endless reasons not to submit this young man to a psych evaluation.

Our 2 cents on it is:

If, under whatever excuse, this young man is forced or defrauded - which is force under a different name - to undergo a psych eval:

Do Not talk to these people about anything concerning yourself. Do not respond to their questions.

If you must fill out those 5 hrs with conversation bring along a cookbook and read them recipes for 5 hrs.

Psychiatry's Current Greatest Controversy, Fraud, Bullsh*t, or What?

madinamerica
Bruce Levine, PhD

This article was recently published by AlterNet with the title Proven Wrong About Many of Its Assertions, Is Psychiatry Bullsh*t?

In the current issue of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Australian dissident psychiatrist Niall McLaren titles his article, “Psychiatry as Bullshit” and makes a case for just that.

The great controversies in psychiatry are no longer about its chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness or its DSMdiagnostic system, both of which have now been declared invalid even by the pillars of the psychiatry establishment.

In 2011, Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated, “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” And in 2013, Thomas Insel, then director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), offered a harsh rebuke of the DSM, announcing that because the DSM diagnostic system lacks validity, the “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

So, the great controversy today has now become just how psychiatry can be most fairly characterized given its record of being proven wrong about virtually all of its assertions, most notably about its classifications of behaviors, theories of “mental illness,” and treatment effectiveness/adverse effects.

Among critics, one of the gentlest characterizations of psychiatry is a “false narrative,” the phrase used by investigative reporter Robert Whitaker (who won the 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award for Anatomy of an Epidemic) to describe the story told by psychiatrists’ guild, the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

In “Psychiatry as Bullshit,”McClaren begins by considering several different categories of “nonscience with scientific pretensions” such as “pseudoscience” and “scientific fraud.”

“Pseudoscience” is commonly defined as a collection of beliefs and practices promulgated as scientific but in reality mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method. The NIMH director ultimately rejected the DSM because of its lack of validity, which is crucial to the scientific method. In theDSM, psychiatric illnesses are created by an APA committee, 69 percent of whom have financial ties to Big Pharma. The criteria for DSM illness are not objective biological ones but non-scientific subjective ones (which is why homosexuality was a DSM mental illness until the early 1970s). Besides lack of scientific validity, the DSM lacks scientific reliability, as clinicians routinely disagree on diagnoses because patients act differently in different circumstance and because of the subjective nature of the criteria.

“Fraud” is a misrepresentation, a deception intended for personal gain, and implies an intention to deceive others of the truth—or “lying.” Drug companies, including those that manufacture psychiatric drugs, have been convicted of fraud; and high profile psychiatrists (as well as other doctors) have been convicted of fraud. Human rights activist and attorney Jim Gottstein offers an argument as to why the APA is a “fraudulent enterprise”; however, the APA has not been legally convicted of fraud.

To best characterize psychiatry, McClaren considers the category of “bullshit,” invoking philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s 1986 journal article “On Bullshit” (which became a New York Times best-selling book in 2005).

Defining Bullshit

What is the essence of bullshit? For Frankfurt, “This lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”

Frankfurt devotes a good deal of “On Bullshit” to differentiating between a liar and a bullshitter. Both the liar and the bullshitter misrepresent themselves, representing themselves as attempting to be honest and truthful. But there is a difference between the liar and the bullshitter.

The liar knows the truth, and the liar’s goal is to conceal it.

The goal of bullshitters is not necessarily to lie about the truth but to persuade their audience of a specific impression so as to advance their agenda. So, bullshitters are committed to neither truths nor untruths, uncommitted to neither facts nor fiction. It’s actually not in bullshitters’ interest to know what is true and what is false, as that knowledge can hinder their capacity to bullshit.

Frankfurt tells us that liars hides that they are “attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality.” In contrast, the bullshitters hide that “the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him.”

Are Psychiatrists Bullshitters?

Recall establishment psychiatrist Pies assertion: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” What Pies omits is the reality that the vast majority of psychiatrists have been promulgating this theory. Were they liars or simply not well-informed? And if not well-informed, were they purposely not well-informed?

If one wants to bullshit oneself and the general public that psychiatry is a genuinely scientific medical specialty, there’s a great incentive to be unconcerned with the truth or falseness of the chemical imbalance theory of depression. Bullshitters immediately recognize how powerful this chemical imbalance notion is in gaining prestige for their profession and themselves as well as making their job both more lucrative and easier, increasing patient volume by turning virtually all patient visits into quick prescribing ones.

