The Global ‘Mental Health’ Movement – Cause For Concern

madinamerica
Justin Karter 10/10/2018

This week, we present the first in a series of interviews on the topic of the global ‘mental health’ movement. These interviews will be led by our Mad in America research news team.

[Ed; at the link. Listen to interview]

In this episode, we interview Dr. Melissa Raven, who is a psychiatric epidemiologist, policy analyst and postdoctoral research fellow in the Critical and Ethical Mental Health research group at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. Originally qualified as a clinical psychologist, she then worked as a lecturer and researcher in public health and primary health care. Her current mental health research and advocacy is informed by a strong social determinants perspective and a strong critical orientation, which she applies to a range of topics, including suicide prevention, workplace mental health, (over)diagnosis, (inappropriate) prescribing, and conflicts of interest in mental health and the broader health/welfare arena.

On October 10th, 2018, World Mental Health Day, The Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development published a report outlining a proposal to “scale up” mental health care globally. At the same time, the UK government is hosting a Global Mental Health Ministerial Summit with the intention of laying out a course of action to implement these mental health policies globally.

In response, a coalition of mental health activists and service-users have organized an open letter detailing their concerns with the summit and report. The response has attracted the support of critical professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, and researchers. 


Thank You Mr Karter and MIA.

Dr Phil (Yeah, another Psychiatrist) Is Concerned About Kanye's Mental Health

No matter how many times we say it, . . . . Collectivism shooting its mouth off Pretending to be Medical.

The Smoke Room
Jena Greene | Reporter

Dr. Phil McGraw has taken some time out of his busy schedule of interviewing viral internet caricatures to actually start acting like a legitimate doctor.

Sort of. [video at the link]

Dr. Phil hopped on “TMZ Live” Tuesday to say Kanye seems to be under several mental duress, given his recent conservative musings on Twitter. (RELATED: FEMINIST WEBSITE PUBLISHES ATTACK ON KANYE’S ‘TRASH POLITICS’)

“He shows, to me, a lack of impulse control. It shows what I would refer to as ‘disregulated thought,'” he says. Later, Dr. Phil says, “He doesn’t have a filter here. The things that he’s saying are irresponsible and ignorant.”

Dr. Phil also suggests that Kanye appears to be misinformed and uneducated.

Which is pretty wild. Kanye did recently admit to struggling with opiate abuse, but I never heard a professional practicing doctor say Kanye was sick. It’s pretty shocking that a licensed psychiatrist is diagnosing somebody spouting right-leaning views as unwell.

Follow Jena on Twitter.

Thank You Ms Green.

Whose Crazy? Trump or The Anti-Trump Shrinks?

 frontpagemag

January 8, 2018
Daniel Greenfield

Lefty Shrinks and Hawaiian Gods Are Angry At Trump 



In October, 125 psychologists and assorted mental health professionals marched to New York’s City Hall while wearing red tags warning, “DANGER.” Leading the march was Peter Fraenkel, author of Sync Your Relationship, Save Your Marriage, mournfully beating a drum in a solemn march. Fraenkel, a psychologist and “professional drummer” was able to combine his love of drums and hatred of Trump.

The ‘Duty to Warn’ march had begun at New York Law School where the experts demanded that Trump be removed from office based on their inability to understand the 25th Amendment. And then the mental health experts marched to the beat of Fraenkel’s drum in what they insisted was a “funereal and dignified” procession.

"Please wear professional attire or dark clothing," the mental health experts were instructed. "There will be a slow drum beat, ‘DANGER’ tape, and flashing warning lights.”

The paperwork urged, “Bring a drum if you have one” and, “come as your solemn, concerned self.”

If only the organizers had put a fraction of their obsessive delusions into actually trying to justify the claim on their shiny blue banner that, “Trump is psychologically unfit to lead this country.”

There were no drums when Bandy X. Lee, the organizer of Yale’s ‘Duty to Warn’ conference showed up on Capitol Hill to “brief” Dem politicians about Trump’s mental illness that she diagnosed over Twitter. Lee, a self-proclaimed expert on the prison system, apparently isn’t even currently licensed to practice.

But on Twitter, Bandy X. Lee explained that she had been "licensed on two continents," has "excellent credentials," a "flawless ethics history" and speaks "four languages.” On Vox, Lee claimed that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem was a “pathological” example of him “resorting to violence”. Then she blamed him for “an increase in schoolyard bullying.” Appearing on MSNBC, she warned that Trump “could be the end of humankind.”

All this craziness didn’t stop Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Jamie Raskin from inviting her for briefings.

Around the same time that Fraenkel was beating his drum in Manhattan, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was released by Macmillan. The book contained unsolicited accusations and diagnoses from “27 psychiatrists and mental health experts”. It was edited by Bandy X. Lee.

Contributors included Tony Schwartz, a former New York Times reporter who had worked on the Art of the Deal with Trump. His mental health qualifications are unclear. Also included is Gail Sheehy, a former New York Magazine writer, who had written a Hillary biography. The epilogue features Noam Chomsky, whom Lee describes as a “linguist and philosopher-historian”. Not to mention leftist genocide denier.

