Psychiatric News | A chronicle of human rights violations and crimes by the psychiatric industry

27 May

Why Are They Drugging The Students?

Posted by Philip in Blogroll. Leave a Comment

Monday May 27th, 2024

From Zero Hedge by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The last few years have blown wide open a scandal that has long existed but is not that well known aside from specialists. The problem is the collaboration between pharmaceutical companies, government regulators, and the medical industry. The problem is so vast that it is hardly describable in a short article.

It turns out that the ineffective COVID shots were just the beginning. As far as we know and have discovered in the course of investigations, the shot was developed quickly as a countermeasure to distract from the problem of a lab leak. The world’s population was held hostage for a year and more while the inoculation was rolled out. But once deployed, it became obvious that it could not actually block infection or stop the spread. So everyone got the bug anyway, and we are left with tremendous damage caused by the shots themselves.

I described this short history to Dr. Drew Pinsky, the famed addiction doctor who now has a popular video podcast. He found no fault with my scenario as mapped above. He immediately added that this has many parallels with the opioid crisis that led him into public advocacy. The pharma companies advertised some miracle drugs to fix pain with no risk of addiction.

The frenzy to prescribe was so intense that some doctors even feared penalties for not prescribing. The result of course was a disastrous addiction crisis that continues to this day. Unlike vaccine companies, the producers were not indemnified against payouts for harms, and as much as $50 billion ended up going to victims just last year. The numbers are mind-boggling.

Just when you think you have reached the bottom of this problem, new information comes along. Last night I was privileged to attend a talk by Sheila Matthews-Gallo who founded AbleChild, an organization that advocates for child rights against forced medicalization. Why would such a thing be needed? As it turns out, many if not most kids in public schools today face this threat daily. They can be identified as having ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

It turns out that there is nothing proven chemically to constitute ADHD. It is entirely a diagnosis applied based on behavior as identified throughout a checklist questionnaire. The checklist is about fidgeting, forgetting, boredom, finishing tasks, various acting up, expressions of frustrations, and so on. In other words, what we have here is a list of all the signs you might expect when boys in particular are told to sit perfectly still at a desk for months and years and complete tasks assigned to them by some authority figure.

With this kind of diagnosis, you are likely to rope in a vast number of kids, particularly the exceptional ones and those once considered to be “gifted and talented.” As it turns out, there is a vast industry working today to pathologize perfectly normal behavioral traits. It hits boys in particular very hard because, in general, they mature more slowly than girls and tend toward behavioral resistance to environmental adaptivity relative to girls.

For more on this amazing reality, see “The ADHD Fraud,” an eye-opening book.

What could be the purpose of such a diagnosis? You guessed it: there are drugs for this supposed problem. They have various names: Ritalin (methylphenidate), Adderall (amphetamine), Dexmethylphenidate, Lisdexamfetamine, Clonidine, and Atomoxetine. Not even one of them has been proven to be a chemical fix for any biological abnormality. They are all behavioral-adjustment drugs; that is, psychotropic drugs; that is, narcotics for kids.

Millions of kids take them, as many as 13 percent of teens. The rate grows higher in the college population. Some one in three adults are taking psychiatric meds. It’s getting worse. It starts in school.

Listening to all of this, I found myself astounded. And yet, in some ways, it fits with everything else we know. We have an industry here that is in a tight working relationship with government institutions like public schools, plus regulators, plus medical authorities that are throwing drugs at people with the promise of miracles but with results that actually ruin lives.

Think of how different your school years would have been if you had developed a drug addiction and lived off psychotropic meds from the age of 7. I was fortunately spared such a fate. But millions of kids today cannot say the same. It’s utterly astonishing. It strikes me that this is a scandal just waiting to be blown wide open.

Among the related factors, as RFK, Jr. has been pointing out in public lately, is the odd relationship between school shootings and the wide distribution of these drugs. Many cases we know about already but the medical records of others are being withheld, even though the public is more and more understanding that the real problem is not guns but pharmacological products. And yet the activists themselves are entirely focused on taking away guns rather than looking more deeply.

I have had personal experience with young adults who are addicted to Adderall. In many ways, when you are a college student, it seems like a miracle drug. In college, discipline over the use of time recedes into a low priority. Instead the demand is to turn in long papers on deadline, memorize vast material you can spit out on a test and forget the next day, and otherwise stay intensely focused sporadically. For many students, this drug is exactly what the doctor ordered: it permits hyper-focused all-nighters followed by a day or two of feeling like a zombie but no one notices.

I’ve known many people who develop addictions, not only physical ones but psychological ones: life without the drug seems dull by comparison and who wants that? These students carry this over into professional life and attempt the same pattern. They can work all day and stay up all night and achieve something that seems mind-blowing but not quite what you asked for. You ask for fixes and they don’t happen. In fact, you don’t hear from them for days after until they reemerge with no memory of the work they did. This pattern repeats itself.

I gradually came to learn that the real problem was the drugs. I concluded that I would rather have a moderately productive employee who at least had a steady pattern of labor and a mild recall of skills that could be built up over time. The issue is that when hiring someone, it’s not quite kosher to ask such questions as: what drugs do you take? You end up guessing, and sometimes guessing wrong.

I’m telling you from long experience that these drugs are a catastrophe for professional life. No one should ever take them. That’s my considered opinion in any case, and I frequently warn college students against them. And what’s true for college kids is thousands of times more so for high school and grade school. It’s a complete scandal that these drugs are given out like candy to school kids. Parents have every right and obligation to resist.

It’s all the more astonishing to learn, as I did last night, that there never was any science to the diagnosis of ADHD, any more than there was any science behind social distancing. It’s all made up to service the state and its adjacent players in the private sector who benefit from various mandates that somehow always end in drugging the population. The whole thing astounds me.

Think about the bigger picture. We’ve created these public schools, force the kids to attend them, ban them from any remunerative work, shove boys and girls together, impose uniform curricula as if every student learns at the same pace, take away discretion from teachers, and saddle the institutions with massive bureaucracies. When the kids don’t take well to the environment, we call them mentally ill and drug them up in ways from which state-connected pharma companies can profit.

This level of cruelty is really baked into the system. It’s a wonder any civilized society could ever accept it. And once you discover the fullness of the scandal about what’s going on, you have to start asking other questions about weight-loss drugs, other vaccines and miracle cures, and the entire machinery of allopathic medicine itself. Yes, the rabbit hole is very deep.

25 Jul

Mental Health Round-Ups: The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes

Posted by Philip in Blogroll. 1 Comment

Tuesday

Reprinted from its original source at The Rutherford Institute HERE

By John & Nisha Whitehead

July 18, 2023

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.

Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile… sound familiar?

It should.

The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.

These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.

An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.

Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.

For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.

One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.

For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.

NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.

Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.

As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”

With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Let that sink in a moment.

Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

We stand at a crossroads.

As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”

WC: 2133

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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