Prior to the chemical imbalance bullshit campaign, most Americans were reluctant to take antidepressants—or to give them to their children. But the idea that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance which can be corrected with Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants sounded like taking insulin for diabetes. Correcting a chemical imbalance seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and so the use of SSRI antidepressants skyrocketed.

In 2012, National Public Radio correspondent Alix Spiegel began her piece about the disproven chemical imbalance theory with the following personal story about being prescribed Prozac when she was a depressed teenager:

My parents took me to a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She did an evaluation and then told me this story: “The problem with you, she explained, “is that you have a chemical imbalance. It’s biological, just like diabetes, but it’s in your brain. This chemical in your brain called serotonin is too, too low. There’s not enough of it, and that’s what’s causing the chemical imbalance. We need to give you medication to correct that.” Then she handed my mother a prescription for Prozac.

When NPR reporter Spiegel discovered that the chemical imbalance theory was untrue, she sought to discover why this truth had been covered up, and so she interviewed researchers who did know the truth. Alan Frazer, professor of pharmacology and psychiatry and chairman of the pharmacology department at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, told Spiegel that by framing depression as a deficiency—something that needed to be returned to normal—patients felt more comfortable taking antidepressants. Frazer stated, “If there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency that the drug was correcting, then taking a drug was OK.” For Frazer, the story that depressed people have a chemical imbalance enabled many people to come out of the closet about being depressed.

Frazer’s rationale reminds us of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent, the title deriving from presidential advisor and journalist Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the manufacture of consent”—a necessity for Lippmann, who believed that the general public is incompetent in discerning what’s truly best for them, and so their opinion must be molded by a benevolent elite who does know what’s best for them.

There are some psychiatrists who view the chemical imbalance is a well-meaning lie by a benevolent elite to ensure resistant patients do what is best for them, but my experience is that there are actually extremely few such “well-meaning liars.” Most simply don’t know the truth because they have put little effort in discerning it.

I believe that McClaren is correct in concluding that the vast majority of psychiatrists are bullshitters, uncommitted to either facts or fiction. Most psychiatrists would certainly have been happy if the chemical-imbalance theory was true but obviously have not needed it to be true in order to promulgate it. For truth seekers, the falseness of the chemical imbalance theory has been easily available, but most psychiatrists have not been truth seekers. It is not in the bullshitters’ interest to know what is true and what is false, as that knowledge of what is a fact and what is fiction hinders the capacity to use any and all powerful persuasion. Simply put, a commitment to the truth hinders the capacity to bullshit.

Bruce Levine, PhD

Commonsense Rebellion: Bruce E. Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist, writes and speaks about how society, culture, politics and psychology intersect. His latest book is Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite. His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

Thank You Dr Levine and MIA.

Not Science. Not Medicine. Not Legal.

We don't own a DSM V, because a 12 pack of Charmin is considerably cheaper.

We do own a pocket reference of the DSM IV, and have accessed behavenet numerous times.

If it truly was beneficial, if it truly was medicinal, if it truly contained Anything at all of curative value, . . . WHY does it contain a Hands Off warning about copyright. DO NOT reproduce this material, . . blah blah blah.

One would be not only tempted but correct to think that the Mental Health of its targets was not its purpose.

Potential patients would look up just what being 'Mentally Ill' was and take precautionary, preventative measures to avoid becoming 'Mentally Ill' . . . if they were Allowed to know the warning signs.

Fraud and Bullshit. In-damn-deed.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

"Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli Auctioning Off Chance To Punch Him In The Face

townhall

Martin Shkreli, the "pharma bro" who made headlines last year after his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, drastically raised the price of a toxoplasmosis drug, is auctioning off the chance to "punch/slap" him in the face in order to raise money for the son of a friend who recently passed away.

Shkreli announced the rather unusual fundraiser on his Twitter account, and claimed that people are already bidding into the mid-five figures.

Shkreli then shifted the "auction" to a Giveforward, and said that everyone who donates will get a raffle ticket for a chance to punch him in the face. The largest donor will also get the opportunity to punch him in the face.

Isn't capitalism wonderful?

Thank You Ms Rouselle and Townhall.

Why would Anyone want to punch Anyone in the medical field in the face?