What makes Tony, Gail and Noam, mental health experts? In a movement that diagnoses the President of the United States over Twitter and then insists he be removed from office, that doesn’t really matter. And it’s why none of the media accounts have even bothered to note that some of Lee’s mental health experts are actually members of the media with no apparent mental health credentials.

In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz diagnoses Trump with a risky “sense of self-worth”. Gail Sheehy accuses him of “narcissism and paranoia” and a “trust deficit.”

In a book already dedicated to violating the professional ethics of the Goldwater Rule, Lee manages to include amateur armchair diagnoses by writers who are even more unqualified than her to make them.

But it’s not as if the professionals are any better.

Bandy X. Lee boasted, “In the book we have as authors Phil Zimbardo, Judith Herman, and Robert Jay Lifton, who are notable not only for their contributions to mental health but for their amazing ethical record. These are living legends who have also stood on the right side of history.”

Lifton is a “leading psychohistorian” who accuses President Trump of "malignant normality" and urges other "psychological professionals" to confront "the malignant normality of Trump and his administration." He appears to define “malignant normality” as behavior he disapproves of for political reasons, but that isn’t actually a form of mental illness. That undermines the whole theme of the book.

And it’s in the book’s foreword.

Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword accuse Trump of being a “present hedonist.” And this is “based on Zimbardo’s time perspective theory.” Zimbardo is both the inventor of the theory and the guy writing about it. Rosemary doesn’t seem to have a degree, but as “part of her Hawaiian heritage, she was trained in the Hawaiian psychology based on forgiveness known as ho’oponopono.”

Ho’oponopono was derived from appeasing the Hawaiian gods. The Hawaiian gods must hate Trump.

Zimbardo and Sword claim “that Trump qualifies as among the most extreme present hedonists we have ever witnessed comes from the plethora of written and recorded material on him, including all his interviews, hundreds of hours of video, and his own tweets.”

So there’s a practitioner of the Hawaiian art of ho’oponopono diagnosing Trump over Twitter. And her colleague, a living legend, is accusing him of a condition that appears to emerge from his own theory.

Everyone in the book agrees that Trump is bad. They just can’t agree on a diagnosis.

Michael Tansey claims it’s a delusional disorder. Laurence Dodes blames sociopathy. Craig Malkin argues it’s narcissism. David Reiss pushes for dementia and cognitive impartment. Steve Wruble claims he has daddy issues. That is, he claims that both he and Trump have daddy issues.

Thomas Singer believes Trump mirrors “our collective attention deficit disorder, our sociopathy” and we must “recognize our own pathology.” Not only is Trump crazy, but we’re crazy for electing him.

Everyone except Singer is probably nuts.

“Donald Trump is so visibly psychologically impaired that it is obvious even to a layman that “something is wrong with him,” John D. Gartner insists. But nobody can diagnose him because “Trump’s is a genuinely complex case.” Even though “many writers have tried to analyze and diagnose Trump, and have gotten pieces of the elephant right. What is missing is the whole elephant.”

What’s the whole pink elephant? According to Gartner, possibly, malignant narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, the bipolar spectrum, hypomania and also maybe, pure evil.

What are his medical sources for these claims?

"Insight into this question comes from, of all sources, Joe Scarborough, host of the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe," he writes. Then he mentions, "David Brooks is not a mental health professional, but he astutely commented on what appeared to him to be Trump’s increasing hypomania."

Ho’oponopono looks a whole lot better than a shrink who watches MSNBC and reads the New York Times and then tries to diagnose a man he never met based on media rants. And that is what all these diagnoses are reducible to. They originate from the media and then the media reports on them.

Do we even need psychiatrists to diagnose Trump over Twitter and television?

“We don’t have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had vastly more exposure to Donald Trump’s observable behavior, his writing and speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years,” Gail Sheehy insists.

That’s quite a turnabout in what was supposed to be a book by psychiatrists and mental health experts proving their case. Instead Sheehy, who isn’t a psychiatrist, insists that we don’t actually need psychiatrists because we’ve seen Trump on television.

But does that mean Sheehy’s readers can start remotely diagnosing her?

James Gilligan insists, “If psychiatrists with decades of experience doing research on violent offenders do not confirm the validity of the conclusion that many nonpsychiatrists have reached, that Trump is extremely dangerous—indeed, by far the most dangerous of any president in our lifetimes—then we are not behaving with appropriate professional restraint and discipline. Rather, we are being either incompetent or irresponsible.” And so psychiatrists must back up lefty biases against Trump.

It’s not medical science, but leftist politics, that’s calling the shots here.

[Ed; We've been making that exact point about the entire Industry for years. Look at the Psychiatrically Diagnosable Behaviors these Shrinks are exhibiting themselves.] 

Many of the essays don’t even attempt to diagnose Trump. Instead they self-diagnose the political trauma that Trump inflicted on them. Jennifer Contarino Panning even invents a “Trump Anxiety Disorder.” The strangest essay belongs to Steve Wruble who attacks his Orthodox Jewish father for supporting Trump in an essay, titled appropriately enough, “Daddy Issues.”

He moans that when he told his father that “Trump was unconsciously sabotaging his chances of winning the election” his father dismissively replied that a Hillary win would be bad for Israel.

"Despite giving my father what I felt was my intellectual gold, he only commented on what was important to him," Wruble whines. "Donald and I are expert at putting our fathers on pedestals while at the same time trying to knock them off in order to make room for us to have our time being seen as special."

Steve Wruble’s essay is in its own way the most honest of the bunch. Because it’s not really about Trump. It’s what Wruble and the other mental health professionals and amateurs project onto Trump.

Wruble blames Trump for the conflicts with his father. And identifies with him. These aren’t essays, they’re Rorschach inkblots. The ‘Duty to Warn’ movement tells us nothing about Trump and everything about the sort of people who take to the streets beating a drum against him.

Trump isn’t crazy. But his accusers often don’t seem too sane.

Noam Chomsky concludes the book by suggesting that Trump would perpetrate “some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act.” The epilogue of a book accusing Trump of mental illness ends with a crazy conspiracy theory by one of the accusers.



Thank You Mr Greenfield and FPM.

Political Medicine: Fire Doctors Who Call Trump Crazy

We keep pointing out that Psychiatric Diagnosis is political, not medical.

Need more proof?

dailycaller
David Benkof Columnist
12:42 PM 09/06/2017

Is Donald Trump crazy?

Calling a politician nuts is hardly unusual during tense political times – in fact, Trump likes to refer to “Crazy Bernie Sanders.” But of late liberals, unfortunately including psychiatrists and others who should know better, have been assailing the literal sanity of the president. More than 60,000 mental health professionals, in fact, have signed a petition calling for his removal because he is supposedly “psychologically incapable” of performing his duties. The signatories are thus flouting the psychiatric profession’s “Goldwater Rule.” That 1973 ethical guideline denounced long-distance diagnoses of public figures – and for good reason.

The doctors trying to diagnose away Trump’s presidency (often by saying he has narcissistic personality disorder) are betraying the values of their profession. Professional organizations and licensing boards should work with them to cease their medico-political campaigns, and if they refuse, they should be barred from further patient contact. At the very least hospitals should refuse to hire them and doctors should refuse to refer patients to them, because their lack of empathy and judgment is unbecoming of a mental health professional.

“Doctors” who condemn Trump’s supposed maladies are unworthy of that title for three reasons:

They lack compassion.

A psychiatrist who sees symptoms of a mental malady in a president’s public statements and behavior could have three possible reactions: 

The doctor could angrily condemn the president, denouncing him as terribly unfit for office, saying a man with such a condition has no business having so much power. Weaponizing illness that way, which has become all too common, is deplorable – particularly since few of those doctors appear to have voted for Trump.

The doctor could calmly express concern about the nation’s welfare given the typical symptoms of the specific condition. Such comments are more benign, but they still use mental illness to predict specific behaviors, and psychiatrists are supposed to be caring professionals, not fortune tellers.

But the third kind of reaction has been completely absent from discussions about Trump’s mental state: the doctor could offer sympathy and compassion for the suffering of the president and his family. If a president had lymphoma or prostate cancer, doctors would wish him well and offer prayers for his speedy recovery. But when the same doctors suspect mental illness and personality disorder, such empathetic responses disappear. Psychiatrists more than anybody should understand that illnesses are illnesses. At the very least, why aren’t the doctors attacking Trump for various conditions offering comfort to Melania and Barron Trump? They know the toll of mental illness on family members, which makes the fact they haven’t been expressing compassion particularly revelatory.

They don’t understand the role of the psychiatrist.

The Goldwater rule exists because psychiatry is an art as well as a science. Specific conditions – or the existence of any condition at all – demand in-person care. (And doctors who do care for a mentally ill person are of course bound to keep what they learn confidential.)

Mental illnesses and personality disorders should not be equated with medical unfitness. Take narcissistic personality disorder: some narcissists do not express their inner life with any harmful effects on those around them. Yet other people do express behavior that looks like narcissism for a different reason: they’re assholes. Who gave the president’s opponents authority to pathologize behavior they observe but cannot fully process?

Besides, President Trump, like all presidents, already has doctors who closely monitor his health. How can remote analysts know the president isn’t already being treated for this condition or that?

Their activism means that people are going to die.

People who fear they might be mentally ill are already loath to seek treatment, and will use any excuse to avoid seeing a psychiatrist or taking whatever medicine they need. Long before Trump, Americans were using mental illness to delegitimize people whose behavior and ideas they reject. If psychiatry were to bring down a president (as these doctors are clearly hoping), mental health will become a central battleground in the nation’s cultural and political wars – and people who need help won’t get help.

People who need psychiatry but don’t get psychiatry are less capable employees, parents, and community members. For them, getting through the day can be as much a struggle as enduring chemotherapy or kidney stones. Untreated people with depression, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric illnesses suffer terribly – and they risk harming others or more often themselves.