Senate Hands Obama Stinging Rebuke: 99 to 1 Vote Overturns Presidential Veto of Bill Letting Families of 9/11 Victims Sue Saudi Arabia

the guardian

Lawmakers refused to oppose measure backed by 9/11 families, permitting them to sue the government of Saudi Arabia for allegedly backing the hijackers

Barack Obama suffered a unique political blow on Wednesday, when the US Senate overturned his veto of a bill that would allow families of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia.

If, as seems certain, the House follows suit later in the day, Obama will endure the first override of his presidency less than four months before leaving office. No Democrats came to the Senate floor to defend his position before the overwhelming bipartisan 97-1 vote. Democratic minority leader Harry Reid cast the sole vote against override, which has put Congress at odds with the White House and national security establishment.

The legislation would permit courts to waive a claim of foreign sovereign immunity when an act of terrorism occurs inside US borders, according to the terms of the bill. Saudi Arabia has objected strongly to the legislation and has categorically denied any role in the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen of the 19 plane hijackers were Saudi nationals.

The measure passed the Senate and House unanimously in May and September, but Obamavetoed it last Friday, claiming that it would make the US vulnerable to retaliatory litigation in foreign courts that could put American troops in legal jeopardy. Proponents of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) insist that it is narrowly tailored and applies only to acts of terrorism that occur on US soil.

Many senators and representatives are also reluctant to oppose a popular measure and be seen as soft on terrorism with elections just weeks away.

Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said the families of 9/11 victims favoured the measure and accused Obama of bowing to Saudi pressure. “All they want is the opportunity to present their case in a court of law,” he said on the Senate floor. “And that’s what this legislation would give them.

“The legislation has run into opposition because it is opposed by Saudi Arabia, who has been making threats against the United States about what it might do if Congress stands with the American people and 9/11 victims and their families, instead of the Saudis.

“And now, according to press reports, the Saudis have gone out and hired an army of lobbyists to work furiously in a last-minute attempt to derail it.”

Texas senator John Cornyn said: “This is pretty much close to a miraculous occurrence because Democrats and Republicans, senators [and] House members have all agreed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which gives the victims of a terrorist attack on our own soil an opportunity to seek the justice they deserve.”

The Republican rejected Obama’s objections. “He cites concerns that the bill would ‘create complications’, he says, with some of our close partners, but the truth is JASTA only targets foreign governments who sponsor terrorist attacks on American soil, plain and simple.”

The bill was revived last year by Cornyn and New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, who said on Wednesday: “This is a decision I do not take lightly. This bill is near and dear to my heart as a New Yorker, because it would allow the victims of 9/11 to pursue some small measure of justice, finally giving them a legal avenue to pursue foreign sponsors of the terrorist attack that took from them the lives of their loved ones.”

John Brennan, the director of the CIA, warned that the legislation would have “grave implications” for US national security. He said: “The most damaging consequence would be for those US government officials who dutifully work overseas on behalf of our country. The principle of sovereign immunity protects US officials every day, and is rooted in reciprocity. If we fail to uphold this standard for other countries, we place our own nation’s officials in danger.”

The vote deals a late blow to Obama on an issue he feels keenly about at a time when his personal popularity is riding high. Before the vote, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters: “The president has strong views about this legislation and the impact that it would have not just on the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, but with countries around the world. It would increase the risk that is facing our service members and our diplomats and our intelligence professionals. And that is a view that president has stated on a number of occasions.

Earnest had a scathing response to the vote on Wednesday. “I would venture to say that this is the single most embarrassing thing that the United States Senate has done, possibly, since 1983,” said Earnest. “Ultimately these senators are going to have to answer their own conscience and their constituents as they account for their actions today.”

Before the vote was held, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, acknowledged the president’s concerns over sovereign immunity procedures and admitted he had difficulty supporting the bill, which “has problems”.

He concluded: “With tremendous reservations and concerns about where this legislation is going to lead us, with tremendous empathy towards the victims that have lived through so much, have seen loved ones gone, that has affected their lives and will affect their lives for the long term, I’m going to support passage of this legislation today, but I do so understanding that there could be in fact unintended consequences that work against our national interest and with a determination should that occur to work with others in this body to try to overcome that.”

The House is set to hold a vote later on Wednesday. If the House also overrides the veto, as seems certain, the bill would become law. During his nearly two full terms in office, Obama has never had a veto overridden by Congress.

Thank You Mr Smith and The Guardian.

Psychiatry, It's A Killing.