On some level, a psychiatrist is a kind of medical priest – a person who keeps deep secrets and exists solely to help people heal and flourish. Psychiatrists who play partisan politics demolish that sense of safety – and for what? We already have politicians and commentators (and ordinary citizens) who analyze a president’s behavior in depth. In a healthy society, everyone has a role to play. If doctors play political operative, who will play doctor?

David Benkof is a columnist for The Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter (@DavidBenkof) or Facebook, or E-mail him at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.
Tags: David Benkof, Donald Trump, Medicine, mental illness

Thank You Mr Benkof and Daily Caller 


Over 60,000 of these ignorant, activist, collectivist reprobates.

American Psychological Association (Here We Go Again) Claims Global Warming Is Making People 'Mentally Unhinged'

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Al Gore unavailable for comment.

Via Seeker:

Climate change is making us mentally unhinged — and not because of the stress we might endure when squabbling with a family member or co-worker about its causes or possible solutions.

Global warming is already bringing about more extreme weather events, like powerful storms, which can cause devastating inland flooding or transform coastal communities into heaps of wreckage. The death, displacement, and personal injury brought about disasters are traumatizing survivors in the immediate aftermath and leaving some with long-term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a report by the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica, a nonprofit focused on climate change.

The study, Mental Health and Our Changing Climate, is a follow up to a 2014 report.

Susan Clayton, a psychologist at the College of Wooster and co-author of the new report, said people who have been through disasters often used terms like “terrified” when describing what happened.

“So not surprisingly negative experience is a common denominator for the people who have been through this,” she said. “And estimates between seven and 40 percent of people who are experiencing natural disasters have some sort of mental health problem, such as anxiety or depression.”
 
Thank You Zip and Seeker. 

Anyone else for a shot of Mental/Junk Political 'Health'?

Climate Depot

• Bloomberg News: Obama ‘stashed’ $77 billion in ‘climate money’ across agencies to elude budget cuts
• Former Obama Official Mocks ‘Hottest Year on Record’ – Temps Within Margin of Error
• Load of bollocks: 2016 allegedly ‘hottest year’ by unmeasureable 1/100 of a degree – While satellites show ‘pause’ continues
• Climate Report to UN: Trump right, UN wrong – Skeptics Deliver Consensus Busting ‘State of the Climate Report’ to UN Summit

Soviet Style Abuse Of Psychiatry Is Now Practiced In The U.S.

thepeoplescube
by redsquare, 2/24/2017

This is not satire.

  
Comrade Psychiatrist is unhappy with Mr. Trump's "delusional reformism"

By Oleg Atbashian | First published in Bombthrowers
American progressives have been enamored with many Soviet ideas in their time, trying to transplant them to the U.S. -- from government diktat and central planning to academic indoctrination and propaganda through entertainment. And while the Soviet Union has gone the way of the dodo, its glorious socialist legacy is still up for the picking.

One of these unparalleled Soviet achievements is the use of psychiatry to silence dissent and delegitimize political opposition, allowing the KGB to lock up dissidents in mental hospitals nicknamed psikhushkas.

In the United States today hundreds of zealous progressive psychiatrists are similarly diagnosing Donald Trump "in absentia" with a variety of incapacitating diseases, from narcissism to neurosyphilis, demanding that he be deposed (and hopefully locked up in a psikhushka along with his supporters).
First, some history. From the 1950s through the 1980s, thousands of Soviet dissenters were incarcerated in mental hospitals. This helped the Communist government to destroy its critics both physically and mentally without the potentially messy trials, while at the same time discrediting all political dissent as the product of ill minds.
According to the acclaimed Sovietologist Robert van Voren, the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR "originated from the concept that persons who opposed the Soviet regime were mentally ill because there was no other logical explanation why one would oppose the best sociopolitical system in the world."

In theory Soviet psychiatry was guided by Karl Marx's "dialectical materialism" (as such, it rejected psychotherapy as "American pseudo-science" that stood in the way of scientific progress). In practical terms, its first duty was to serve the Party and the government in building the communist society. To that end leading Soviet psychiatrists fabricated a convenient disease called "sluggish schizophrenia." The "sufferers" didn't necessarily need to be psychotic; they could maintain productive careers and have families without anyone noticing their unusual behavior. The symptoms of the disease were pessimism, depression, delusional rejection of progressive ideas, obsessive criticism of the government, and paranoid thoughts about being watched by the KGB. 

The government psychiatrists were especially concerned with diagnosing and treating the so-called delusion of "reformism" -- persistent ideas about reforming the Soviet political and economic system. 

No doubt, American progressive psychiatrists would be only too happy to diagnose "reformist" delusion in Trump and his supporters, who are known for their persistent calls to "drain the swamp." The rationale behind the "mental disorder" diagnosis seems familiar: no sane person who has attended public schools and watched CNN would oppose Obama's "fundamental transformation of America" or the candidacy of the honest, intelligent, healthy, and mentally stable Hillary Clinton. 

Therefore, only the mentally ill would oppose political correctness, the growth of government, redistribution of wealth, socialized healthcare, man-made climate change, multiculturalism, open borders, the media's trustworthiness, and the Democratic Party in general.

American progressive psychiatrists don't necessarily need to copy their Soviet colleagues. Having their minds attuned to the same progressive brainwaves should be enough to produce similar results. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

There is an old Soviet joke about a man who worked at a secret military plant which was disguised as a sewing machine factory. He stole some parts hoping to build his wife a sewing machine at home, but every time he assembled the parts he ended up with a machine gun. Similarly, progressivism disguised as psychiatry (or as any other science for that matter) will only end up with more psikhushkas.


It started with a trickle.
Back in 2009, a conference of British "eco-psychologists" argued that "climate change denial" should be classified as a form of "mental disorder" -- a notion cheered on by American progressives.
In 2012, a professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon addressed a major international science conference in London with a message that any "resistance" to the man-made climate change theory "must be recognized and treated." 

In 2014 Psychology Today published an article by a "therapist turned advocate" who listed symptoms of climate-change denial to help identify this "disorder," and thought that her job was to induce climate-change-related terror and anxiety in her patients who didn't already exhibit these conditions, openly bragging about breaking the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm."

In July 2015, Clinton-appointed U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman already applied the idea of psychiatric treatment of political dissent in the sentencing of the well-known conservative author and filmmaker, Dinesh D’Souza. 

Enter Donald Trump.
In November 2015, as Trump became a frontrunner in the GOP primaries, Vanity Fair ran with this story: Is Donald Trump Actually A Narcissist? Therapists Weigh In! "As his presidential campaign trundles forward, millions of sane Americans are wondering: What exactly is wrong with this strange individual? Now, we have an answer."

In June 2016, when it became clear that Trump had a clear path to the Republican nomination, the Atlantic published a long "research" piece titled, The Mind Of Donald Trump: "Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity -- a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency."

Almost simultaneously, the Huffington Post weighed in with Too Sick To Lead: The Lethal Personality Disorder Of Donald Trump.
In August 2016, Politico amplified Mika Brzezinski's plea: A psychiatrist needs to examine Trump. 

In January this year, the New York Daily News quoted a number of progressive psychiatrists in President Trump exhibits classic signs of mental illness, including 'malignant narcissism,' shrinks say.
The same month, the Independent published 'Malignant narcisissm' [sic]: Donald Trump displays classic traits of mental illness, claim psychologists: "More and more mental health experts are sharing their diagnoses to warn the public."

This February has seen a deluge of articles with repetitive headlines accusing Trump of psychiatric and personality disorders -- from Common Dreams to Scientific American to U.S. News.
There have been at least two online petitions regarding Trump's mental health. One such petition bears a title in the unmistakable style of Soviet government psychiatrists: Mental Health Professionals Declare Trump is Mentally Ill And Must Be Removed. It was posted by John Gartner Ph.D., who claims, without ever meeting the president in person, that "Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States."

Another petition by Dr. Lance M. Dodes, M.D., written in the form of an open letter to the editors of the New York Times, stated that "Mr. Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them." 

The letter, as published in the New York Times, concludes that all of the above "makes him incapable of serving safely as president."
The petition was signed by 35 medical professionals, who had never seen Mr. Trump in person. Their diagnosis could only be based on observing their progressive patients who couldn't stop ranting about Trump's derangement and whose maniacal obsession with Trump contributed so much to the therapists' bank accounts that the doctors were compelled to "give back to the community" and signed the anti-Trump petition as a way to relieve their guilt. (We've never met these people, which makes our psychoanalysis of them just as credible as the psychoanalysis of President Trump published in the New York Times.)

With so many psychiatrists suddenly arriving at a "scientific consensus," it seemed that the world was ready for another award-winning Inconvenient Truth movie declaring that "the science is settled" and that "97 percent of psychiatrists believe that Trump's mental illness is real." Their opponents were this close to being labeled as flat-earthers and science-deniers. 

Soviet citizens had reached a consensus that they were on a bus heading towards a beautiful communist future (an example of sane behavior).

Just then the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, who wrote a book on psychiatric disorders, dumped a bucket of cold water on his colleagues, calling them "amateur diagnosticians" who "disregarded professional ethics."

In a letter to The New York Times, published under the title, An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State, the snarky Dr. Frances gave Trump a clean bill of health, saying that "he may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill," and noting that "It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither)." We can only add that in the Soviet book of Political Psychiatry, Dr. Frances would be denounced as a revisionist bootlicker and a pseudo-scientist, and rewarded with an involuntary stay in a psikhushka for deviating from the Party doctrine. 

The festival of psychiatric progressivism still culminated with the left-wing New Republic's publication of A Medical Theory for Donald Trump’s Bizarre Behavior: "Many mental health professionals believe the president is ill. But what if the cause is an untreated STD?" Its author, Dr. Steven Beutler, M.D., an infectious disease specialist who must have missed the memo from Dr. Frances, refers to the above "scientific consensus" and offers a theory that Trump may be suffering from untreated syphilis -- a sexually transmitted disease that can destroy the human mind and personality. The logic is bulletproof: "[Trump] was sexually promiscuous in the 1980s, a period when syphilis cases were rapidly increasing in the U.S." 

No word on whether Trump could have contracted syphilis from sexual contacts with Vladimir Putin, but given the number of media headlines exposing the alleged Trump-Putin "bromance," a Pulitzer Prize is in the cards for a journalist-turned-psychiatrist (or vice versa) who can prove that both Trump and Putin exhibit the same symptoms of mental derangement stemming from a sexually transmitted disease they gave each other during a past secret "bromance" (dates and locations to be provided by a self-described former British intelligence officer).

Perhaps progressive psychiatrists can also explain the sudden, psychologically improbable switch from admiration of Russia to fear and paranoia of Holy Mother Russia that surpasses the cartoonish Red Scare. Our own diagnosis suggests that what the progressives loved most about Russia was not its people but the socialist system the Russians lived under, experiencing all the sluggish schizophrenia and delusional reformism conjured up by government psychiatrists. On that grandiose scale the people were unimportant; they might as well be monkeys or penguins. Now that the Russians have torn down socialism, their country is suddenly ripe for demonization. Putin's authoritarianism alone can't explain such disgust; the progressives have embraced worse monsters in the past. A more likely explanation is that Putin's regime is much less progressive than the old Soviet one. No socialism, no love. And Putin likes Trump. The horror.

"Trump isn't crazy," argues Dr. Frances on his blog in Psychology Today. "The urge among amateur diagnosticians to mislabel Trump as mentally ill is perfectly understandable," he writes in another blog post. Dr. Frances understands the motives of his progressive colleagues because he resents Trump just as much as they do. The difference is that he has been able to keep his sanity, while his colleagues' obsession with Trump has caused them to lose touch with reality, along with their ability to distinguish between opinions and facts. 

It is logical to ask then, why doesn't the good doctor diagnose the obvious insanity of his colleagues, at least in generic terms, as a medical phenomenon? He might even discover a link to the sluggish schizophrenia of the progressive movement.

Such a proposition isn't all that unthinkable. In the Los Angeles Times, of all places, there appeared an op-ed titled, Do you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome? with helpful descriptions of the symptoms and stages of the disease. 

The template for diagnosing TDS is readily available. Take, for example, the petition Dr. Dodes references in the New York Times and replace "Mr. Trump" with "Dr. Dodes":

Dr. Dodes's speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize [with fellow Americans]. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Dr. Dodes's speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as a psychiatrist.

Without a doubt the efforts of the remaining few sane psychiatrists in America would be best spent on trying to find treatment for this debilitating mental disorder.

Thank You Mr Atbashian and the cube.

Opinion: The Dangerous Ideal of Mental Health

medicalxpress
January 19, 2017 by Simon Keller


The following commentary is provided by Simon Keller, a professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington.

We are in the midst of a significant change in the way we think about mental health. For most of medical history, mental health has been understood as the absence of mental disorder. Progress in mental health has meant progress in understanding the varieties of mental illness and other forms of mental distress, and how they can be prevented and treated.

Today, however, mental health is increasingly understood as a positive state: as something to aspire to. Led by the new academic field of positive psychology and by popular trends like the mindfulness movement, we are coming to see mental health as an ideal that we can work to achieve. As you might go to the gym or change your diet to get a healthy body, people now will meditate or practice mindfulness or write gratitudes, with the goal of attaining a healthy mind.

This new positive conception of mental health should be treated with suspicion. Beyond our understanding of mental illnesses and other negative mental conditions, we do not have much of a clue about what mental health is.

We have a decent understanding of bodily health, because we have a decent understanding of the function of the body and its parts. Lungs are for breathing; legs are for walking; a heart is for pumping blood. Mostly, a body is healthy if its parts perform their functions well. But what is the function of the human mind? What is the true purpose of our thoughts, feelings, emotions and beliefs?

We might find the function of the human mind in its evolutionary history, in a story about what the human mind was selected to do. But it is doubtful that evolution selected us for mental health. We are not designed by evolution to be stress-free, well-adjusted, tranquil and compassionate. Rage, jealousy, self-doubt and cruelty are all equally components of the evolved human mind. What helped us to survive evolutionary selection does not guarantee a healthy life in the modern world.

A different story about the function of the human mind can be found at the beginnings of Western philosophy, in Aristotle. Humans are special, Aristotle says, because humans are rational, and so the function of the human mind is to display excellence in rationality. As Aristotle is aware, however, this story raises as many questions as it answers. To explain what it takes to achieve excellence in rationality, we need an account of good human reasoning, and this is a matter of values. The ideal of mental health quickly becomes a moral ideal.

Many public health bodies see mental health simply as happiness, or as "well-being". The World Health Organization defines mental health expansively, saying that a mentally healthy person "realizes his or her own potential", "can work productively and fruitfully", and "is able to make a contribution to his or her community", among other things. That definition sounds benign, but in its way, it is quite judgmental. Most of us probably do not realize our own potential; do we then fall short of full mental health? Why connect the healthy mind so closely with productive work? And if you are unable to contribute to your community, perhaps the problem lies with the community, not with your mind.

No matter how it is understood, a positive conception of mental health always expresses a moral or political ideal, entailing a view about how humans should live and how we should relate to each other. People of different ideologies, religions, and cultures will naturally disagree about what true mental health looks like.

But that is not how the positive conception of mental health is usually presented. The positive conception of mental health is dangerous, because it takes the concept of health, which we usually treat as objective and scientific, and applies it to the questions of how we should think and how we should live. It hides moral and political ideals beneath a veneer of medical inevitability.

It is one thing to understand and treat mental illness and distress. It is another thing to choose a vision of human life and present it as the ideal of mental health.

Before thinking about what it means to achieve mental health, you need to think about what kind of person you would like to be. Mindfulness or meditation might help you become the person you want to be. So might playing bridge, reading novels, hanging out with friends, doing well at your job, helping others, playing computer games or watching cricket. None of these activities has an intrinsically greater claim to be the key to mental health. The question of how to achieve mental health comes down ultimately to an ancient, difficult, personal and thoroughly moral question: the question of how we ought to live. It is not a question that science or medicine can answer.

Thank You Mr Keller, Victoria University, and Medical Xpress

EPA's Gina McCarthy and Obama's Totalitarians

Global Warming Skeptics are not 'Normal People'. 
EPA Chief Diagnoses Dissenters Soviet Style. 

frontpagemag
June 26, 2015 by Jamie Glazov 

Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov disappeared from public view in early May, 1984 after he had begun a hunger strike to get permission for his wife, Yelena Bonner, to travel to the U.S. for heart surgery. In the Soviet paradise, wanting one’s anti-Soviet wife to live, and, worse still, to be saved by evil capitalist surgeons and not by the holy surgeons of the Soviet utopia, was, clearly, an exercise in abnormal psychology.

Sakharov was undoubtedly “mentally ill.” No wonder, therefore, that Soviet authorities forcibly confined him in a closed ward of the Semashko Hospital in Gorky, where he was force-fed and given drugs to alter his state of mind. This is how Soviet authorities believed they would get the Soviet dissident to not only stop caring about his wife, but to also make a public recantation about his abnormal anti-Soviet views – a gambit in which they ultimately failed.

The Soviet system had a long and cruel record of perverting psychiatry to abuse political dissidents. Labelling many thought-criminals ”insane,” the communist regime institutionalized them under horrifying conditions in mental hospitals and force-fed them dangerous and mind-shattering drugs. Dissidents such as Pyotr Grigorenko, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Vladimir Bukovsky and Natalya Gorbanevskaya were among the brave heroes who did not elude this grotesque form of Soviet barbarity. Grigorenko was forcibly committed to a special psychiatric hospital for criticizing the Khrushchev regime. Brodksy was sent to mental hospitals for not writing the right kind of poetry; his treatments involved “tranquilizing” injections, sleep deprivation and forced freezing baths. Esenin-Volpin was institutionalized in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for his anti-Soviet thoughts. Bukovsky was also confined to the same psychiatric hospital for “anti-Soviet agitation.” Gorbanevskaya was committed to a psychiatric hospital for, among other “abnormality” crimes, attending the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

And now enter the leftist totalitarians of the Obama stripe. While anti-Soviet ideas caused dissidents to be confined to psychiatric institutions in the Soviet Union, the soil is now being fertilized for the same process in the American leftist land of Alinskyite hope and change. Indeed, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy consoled leftists worldwide this past Tuesday, engaging in Soviet-style labeling vis-à-vis global warming dissidents that would have made Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov proud. Addressing an audience at a White House summit, she stated that “normal people,” and not climate skeptics, would win the debate on global warming. She made the comment in the context of why the EPA had issued a recent report on global warming’s negative impacts on public health, stressing that, “It’s normal human beings that want us to do the right thing, and we will if you help us.”

The contention that global warming skeptics are not “normal people” is, of course, a normal sentiment coming from a leftist. The Left, as the history of the Soviet regime and other communist regimes has well revealed, breathes it oxygen by labeling. The opponents of the messianic utopian cause are always “evil” and/or “mentally deranged” to one extent or another. And these labels are very effective in demonizing and dehumanizing dissidents — especially when the labels have that little inconvenient limitation of not having any relationship to the actual facts. There is enough evidence to suggest, after all, that man-made global warming is the myth that the skeptics say it is. A strong presentation of the facts by Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield on this score can be found here and here.

Gina McCarthy’s totalitarian attitude toward global warming skeptics parallels, of course, the Soviet mindset that forced Soviet dissidents into psychiatric hospitals and to be force-fed drugs. McCarthy and her superiors in the Obama administration do not, at this point, have the power to put the skeptics they are labeling into asylums, and to be administered “tranquilizing” injections and immersed into ice baths, but it is clear from their own words what their desires are – and what path they are clearing for the brave new world.

The spheres of powerlessness and dehumanization being built by the Gina McCarthys of the Obama administration, to which dissidents and the opponents of “hope and change” are being banished, are somewhat of a personal issue for this writer. My father, Yuri Glazov, was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University who became a “skeptic” about the Soviet paradise in which he lived. He attended human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners and signed letters of protest against Soviet political repressions. For not being “normal” in this particular regard, he was fired from his work and received a labor card with a special secret code that meant that he was blacklisted and could not receive employment anywhere in the country. The activities he had engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades. But we were the lucky ones. The ones who got away.

My family never forgot, obviously, those who we left behind — and Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Vladimir Bukovsky and Natalya Gorbanevskaya were and are among our friends, and the torment they endured for not being “normal” remains etched in history and in our hearts, and we gauge very clearly the pernicious ideological seeds that spawned their persecution and suffering.

My family escaped a totalitarian hell to come to a free country to now face, in the most tragic and bizarre sense, the ideological cousins of our tormentors. The Left and its totalitarian gate-keepers are now in solid power here, slowly but surely building the prison walls and “psychiatric” spaces designed for the treatment of abnormal skeptics. Gina McCarthy and her ilk must be called out for exactly who they are — and for what they are intending to do. The unimaginable cruelties that Andrei Sakharov endured in the Semashko Hospital in Gorky in the mid-1980s must never be forgotten and must never leave our hearts, for they are the dividing lines in the battle between good and evil, despite the labels that try to camouflage the truth.

Thank You Mr Glazov and frontpagemag.

US Marine Released From Political Psychiatric Detention

WTVR.com has;
Detained Marine Veteran Now Released, Per Judge's Order
Posted on: 12:43 pm, August 23, 2012, by Nick Dutton and Catie Beck, updated on: 05:58pm, August 23, 2012

UPDATE: Brandon Raub released, on his way home 

COMPLETE COVERAGE: Chesterfield Marine veteran detained over Facebook posts

HOPEWELL, Va. (WTVR) – A Hopewell circuit court judge has ordered that a Marine veteran detained over anti-government Facebook posts be released from a psychiatric hospital.

CBS 6 News’ Catie Beck said the Judge Allan Sharrett dismissed the case Thursday against Brandon Raub. The judge said the original petition for Raub’s detention contained no facts. In other words, there was no information on why Raub was being held — and the judge deemed this violated his civil liberties.

As a result, the judge ruled the government had no grounds to hold Raub.

Beck said the judge is in the process of writing an order for Raub’s release. He is has been released from the hospital in Salem, Virginia Thursday afternoon and is headed home to Chesterfield. 

The decorated U.S. Marine veteran was questioned by FBI agents about his Facebook postings and then hauled away from his Chesterfield County home in handcuffs last Thursday.

CBS 6 checked his criminal history and found it to be clean. And Brandon Raub’s mother told CBS 6 News’ Mark Holmberg that her son he had no mental health history. [READ MORE: Mother of detained Marine vet says he’s a patriot, not a threat]

“He never was violent or psychotic or anything like that,” Cathleen Thomas told CBS 6. “There were just conversations we had back and forth, very deep.”

BONUS: Full text, Brandon Raub’s proclamation: Take our Republic back

Cell phone video shot by a friend that showed Raub being thrown to the ground and then put into a police car has gone viral on Youtube. His story, portrayed as a patriot whose free speech rights have been violated, has shot across the country.

A number of protestors gathered outside John Randolph Medical Center Monday, where Raub was being detained. Earlier this week, a judge approved a motion to transfer Raub to the Veterans Hospital in Salem.

The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville-based civil liberties group whose lawyers represented Raub, argued his arrest was was improper and unlawful. However, federal agents contend that Facebook posts made by Raub were “terrorist in nature.”

A former Marine who served two tours in Afghanistan with Raub told CBS 6 News’ Catie Beck Monday that Raub is a courageous and patriotic young man with showed no signs of posttraumatic stress disorder. Additionally, the man said he believes a mental evaluation would find Raub sane — and not someone who is capable of a terroristic threat.

Check back with WTVR.com for the latest updates on this developing story. Catie Beck will also have LIVE reports on CBS 6 News starting at  5 p.m. 

COMPLETE COVERAGE: Chesterfield Marine veteran detained over Facebook posts

• Brandon Raub to be transferred to Salem psych ward
• Full text, Brandon Raub’s proclamation: Take our Republic back
• Mother of detained Marine vet says he’s a patriot, not a threat
• Statement from attorneys on Brandon Raub detention
• Chesterfield police: Raub resisted officers, was taken for evaluation
• Chesterfield Marine veteran to remain detained over Facebook posts
• Chesterfield man, Marine veteran, detained over Facebook posts

A United States Marine, Incarcerated as Mentally Ill for criticizing his Government.

Any problem understanding Why we're Anti Psychiatry?

Psychiatry can not be reformed. There's nothing There, To Reform.

Expose it, and outlaw it.